Nobilis pointed me in the direction of Figleaf’s “The No-Sex Class: Men, Women, and Gangbangs in Porn” which led me to “Once more into the breech” by Amanda over at Pendragon.net, which led me to “On Porn, Sex And Pincushions” over at Echinde of the Snakes.
Although each of them stray in their topics a little, all of them are worth reading, as they all deal with the subject of porn tropes, and how those play out in the reality of society, sex education and the bedroom.
These are all very sex positive people who have, in their turns, problems with certain depictions of sex in porn. I’ve dealt with this subject a little myself in a couple of posts on non-consensual sex in erotica and the semiotics of semen.
I think I must agree with Amanda and Echinde that because of a woeful lack of sex-positive sex education, a lot of young men and women are learning about sex from the porn industry and – I’m sorry if this makes people angry – but they are not responsible sex educators. That’s not their job and, with some notable exceptions, like the Tony Comstock films, education is not much of a byproduct of porn.
Neither is written erotica an educational tool. The assumption is made, and rightly so, I think, that once you are reading erotica or watching porn, you already know a decent amount about sex. Certainly I do not put myself forward as a sex educator. However, a lot of these articles demand, subtextually, that porn SHOULD act as an educator by virtue of its reach into the groins of millions of boys and girls out there. The truth about porn and erotica is that they are seldom vehicles for changes in thinking. They are much more likely to be sexually framed reflections of the society in which they are made or written.
So the tropes of female humiliation like bukakke, multiple men on a single woman or rough anal sex are simply visualizations of a underlying social understandings: women who like a lot of sex are dirty sluts who deserve to be humiliated. Amanda points out that these are, in fact, supporting the narrative of extremely conservative family values. I agree. In the same way that the unwed teenage couple who fuck first always die in horror films. It doesn’t contradict socially normative values – it supports them.
What offends me so much about both genres is that they’re just so damn conservative and superficial.
One of the things that neither Amanda nor Echinde discuss in much detail is that women are inheritors of these same underlying social understandings, too. Porn actress may indeed have to pretend to ‘like it hard up the ass’ but, for some women, there is sincere erotic value in the act of being subjugated, mistreated and humiliated. And they’re not pretending! They actually do get off on it. A lot of feminists would have us believe that those of us with a penchant for various forms of not so sex-positive sex are sick individuals who require a good long bout of therapy. Maybe.
Frankly I don’t see that much daylight between scaring women into submission to an idea by threatening them will hell-fire or the stake, and the kind of social ‘normalization’ that goes on in a lot of psychologist’s offices. One might be less physically barbarous, but the both have the effect of making women conform to a socially agreed-upon norm of what it means to be a good woman.
I would argue that those female-held proclivities that offend feminists so much are simply the residual echoes of a historical half-life of many thousands of years of male hegemony and restricted definitions of what being a woman is. To me, it seems ludicrous to expect millennia of enculturation – and not just in the west – to evaporate because someone proclaimed women emancipated in the 1960s.
The balancing of gender equality is easily effected in law and employment, but much, much more difficult to construct in the cultural values and internally generated definitions of self. It will, in my opinion, take centuries.
In the meantime, I’m going to write things that make some feminists angry. I’m going to eroticize things that they feel are inappropriate. Because this is a part of my sexual dynamic, a product of my history. I’m being honest about what turns me on, or what fascinates me from an erotic viewpoint. That, I think, is my most important role as a writer of erotica.
The other thing that is seldom talked about in the context of sexually oriented material, is gut level reaction. It’s all very well to discuss the semiotic implications of porn tropes in the cool light of reason, but that is NOT how people have sex. The go with their unconscious drives and their lizard brains. And I’d argue that for a lot of us, we haven’t gotten past the 15th Century.
What I’d like to say is that real feminists (males and females) who truly care for the equality of women, will acknowledge that we are all negotiating our way through the very dawn of a different paradigm for both genders. And we each deserve the respect to be allowed to negotiate it in the way we can, with the tools we have, carrying the weight of history on our backs.
This is exactly what I needed this morning. Thank you.
A very interesting article!
As a horror buff I’ve always been interested by the role of women and misogyny in horror films. What I’ve noticed of late is that there is no longer that trope of Those Who Fuck Die. In fact, most characters in horror films since “Scream” are openly sexually active, including the main characters, and not all of them die.
I think issues of sexuality and sexual expression have been somewhat normalised to the point where archaic notions like “sluts die first” no longer interest or apply to modern audiences. That’s not to say that gender and sexuality issues are not present in horror films, I’m just saying they’ve become a bit more sophisticated since then.
Nice work though, and looking forward to reading more of your essays.
Best regards,
Sezin
Amen, my dear. Behind the facade of the norm rest the pathologies that violate our cultivated moralities and for better or worse make us who we are. It takes courage and imagination to approach such complexities. The soul has it’s own needs.
Nicely put, Remittance Girl although I think there’s another, more feminist-friendly way to put some of your points.
First, rather than saying porn and/or erotica should provide sex education I think most feminists (and certainly Amanda, Echidne, and me) think *sex educators* should provide sex education. Because, seriously, we don’t have to worry about the Road Runner cartoon’s depictions of gravity because thanks to education and considerable experience what happens to the coyote doesn’t influence our expectations in reality. And so with sex, and I think you put it extremely well: to the extent porn has a pernicious influence it’s because viewers have no other sources of education and, frankly, relatively limited opportunities for experience.
As for the notion of getting off on dominance or submission you make another really excellent point: a lot of this stuff really does have a half life. And to build just a bit on your point, if women grow up in a culture that assumes the avenue to authorized sex is submission and self-effacement so deeply that marriage erases your own family name then yeah, it’s not going to be too surprising that submission as release is going to work itself into fantasy. But in this case I’m pretty sure most feminists (Amanda, me, I’m not positive about Echidne) would say that whatever turns you on in bed is fine as long as you don’t confuse it with the rest of your life or, worse, try to enact your personal turnons into law. For instance a fantasy about Grand Inquisitors could be hot. A reintroduction of the actual Spanish Inquisition would… not.
Which also, by the way, wouldn’t be as much of a problem in porn if there was first even a bit more sex education and direct experience.
In other words it’s not so much the responsibility of sexual fantasy-facilitators such as porn and erotica to educate. But it is the case that without *somebody* doing education porn is going to wind up teaching a lot of people that, oh, say, positions that maximize camera angles are preferable to positions that maximize genital stimulation.
Anyway, it shouldn’t be up to you to provide the basics anymore than it’s up to poets to teach punctuation. Though punctuation should still be taught. If, for no other reason than, as poets know, there’s more pleasure in breaking rules you know and understand.
figleaf
Remittance Girl, you have expressed well some notions that have been rolling around in my mind for quite some time but that I’ve been unable to wrap up in language.
I am frustrated with most porn in the way it portrays women, but that doesn’t stop me from being turned on by some of the subjugation, anyway.
I’m deeply tired of political feminists telling me that what turns me on makes me less of a woman, and trying to control my sexuality as surely as the “male oppressors” ever could have.
I’m irritated that the very people who publicly condemn anything erotic are the very ones who shape much of what the rest of us get to see.
And all of this is, ultimately, why I love your stories so much. It happens that some of the things that intrigue you turn my crank, too – a happy coincidence for me. But it’s also that somehow the tone of your stories keeps at bay the undertone of guilt I get in reading some other erotic fiction, born of the issues you’ve addressed here, perhaps because other authors are doing a poor job of grappling with this challenge themselves. I thank you for the relief.
Kate
RG, I’ve read this a couple of times (there are a lot a big words here, so I had to resort to a dictionary). You make some excellent points and the one that sticks with me the most relates to the legitimate way many women find satisfaction in submission and humiliation. While there are troubling aspects concerning the social, historical, cultural, and often personal, millieu, out of which such feelings emerge, more troubling yet is that most erotica and porn fail to explore it in more that a superficial or stereotypical way. As you say, porn dwells on bukakke, exploded asses, and gang rape, while most bdsm erotica falls into a familiar formula of woman meets man, man overwhelms woman with his strength, women submits, and woman discovers she really liked it after all.
Where are the strong, confident women submissives in the bdsm literature?
Personally, what I like most about this post is the statement that erotica writers are not sex educators. That’s very true, but the painful reality is, people expect what we write to be chapter and verse on how sex should be done (and even worse, think every story is an autobiography of the author). Why is it that erotic fiction is never really believed to be just that – fiction? I would never read a science fiction book and expect to be able to build a rocket afterward.