thinking

Writing About Porn Panic and Porn Influence

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If you want to boil Porn Panic into a single concept: It’s about the breathless trembling shock  people write about facials with.

In porn, it makes a great visual to have the guy finish by wanking all over the model’s face.  The visual nature of the medium means that the positioning and nature of communication of the erotic puts the semen produced somewhere into the picture and facials are an alternative to creampies, pearl necklaces, whatever slang term for festooning the buttocks, etc. Something particular about putting semen on the face causes a tizzy.

It’s a newer behaviour in the sense that it meandered over from Japanese porn in my teenage years to be a standard in pretty much all western porn.  It is extremely fair to say that porn influences the sex we are having because of it’s ubiquity.  And inevitably the discussion leads to articles like this., in the NYTimes, discussing what teens might be learning from getting a sexual education from porn.

Writing about the influence sexual media has on sex is hard to do without tut tutting.

I hypothesize that the piece we are missing from all this is that sex is supposed to be a conversation, not some static, platonic idea of sexy, and porn influencing sex is a feature not a bug.

For a while, after he came, LDR style, Brick would send me a snap of a palmful of cum, all shiny as “proof”.  I don’t know if he found this erotic for the sake of the act or presumed that I must like “proof” and was doing it for my benefit. It’s not something that, prior to him, it would have occurred to me to ask for. But curiously enough, he stopped doing it (probably because changes in living situations eliminated privacy for him) and I find with this introduction of what is in effect a fetish activity, I actually kinda liked it and now miss it.

Sexy is social. Social is communication. Art is communication. Sexy is art. 

I don’t think we’re very good at acknowledging the flow of sex-as-a-conversation  without bringing in mortality. For example recently as a think piece, Hylas and the Nymphs, by Waterhouse, was removed from it’s place in the gallery it lives in. I think it’s a beautiful enough painting I put a print of it in my bathroom. It is, however, a pretty good piece to use for the conversation about why great art so often means shit that gets a wealthy straight male audience off and we value this sort of thing so much we don’t think particularly hard about trotting people we want to be educated past glorified excuses to look at idealized titties.

Framing matters. Sometimes literal framing in gilt. Porn gets slapped around because it doesn’t even get to wear the crown of art (and people sneak their porn in by calling it ‘art’ because we’re bad at acknowledging that lowly pop art is still art but Hylas and the Nymphs is no more or less dignified than the carefully made up fake PoV shot of a model getting cetaphil flung at her face because it makes a better visual than the variable amounts of semen produced by a human male.

I’m going to go against the grain and make a statement:  Sex is supposed to be performative.

That’s the weirdness about all this, an unspoken part of the conversation where people have an idea of pure and good sex that is normal, a porn influenced sex that is a cabaret show of perversity, but sex doesn’t actually work like that, and what sex it, is a variable conversation and set of fungible norms. It is not a penis churning a vagina, although it could be.

For example, a performance: Brick likes mouths a lot when we have sex so there’s a particular maneuver I do where I lift my head a little bit to flick my tongue over his nipple while getting my long dark hair out of the way that really Does It For Him. Why? He learned his nipples are sensitive from a past partner with outlandish oral skills, but who knows where she picked up the idea of putting her mouth on nipples. No single sexual behavior is universal across all humans.  It didn’t occur to him to ask her to do that until she put her mouth there and from whatever source she learned it from, now I get asked to lick because we’re smart adults who can talk about desire.

Why am I going to the trouble of slightly angling my neck so her can see my tongue pull over his nipple? There’s a diagonal perspective where I can watch him react to what I am doing and if I get it just right, his eyes take on a haze I find incredibly sexy.  Although I like his penis and this act is usually accompanied by him with is clutched in his fist wanking into the general area of a potential orgasm,  the social and psychological aspect of sex means where we put our eyes and the emotional intimacy is a huge part of this.

Bless the NYTimes article I linked to, they at least mentioned that part of the appeal of people doing facials (from the awkward teen conversations) is the eye contact with the people involved. I wish we could get beyond the idea that porn is teaching kids to be rapists, which is one of the points that that NYtimes article was hammering out. (I don’t think that’s porn, I think the norms of the factor we call rape culture are in every facet of our life including porn- people raped perfectly happily before the wide availability of porn, and even if civilization and its medias vanished they will carry right on raping until our species fundamentally changes.)

When we try to talk about sex, it’s such a big topic that bits and pieces get left out.

For example a significant percent of women get pain from vaginal intercourse or no orgasm from any sexual activity ever including masturbation (1 in 10) and we don’t know why.

Millennials as the TNG  Munch demographic, the people aged 18-35 to whom the internet was a factor in our life but not simply the background radiation.  Usually we get lumped into the batch of up and comers, that next swathe of kiddos maturing away- although Gen X is somehow able to keeping well clear. And the inevitability of this is that people will also talk about the peculiar challenge that is Porn and Sexual Norms.

The internet exploded the community around having sex, by allowing disparate people wealthy enough to afford a connection the ability to access material for titilation. Everything about the modern BDSM community is not, despite what some people wanking themselves into a coma will tell you, the work of Old Guard guys, although they were a culturally relevant factor, but the newsgroups crawling out of the medium of safe communication behind usernames and into the first “Munch”. Which, btw, was organized by a woman. But the other side effect of internet connectivity was a golden age of relatively unfettered access to sexual materials.

Porn drove internet innovation- technologies to deliver video and static images, like it or not, were motivated in huge part by desire to look at things that got people off.  They sure as skippy didn’t invent sex though- porn is ancient. The oldest known paintings include illustrations of little stick figures with erections, including fucking wildlife. (Ahem it’s about man’s dominance over ANIMALS, OK! It’s SYMBOLIC!  Not! Freaky! Prehistoric! Beast! Porn! Side note: although the cave paintings usually depict skinny tanned white guys doing the painting 3/4 of the handprints in the work appear to be women based on typical sexual diamorphism in finger length, so this is another case of women making nasty tumblr worthy filth about boys) .

But Porn Panic should not supersede nuanced critique

When I say Porn Panic, I mean the idea that somehow erotic art is a thing that is actively inherently toxic, and gets combated as an intrusive external force.

We’re in an awkward period right now, where enough people have gotten on the web that rather than being the privileged domain of largely straight white wealthy people with leisure time and some specialized knowledge, enough of the population enjoys connectivity that there’s a backlash- places like the UK are not entirely comfortable with the idea that huge amounts of sexual materials are out there and thus because porn makes a part of a conversation about what people Should Be Allowed To Have.

This is the wrong conversation- excepting naked imagery produced in the absence of consent, which is a separate issue to image content, the idea of toxic art is pernicious.

The conversation about how media was teaching people they were doing sex in a problematic fashion did not start with internet porn- prior to this there was “MTV music videos” or other fretting about

Make Love Not Porn and Porn Literacy are both trying to combat that, but the former bites the hand that feeds, seeking to define porn as the things that do sex in a way that they do not agree with, with the idea that they should from there make explicit erotic art they get to call not porn. Basically it’s Porn Panic with the idea that if you rebrand things “erotic, softcore, Not Porn) you are excising the poison without losing the medium. This is implausible, and more than a little be self-deluded that you don’t have your own norms that may be equally problematic- particularly if you become the new dominant voice.

For instance, we live in a culture that penalizes being fat, and prioritizes being skinny. Good work is done to help people who are not skinny feel sexy. However, cultures that are fat dominant in their aesthetic are not any less oppressive.

Where Porn Literacy can, but not necessarily, fall flat is that while they are correct that the larger world of sex exceeds the limited window of what porn lets views see and is a dialogue of norms not passive entertainment, there remains this search for innocence as a moving target, a time before the nastiness intruded.

This is why while it would be socially beneficial for me to say I write “erotica” or dress myself in the language of anti-porn, I prefer to say I write and consume porn

What Would Fantasies of Female Dominance Look Like Without Sexism?

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 This isn’t a post about abolishing sexism, it’s about female dominance and power in an imbalanced world.

nudepaintingmanUnfortunately, the sexes are not treated equally in society at large. I’m not really prepared to debate this fact in some sort of “choice to be powerless” or “so what if you don’t have power, you have boobs and tears!” thing, and this isn’t time to be all “Activate FEMINIST RAGE!”

I mean that the relationship we have with sex/gender (I’m using the two together) really colours the shit out of our kinks.  I’m speaking in terms of the norms here, of course. I’m sure you know some exceptions. But look: Female subs do not heavily fetishize cross dressing, male dominants are assumed to want to fuck their subs six ways to Sunday, and when people try ineptly to justify maledom they generally grab at concepts like primal, where as gender flip keeps trying to tell me I’m a wise Mommy.

Thing is, it muddies things in that doing things a particular way becomes inherently subby, at least as porn would have you believe. Whether it is getting fucked up the ass of wearing panties, or more extreme as to refer to the underpinnings of the relationship dynamic… It’s  feels like a niche.

Take a dude doing housework as a male sub staple. Actually, dudes do housework, even doms. Not as much, on average, as women of all orientations. But if men want to eat and not fester in their own filth, adults usually have some life coping skills, at least as far as trashbag or can opener operation. But I cannot move for guys writing to me to offer to clean my house. Female subs clean house, often in a way that’s just as service oriented as male subs, but they don’t offer it up front as a mating signal. Because housekeeping is something chicks get delegated with.

And the stupid femdom uniform or the fact that we use the term “femdom” or “Domme” to delineate. There’s definately a “Mistress” outfit that people expect. In practice male doms have the utilikilt leatherdaddy look, but put on some spike heels and shoot from below and -ping! Femdom. Or uncomfortable goth slut. The uniform muddies the conversation about femdom, because what you wear is often treated as important as what you do.

And there’s all the vocabulary. FLR (Female Led Reationship), I’m looking at you. As if you had to make a special category to get away from the default. Because the current standards are “traditional” (male dominant) and “equal” (egalitarian), there has to be a special term for being a dom in a TPE dynamic that coincidentally is also female dominated.

And then there’s female supremacy. The premise of it is that if women were in charge, either it would be paradise or castrating harpies. Curiously, I can think of few explicitly male-dom world ideas that are not rape happy weirdness. It’s less popular, as a kink, and nobody who gets hot and bothered about the idea thinks that men being in charge is better.

Because they already are occupying most of the top spots. So I find myself in the awkward place of telling people to stop calling me perfect. But I live in the world I do and it’s going to colour all our behaviour.

One of the great unkillable D/s narratives is the dom-as-leader. Honestly, as long as you don’t take it seriously, it is hot. On the other hand, since so few women get to be leaders, at least compared with men, it seriously colours the fantasy. And it is to the point that an expression of being your own person, as a woman, codes as being dominant. It’s like we can’t completely escape hierarchy thinking.

I think one of the reasons why male subs get so much crap is because they are assumed, if they are beneath a woman, to be beneath everyone. Like some sort untouchable caste, in a highly hierarchical pecking order (and D/s is often about getting off on abuses and strengths in extreme power disparity) subs of both genders get shamed in the fashion that is typically used to batter their gender.

And the stakes are pretty crappy for a dude. While women are coaxed into infantile passivity, and made to be concerned with sexual purity… men at the bottom get all sorts of fetishes that are related to how men have been historically pushed down and about stripping them of male privilege and treating them like women- they are pussified (and I use that term deliberately), cuckolded, denied sex and put through forced bi. And yet the comparative approach to bisexuality in sub women is generally about sister slaves, and putting on a show, and lesbian female dominants. fucking women is presumed to be something that everyone wants to do.

All that aside, when we construct BDSM fantasy societies, there’s plenty of egalitarian examples. Whether the concept is a secret world within our world or a whole planet of kinky people though, again you get the perennial bi women. It’s to the point that the hard ass second in command to a head femdom is a kink cliche.

So where does that leave you when you are femdom fantasy building? Technically it’s a fantasy so you can do anything you damn well please. If you want a lady with a harem of bisexual slave boys who doesn’t even understand the concept of gender, much less descrimination, you can knock yourself out. But like how the genres of fantasy and sci-fi are lamentably tainted by the cultures that birthed them, and keep serving up patriarchy in the far future and magic-far-away-land, femdom’s presumed tropes are well attached baggage.

I did it in my own work. Catamite, despite being scifi, is set in a very patriarchal world. It’s actually much worse than anything I personally have ever dealt with, being neo-Victorian. Annette, as a character, has an unusual amount of liberty for her imaginary geography.  This is not really a spoiler, but this is intentional in a place where the world the characters are living in is actually one of several planets, and the place they are in is very much a weird cultural backwater. I wanted a society with vast inequality, I did not want an amazon fantasy land and apparently this is what I defaulted to.

I wonder if my interest in that means that I still am constructing power in relation to men and unfairly excluding women from the picture? Catamite doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, though in part because it is a story about heterosexual relationships. In theory it wouldn’t pass in the opposite direction- I don’t think there’s a single male-on-male conversation where women aren’t the focus in Catamite either.

On the other hand it means that my domly-dom character is still subordinate. There’a a bit of me that wonders if I’ve created something straight out of the Office skit about not being the one truly in charge even in the infinite realm of possibility.

Dwight: I am gonna be your new boss. [laughs] It’s my greatest dream come true. Welcome to the Hotel Hell. Check in time is now. Check out time is never.
Jim: Does my room have cable?
Dwight: No. And the sheets are made of fire.
Jim: Can I change rooms?
Dwight: Sorry, we’re all booked up. Hell convention in town.
Jim: Can I have a late checkout?
Dwight: I’ll have to talk to the manager.
Jim: You’re not the manager even in your own fantasy?
Dwight: I’m the owner. The co-owner. With Satan!
Jim: Okay, just so I understand it, in your wildest fantasy you are in Hell and you are co-running a bed and breakfast with the devil?

So is it some sort of sexism on my part that the setting I threw together to provide a great range of power imbalance is extremely male dominated as a side effect? Probably. I was also interested in writing about how Annette navigated the space she was in, and how power is very fluid and unreliable, yet I still did a retread of the patriarchy.

Be that as it may, if you fetishize power imbalance, even if you disapprove of them in practice (like a person with a rape fantasy), the bullshit around gender is also fantastic source material.  I don’t necessarily think I conveyed it properly, but Adam/Phillip’s behaviour is supposed to have been guided by his own relationship to the masculine expectations of his culture.

And yet, fetishes seem to by and large follow cultural trappings. I understand that cultures without much ethnic diversity with inequality don’t really get up to as much of the weird ass “interracial” stuff the US spews out. If, perchance, we stopped having weird inequalities based on your perceived chromosomes, would this eliminate thing like cross dressing being used as a punishment?

So what would dominance be if there wasn’t some sort of significant gender imbalance?

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I have no idea where this lovely homage to a classical painting came from, but if you know the artist please tell me.

Vanilla-ish

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So if previously I lambasted vanilla as the destroyer of relationships, on the other hand I think ‘vanilla’ is a really imprecise term in relation to kink.

For one thing, it sets up a false dichotomy. Either you are Vanilla or you are Kinky and never the twain shall meet. Or worse, Vanilla bad, Kink good. Which is hardly fair to the legion of people with happy, healthy sex lives who don’t want kink.

So, when tomcat_S, of Fetlife asked:

I want to know if submissive men still have vanilla sex (intercourse).
Personally I think it is difficult to move back to vanilla once you are too deep in BDSM as submissive man.

I had a genuinely hard time answering that one because the line between vanilla sex and not vanilla sex is, to say the least, blurry. What, after all, does vanilla sex look like? Which, by extension moves into asking, what does normal, average sex look like? People are quick to talk about sex in only one position, usually missionary, or unenthusaistic sex with hang ups. Self described refugees of vanilla talk about cessation of sex entirely, or dismal, once a month encounters where they were made to feel less than worthy for their desires. But bed death is not vanilla. It’s sad, but kinky couples get bed death too. And often the so called vanilla refugees didn’t want merely a bit more in the way of blow jobs or fingering, or sex in the garage, not the bed, they wanted their particular sexual need explored enjoyed and respected.

Kinky also isn’t just everything on the extreme end of debauched. So is it spankings? Dirty talk? Whips? Well, not everyone is interested in any particular fetish even if they are kinky, so obviously as in the instance of my pre-Divorce relationship you can have a partner who really is giving and willing in most reasonable things.

For some people, their particular fetish is the only part of their sexuality worth doing. For others, it’s a buffet with all sorts of cool stuff and no main course, one day doing D/s, the next day gentle anal, then hot wax. And yet, even needing fetish 1/4 of the time or all the time, the “vanilla” seldom goes away. Most kinky people don’t take sucking and fucking and kissing and touching off the menu, unless they have a personal preference against those activities that transcends being kinky.

And people are still kinky and fuck in missionary. It’s my favourite position. I’d be very depressed if being kinky precluded it, much less didn’t let me integrate it into my sex life. And besides, plenty of people are also making kink and vanilla kinda blurry when they do it. Check out fetlife’s barrage of amateur porn. As much as people are sharing their ropes and corsets and post scene pics, a hell of a lot of the snapshots are basically indistinguishable from regular porn. And sometimes nerve endings are nerve endings- unless I brought fetish gear to bed with me, my kinky masturbation looks a hell of a lot like vanilla masturbation because an orgasm is an orgasm no matter how you arrive there.

Context matters. Half the stuff we seem to get up to is only kinky because of the framing. When is, after all, a blow job cock worship, when is it enjoying your property and when is it just a blow job? I can’t tell you where vanilla ends and begins, only that I’m not embarassed that sometimes I’m also vanilla-ish.