The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (40 page)

ARIANE CRUZ

Ariane Cruz
is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in African diaspora studies with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality. Her research interests include images of black female sexuality, black visuality, and pornography. She is currently working on a manuscript exploring black women, BDSM, and pornography. Her teaching at Penn State includes classes on feminist visual culture, and representations of race, gender, and sexuality.

S
he cannot help herself from thinking: Poor: Ignorant: Sleazy: Depressing.

This does not excite or stimulate.

—Alice Walker,
Porn
¹

Forty years ago, Alice Walker wrote an honest, incisive account of her intimate encounter with pornography as a black woman. About six years ago I began seriously consuming hardcore pornography featuring black women as part of what was then my doctoral research. In her essay, Walker recounts experimenting with pornography in a passionate sexual relationship with a male partner who invites Walker to view his pornography collection. Brought into the relationship to enliven the sex, pornography instead quells Walker’s libido, arresting her “flow” of sexual energy, and causes him to “feel himself sliding down the wall that is her body, and [be] expelled from inside her.”
²
Walker writes about becoming deeply disturbed in particular by two pornography scenes she shares with this lover—first, a beautiful black woman who resembles her close friend Fannie in a threesome with two unprepossessing white men, and second, a “DP” scene in which a white woman is fucked by two black men who resemble Walker’s own brothers, Bobo and Charlie.
³
These scenes color her view of pornography, leaving her such that “[s]he can-not
help herself from thinking: Poor: Ignorant: Sleazy: Depressing. This does not excite or stimulate.”

Experiencing many such similar moments in my personal life, these experiences have intensified and become more complex since I started consuming pornography independently and under a different title: scholar. My being hurt and/or confused by discovering porn in a partner’s drawer (one of the first of many secret stashes I would discover throughout the years), tentative about how to “successfully” incorporate pornography into sexual relationships in ways that may be mutually pleasurable and not hurtful to both partners, and doubtful if such a feat even remains possible, foreshadowed issues I would encounter years later in my research. I have become increasingly disrupted by not only, as Walker illustrates in her essay, seeing people you know in porn and seeing porn in the people you know, but also seeing pornography in yourself, and seeing yourself in pornography. Particularly as my work focuses on representations of black women in pornography, it has been impossible not to insert myself into many of the scenes I’ve watched. I did not anticipate these personal effects that researching pornography would engender. Sexual intimacy, as Walker limns, often runs the risk of intensifying such effects.

Partners speaking in what I might call “the language of pornography,” may not be a new thing, but such utterances have become increasingly discordant, as I am more fluent in this expression now because of my research. This language, a visual and physical lexicon, includes stock statements and actions commonly present in most mainstream American pornography—highly scripted and deliberate “dirty” talk; the patting, slapping, or spitting on one’s vagina during oral sex; the gratuitous tapping of a penis against one’s hips, buttocks, face, or chest; crazy positions that require ample physical dexterity and produce a high visual impact yet yield a low return on pleasure; requests to leave shoes and undergarments on; hair tugging; and of course, money shots and an overzealousness to watch ejaculation on one’s face or breasts (more likely referred to as “tits”) specifically. While these acts may not be in fact imitations of pornography, my sensitivity to them as mimics of a uniquely thespian nature, is certainly due to my own consumption of porn. So regardless of whether or not pornography is invited, it maintains no latent presence in my intimate relationships.

I not only remain confused about my personal (and professional) feelings for pornography, but also struggle with how to place it, both metaphorically and physically. The quandary of porn’s grander socio-cultural positionality has become reflected on a small scale in both my
living and workspaces. From the time an object arrives in my mailbox, whether it be a magazine tightly sheathed in black plastic meant to conceal its pornographic nature while simultaneously screaming “porn!” to the postperson and to my neighbors, or a suspiciously unmarked cardboard box of DVDs—it reflects an ambivalent suppression of pornography that conflicts with my efforts as a researcher to expose it as a critical medium in the production of racialized sexualities. In many ways my apartment has become an unlikely microcosm, comically reflecting the antipodal positioning of pornography in mainstream American culture—what Linda Williams calls “on/scenity,” a term that begins to communicate the paradox of pornography, a condition that describes pornography’s liminal yet central placement within American culture, its unstable residence somewhere between the real, symbolic, and imaginary, mainstream and margins, legal and illegal, good and bad, and urgently desired yet highly shunned.
⁴
The often frantic search to clean up my apartment before a new guest visits now includes, in addition to depositing clothes in closets, and dishes in the dishwasher, stashing my pornography collection. I hide my porn magazines behind their orthodox brethren—cooking magazines. Turning their spines inward, I tuck hardcore DVDs under their lesser-utilized shelf mates—fitness DVDs. Not bothering to conceal my “academic” library of pornography scholarship residing on my bookshelves, I have been questioned many times by my more discerning houseguests who have taken time to peruse the collection of books on my shelves. In my office, where I refrain from watching any hardcore moving image porn or looking at more graphic print materials, similar acts of dissimulation occur. Struggles with how to place pornography in the personal space of my home and in the professional space of my office speak to the broader, yet equally nebulous question of pornography’s place in modern society.

My equivocation toward pornography continues to be fueled by the once humorous now vexing questions (posed mostly but not exclusively by men) about my work such as, “Do you need a research assistant?” “I am so fascinated by your topic; can we talk more about it—perhaps over lunch, dinner, or a drink?” and, the sometimes more benign but often equally loaded question, “How did you get into
this
?” These questions often mask a variety of less appropriate questions like, “Are you
down
?” “What is wrong with you—what kind of kinky pervert are you?” “Why would a junior scholar such as yourself squander her academic career studying this nonsense?” and “Why would you, especially as a black woman, ‘go there’?” This latter question, almost effecting a warning by some, gestures the politics of respectability that still regulate black
women’s expressions and practices of sexuality, and to their careful negotiation of their already contested space within the academy.

My answers to these questions are inchoate. On occasion I have, rather cheekily, referred such inquisitors to Peter Lehman’s comprehensive article on why one studies and teaches pornography.
⁵
Other times, my response, still not the retort I might like it to be, typically reverts to a most desiccated stock answer about pornography, as a multibillion dollar industry in the US alone, being a vastly under-studied medium, particularly in regard to its representation and construction of black female sexuality. To this answer I often receive a follow up question: “Aren’t all women similarly treated and objectified in pornography—i.e. how are black women represented differently from white, Asian, Latina, or any other group of women?” Here my reply, certainly more the reprisal I intend it to be, typically takes the form of a series of questions which I envision as a round of ammunition: “Do all women experience being a woman the same way, do all women have similar histories, and do all groups of women share the same legacies of sexual violence? To contend that all women are similarly represented in pornography is to disavow race as a critical category of human difference and power. It is an assertion that denies intersectionality as a vital feminist and antiracist mode of critique that aims to more complexly theorize and deconstruct the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, class, and oppression, to better understand the mutlivalence of diverse women’s experiences, and ultimately to more effectively enact modes of resistance to hierarchy and hegemony.”
⁶

Consequently, as a black feminist woman scholar researching images of black women in hardcore contemporary American pornography, I have struggled with a deep ambivalence toward my own consumption of pornography.
⁷
When I first began this project, I was convinced that pornography was not antiwomanist, Alice Walker’s inclusive poetic term encompassing a black feminist and woman of color feminist perspective. That is, pornography was not, in my mind in opposition to black women’s self-empowerment, expression of sexuality, and access to pleasure and erotic power. Though Audre Lorde, in her groundbreaking conceptualization of the erotic as a “life force of women,” considers pornography as antithetical to the erotic, I believed pornography could function as a tool, albeit problematic, through which one may unleash her erotic feelings, accessing not merely sexual power and pleasure, but an awareness of the flesh, both carnal and spiritual.
⁸
To censor pornography would be to regulate women’s erotic autonomy and sexual agency, which as M. Jacqui Alexander reminds us, are critical elements in not just the struggle of decolonization, but the fight against recolonization
as “the attempts by the state, and the global economic interests it represents, to achieve a psychic, sexual, and material usurpation of [the] self-determination . . .”
⁹
Identifying myself as “sex-positive, sexually liberal, or a pro-porn feminist,” I believed that, in addition to being a central and oft-overlooked site within academia for considering black female sexuality, pornography was
good
.
¹⁰
Pornography is an important instance of speech and a creative cultural production that offers vastly productive possibilities of and for sexual expression. Porn allows for a safe space in which to access pleasure and to enact fantasies. By “safe” I mean that through pornography, one can enact her own sexual fantasies without many of the real consequences that are associated with physical sexual partnerships—sexually transmitted infections, a myriad of obligations, emotional attachment, and so on.

For some black women in particular, I hoped pornography might even offer a solution for those trapped in what Darlene Clark Hine terms the
culture of dissemblance,
the politics of silence shrouding expressions of black female sexuality. Hine posits that a culture of dissemblance has been practiced by black women in response to the historical reality of sexual oppression, sexual violence, and the threat of both. So as a result of a history of violence rooted in antebellum sexual politics and practice, African American women have “created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.”
¹¹
Pornography, I thought, might be an unlikely tool in overcoming the “evasiveness and displacement” that many black women arm themselves with as a protection against sexual violation.
¹²

This understanding of the productive potential of pornography for black women has distanced me from a number of seminal black feminist scholars whose work I deeply respect, in addition to Walker. Indeed, black feminism has historically produced a particular set of constraints for black women pornography spectators. Patricia Hill Collins, for example, in her exploration of the sexual politics of black womanhood, argues that black women are a “key pillar on which contemporary pornography rests,” as a medium that treats black women as sex objects, relies on violence as an implicit or explicit theme, and champions themes of female passivity.
¹³
Jewel D. Amoah’s “Back on the Auction Block: A Discussion of Black Women in Pornography,” argues that pornography is particularly detrimental for black women in its double jeopardy effect of combining racism and sexism. According to both Collins and Amoah, black women are especially vulnerable to the harms of pornography because they must contend with both its sexual and its racial politics—sexism and racism.
¹⁴
Tracey A. Gardner’s “Racism in Pornography and the Women’s Movement,”
reaffirms the sociohistorical salience of racism to contemporary American pornography. First presented at a Feminist Perspectives on Pornography Conference in 1978, Gardner’s attack against pornography is deeply personal: “I want you to understand that when a person of color is used in pornography it’s not the physical appearance of that person which makes it racist. Rather it’s how pornography capitalizes on the underlying history and myths surrounding and oppressing people of color in this country.”
¹⁵
Similarly, Luisah Teish posits the unique harm that pornography wreaks on black women because of their historical legacies of violence (sexual violence in particular), stating, “the pornography industry’s exploitation of the black woman’s body is qualitatively different from that of the white woman.”
¹⁶
Though these scholars have done important work to bring pornography into the discourse of black feminism and consider its unique sociohistorical, cultural, and political relationship to black women, the substratum of racism, sexism, exploitation, and victimization that buttresses this body of work prevents a more nuanced, radical analysis of the polyvalence of pornography. It also prevents a vital narration of the complexities of black female sexuality and its productive opportunities for black female sexual pleasure and power.