Wednesday, November 30, 2011

21st century sex and porn women want

Porn Women Want:
James Deen (tumblr)
A fall issue of the Utne Reader is devoted to 21st century sex. Featuring many good articles, it also includes an excerpt from A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. The authors boastfully claim to have conducted "the world's largest experiment" "to understand the specific cues that trigger human desire." True, they report some curious findings about people's online searches for porn (on which their purportedly extensive study is based). But they appear sadly unable to unstuck themselves from stereotypical assumptions about gender. "On the web, women prefer stories and men prefer images," they claim. And the kinds of stories women like feature "sexy vampires and lusty werewolves" because "supernatural males are alphas among alphas, turbocharging cues of masculinity ... fully capable of protecting the ones they love." Men, on the other hand, like to look at young women, MILF (Mothers I'd Like to Fuck), big penises, and cuckold porn because it stimulates "sperm competition," which enables a male's sperm to compete with other males' sperm to impregnate a female's egg. ("If a man believes that his sexual partner may have been with a rival, he is driven to have sex with her as quickly and as vigorously as possible").*

If you read their book or the excerpt published in the Utne Reader, I ask that you also read feminist sex and porn blogger Ms. Naughty's sharp post critiquing these authors' study and their findings (I also post a bit about it here). As Ms. Naughty noted when she wrote her post back in June, plenty of other bloggers had by then already pointed out various problems with this book and the methodology used. But Ms. Naughty adds some eyeopening facts debunking their study.

It's not that men are visual and women like to read. Young girls have objectified, if you will, their favorite movie and music stars for decades, decorating their rooms with posters at which they will gaze adoringly while nurturing their secret (and not so secret) crushes. And as Ms. Naughty--who is also the Webmistress behind the largest domain network of porn aimed at women--can tell you, it is also not true that men like to look at porn while women like to read erotica. It's just that there hasn't been made much porn catering to the female gaze. But a growing number of women who are re-visioning porn from a female point of view have set out to change all of that.

In the meantime, some women revert to mainstream porn actors who divert from the mainstream porn look. In the winter issue of Good magazine, Amanda Hess has a profile of James Deen, a young, guy-next-door looking porn star who is becoming famous for his appeal to women. Explains Hess:
Deen has carved out a niche in the porn industry by looking like the one guy who doesn’t belong there ... Deen is not supposed to be the star of his scenes—his sex partners are. But on Tumblr, a network of teenage bloggers has emerged to turn the focus on him. The young women trade Deen videos, post candid photographs, and pluck out all the minute details that turn them on: the way he looks at a woman, touches her, stares into her eyes, whispers in her ear. “There was just something about the way he moved,” Emily says of her first exposure to Deen. He seemed to be “speaking to the girl, but not with his mouth, with his hand over the girl’s throat, and with his eyes” ... (What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier of Female Frontier)

J. Bryan Lowder at Slate sums up some key remaining points of Hess' article as follows:
Hess goes on to discuss why there aren’t more guys like Deen in the male porn-star stable, and her findings tell us just as much about male viewers’ hang-ups as they do about women’s erotic preferences. Part of the problem is that men (who largely control the porn industry) imagine that women want everything big—“Big arms. Big abs. Big dicks,” as Hess puts it—when what they really want is something a little less overwrought. One of Hess’ subjects described her attraction to Deen thusly: “He was almost like a guy that you would just hang out with at Hebrew school.”

But the real obstacle to the proliferation of female-friendly male porn stars is, oddly, a rather nasty and subtle strain of homophobia, revealed in the following double-bind:
The straight male performer must be attractive enough to serve as a prop, but not so attractive that he becomes the object of desire.
Hess is spot on. Men need to see a penis in straight porn (presumably to stand in for their own), but not one that is attached to a guy who might be threateningly attractive, not to mention plausibly appealing to the woman involved. Maybe this insistence on a male blank slate (a kind of reverse objectification, when you think about it) makes it easier to project oneself onto the disembodied penis, but it also protects men from the potentially scary experience of being turned on by both partners of a heterosexual encounter—which, yes, does involve another dude. In other words, the bland interchangeability of the “unreasonable” looking men allows them to avoid confronting the terrifying specter of homosexuality.

Hess’ informants within the industry confirm this when they explain that a man simply cannot be the focus of a porn flick (in the film itself or even on the video cover) because consumers will be spooked. The sad thing here is that in this arrangement, everyone loses: Women can’t get the kind of porn they want from the mainstream (there are, of course, many excellent indie outfits who make great lady-centric films), an insidious kind of abstract homophobia is reinforced and, perhaps worst of all, many straight male viewers suffer unnecessary emotional and sexual stunting.

It’s telling that it was a woman, Pamela Peaks, who first recruited Deen into the porn life—she obviously knew what she liked, even if it was a gamble. But now that Deen’s “skinny, Jewish ass” has proven its worth, perhaps other producers, female and male alike, will be willing to challenge and entice their viewers with a more diverse casting couch as well.

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* Yes, I do have a problem with Ogas' and Gaddam's eager attempts to define all their findings in terms of a fundamental understanding of biology. While the authors pretend to take cultural components into consideration, they are clearly conflicted:
By investigating the software of our sexual brain, we can finally appreciate the true nature of human desire. There is no such thing as an absolute “male sexuality” or “female sexuality,” but instead a number of gender-specific components, subject to the vagaries of biology and experience. Cues can flip, change, or transform, resulting in endless variations of sexual identity that defy easy labeling. But it is our sexual cues—our finite, identifiable, biological cues—that grant us all the pleasures of sex.

Our cues release us, even as they bind us.

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