I recently started reading Caitlin Moran's
How To Be a Woman, and, as expected, I found her comments on contemporary pornography to be spot on.
"Essentially," Moran writes, "the Internet vends a porn monoculture." Precisely. When a person searches for pornography on the Internet, the majority of results will be short clips or pictures from mainstream American studios, filmed in the San Fernando Valley. The woman will likely be slim and Caucasian (although mainstream "niches" feature women of other ethnicities as well), wearing heavy makeup and ridiculously revealing clothing, and sporting a completely hairless pubic region. Her male partners will also likely be completely hairless, and will most certainly be well endowed. The short video will begin with the woman performing oral sex on the men, who will often handle her roughly, slap her face, call her degrading names, and force her to gag on their genitalia. The men will then proceed to penetrate the woman's vaginal, anal, and oral orifices, until the scene concludes with the men masturbating until they ejaculate on the woman's face. (The material from European studios will be mostly similar, although perhaps without the derogatory language and with most certainly with more fashionable clothing.)
As Moran observes, "That single, unimaginative, billion-duplicated fuck is generally what we mean by 'porn culture.'" She then goes on to list several of its signature characteristics that have had a tremendous influence on the world outside of pornography: "Brazilians. Hollywoods. Round, high plastic tits. Acrylic nails that make it impossible to do up a shoe buckle, or type. MTV full of crotches and tits. Anal sex being an assume part of every woman's repertoire. Posters for makeup, or TV shows, that show women glassy-eyed, open-mouthed, and ready for a faceful of come. Knickers being replaced by thongs. High, high heels that aren't really made for walking--just lying back and being fucked in." Aside from the breast implants (which are no longer in fashion), Moran's list is certainly accurate.
As a result of the proliferation of porn culture, according to Moran "12 percent of the images of women on the Internet are of them either on all fours, rammed into some highly unhygienic PVC, or being forced around outsized male genitalia, as if their sundry openings were some manner of tube bandage."
As Moran's description emphasizes, porn culture is not erotic. In fact, porn is the complete opposite of eroticism. Porn depicts the distorted bodies of 21st century consumer capitalism engaging in an uninspired performance of various sex acts. While the overwhelming majority of mainstream American porn focuses on men dominating and abusing women, the process effectively dehumanizes and degrades all those involved.
In response to anti-porn Feminists, Moran notes that "the act of having sex isn't sexist, so there's no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist." Instead, she writes, "it's the porn
industry that's the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt, and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth…$30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb."
Porn in its industrialized form is human sexuality distorted by consumerism and commodified. Porn perfectly illustrates McLuhan's point that "medium is message": it does not matter that most porn is consumed without paying for anything other than an Internet connection, because the very process of consuming it transforms us into more prolific all-around consumers. By feeding us plastic sex acts devoid of desire, porn distorts our relationship to ourselves, our bodies, our sexual partners, and our own desires. We then attempt to fill the void created by porn with renewed consumption in all aspects of our lives. The consumer of porn may witness countless ejaculations, and may himself ejaculate more often than is healthy, but he never achieves the satisfaction of orgasm. Porn creates desires but does not satisfy them.
Moran correctly notes the deleterious affect that porn culture has on
the young, both male and female alike. While porn is only intended for
adults, its proliferation ensures that children will nonetheless come in
contact with it at some point. As a form of sex education,
industrialized porn presents a single homogenous conception of
sexuality, entirely centered on the phallus. Porn teaches young women that they must remove their pubic hair and wear revealing clothing to attract men. They are shown that their pleasure is not important; instead, their role in sex is to please the man and allow him to take his pleasure from her however he sees fit. Men, in turn, are shown a selfish and violent version of sexuality that essentially amounts to masturbation, using the woman to achieve orgasm.
Moran imagines that young boys encountering porn for the first time would be "scared of someone who looks like an angry Burt Reynolds, bumming someone across a landing." I would add that even adults who encounter porn culture for the first time can end up feeling disturbed, if not frightened, by what it communicates. A short personal anecdote may help illustrate this point.
Like Caitlin Moran, I count myself as belonging to "the last generation before free online pornography starts being handed out, with the same largesse with which the postwar Labour government handed out milk and spectacles." As a teenager, pornography for me meant magazines with pictures of naked women, from the frustratingly obscure
Playboy to the more satisfying and revelatory
Penthouse,
Hustler, and
Gallery. When I first started viewing internet pornography while at college, it was still confined to photos rather than videos. The closest I came to the porn industry was through film stills (such as the scene between Nikita Denise and Lexington Steele in
Heavy Metal 2, which was an early favorite of mine for some reason).
Fast forward a few years. It was late at night, and I was surfing the web for some porn. I came across a page with a few short clips featuring an Asian woman and two extremely well-endowed Caucasian males. (I later learned that the scene was from Redlight District's
Two in the Seat, featuring Tolly Crystal, Steve Holmes, and Brandon Irons.) I was both horrified and incredibly aroused by what I saw, as the men handled Tolly very roughly, using her for their pleasure.
Tolly is clearly not enjoying the experience. Early in the scene, Irons tries to insert his finger into her anus while he is penetrating her vaginally, but Tolly pushes his arm away. Irons nevertheless persists, at one point telling Tolly, "I'm gonna hurt you, bitch." (He also tells her she has a "filthy pussy" and calls her a "whore"). Meanwhile, Tolly performs fellatio on Holmes, who pushes her head down on his penis. At one point, Holmes tries to kiss Tolly, but she vehemently refuses. When the men take turns sodomizing Tolly, they are obviously hurting her. As she winces and screams in pain, Holmes moans in pleasure, and Irons emits his own joyful exclamations. After a lengthy double-penetration sequence, the two men ejaculate on her face. Tolly's relief at the conclusion of the scene is evident--although her body is damages, she has survived the ordeal and will get her pay check.
As a sexually experienced adult, I can appreciate the Bataillean transgressiveness of the scene. It is so obviously wrong, in so many ways--Crystal, a Mongolian who came to the porn industry through Budapest, died shortly after the scene when she "fell" from a roof under mysterious circumstances. (It remains unclear whether her death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder carried out by Eastern European mafioso and/or human traffickers). Yet to this day it continues to arouse me, and remains one of my the few mainstream American porn offerings that I still watch.
The problem, however, is that there are just too many scenes like this out there, offering essentially this same violent and sadistic version of sexuality.
Two in the Seat is arousing in the way rape fantasies are arousing--as an outlier, a variation on shared, consensual, non-exploitative sexual experiences. But when it becomes the norm, it looses its transgressive character. When there are too many rough and abusive porn scenes out there, sex itself becomes impoverished.
As an alternative to porn culture, Moran suggests a new, female pornography,"something that shows sex as something that two people do together, rather than a thing that just happens to a woman when she has to make rent. Something in which…everyone comes." Indeed, if there is one critique to be made of today's American and European pornography, it is that it is exclusively phallocentric. Even so-called "lesbian" porn scenes revolve around penetration and often female "ejaculation" (urination). As in Tolly's scene, when the men ejaculate, the scene is over and the woman's work is done. Her pleasure is not even an issue, let alone a focal point of the encounter. Men and women alike would benefit from more female orgasms in pornography, and less focus on the phallus and male ejaculation as the center and focal point of each scene.
Moran then offers a brief vision of what female pornography might involve: "I suspect that female pornography, when it really gets going, will be something wholly other: warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic, with wholly different parameters to male porn." I agree with Moran on the dangerous aspect, as female pornography will certainly not be vanilla or politically correct. Even Joan Sewell confessed in
I'd Rather Eat Chocolate that, since adolescence, her fantasy has been that "these knights from the Middle Ages would ravish me" (essentially, that she was a prisoner having forced sex). In my own experience, the women with whom I have viewed pornography tend to appreciate the rougher variety: gang rape, tentacle rape, etc.
What separates this sort of violence from the violence in mainstream pornography (aside from the fact that simulated rape scenes do far less damage to a woman's body than most "consensual" anal and gangbang scenes) is the ability to shift perspectives. Whereas today's porn almost exclusively forces the viewer to experience the scene from a phallic perspective, Moran envisions female pornography as a polymorphous, pan-sexual journey: "In their fantasies, the women grow and shrink, shape-shift, change age, color, and location. They manifest as vapor, light, and sound, they strobe through conflicting personas (nurse, robot, mother, virgin, boy, wolf) and a zodiac of positions…Imagine if pornography was not this bizarre, mechanized, factory-framed fucking: bloodless, naked aerobics, concerned solely with high-speed penetration and ostentatious ejaculation. Imagine if it were about desire."
