The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (32 page)

When I talk with my clients about porn, I deliberately point out that the performances they witness often do not push the bodies of the actors many steps past what is already a part of their bodily experience and performance repertoire. The work that we do in therapy to distill scenes to their psychological essence and redesign them for clients’ bodily experiences and limits is part of what can be healing for clients and can allow for the reclamation of experience.

I work near the borderline of Berkeley and Oakland. My office is on the third floor of a quaint and quiet craftsman building converted into psychotherapy suites. On clear afternoons, through the west-facing window of my office, the San Francisco Bay sparkles under the burnt orange peaks of the Golden Gate Bridge. The courtyard blooms year round with lilies and lavender. Most importantly, I’m accessible to the queer activists, students, and radical folks of color who make up the majority of my clients.

One example that I give my students is of a Chicana lesbian couple who came to see me because their sex life had dwindled. As I questioned them about their experience, we discovered that they had not come up against a lack of desire, but that they each had fantasies they wanted to try out that the other was hesitating about. When they talked together about their desires, each became scared and overwhelmed by what the other was proposing. When we explored their fears about what they thought the other desired, they were never entirely correct, often imagining far edgier sex play than either partner actually desired. One wanted to play with bondage, the other with dirty talk. We decided that much less threatening to each would be finding porn that depicted their desires, and then watching it together and see how it felt without the pressure of having to enact anything. Watching others perform what they were interested in exploring allowed for an amplification of experience that they could project themselves into with the goal of staying present with their experiences.

As with this couple, many of the clients who come to see me to talk about issues of gender, sexuality, and sex practices are survivors of sexual abuse and sexualized violence. They are searching for language and images to help them articulate their experiences, fears, and fantasies.
Even most good writing about sex, consent, and sexual experience depends on theory, not the breath, skin, and bones experiences of our actual bodies.

Pornography invokes a suspension of disbelief. It asks us to project ourselves into the experiences of others we witness, to try to imagine how those experiences would feel, and whether we want to enact them.

The women in this couple and I spent time talking about how their histories of sexual trauma and recovery felt linked to their daily experiences of racism. When they thought about the possibility of playing with issues of power between them, they had difficulty disconnecting power-play from their daily struggles for empowerment. They didn’t want their sex life to be another site of struggle.

But as we continued exploring their embodied linking of sex, trauma, racism, and struggles for self-authorization, we wondered if incorporating edge play and power into their explicit sexual vocabulary would in fact help them to integrate their sexuality with the other aspects of their empowered cultural resistances.

So we began to ask other kinds of questions: When we experience something as scary or dangerous, why do we believe we shouldn’t explore it? When is anything not raced, classed, or gendered? It is just that we often avoid becoming conscious of those dynamics, or set out to actively interrogate our feelings about them.

When we explore our feelings of oppression in the context of a negotiated scene, we give ourselves permission to become acutely aware of power imbalances around issues of identity that we live with daily, but that we usually defend against knowing consciously. When we play with these dynamics, yes, they are uncomfortable—or exciting, or dangerous—but that isn’t different from how we actually experience them; we often keep those experiences just outside of our conscious awareness. We are allowing ourselves to have the feelings that we carry in our bodies daily. What comes next—grieving, fighting back—is all the exploration of our unconscious desires and fantasies made conscious.

When the couple did finally sit down to watch each other’s fantasies played out on their TV screen, they were each turned on by the other’s fantasies. It had been crucial for them to find queer pornography starring women of color who seemed truly into what they were doing, and not victimized.

“Oh,
that’s
what you meant? I’d love to,” responded one of the women. They each felt more open to trying out their fantasies, and they negotiated a variation of the porn scene they had watched, and scaled their play to the boundaries and limits they wanted to start with.

Pornography can show us not only what we desire, but also what we grieve. In the past few years, I’ve been working with gay men who have come into therapy to grieve the decimation of their communities from AIDS. Most of them have lost lovers, all of them have lost friends, and some are HIV positive. When we spend time talking about their losses, the loss of a sense of freedom around their sexuality is always a source of intense grief. They know about safer sex and how to make safe sex hot, and many of them report no conflict in their actual, embodied sexual lives about HIV status or precautions. But what they long for is a time or place immune to fear. We talk about the ways in which they use pornography that depicts unprotected sex as an act of remembrance of a kind of sexuality unhindered by fear of contamination. Porn that features unprotected sex is the iconography of their loss.

My own first exposures to empowered queer pornography were in the late night parties of Queer Nation, and projected onto the walls of galleries during ACT UP benefit parties in the late 1980s and early 90s. Even then, images of unprotected sex were the icons of rebellion, the fantasy of bodies in contact without barriers or borders, which is still the fantasy of sex that many people carry, and the emotional interpretation of which is still held as the psychoanalytic goal of “healthy intimacy.”

With my clients, I refrain from sharing my history with queer porn in order to allow space for their own associations to take center stage in our work. This is, of course, the traditional psychotherapeutic framework: keeping, when possible, the subjectivities of the therapist out of the middle of the consulting room. I believe, however, that we are in a cultural moment when the need for therapists to use our own experiences, and make them visible to our clients, has moments of centrality.

Over the past several years, transgender and genderqueer clients have come to my office exploring their bodily shame, grief, excitements, and fantasies. Unlike the fantasies and grieving about the loss of unprotected sex that are often shared by gay men, the fantasies and grieving of trans and genderqueer clients are often about the absence of modeling and images they’ve had to help them articulate their desires for their embodied selves. They grieve for what they never had.

With transgender and genderqueer clients, porn often comes into our psychotherapy early as a cue of sexual desire and an exploration of object choice, and also as an exploration of embodied subjectivity. The struggle to find images of who they could imagine being often leads clients to current genderqueer porn where they find not only energetic possibilities, but also actual bodies they can imagine becoming.

Because trans and genderqueer clients often have no models of their particular embodied gender expression and experience within their families of origin, clients need therapists to encourage their development of embodied self-expression—including sexual expression. I often think of my first supervisor who would want me to remain neutral. It isn’t neutral to encourage clients to develop and hold on to their fantasies of who they can be in the world. It’s necessary.

When I tell my students about using porn with trans clients to help them identify embodiments that resonate with them, one case often comes to mind.

The client was Asian American, born with a female body. He had spent his twenties identifying as a butch lesbian, then as genderqueer. When he came to see me, he was starting to request that people use male pronouns when talking about him, and he was contemplating what kinds of surgery and/or hormones he might use to alter his body. He had been in a long-term relationship with a lesbian that had recently ended. He was worried that he would never find someone to be in a relationship with once he transitioned.

We spent months talking about how he imagined himself moving through the world. Though he could feel it energetically, he couldn’t see what the possibilities were. When he’d look in the mirror and try to imagine a body that fit and reflected how he felt, he found that his shame about his body not matching his fantasies was so great he couldn’t sustain his attention. He’d look away distraught and hopeless, worried that no one would be attracted to him.

We started experimenting with him watching porn that starred genderqueer and transgender performers, specifically seeking out porn with Asian American performers. He began to fantasize about some of the bodily possibilities he was seeing, and began to envision a specific body for himself when he found a particular performer he thought matched his biological body type and the energetic qualities he strove to connect with in himself. His hopelessness began to lift.

Then, he asked me if I would watch the porn film with the performer whose embodiment had given him hope and images for his own embodied transformation.

I thought again of my first supervisor, knowing how much she would disapprove. Then I thought about my betrayal of the client with whom I had so unsuccessfully explored her use of pornography and fantasy. Part of the problem, as I now understand it, was that we didn’t have the right
kind of images to offer her. She didn’t want to identify with the men she saw as perpetrators in the porn, but she wanted to do what they did. I think now about porn made by Courtney Trouble, Madison Young, Tristan Taormino, and Shine Louise Houston. These films would have helped my client imagine ways of being in the world, of being in her body in relation to other bodies. She would have found the images hot, and she could also have read, seen, or heard interviews with the pornographers and actors about their experiences of sexuality and performance. These images would have lessened the stranglehold of her shame.

My supervisor had worried on my behalf that my client was trying to seduce me, insinuating her sexual aggressiveness into the psychotherapeutic relationship by my client’s insistence on exploring her fantasies of domination with me. I did not want to repeat the shaming and betrayal with this client by rejecting his attempts to share his experience with me. I agreed to watch the film my trans client was holding as a talisman.

The session after I agreed to watch the film, he came into my office and hesitated before sitting down. Unlike that first office, this one is spacious, with a bookcase filled with writing by radical queer and trans folks, women of color, and kids’ books about multicolored and multi-gendered families. He stood in front of the bookcase and looked at the spines of books for a minute before sitting down and beginning to speak.

“So, um, what did you think of the film?” He fumbled a bit, a little shyer than usual, not meeting my gaze the way he usually did.

I smiled at him. “I will tell you, but first I want to know what it was you were hoping I would see. Tell me what you see.”

“He’s hot,” he asserted. Then he laughed, “OK, he’s hot, but he seems so at ease with his body—proud of it, you know?” He looked up at me, then back down.

“And the women with him seemed so turned on by him. And it seemed real. He let them touch him and they weren’t uncomfortable. And he wasn’t either.”

We smiled at each other across the room, the sunlight climbing up the wall next to us.

“It just makes it seem like it could be a possibility, you know? That someone could be attracted to him. That maybe someone could be attracted to me like that.” He hesitated, like there was something else he was trying to say.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know how to ask this. I mean I know you’re my therapist, I respect that. I’m not hitting on you and I don’t want it to sound like
I am. But—” he said, looking up at me and then quickly away. He took a deep breath. “Did you think he was hot? I mean, could you, or someone like you, be attracted to someone like him?”

“Could a cisgendered dyke think a trans guy was hot?” I asked him, smiling. I waited until he looked up at me. “Because you want to know if this body that seems like a model for you, of how you could imagine being in the world, was sexy to anyone else. Were the performers having sex with him really enjoying it or were they just acting?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I mean, I know it’s porn and so they edit it to look smoother than it was, and they are acting, but the chemistry looked real. I mean, the woman looked like she was really into it, and so did he.”

“You sound certain, now,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking up at me again. “It was hot.”

He started laughing, looking delighted at what he discovered he believed.

“Yeah,” I said to him, “it was hot.”

Author’s note: All identifying information about clients has been altered to protect client privacy. Most case examples are composite sketches drawn from issues raised by many clients over the years, with all specificity blurred, changed, and symbolized.

III

DOING IT IN SCHOOL

“A Feminist Teaching Pornography? That’s Like Scopes Teaching Evolution!”