“Au Québec, le mot le plus souvent recherché sur Pornhub est… « Québec » !”
It would be difficult to legitimately object to the premise that pornography has been one of the central and most important aspects of artistic production in Québec since la Révolution tranquille.
It was the success of the films de cul of the 1960s and 70s that established a Québécois film market, both at home and internationally, as viable. And many of the province's most significant directors - Carle, Héroux, Arcand, Fournier among them - worked within and against this tendency.
There was a wealth of erotic visual art and music also created in that period, providing one of the strongest and most intellectually complex counter-directions to the more generically internationalist art contemporain that attained institutional hegemony in the 1970s and 80s.
The complexity and wealth of the erotic material created in those two decades petered out somewhat in those that followed, in no small part thanks to the rise of video and then the internet, but also because the country's film establishment and its funding models changed significantly.
While one of the primary artistic contributions that contemporary Québec offers the world is Pornhub, AdulTime, ManyVids and Brazzers, stationed here but mostly hubs for a market of transnational productions, the province does still produce some local material.
This is the topic of Jean-Marc Beausoleil's book Pornodyssée: une saison dans l'industrie pornographique, published by Somme Tout in 2020. A few years earlier, they released the better Bleu nuit: Histoire d'une cinéphilie nocturne.
Composed of short chapters, the book offers fleeting reflections on pornography, but concentrates primarily on miniature portraits of various industry figures. There are performers, marketers, make-up artists, editors, and so on. Anecdotal detail weighs in one chapter and the next will simply distribute statistics across sentences without explication.
In terms of its portraiture, it is admittedly crude, even verging on caricature. The author apologizes for this toward the end, but he apologizes about something every few chapters, as though he is imposing this book on people uncomfortable with pornography.
Extremely thin on anything approaching lewd detail, its cast of characters are depicted in terms as banal as possible. We are given the details of their origins (almost all of them are from rural Québec), their educational formation (most of them at least went to cégep), most were subsidized by government grant to attend some manner of film school, and their various interests (horror movies, comicons, fitness).
For those on the production and management side, they are presented as bankers down to the details of their office decor. The performers tend to be strippers, cosplayers, musicians etc. They are almost all heavily tattooed, their tattoos displaying their self-mythologizations.
Frequently the women have hair dyed in garish colours or sport fluorescent wigs. The author goes to pains to stress their ethics, their political sympathies with LGBTQ etc. (Vandal Vyxen is even a 'mascot' for this).
All in all they embody every cliche of the punk or anarchist type and he explicitly relates them to this. Placing them in an exceedingly loose lineage of avant-gardism extending back to Sade, their sex acts are given political polish.
They are the practicioners of “Le porno progressiste” and the various signs they wear on their exposed bodies are the marketing and ideological equivalent to the organic label you find on products at the grocery store.
But even with porn cast as a “contre-culture. Porno punk. Porno chic. Pornanarchiste,” in practice, all these figures are functional aspects of an extreme form of neo-liberalism which, despite the participants' adherence to an ideology of social constructionism, operates within a stark and reductive biological determinism that makes those things appear delusional.
Such ironies are introduced, yet hardly elaborated on.
Beausoleil’s book often feels like the novelization of a documentary film. His mild sense of caricature isn’t harsh enough to make this captivating.
The largest disappointment of the book is that while he rightly justifies it by claiming that pornography can be art, almost nothing that he writes goes far to support this assertion. He does not bother to take seriously what artistry there is in a video from Pegas or AD4X, how the various studios differ in their aesthetics and in their garishly québécois qualities.
There is no visual analysis, and there certainly is none of the contextual analysis that could explain why AD4X attempted to make Guylaine Gagnon one of their stars and the peculiar humour and mannerism that was common to the way they depicted her having sex.
While most of the pornography created as uniquely québécois is recognizable as such, this is never fleshed out any more than why the city, of all places, should be the one that produced the "Monsanto du porno."