Thursday, July 24, 2008

Feminist Porn: Where Are the Men?

Heh. Did you think I'd provide a picture? You'll have to keep searching, long and hard.

At Feministe, KaeLyn has a well reasoned defense of sexual pleasure (including "politically incorrect" forms). The ensuing discussion is one of the most civil ones I've seen on the Web, which otherwise just seems to re-ignite the feminist sex wars again and again.

But I have to admit, I hurried through her argument in order to get to the promised not-safe-for-work links. (Follow the link above to KaeLyn's post if you're curious, too.) KaeLyn presents a bunch of sites that I'd never even heard of. It was fascinating to see that the Internet is big enough even for feminist-inspired menstruation porn. (Yeah, really. And they're not just doing it to gross you out.)

It didn't take long, though, before I could see that among the eight sites she listed, only a couple of the (No Fauxxx and VegPorn) showed any men at all. Absolutely nothing I saw got me even slightly heated.

I'm sure some heterosexual women get off looking at other women - we've all been trained to view the female body as eroticized and the male body as just outside the frame. As commenter "Shy" wrote on Feministe:
As a mostly heterosexual woman, I feel that I have internalized the male gaze to the extent that now I am supposed to be (and sometimes am) turned on by naked women and expressions of female sexuality. What about men expressing their desire to sexually please others? What about men reveling in their own beautiful, natural bodies for the enjoyment of others? If porn and sex work were really about the full range of sexual expression and not about rape, domination, and the continuation of patriarchal norms, then there would be just as many men featured on feminist sites as women.
I get that some women do respond to other women's sexualization. But female flesh totally doesn't work for me. And Shy is right on when it comes to the dynamics of social/sexual domination.

And there's more. When I say that Fauxxx and VegPorn feature a few men, I'm using the term "men" very loosely. The guys featured on both those sites were really young. Like, they could be my students. They could be my offspring. They could credibly pose for "barely legal" sites. Too many of them share the skinny boy-model aesthetic that I criticized a few months ago. Not sexy, in my book.

No Fauxxx is specifically soliciting male models, but they're calling for "boys." While this might cater to a very small subset of hetero women, to me it looks more like they're following certain conventions in gay porn.

So where, please, is the porn featuring attractive men? Where are the grown-ups? Where are strong but not musclebound, ordinarily be-haired, men between 25 and, oh, maybe 60, who aren't overly prettified? Where are the men who can credibly project experience and maturity, as well as plain old naked beauty? And dang it, I'm not talking about Ron Jeremy; he's got experience and maturity, and he's certainly not pretty - but having seen him speak at my university last winter, I know that he turns me on about as much as menstruation porn.

I don't think we can speak of real feminist porn until there's serious turnabout, with women authorized to enjoy the visual pleasures of adult male bodies on our own terms - to look, as well as be looked at. Once objectification becomes a two-way street, I'm not sure it continues to be objectification after all. And that, to me, would be a necessary prereq to any truly "feminist" porn.

3 comments:

jfpbookworm said...

So where, please, is the porn featuring attractive men?

One of the drawbacks of feminist porn as it currently stands is that it's like "feminist music" a few years back - entrenched in a particular subculture (in that case, either folkie or riot grrl) and not all that willing to break out of it. The "feminist porn" sites that were linked to in that thread were all, as far as I could tell, very much part of a hipster (or scene, or whatever the kids these days call it) subculture, and that's a subculture that's very much youth-centered.

Another aspect is that, as you pointed out in your fashion post, this look is very childlike. More particularly, it's very much an image of powerlessness - not of the "strong but submissive" sort discussed over at Bitchy Jones, but of passivity. The idea seems to be that subjects and subjects, and objects are objects, and never the twain shall meet; there has to be this power dynamic involved, and the best we can do is reverse the genders. It's also a relatively androgynous sort of look - as if, rather than trying to figure out what might make for a beautiful man, the folks producing these materials (echoing, of course, their larger subculture and society in general) just figured the men who came closest to women's beauty standards must be the most attractive.

In a commercial context, there's a tendency to be risk-averse, and creating a product unlike what's already on the market is seen as risky. (This is why I think any reforms along these lines aren't going to come from the commercial producers of erotica.)

I do wonder how much of it is actually attributable to the preferences of producers of the material and how much it's a difficulty of finding men willing to participate. There are plenty of discouraging factors: homophobia, the fear of social or economic consequences (which women face too, obviously, but male privilege exacerbates this), or the view that men just don't have the capacity to *be* attractive (or just that one personally isn't, a.k.a. "why I don't do HNT").

Smirking Cat said...

I get very tired of the attitude that women are not visual when it comes to sex, that we just want to be held and then ring popped onto our finger. That attitude seems to carry over into porn, that women don't need or want to see men in a purely sexual light for our own pleasure.

Sungold said...

Smirking Cat, I couldn't agree more. Being held is nice - but goodness, I can get that from my kids and friends. And I think porn really reflects the idea that women aren't sexual actors.

jfpbookworm, I appreciate your very thoughtful comments. Thanks so much for stopping by! (I "know" you from Sunflower's blog and also figleaf's.)

I think the analogy to feminist music is perfect. I never got into either of those subcultures, either. For that matter, even when I was young, I was never terribly hip. :-)

Yeah, the androgyny is part of what fails to light my fire. Again, it shows how prevalent and inflexible the beauty ideal is - and how we as a society seem unable to imagine men as objects of heterosexual desire. And sort of paradoxically (but not really) a strong and conventionally masculine man totally falls outside the paradigm - I guess because it's inconceivable to porn producers that such a man can or should be objectified?

I have to wonder if someone like Ron Jeremy is reassuring to men precisely because (apart from his large equipment, which I think men are supposed to *identify* with) he's really *not* attractive. I realize that indie porn and mainstream/industrial porn are not the same thing, but neither seems to offer any real space for what I find sexy in a man.