If you happened to be in Usdan around 12:15 on Thursday, you might have seen me with a friend that shall remain nameless giggling like schoolgirls as we watched a curvy blond woman perform fellatio on a man with a striking resemblance to a Ken doll. We were, as any normal Wesleyan students sitting in a public space would be, watching vintage 1970s porn. The film began with several attractive people running around a pool in bell-bottoms and progressed to shots of other couples looking on appreciatively as the blond woman pleasured the Ken facsimile. All of this was, naturally, set to peppy 70s tunes. I felt like I was watching a very dirty version of The Brady Bunch.
When I decided that I wanted to write my last column about porn, I immediately knew that I wanted to talk to this friend. She has seriously considered taking her combined FGSS and Film major skills to the art of feminist pornography production. I therefore asked her for some suggestions as far as what to watch in the realm of online porn. She recommended Pornhub.com, which I had also heard was a good place for a wide range of videos.
And so I visited Pornhub, where I was immediately greeted by freeze-frames of the sites most popular videos and an animated advertisement for a site with a theme of anal punishment. Squinting at the rather disturbing clips that this advertisement played over and over, I felt much too sleazy and quickly clicked on the “Categories” link at the top of the page.
I was immediately curious about the “Female Friendly” genre, wondering what about those videos made them good for girls. I found videos with titles like “Mya and Tristan” written in curly, cursive fonts.
My friend had a similar reaction to mine when I talked to her about this section. “At first it made me laugh, but then I clicked on it and found it incredibly offensive. It’s basically these story-lines that are supposed to be for women, and they’re funny and entertaining, I guess. But I had a problem with it being called ‘Female Friendly’ rather than just being called ‘Cheesy Storylines’ or something,” she said.
We noted the little pink female symbol next to Female Friendly. It reminded us of one of those little leafs next to vegetarian options on menus. “It plays into this idea of stigmatizing porn, that women don’t really watch porn, and if they do watch porn, they want a different kind of porn,” my friend said.
Indeed, this seemed all too obvious when I browsed the site more thoroughly. The only big difference between “Hardcore” and “Female Friendly” was that, in Female Friendly, the participants were more likely to be described as a couple. Other than that, they were still both just videos of sex.
An entire section devoted to what I, as a woman, apparently want in porn and sex suggested a direct challenge to the feminist idea that the “personal is political,” that the choices we make at home have political effects. In general, I am all for freedom in sex. So long as those involved are safe and consenting, I feel that people should be allowed to do whatever they want in bed (or out). If women want to be submissive during sex, I don’t take that as a political statement.
But can we really apply this blanket acceptance of all tastes and preferences to pornography? “I feel very conflicted about that,” said my friend. “Because on the one hand I want to be like, ‘Yay sexual freedom, sexual liberation, do what you want in bed, be empowered, do whatever gets you off!’”
“At the same time, though, different things in our culture definitely promote feeling a certain way about sexual acts,” she said. “A glorified rape scene, while it can serve its purpose, I think in some ways does shape the way we view things. But what wins out in my mind is this idea of sexual liberation.”
We agreed that being submissive in bed as a woman does not make you anti-feminist.
“Because you can definitely derive agency from that,” my friend added. “You can definitely derive agency from performing the way that you want.”
At its root, porn is a representation of both our most mundane and most disturbing sexual predilections. And while those preferences may not be political when acted on privately, they immediately become political when they are used to create a public media with labels and categories for consumption by the masses.
The porn industry is capitalistic—it will give us what we ask for, no matter how silly, or kinky, or sleazy. But it will rarely, if ever, get it right. Our fantasies, when translated to a script with overly made-up actors and bad lighting, are not our own anymore. Porn is someone else’s interpretation of our fantasy, of what we want. Porn in a way therefore puts the director’s and the actor’s image of sex onto the viewer—we are no longer completely in control of what we see and hear, as we are when we fantasize on our own. Unavoidably, porn makes a statement about what sex is and should be to the viewer, and, as is any real statement about sex, this one is political. By watching any porn, therefore, we are making a political choice—choosing to accept this particular version of what sex is.
When thrown into that bad lighting for more than just one person to see, fantasies and preferences cease to be only that; they become suddenly messy, suddenly political—suddenly dirty. It is that grey area that we, as sexual beings and consumers of pornography, must navigate every time we sit down at our computers.