We Just Aren’t That Simple

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.