The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (25 page)

So there I was, a women’s studies professor, being told that I needed therapy by the woman the
New York Post
has called “feminism’s newest and most provocative voice.” Of course it wasn’t that I wanted Levy to authorize my pervy desires; instead, I truly wanted to know how Levy believed our generation should be defining feminist sexuality. Though she wouldn’t be specific, what I take from her book and her talk is that we should relate to our attraction to raunchiness like we might relate to a pattern of dysfunctional relationships: no matter how attractive assholes are, at some point you need to rewire your desire in the direction of what’s good for you. We need to get clean and sober.

At the end of the day, my exchange with Levy drew my attention to the persistent gulf between feminist and queer approaches to sexuality. While Levy might seem like something of a 1970s lesbian feminist throwback, her position shares much in common with that of seemingly more sex-positive, or porn-positive, feminist voices of our time. Ultimately, Levy is a champion of genuine female desire, and her dual focus on femaleness and genuineness is consistent with the aims of many feminist leaders in the sex industry (though the latter are far more certain than Levy that porn is an outlet for genuine female desire). For instance, according to the folks at Good for Her, the Toronto feminist sex shop that hosted the 2011 Feminist Porn Awards, feminist porn must meet one of the following criteria: “a woman must have been involved in the production, writing, or direction of the work; or the work must convey genuine female pleasure; or the piece must expand the boundaries of sexual representation and challenge mainstream porn stereotypes.” Allison Lee, Good for Her’s manager adds that, “Feminist porn is not necessarily directed by women or only aimed at women. But what feminist
porn does do is take women into account as viewers. . . . One of the things that is considered is whether it’s something they think that women might enjoy.”
²
In sum, feminist approaches to sexuality privilege women’s genuine desires and experiences, but it does so without much critical reflection on who we think women are, and how they come to desire what they do.

In contrast, queer approaches to sexuality—at least those informed by queer theory—are not likely to take the gender binary or the pursuit of genuineness so seriously. As transgender theorists like Kate Bornstein and Jacob Hale have so beautifully illustrated, biological maleness and femaleness are hardly the most interesting or erotic ways to organize or represent sexuality. What a sad and boring state of affairs it would be if marketers could truly anticipate what “women might enjoy.” The beauty of queer desire is precisely that it is unpredictable, potentially unhinged from biological sex or even gender, and as such, difficult to commodify. A given viewer may have a vagina, but while watching porn, who knows what kind of subjectivities emerge (male? alien? robot? wolf?), or what kind of imagery this viewer might enjoy. Sure, market research may indicate that women do, in fact, have group preferences (for deeper plot narratives, close-ups of female orgasms, and so on), but even these “feminist” preferences have been marketed to us, and arguably mirror simplistic cultural constructions of femininity, such as the notion that women’s sexuality is more mental or emotional than physical.

The recognition that gender and desire are socially constructed certainly doesn’t mean that all porn is politically neutral, or that there’s no need to reflect critically on what we consume. In my view, the first responsibility of all queer feminist pigs is that we take some time to observe our desire, and then think creatively about how our particular lust might serve our queer feminism. So, by way of example, let’s start with mine . . .

My Piggish Desire: The Elephant Chain

For the past few years, I have been watching—and writing about—the genre of college reality porn, with focus on a series called
Shane’s World: College Invasion.
In this immensely popular series of college reality porn, which
Rolling Stone
referred to as “the new sex ed,” professional female porn stars arrive at college fraternity parties and refuse to have sex until the frat boys have engaged in a series of feminizing and sexually intimate humiliation rituals with one another. The boys strip naked, put on pink bras and panties, “bob for tampons,” scream their assessments of their
friend’s penises (for example, “Big fuckin’ donkey dick! Big fuckin’ donkey dick!”), and receive blowjobs from porn stars while standing side-by-side, surrounded by a circle of cheering male friends.

Intellectually speaking, what interests me about these films is the way they rely upon and promote the notion of homosexual
necessity.
The conceit of
College Invasion
—and of fraternity hazing rituals more generally—is that boys have no choice but to wear pink panties, to put their fingers in each others’ anuses, or to eat cookies covered in their friends’ cum.
³
They
simply must
do these things because the stakes are too high. If they don’t, they might not get to have sex with a porn star, or in the case of hazing, they might not be admitted to their fraternity of choice. Of course, this necessity is manufactured by the boys themselves, and then capitalized upon by the producers of college reality porn.
College Invasion
might just as well cut to the sex between porn stars and frat boys and bypass the homoerotic contests and rituals, but this is not what happens. Feminization and homosexual contact are precisely what makes the films a “realistic” portrayal of fraternity life, and therefore, precisely what viewers wish to see.

It turns out that I don’t have only an intellectual interest in these scenarios; I think they’re hot. I am impressed by the imagination required to manufacture them, the complex rules that structure them, and the performative and ritualistic way that straight men touch one another’s bodies or order others to do so. One of my favorites is a fairly elaborate and notorious fraternity hazing ritual called the Elephant Chain, wherein participants are required to strip naked and stand in a circular formation, with one thumb in their mouth and the other in the anus of the young man in front of them. Like circus elephants connected by tail and trunk, and ogled by human spectators, they walked slowly in a circle, linked thumb to anus, while older members of the fraternity watch and cheer.

I am not particularly interested in psychoanalyzing why anyone desires what they do; this endeavor is almost always essentialist and pathologizing (which is why Ariel Levy’s comments about my need for psychotherapy left me cold). But I will say this: these scenes remind me of the kind of sexual games my friends and I played as young girls (starting around seven or eight years old), before any of us knew what sex would later be. In the absence of a coherent and normative conceptualization of sex, we cobbled together the gendered and sexual tropes familiar to us as kids. We crafted highly detailed narratives about ourselves (we were beautiful fairies, rebellious teenagers, wealthy movie stars, doctors, and patients), and our circumstances (the various events that presumably
resulted in the
need
—whether we liked it or not—to reveal/touch/kiss certain body parts). We knew we were playing. We invented scenes. They had to be negotiated. There were rules. People were bossy. Body parts were gross. But we touched each other anyway.

One of the things I love about homosexual encounters between adult heterosexuals is that they constitute a unique erotic domain characterized by many of the features of childhood sexuality. This is not because it is a “childish” act for adult heterosexuals to have sex with one another, or because straight men in fraternities (or military barracks, prisons, and so forth) are less evolved or self-aware than men in other contexts, or for any other reasons that might stem from such a simplistic and moralizing reading of sexuality. Instead, it is because homosexual sex enacted by heterosexuals—like sex between children—occupies a liminal space within sexual relations, one that sits outside of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and is sometimes barely perceptible as sex. Like childhood sex, it goes by many other names: experimentation, accident, friendship, joke, playing around, and so on. Participants must painstakingly avoid being mistaken as sincere homosexuals by demonstrating that the sexual encounter is something other than sex, and in many cases, they do this by agreeing that the encounter was
compelled
by others (such as older fraternity brothers) or by circumstances that left them little choice (such as the dire need to get into a particular fraternity). Avoiding homosexual meaning requires that heterosexuals must get really creative. And this heterosexual creativity speaks to my queerness, even as it is arguably motivated by heteronormativity, or a seemingly compulsive need to repudiate gayness.

College reality porn is not queer or feminist porn. It is not porn worthy of queer praise. But even within this less-than-liberating genre we can find ideas, gestures, and scenes that unintentionally provide fodder for queer orgasms, and opportunities for queer reflection. All of us can take queer meaning from mainstream, raunchy, and typically sexist and homophobic porn. We can actively disindentify with its intended meaning or impact, even as we are deeply critical of the oppressive systems that produce a demand for such images or that encourage the most normative readings of them.

If the Buddha Watched Porn

To return to the vision of “Porn This Way!,” the song I discuss at the outset of this essay, we might ask how watching or making porn can actually “change the world”? Certainly it cannot do so in isolation, but working
with and on porn—the representational branch of the erotic—is a vital part of the effort to have a creative, humane, and loving relationship to sexualities, rather than one that does violence. At the very least, our relationship to porn must be one that strives to cause no further harm, aims to delink our sexual longings from various systems of oppression, and stays in touch with our queer and feminist impulses. This is a practice that we can, indeed we must, be able to do despite the content of the images provided to us.

I am a lazy and inconsistent follower of American Buddhism, but I have read enough to know that one of the goals articulated within its framework is to observe our less than ideal behaviors—addiction, escape, distraction, etc.—with curiosity and compassion. We are surrounded by less-than-ideal circumstances—such as, for instance, bad or problematic porn—that trigger our less-than-ideal responses. This, according to many Buddhist teachers, is the human condition. The challenge is to avoid getting wound up with shame and judgment (for example, “This is disgusting and offensive. I can’t believe I am aroused by it.”) or justification (for example, “This is disgusting and offensive, which actually makes it super queer, transgressive, liberating, and cooler than what everyone else likes.”).

Some people dedicate their lives to Buddhism by living as monks or nuns, and I believe this is a praiseworthy choice. But most of us plod along, working with the murkiness of our non-monastic lives. Similarly, some people make beautiful queer and feminist porn that is attentive to various modes of representation and desire, or they become its devout consumers. But many of us just keep going back to the mess of heteronormative, male-centric images of tits and ass. Sometimes we mindlessly consume it, but sometimes—on our better days—we
mindfully
consume it, noting what it does and does not do for us, how we respond, what stories we tell about its meaning and ours in relation to it.

A Queer Feminist Pig’s Manifesta

1.
I get off on porn smartly and mindfully.
I am interested in my desire. I do not presume it is natural, static, or predictable. I observe its form and shape, not because I want to know how my childhood experiences or social conditioning might have determined it beyond my control, but because I want to know its relationship to my happiness, my suffering, my creativity, and my politics.

2.
I do not take my “self” as a viewer too seriously.
I do not feel I need to conform to any expectation—on the part of marketers, my communities, or myself—about what “people like me,” or with my body parts, should desire. I can, with some effort, practice erotic egolessness and/or performativity by exploring the delicious potential of cross-identifications and non-identifications. In sum, I practice the
art
of spectatorship, identifying and disidentifying with the images made available to me.

3.
I am responsible for the impact of my sexual desires and sexual consumerism on others and myself.
I will be mindful of where and to whom I direct my gaze, with particular attention to matters of consent and dehumanization.

4.
I cultivate a private, internal space where I can honor and observe the complexity of my sexuality as it evolves.
Though I remain publically accountable, I provide myself with moments of exploratory freedom, creative license, and orgasmic surprises. I let my sexuality take me off guard. I move into it, even when it scares me. I trust myself to work productively—queerly and feministly—with my desire.

5.
I praise those who aim to dismantle racism and melt heteropatriarchy with their art, their porn.
I am bored by normativity. I believe that sexuality breathes life into the revolution. I celebrate queer, antiracist, and feminist images that reflect the diverse reality of sexualities and bodies, and that serve as models for what our bodies can do and be.

Notes

1
. “Gender Neutralizing: Porn This Way,” YouTube video, 3:46, posted by “debaser9779,” May 2, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj-l6cakhV8
. Note: The song includes additional lyrics I did not include in my excerpt here that critique Gaga’s liberal multiculturalism and biological essentialism.