Paper presented at the 1st World Congress for
Sexual Health: 18th Congress of the World Association for Sexual Health:
Achieving Health, Pleasure and Respect, Sydney
(2007 April 15-19).
Dr. Michelle Mars, Senior Lecturer
Sociology, Social Policy & Social Work
Massey University, Private Box 756
Wellington, New Zealand
Ph 64 4 801 5799 extn 6945Mobile 64 21 979 373
The title of this article is the title of my
current research project. I want to know what kinds of pornography women take
pleasure in. Researching women’s pornopleasures is an ongoing journey fraught
with personal and professional tensions. To begin with pornography connects
with my earliest sexual memories, reading porno magazines under my friend’s
parents’ bed, trying out the scenarios with one another when sleeping at each
other’s houses. This experience for me was wholly positive. Later as I became
conscious of feminism and the anti-pornography stance, my reaction was
ambivalent. For me pornography meant the guilty orgasmic pleasures of mutually
pleasurable teenage girlie sex. What could be wrong with that?
Apparently plenty, pornography, in the era of ‘women
against the night’ and pro-censorship campaigns was off the menu. Later, in the
early 1990’s coming to a feminist masters class entitled Feminism, Sexuality
and Foucault I explored the issue in the context of the so-called ‘feminist sex
wars’. The feminist sex wars of 1980s pitted anti-censorship sex radicals
against those for whom pornography was synonymous with women’s oppression. This
was a no-win battle. To support women’s rights to pornographic pleasure was to
support sexploitation and misogyny. To argue against pornography was to support
the conservative, sex negative status quo. Feminism whilst arguing that sexual
power could provide a source of power for women was complicit with the
suppression of sexuality. The debates over sex and pornography often ended with
a call to become agents in our own portrayals of pornography, to stop talking
and start doing (Assiter & Avedon 1993).
So what kinds of pornography do women find
titillating and sexually arousing? Preliminary findings based on thirty
in-depth interviews suggest that women have definitive and heterogeneous ideas
about what they like. There is no
particular pattern evident in the research findings to date. The women who took
part in the research stated that they have taken pleasure in watching the following:
…explicit sex scenes on stage, dildo sex, play acting, really leather
stuff, hard core and S & M, two women, natural really sweet and honest sex,
sex with a big dog, Harvey Keitel touching the hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking
in the Piano, gang bangs if the woman is in control, porn that leads to sex,
fisting, threesomes two women and a guy, two guys and a woman, Maori boys-the
warrior thing, a little bit of intrigue, sounds of a woman coming, anal bondage
sex with strangers, consequences and rules, women doing things to women,
someone pleasuring themselves, dominating a Yakuza,
being submissive, an hour and a half of women getting oral, the Marquis de
Sade, a hint of violence, intergenerational sex like a grandfather or father
with a daughter, promise or hint of things to come, women kissing, bum sex…
I presented these findings at the Congress of
the World Association for Sexual Health in April this year. One of the first
questions asked of me in response to the presentation was, why am I interested
in pornography when surely erotica is a more suitable object of study when
researching women’s sexual pleasure? I hear this question repeatedly when I
engage in discussions about the research project. The question itself firmly
locates feminine desire in the pornoghetto of softer light, good, blissful
eroticism while hard heavy, misogynist pornography remains a masculine domain.
I am not denying that pornographic text does not represent women as subordinate
social beings. The symbolic rituals that exist within pornography are much the
same as those that exist elsewhere (Kappeler, 1986). Nor am I denying that
erotica turns some women on. However, the conflation of women’s desire with
erotica is one of many social conventions that continue to reinforce traditional
power structures in which female sexuality is suppressed.
Judith Butler (1997) adapts Althusser’s concept
of ‘interpellation’ (the process of calling into being) to explain the way in
which conventions, or collections of conventions, come to have particular
cultural meanings. According to Butler
reality takes shape through reiterative performances. Every performance of a
softer, more subdued, ‘erotic’ ‘feminine sexuality’ brings that characteristic
into a space that is culturally intelligible instantiating a particular
category of sexual expression. Thus, conventions such as the idea that women
prefer erotica, or softer forms of sexual expression serve to ensure that the
breadth of women’s sexual expression and desire are kept simmering under the surface.
However, there exists the possibility of resistance to, or transfiguration of,
the signs and symbols that a culture assigns (Butler, 1997, Foucault, 1976). In
this project the diversity of women’s sexual expression and desire, many of
which clearly exist outside the boundaries of social acceptability, are clearly
visible.
The culturally inscribed idea that women enact
a more subdued sexuality proscribes the very idea of women’s pornopleasures and
should make it difficult for me as a researcher to find informed research
participants. In fact it is extremely easy to find women happy to
talk frankly about what they like. However, the talk about sex and sexuality
that takes place outside of the interview questions is the more revealing than
the opinions on porn and over time, this slightly off topic talk has come to
interest me more than the answers to the original research questions. The talk
of sexual preferences, sexual scenarios and pleasures that are not captured
within the pornographic genre is fascinating. I have found in previous research
projects that when people speak on a subject that is considered marginal it
often unleashes a torrent of information on and around the topic. The suppression
of women’s sexuality silences the actively desiring woman, making it difficult
for her to voice dissatisfaction without entering the marginalised realm of the
slut.
Providing a legitimate social space in which
women can straddle the virgin/whore dichotomy and speak frankly about sex
allowed the participants to say ‘we do and we can be sluts too!’
References
Assiter, A.,
Avedon, C., & (1993). Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: Pluto Press.
where
Barthes, Roland.
(1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech New
York Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1976). The history of
sexuality: an introduction (Vol. 1). London:
Penguin Books.
Kappeler, Susanne. The pornography of
representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.