Pornography, Loads of Cheeseburgers, Symbolic Violence Against Women: Triggers
Here's a very long-winded entry that basically sums up to "Womens studies major bagged on Agoutirex's favorite fatty porn model, Agoutirex is hurt and confused."
A few years ago, Moody and I went to see a talk on pornography hosted by the UC Davis Women's Resource Center. The speaker was a journalism professor from a university in Texas, the name of which I forget, who had followed trends in the porn industry for the last fifteen years and had found that porn was becoming more violent, more degrading, and more misogynistic. He had some good points, but the talk suffered from some major limitations, not the least of which was that it was only an hour long and you can't really address all the varied aspects of such a huge topic in that short amount of time.
More importantly, the speaker restricted his definition of pornography to studio-produced films aimed at a straight male audience. Admittedly, that still covers a lot of porn and he may have intentionally restricted himself just because of time limitations, but he honestly appeared to be completely unaware of any pornography that did not fit that model. Weirdly, he kept referring to the video rental experience. I thought that was rather odd, since, and I could be wrong here, I was under the impression that most people these days got their dirty pictures on the Internet. In fact, I don't think I know of anyone who rents adult videos these days. In my entire life, I've only seen two actual rented porn movies. The first one, "Freaks of Leather," some friends showed me because it contained a ridiculous scene where a woman is so deeply penetrated that..uh..it comes out of her mouth...yeah, just like in real life. Um. Apparently someone involved in the production must have thought that was erotic. The other one was "Cherry 2000"; Moody and I rented it by accident because the rental shelved it on the "science fiction" rack and we thought it was a comedy about an android from the future who travels to 1980s LA to rediscover the joys of sex because, in the future, there is no love. Both films were pretty dull and unarousing, although I remember that the star of "Cherry 2000" was pretty good at faking orgasms. But in any case, I'm not really the target audience since I'm a creepy fetishist with very specialized interests (THIS FACT WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER IN THIS RAMBLING STORY, BEAR WITH ME)
So he said that porn films were obsessed with showing men dominating women through absurdly violent sex acts which didn't reflect the actual sexual practices of most real life Americans, things like "double anal," "double vaginal," "ass-to-mouth" and the dreaded "gangbang." And then men watch these pornos and have unrealistic expectations of sex and feel bad when they can't double penetrate a woman on account of not having two penises. The speaker then went on to talk about how he felt ashamed of being a man because of the way women were exploited in porn. That really seemed an odd confession and one which made the audience, which incidentally consisted of mostly women, more visibly uncomfortable than anything else he'd described. He didn't have anything to say about the exploitation of women in the actual production of porn, instead talking mostly about how porn consumption affects the behaviors or attitudes of the viewer -- except that all his examples involved child porn and child molesters. So I don't know how much you could really extrapolate from that about the effects on non-pedophiles.
Audience members raised several objections. One woman pointed out that adult porn actresses were capable of making their own decisions about how to use their bodies; he dismissed this criticism, telling the questioner that she had swallowed a lie perpetrated by the porn industry that appearing in porn was "empowering." Another girl asked how his analysis applied to gay porn or porn aimed at straight women. This stymied him and, seemingly unable to imagine something that didn't fit the straight porn model he'd been speaking about, said that gay porn had the exact same power dynamic as straight porn because the gender roles played out in the latter by the man and woman were played out in the former by the "top" and "bottom." I guess you could argue that's the case because of the whole "It's not gay if you're pitching" mentality, but it still seems like an oversimplification to say that changing the sex of the participants won't at all change the issues involved. He ignored the second part of her question.
I also asked a question, but, unfortunately, I don't think I was very articulate because he really didn't understand what I was getting at. Hopefully I'll be better at explaining myself here: I wanted to ask about SFW fetish pornography, meaning smut that's unrecognizable as such outside of its target audience - like films of women eating cake or driving their cars into snowbanks*. (He had briefly talked about fetish porn earlier in the evening but he limited that to BDSM, which he claimed displayed the same misogynistic, dominant tendencies. Not sure if that assessment also applied to BDSM porn involving dominant women and submissive men.) I also asked what it meant that a lot of this niche fringe fetish porn was being made by amateurs (At least in the fatty porn market which is admittedly the only porn market that I'm at all familiar with because I am a big gross pervert) since presumably making porn for a small niche audience wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth a studio's time. A lot of these new fetish smut-mongers were one-person-operations, mostly women who saw a market, set up their own online stores, pulled out camcorders and filmed themselves eating cake in their basements.
He said that any sort of porn reduces women to a commodity packaged for the consumption of men.
Anyway, I was reminded of this because of a recent article in Bitch Magazine entitled Sex and Food: What Feeding Porn Tells Us. I read it because it addressed fatty eat porn, which is my favorite kind of trashy smut, but it also brought up the same question about one-woman porn operations. What does it mean if a woman goes into the porn-making business by herself without any involvement by anyone else? The answer is that you just pretend that there's a man behind the camera.
In her article, author Jessica Hester makes a number of the standard assumptions that non-perverts always make when they write about this fetish, the most obvious of which is that its ultimate goal is always grotesque blob-like immobility, but otherwise she's spot on about a lot of things about fatty fetishist mentality. I won't lie, a lot of fatty fetishism comes from a dark place, but that's sort of the way it is with most erotic fantasy. My main beef with Hester's work is that she chooses an illustrative example that, uh, doesn't actually illustrate any of her points at all.
Ivy doesn’t look like most performers in mainstream pornography. Then again, the thousands of viewers who have logged on to watch her YouTube videos or look at her photo sets aren’t seeking mainstream adult entertainment. While most porn stars and pinups show off their tits and ass, Ivy shows off her big belly, the body part fetishized in the niche genre of feeding porn.
Photos and videos on websites like BigCuties and BBW Pinups show scantily clad, obese women packing away pastries, chowing down on cheeseburgers, and feasting on fries. In one video, Ivy performs calisthenics until she groans and wheezes. Then, after looking off-camera for reassurance, she begins to gorge on powdered donuts while exaggeratedly and sensually licking the powder from her fingers and rubbing her stomach, still gasping for breath.
This was kind of weird because I read that opening section and was all WAIT A SECOND, IS SHE TALKING ABOUT HOTFATTYGIRL IVY (LINK NSFW)?!? It was really weird to see Ivy mentioned because I've seen most of Ivy's videos; she's one of the few actresses in the fatty porn niche that, in my opinion, IS DOING IT RIGHT. Most ladies who make these videos just sit there, glassy-eyed, silently eating cake, as they lie back and think of the queen. Ivy usually seems engaged in what she's doing. She seems to be enjoying it. She's quite vibrant and talkative as she crams cake down her throat. She's also pretty durrrrrrrrr
But while the presence of obese bodies in porn could be encouraging and radical under different circumstances, feeding porn’s gender dynamics undercut that potential. Even in the absence of a phallus, men are central to the eroticized dominance and submission that’s performed in feeding pornography. A “feeder” (usually male) encourages the “feedee” (usually female) to gain weight, often literally placing the food in her mouth.
The feeders who, off-camera, forcibly coax a female performer like Ivy to gorge posit themselves as masters on whom she is dependent for instruction and encouragement. It’s different from much of traditional porn only in the poundage: By performing a relationship of overt dependence, the men who create such videos -- and the viewers who identify with them -- claim the female body as a site for male domination and control; if the woman happens to enjoy it, that’s secondary.
That last sentence is true enough. Pornography is made for the enjoyment of the audience, not the actress -- and the audience here is presumably all male. I like Ivy because she's a really good actress and very good at making it appear that she's enjoying herself. Ivy has said on a number of occasions that she actually has a fetish for this sort of thing and claims to have been into it long before she started posing on the Internet. But of course that's ridiculous, because women don't have a sexuality, right? They just do this sort of thing for MEN.
But ANYWAY, the point that I want to get to is that none of the Ivy videos I've seen have featured any male actors. And it's obvious that there's no cameraman, male or otherwise, as Hester imagines. The camera never tracks or pans; it's always just static. The only time that it changes is when Ivy herself walks over to it and moves it. Half the videos only end when Ivy walks out of frame to turn it off.
Of course, it's not reasonable to expect Hester to watch every single Ivy video, because, if you're not into this fetish, they're pretty dull. But an easy way to avoid making a mistake like this would be to contact Ivy and get her take on this. Hester didn't. I spent the whole article thinking, "Well, she probably chose to talk about Ivy rather than any of the dozens of other women catering to this niche because she was able to get some quotes from Ivy." But no, apparently, Hester just randomly chose Ivy as an example, watched a couple of her videos, and wrote her editorial based on that. Maybe it's just because I'm a reporter, but when the article ended without any input from its main character it just felt weird and unfinished. I think the real problem is that Hester is a student of English and gender studies at the University of Chicago. She's an academic in training rather than a reporter. That might explain why she didn't contact Ivy, as academics generally put more stock in studies and journal articles (which Hester does make extensive reference to) and dismiss personal stories as anecdotal evidence. That's in contrast to reporters who regard personal stories as the real "meat" of a piece. So it's not surprising that Hester wouldn't have bothered to contact Ivy, but it's unfortunate. I'm sure that there are plenty of other fatty porn videos out there that do conform to Hester's hypothetical male-dominated feeding scenario (I haven't watched them, but I don't at all doubt that they exist), but she seems to have picked the one instance that bucks that trend as an example.
That said, Hester's assessment of the mentality of fatty porn VIEWERS is pretty spot-on.
Also, this is the picture that Bitch included with the article. I dunno, it doesn't really say "women exploited by evil fetishists" so much as "Hahah look at the fat tub of crap." Stay classy, Bitch.
EDIT: Here's the original article as it appeared in Bitch; Ivy defends herself in the comments far more eloquently than I could so go read her reaction there. Hester's only response is that she never explicitly accused Ivy of Most of the other comments are the standard HAHA FATTIES LOSE SOME WEIGHT WE ARE JUST SAYING THIS BECAUSE WE ARE CONCERNED trolling and EVEN IF A WOMAN MAKES PORN BECAUSE SHE CHOOSES TO OF HER OWN FREE WILL AND SHE ENJOYS THE FETISH THAT SHE'S CATERING TO AND SHE STARTS A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN-OPERATED BUSINESS DOING IT, IT IS STILL EXPOITATIVE BECAUSE A MAN MIGHT SEE IT wank. Now I wish I had a subscription to bitch so that I could cancel it. This issue is very important to me because I am a pervert.
* - That's a real fetish, by the way, but I forget what its adherents call themselves.
A few years ago, Moody and I went to see a talk on pornography hosted by the UC Davis Women's Resource Center. The speaker was a journalism professor from a university in Texas, the name of which I forget, who had followed trends in the porn industry for the last fifteen years and had found that porn was becoming more violent, more degrading, and more misogynistic. He had some good points, but the talk suffered from some major limitations, not the least of which was that it was only an hour long and you can't really address all the varied aspects of such a huge topic in that short amount of time.
More importantly, the speaker restricted his definition of pornography to studio-produced films aimed at a straight male audience. Admittedly, that still covers a lot of porn and he may have intentionally restricted himself just because of time limitations, but he honestly appeared to be completely unaware of any pornography that did not fit that model. Weirdly, he kept referring to the video rental experience. I thought that was rather odd, since, and I could be wrong here, I was under the impression that most people these days got their dirty pictures on the Internet. In fact, I don't think I know of anyone who rents adult videos these days. In my entire life, I've only seen two actual rented porn movies. The first one, "Freaks of Leather," some friends showed me because it contained a ridiculous scene where a woman is so deeply penetrated that..uh..it comes out of her mouth...yeah, just like in real life. Um. Apparently someone involved in the production must have thought that was erotic. The other one was "Cherry 2000"; Moody and I rented it by accident because the rental shelved it on the "science fiction" rack and we thought it was a comedy about an android from the future who travels to 1980s LA to rediscover the joys of sex because, in the future, there is no love. Both films were pretty dull and unarousing, although I remember that the star of "Cherry 2000" was pretty good at faking orgasms. But in any case, I'm not really the target audience since I'm a creepy fetishist with very specialized interests (THIS FACT WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER IN THIS RAMBLING STORY, BEAR WITH ME)
So he said that porn films were obsessed with showing men dominating women through absurdly violent sex acts which didn't reflect the actual sexual practices of most real life Americans, things like "double anal," "double vaginal," "ass-to-mouth" and the dreaded "gangbang." And then men watch these pornos and have unrealistic expectations of sex and feel bad when they can't double penetrate a woman on account of not having two penises. The speaker then went on to talk about how he felt ashamed of being a man because of the way women were exploited in porn. That really seemed an odd confession and one which made the audience, which incidentally consisted of mostly women, more visibly uncomfortable than anything else he'd described. He didn't have anything to say about the exploitation of women in the actual production of porn, instead talking mostly about how porn consumption affects the behaviors or attitudes of the viewer -- except that all his examples involved child porn and child molesters. So I don't know how much you could really extrapolate from that about the effects on non-pedophiles.
Audience members raised several objections. One woman pointed out that adult porn actresses were capable of making their own decisions about how to use their bodies; he dismissed this criticism, telling the questioner that she had swallowed a lie perpetrated by the porn industry that appearing in porn was "empowering." Another girl asked how his analysis applied to gay porn or porn aimed at straight women. This stymied him and, seemingly unable to imagine something that didn't fit the straight porn model he'd been speaking about, said that gay porn had the exact same power dynamic as straight porn because the gender roles played out in the latter by the man and woman were played out in the former by the "top" and "bottom." I guess you could argue that's the case because of the whole "It's not gay if you're pitching" mentality, but it still seems like an oversimplification to say that changing the sex of the participants won't at all change the issues involved. He ignored the second part of her question.
I also asked a question, but, unfortunately, I don't think I was very articulate because he really didn't understand what I was getting at. Hopefully I'll be better at explaining myself here: I wanted to ask about SFW fetish pornography, meaning smut that's unrecognizable as such outside of its target audience - like films of women eating cake or driving their cars into snowbanks*. (He had briefly talked about fetish porn earlier in the evening but he limited that to BDSM, which he claimed displayed the same misogynistic, dominant tendencies. Not sure if that assessment also applied to BDSM porn involving dominant women and submissive men.) I also asked what it meant that a lot of this niche fringe fetish porn was being made by amateurs (At least in the fatty porn market which is admittedly the only porn market that I'm at all familiar with because I am a big gross pervert) since presumably making porn for a small niche audience wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth a studio's time. A lot of these new fetish smut-mongers were one-person-operations, mostly women who saw a market, set up their own online stores, pulled out camcorders and filmed themselves eating cake in their basements.
He said that any sort of porn reduces women to a commodity packaged for the consumption of men.
Anyway, I was reminded of this because of a recent article in Bitch Magazine entitled Sex and Food: What Feeding Porn Tells Us. I read it because it addressed fatty eat porn, which is my favorite kind of trashy smut, but it also brought up the same question about one-woman porn operations. What does it mean if a woman goes into the porn-making business by herself without any involvement by anyone else? The answer is that you just pretend that there's a man behind the camera.
In her article, author Jessica Hester makes a number of the standard assumptions that non-perverts always make when they write about this fetish, the most obvious of which is that its ultimate goal is always grotesque blob-like immobility, but otherwise she's spot on about a lot of things about fatty fetishist mentality. I won't lie, a lot of fatty fetishism comes from a dark place, but that's sort of the way it is with most erotic fantasy. My main beef with Hester's work is that she chooses an illustrative example that, uh, doesn't actually illustrate any of her points at all.
Ivy doesn’t look like most performers in mainstream pornography. Then again, the thousands of viewers who have logged on to watch her YouTube videos or look at her photo sets aren’t seeking mainstream adult entertainment. While most porn stars and pinups show off their tits and ass, Ivy shows off her big belly, the body part fetishized in the niche genre of feeding porn.
Photos and videos on websites like BigCuties and BBW Pinups show scantily clad, obese women packing away pastries, chowing down on cheeseburgers, and feasting on fries. In one video, Ivy performs calisthenics until she groans and wheezes. Then, after looking off-camera for reassurance, she begins to gorge on powdered donuts while exaggeratedly and sensually licking the powder from her fingers and rubbing her stomach, still gasping for breath.
This was kind of weird because I read that opening section and was all WAIT A SECOND, IS SHE TALKING ABOUT HOTFATTYGIRL IVY (LINK NSFW)?!? It was really weird to see Ivy mentioned because I've seen most of Ivy's videos; she's one of the few actresses in the fatty porn niche that, in my opinion, IS DOING IT RIGHT. Most ladies who make these videos just sit there, glassy-eyed, silently eating cake, as they lie back and think of the queen. Ivy usually seems engaged in what she's doing. She seems to be enjoying it. She's quite vibrant and talkative as she crams cake down her throat. She's also pretty durrrrrrrrr
But while the presence of obese bodies in porn could be encouraging and radical under different circumstances, feeding porn’s gender dynamics undercut that potential. Even in the absence of a phallus, men are central to the eroticized dominance and submission that’s performed in feeding pornography. A “feeder” (usually male) encourages the “feedee” (usually female) to gain weight, often literally placing the food in her mouth.
The feeders who, off-camera, forcibly coax a female performer like Ivy to gorge posit themselves as masters on whom she is dependent for instruction and encouragement. It’s different from much of traditional porn only in the poundage: By performing a relationship of overt dependence, the men who create such videos -- and the viewers who identify with them -- claim the female body as a site for male domination and control; if the woman happens to enjoy it, that’s secondary.
That last sentence is true enough. Pornography is made for the enjoyment of the audience, not the actress -- and the audience here is presumably all male. I like Ivy because she's a really good actress and very good at making it appear that she's enjoying herself. Ivy has said on a number of occasions that she actually has a fetish for this sort of thing and claims to have been into it long before she started posing on the Internet. But of course that's ridiculous, because women don't have a sexuality, right? They just do this sort of thing for MEN.
But ANYWAY, the point that I want to get to is that none of the Ivy videos I've seen have featured any male actors. And it's obvious that there's no cameraman, male or otherwise, as Hester imagines. The camera never tracks or pans; it's always just static. The only time that it changes is when Ivy herself walks over to it and moves it. Half the videos only end when Ivy walks out of frame to turn it off.
Of course, it's not reasonable to expect Hester to watch every single Ivy video, because, if you're not into this fetish, they're pretty dull. But an easy way to avoid making a mistake like this would be to contact Ivy and get her take on this. Hester didn't. I spent the whole article thinking, "Well, she probably chose to talk about Ivy rather than any of the dozens of other women catering to this niche because she was able to get some quotes from Ivy." But no, apparently, Hester just randomly chose Ivy as an example, watched a couple of her videos, and wrote her editorial based on that. Maybe it's just because I'm a reporter, but when the article ended without any input from its main character it just felt weird and unfinished. I think the real problem is that Hester is a student of English and gender studies at the University of Chicago. She's an academic in training rather than a reporter. That might explain why she didn't contact Ivy, as academics generally put more stock in studies and journal articles (which Hester does make extensive reference to) and dismiss personal stories as anecdotal evidence. That's in contrast to reporters who regard personal stories as the real "meat" of a piece. So it's not surprising that Hester wouldn't have bothered to contact Ivy, but it's unfortunate. I'm sure that there are plenty of other fatty porn videos out there that do conform to Hester's hypothetical male-dominated feeding scenario (I haven't watched them, but I don't at all doubt that they exist), but she seems to have picked the one instance that bucks that trend as an example.
That said, Hester's assessment of the mentality of fatty porn VIEWERS is pretty spot-on.
Also, this is the picture that Bitch included with the article. I dunno, it doesn't really say "women exploited by evil fetishists" so much as "Hahah look at the fat tub of crap." Stay classy, Bitch.
EDIT: Here's the original article as it appeared in Bitch; Ivy defends herself in the comments far more eloquently than I could so go read her reaction there. Hester's only response is that she never explicitly accused Ivy of Most of the other comments are the standard HAHA FATTIES LOSE SOME WEIGHT WE ARE JUST SAYING THIS BECAUSE WE ARE CONCERNED trolling and EVEN IF A WOMAN MAKES PORN BECAUSE SHE CHOOSES TO OF HER OWN FREE WILL AND SHE ENJOYS THE FETISH THAT SHE'S CATERING TO AND SHE STARTS A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN-OPERATED BUSINESS DOING IT, IT IS STILL EXPOITATIVE BECAUSE A MAN MIGHT SEE IT wank. Now I wish I had a subscription to bitch so that I could cancel it. This issue is very important to me because I am a pervert.
* - That's a real fetish, by the way, but I forget what its adherents call themselves.