An Interview with a Female Pornographer

An interview with Yoshki Greenberg by Theresa Heath-Ellul

Yoshki Greenberg is not your stereotypical pornographer. A self-identified queer Jew, she doesn’t wear an expensive suit, smoke a cigar or shoot me a look of sleazy calculation when I meet her. It’s slightly disappointing. On the contrary, she is engaging, intelligent and very funny – which begs the question: how did a young, educated, queer feminist end up making ‘niche-narrative-hardcore pornography’ for two years?

‘Well, I’d come back from university where I studied film and was making a living as a stills photographer when a friend called me up and said, “I hope you don’t mind but I’ve given your number to a porn director!”

Some 22 year olds might have been fazed by this. Greenberg decided it would be a challenge and began working as an on-set photographer, from where she moved in to writing, shooting and directing her own films:

‘There was nothing you’d class as mainstream – it was boy-boy, girl-girl, and a lot of female-dominated stuff with women in positions of power over weak snivelling men…the stuff that I ended up doing grew out of wanting to have an all girl-version with the same power dynamic.’

Greenberg’s first shoot was nerve-wracking, but this was nothing compared to telling her mum what she now did for a living – ‘My daughter the pornographer…’ is not a phrase most mothers envisage having to say. Mama Greenberg, however, took the news with a highly pragmatic shovel-full of salt:

‘My mum just sort of looked at me and said, “Well, at least you’re not selling mortgages to people who can’t afford them!”

Greenberg made approximately 20 films and a shit-load of money. She worked hard to produce images that spoke to her but, despite depictions of the lesbian erotic, the material ‘was still very much marketed at men’. In retrospect, she has mixed feelings about the industry, alternately portraying it as a liberal sexual playground and a corporate machine that sucks people in and spits them out when they’ve lost their novelty:

‘I did the job for two years and at first it was very exciting and positive and I didn’t come up against any sexism. It was fun, you’d meet people who were interested in expanding their horizons. I never met anyone who said they felt forced into it, I met a lot of very intelligent, very powerful women who had made a choice – although that was part of the sadness. They realised their bodies were commodities and that they only had a very small window of time where they would be the ‘in’ thing…people get very bored very easily in porn. We had other girls who went in and thought, ‘Isn’t this fun?’ and six months later they’d be just a fucking car accident…’

Nor did Greenberg herself remain immune from the ‘lifestyle’, and her own drug use became increasingly heavy:

‘There was a proper scar-face moment, I was sitting in a room, we’d just done a shoot, there was all this detritus of a set-shoot everywhere, and we’d had the lights on for ages and I was sweating, had a real fucking cocaine habit at the time, there was money all over the desk, and I was there, like, 24 years old, washed up… and I thought, mate, this can’t go on.’

A committed activist who condemns the Israeli government’s policy in Palestine, Greenberg’s personal life was also becoming increasingly disconnected from her day job:

‘I was spending all of my off-time and money going to Palestine and Israel to re-build houses, do loads of activism, and there was this ever-widening chasm between what I was doing in my own time and what I was doing for my job. And I was ill, I wasn’t well mentally…’

It would be easy and probably lazy to draw a link between the porn environment and Greenberg’s deteriorating mental health and drug-use. She is emphatic that ‘lots of people handle it fine’, and that she is just one person with this experience:

‘I still have friends who work in the industry now and they absolutely love it so maybe I’m just not built to handle it.’

Greenberg hasn’t made any porn for 3 years, during which time she suffered bereavement and a nervous breakdown, and is now the co-ordinator of an ‘alternative Jewish news site’ and a fledgling stand-up comedian. A background in porn must be every comedian’s wet dream, and I’m suddenly snorting over-priced coffee (we’re in the Southbank Centre) out of my nose as she tells me of the masturbating actor who ‘basically started doing a helicopter’. And the one who was trying to rid his penis of excess lube and managed to fling it in to her eye: ‘I was just like, “Oh my God.” And he was like, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Becoming serious once more, Greenberg describes how she’s now keen to explore DIY, sex-positive porn, and firmly believes there’s a market for more queer, lesbian and female-orientated material:

‘I think if you went and asked women if they feel they are seeing positive, sexy, empowering things, enough of them, the answer would probably be no.’

Having run the gamut of feminist stances on pornography, Greenberg is now firmly pro-sex. She is frustrated by the view of anti-porn feminists that all pornography encourages men to treat women badly:

‘That kind of stuff really underestimates personal knowledge and ability and ways of understanding and perceiving the world.’

Most vociferously, Greenberg detests generalisations and sees porn as a multi-dimensional form that is utilised on various levels by a plethora of individuals. When I tell her about a recent article by Julie Bindel claiming, among other things, that pornography harms women and promotes misogynistic and violent male behaviour, she becomes a ferociously indignant:

‘It’s that whole painting in absolutes. There aren’t any. It’s an affront to me. Look at me. I’m a white queer Jew sitting in an affluent area of London talking about my privileged life and what I think about fucking. Who the fuck am I to speak for women of colour, trans people…? You know, I can’t speak for them and I don’t pretend to. I don’t pretend to speak about anyone else apart from myself.’

‘Fuck’ indeed.

See more about Yoshki and her stand-up on her Facebook page

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