For my first director profile, I have picked someone who initiated a major transition in my life, and has taught me an incredible amount about gender, sexuality, and viewing relations. Mason, or Sam No as she sometimes goes by, is a female director specializing in rough gonzo, yet with a remarkable ability to cast and shoot her movies in a manner that is truly electric, beautiful, and often strangely romantic. Her films literally shine, through outstanding framing and production values, and occasionally oil on asses.
There really isn’t that much information on Mason’s upbringing; what there is can be found in a chapter she wrote for Carly Milne’s edited collection, Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography (2005). This was where I first heard of Mason, and I read her chapter with great interest – she was obviously an extremely intelligent woman who was dedicated to exploring female sexuality – and more particularly, her own sexuality – through her films.
Turned off by certain aspects of porn, predominantly what she perceived to be degrading treatment and representation of women, Mason nevertheless found herself «drawn to it out of sexual curiosity» and after taking some courses in feminist theory at college, she reconsidered her initial assumptions about the genre: «I started to consider that the issues I had with pornography were simply reflections of the way society treats women generally.
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