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An endlessly languorous coupling between one of the sisters, wearing a teddy, and her piano teacher is decorously filmed at a distance. Whatever its impact on females, male viewers may think they are watching two tired high ) school wrestlers from a balcony seat. "It's beginner's porn," says Steffani Martin. "Sensitivity is wonderful, but it's not grounds for arousal," says Jim Holliday, a longtime porn maven who says he has watched some 7,000 X-rated films, and is the author of Only the Best, a new book about pornographic films. "I admire Royalle, but I personally don't find her films to be the least bit erotic."
Royalle's four films are considered the best examples of porn in the feminist style. The sex scenes flow from female passion and needs, not male lechery, and women tend to initiate the sex. In Daughters, the male leads are unremittingly sensitive and determined not to dominate. When one of the three daughters gets a job in London, her boyfriend cheerfully changes jobs to follow her abroad. The youngest sister, after an endless series of chaste dates with a refined boyfriend, consummates the affair as the film ends. Says Royalle: "Women like the buildup, the tension -- Will it or won't it happen?"
Royalle risked feminist wrath, however, by including a mild and playful bondage episode. She acknowledges that bondage and submission scenes, though high on the lists of female fantasies in sex polls, are "politically incorrect" with the women's movement. "Women do have these fantasies," she says, "but people are still so ignorant that they take them literally and think women want to be mistreated."
Though many feminists oppose all X-rated material, some seem willing to accept couples films, at least in principle. "If this porn is the new erotica that appeals to women, then I think it's terrific," says Gloria Steinem. Betty Friedan, a longtime opponent of censorship, says, "Any romantic, exploring, playful or humorous depictions of sex are O.K. with me." Women- oriented hard core will never eclipse the darker forms of porn, but as Porn Star Dare says, more and more people do not mind watching "things that couples would do when they get home."