The Pink Pr0n Is Powerful
First, two paragraphs of preface:
In the interest of my not having to waste keystrokes debating whether Sex Is Ebul, let me just say that this essay assumes ours to be a Sex-Negative culture, and that I will be taking a Sex-Positive tack. If you don't know what these terms mean, please to be following the above links to Wikipedia before reading further, kthx.
Also, I will be using the term "queer" to include kink as well as sexuality and gender, and I will be using the phrase "sexually deviant" as an alternate but equivalent umbrella term to describe these groups. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that this is also a dated psychological term for which the new preferred term is "paraphilia", but in this case I'm using it in its literal sense to mean someone whose sexuality differs from what is considered by the surrounding culture to be the norm. To this, I will be considering genderqueerness to be a sexual deviation (and thus grouped for the purposes of this essay under the heading of sexuality) due to the strict guidelines of heteronormativity.
Now. All that boring stuff's over, on to today's essay.
Today's essay will be about porn. No, not the porn industry, just porn. Regular ol' run-o-the-mill NC-17 slash fanfiction written by normal people in their spare time. Well, "normal" in a sense. Obviously, what I do in my spare time would not be considered "normal" by the status quo in my society. But the rest of the time I'm still going to the supermarket or working a job or being made to sit through holiday suppers with family just like the rest of that miserable status quo. But all of that stuff is separate from sexuality, right? So why should it matter what I do in my spare time?
Because it's not separate from sexuality. I can't go to a movie or turn on my television or pick up a magazine or overhear a conversation or open a book without being accosted by someone else's sexuality. It's not a lack of sexuality we're seeing when Spider-Man and Save-Me Woman have their Moment on screen, or when the old lady at the bus stop is telling everyone who'll listen about her son's wedding, or when a co-worker of mine tells another that it's not in a man's nature to do housecleaning. Nope, it's sexuality, all right. It's just a different way of talking about who's sleeping with whom and how and why.
No, really, it is. Our society is so heterocentric that heteronormative sexual acts can be discussed (or indicated in some way) without our even recognizing the expression of the occurrence as being sexual in nature. Let me put it another way: Suppose my weekend plans included going away with a cisgendered male partner to have monogamous kink-free heteronormative PIV sex in the missionary position, most likely for the purpose of procreation, and he would be the dominating party. This could be communicated while still retaining propriety in a social situation with the word "honeymoon" without all of the specifics of the actual act needing to be explained, because they can be assumed to be understood by the status quo.
To use another example, imagine you are watching a television show or film, and a male character (Bill) and a female character (Billie) walk into a bedroom together, and then the scene changes. We do not have to see them disrobing or explicitly engaging in a sexual act to know the film intends to communicate to us that a certain very specific sexual act was committed in a very specific way. Given no other information, this kind of sex is the assumption.
But why? Why is this kind of sex supposed to be the Default no-frills-attached sexual act? Well, to get into that, we would need to explore the role of some pretty high-level feminist theory concepts such as Othering and Invalidation and Normalization. But suffice it to say that heteronormative behaviours are considered to be the default not because they possess some essential quality that deviant behaviours do not, but because their being considered default empowers those who advocate them, and disempowers (and labels as "deviant") all other forms of sexual behaviour.
So, if the writers of Bill and Billie's scene had intended to show that Bill and Billie had had any other type of sex, they would have had to go out of their way to dispel the assumptions they knew their audience would make. They would have had to, at the very least, explain or allude to another sexual act having occurred, thus bringing down upon them the hammer of censorship, because now an actual sexual act is being discussed rather than hidden in terms of desexualized euphemisms.
But while sexually normative people have the benefit of this universally-understood code for discussing sex in desexualized terms, queer writers (and indeed the queer population at large) have no such luxury. If I want Character X and Character Y to have the kind of sex I have, or to have the kind of sexuality I have, I have to say so. I have to explicitly demonstrate in my fiction precisely what is occurring and how, because for me (and thus for my characters), there is no prearranged sexual dance as there is in heteronormativity.
And talking of that prearranged sexual dance, who's to say it's not a form of deviant sexuality in and of itself? What we have going on in our culture, as my partner noted recently, is a fetishization of the mainstream. Essentially, most people are sexually attracted to, and indeed sometimes sexually aroused by, the gender role of the opposite sex. The more socially normative the person, the more sexually attractive they are to the fetishist. Thus explains the marriages or partnerships we often see between people who don't seem to be able to offer one another anything outside of conformity to the roles of Husband and Wife or Boyfriend and Girlfriend. We just don't normally see this as a fetishization because it's not treated as such.
But if you're one of these people, you can talk about it with other people in public, make friends and have positive social interactions as you discuss the many facets of this sexual preference for the status quo. "I just want a nice girl to settle down and raise a family with." "He's the man of my dreams; the one my mother always said would come one day to sweep me off my feet." "He's so manly." "She'll make a good mother." Again, here are allusions to the speaker's sexuality, but as they are heteronormative, they are desexualized in our society since they are so normalized.
But I, to use one example, like nerdy people. Show me a pair of glasses and button-down collar and a string of well-intoned technobabble and I'm yours, baby. But I can't talk about this in public. I can't say "You know, old lady at the bus stop, I'm just looking for a submissive nerdy boy to have a few good times with." To use another example, if I preferred manly men, I could say that I really go for a man with muscles, but if I were a foot fetishist, I couldn't even mention my preferences. Both are bizarre fixations on a bodily attribute for sexual gratification; one is considered perfectly acceptable, one is considered laughable at best (from Wikipedia: "Fetishism is diagnosable as a paraphilia in the DSM").
We can see here that to discuss heteronormative sexuality is to discuss "dating" or "relationships" or "love", but to discuss deviant sexuality is undisguisably sexual. So if I have any kind of deviance in sexuality, it must remain hidden, and so I lose that bond I may have forged with others by discussing it as others do and possibly finding commonality. But perhaps more importantly, if my sexuality is deviant enough from heteronormativity, then not only am I alien to others, but they become alien to me as well. Marriage, for example, means nothing to me as a queer person except as an institution of exclusion and oppression. It is not beautiful or romantic; in fact I consider it an insult.
As another example, imagine if, instead of slash, I penned beautiful heterocentric romances between original characters, involving only dominant men and submissive women jerking helplessly along in a pre-scripted social dance culminating in marriage and children and happily-ever-after. This would be a hobby I could share with family and co-workers, and for which I could be appreciated. "That's my daughter the writer," my mother might have said when I was a teenager, and beamed at me with pride as I entered my well-penned prose into scholarship contests. I might have majored in the art I love so much, had my talents honed by a professor who took an interest in my style. But I'll never know, and I'll never be able to avail myself of those sources.
So gender and sexuality are not airtight; they affect so many areas of our lives. But worse, the silence mandated by our sex-negative society regarding anything pertaining to sexuality assures that we will continue to be alienated and ridiculed.
Defense of slash porn almost always comes in the form of pointing out that it has merits in spite of its being pornographic. But that is a defense of slash itself, not slash porn. I maintain, however, that slash porn has merits not only because it is slash, but also because it is pornographic. Further, it has many times been suggested to me and other slash writers that perhaps we should remove the erotic sections from our stories to make them more palatable to a wider audience. But I'm not going to do that, and here's why:
For one, I'm not going to be silenced. As I mentioned above, people with sexualities and sexual preferences which deviate form the norm are harmed by the silence imposed upon them, particularly in conjunction with the constant cultural crowbarring of heteronormativity into every aspect of a person's life. I not only refuse, through slash, to be an instrument of heteronormativity, but through erotic slash, I refuse to remain invisible in doing so. It is not enough to simply ask our society to accept that queer people are different in a vague and undefined manner; it must be understood and accepted that we are sexually different.
Along these lines, I write slash porn that deals with a wide range of sexual topics such as BDSM and fetishism. Because slash porn is inherently queer and usually sex-positive (or at least sexually open), it lends itself quite naturally to these issues. The validation this affords us as sexual deviants is incalculable; it is empowering on a massive scale to find that someone else shares the very same secret you've been ashamed even to admit to yourself. No other place can be as consistently expected to be safe for sexual deviance as slash writing.
The erotic text also stresses a sex-positivity absent from virtually all other media. I love Character X, and I love his relationship with Character Y, and I want to express that sexually, so I write X/Y. The reader, the other part of this equation, not only receives my expression of appreciation for these characters or this pairing, but may identify with it and find it a worthy sexual expression. Porn writers are aware of the purposes for which their stories can sometimes be put to use, and I find this to be just as legitimate as any other use where the reader finds fulfillment or enjoyment. An audience who wants porn is just as valid as an audience who doesn't, particularly if I feel a kinship with that audience.
And slashers are kin, whether they'd like to admit it or not. In their appreciation of slash, they're already sexually deviant, as this is not currently a socially acceptable interest. As a fellow slasher, I want to give them what they want, and I will not make a value judgment on the pleasure taken from slash simply because it happens to be sexual in nature. Pleasure is pleasure, and I am honoured to think my writing ever pushed any fellow slasher's proverbial buttons. So my writing is not just about expressing my appreciation of Character X, but it is about celebrating my sexual deviance with other queer people through Character X. To remove that would be to remove one of the main purposes of my writing. Not to overestimate the quality of my writing in making this comparison, but to ask me to remove sexual content in a story would be as inappropriate and ignorant as asking Harper Lee to remove the African-Americans in To Kill A Mockingbird.
So much has been said so much more eloquently regarding feminism and slash that I don't feel I could add much to it. But I do feel I should point out again that what is written on the subject often deals more with slash than with NC-17 slash in particular. Again, sex and gender are hugely intersected with sexual issues. It is not enough to recognize that women are gaining empowerment by writing male characters, but we also need to recognize that women are gaining sexual empowerment by writing about sexual situations involving males, and that this is no small victory.
So get out there and read and write that slash, and enjoy it like you've always been told you shouldn't. It's very, very important that you do. If anyone knocks, tell 'em you're busy saving the world.
In the interest of my not having to waste keystrokes debating whether Sex Is Ebul, let me just say that this essay assumes ours to be a Sex-Negative culture, and that I will be taking a Sex-Positive tack. If you don't know what these terms mean, please to be following the above links to Wikipedia before reading further, kthx.
Also, I will be using the term "queer" to include kink as well as sexuality and gender, and I will be using the phrase "sexually deviant" as an alternate but equivalent umbrella term to describe these groups. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that this is also a dated psychological term for which the new preferred term is "paraphilia", but in this case I'm using it in its literal sense to mean someone whose sexuality differs from what is considered by the surrounding culture to be the norm. To this, I will be considering genderqueerness to be a sexual deviation (and thus grouped for the purposes of this essay under the heading of sexuality) due to the strict guidelines of heteronormativity.
Now. All that boring stuff's over, on to today's essay.
Today's essay will be about porn. No, not the porn industry, just porn. Regular ol' run-o-the-mill NC-17 slash fanfiction written by normal people in their spare time. Well, "normal" in a sense. Obviously, what I do in my spare time would not be considered "normal" by the status quo in my society. But the rest of the time I'm still going to the supermarket or working a job or being made to sit through holiday suppers with family just like the rest of that miserable status quo. But all of that stuff is separate from sexuality, right? So why should it matter what I do in my spare time?
Because it's not separate from sexuality. I can't go to a movie or turn on my television or pick up a magazine or overhear a conversation or open a book without being accosted by someone else's sexuality. It's not a lack of sexuality we're seeing when Spider-Man and Save-Me Woman have their Moment on screen, or when the old lady at the bus stop is telling everyone who'll listen about her son's wedding, or when a co-worker of mine tells another that it's not in a man's nature to do housecleaning. Nope, it's sexuality, all right. It's just a different way of talking about who's sleeping with whom and how and why.
No, really, it is. Our society is so heterocentric that heteronormative sexual acts can be discussed (or indicated in some way) without our even recognizing the expression of the occurrence as being sexual in nature. Let me put it another way: Suppose my weekend plans included going away with a cisgendered male partner to have monogamous kink-free heteronormative PIV sex in the missionary position, most likely for the purpose of procreation, and he would be the dominating party. This could be communicated while still retaining propriety in a social situation with the word "honeymoon" without all of the specifics of the actual act needing to be explained, because they can be assumed to be understood by the status quo.
To use another example, imagine you are watching a television show or film, and a male character (Bill) and a female character (Billie) walk into a bedroom together, and then the scene changes. We do not have to see them disrobing or explicitly engaging in a sexual act to know the film intends to communicate to us that a certain very specific sexual act was committed in a very specific way. Given no other information, this kind of sex is the assumption.
But why? Why is this kind of sex supposed to be the Default no-frills-attached sexual act? Well, to get into that, we would need to explore the role of some pretty high-level feminist theory concepts such as Othering and Invalidation and Normalization. But suffice it to say that heteronormative behaviours are considered to be the default not because they possess some essential quality that deviant behaviours do not, but because their being considered default empowers those who advocate them, and disempowers (and labels as "deviant") all other forms of sexual behaviour.
So, if the writers of Bill and Billie's scene had intended to show that Bill and Billie had had any other type of sex, they would have had to go out of their way to dispel the assumptions they knew their audience would make. They would have had to, at the very least, explain or allude to another sexual act having occurred, thus bringing down upon them the hammer of censorship, because now an actual sexual act is being discussed rather than hidden in terms of desexualized euphemisms.
But while sexually normative people have the benefit of this universally-understood code for discussing sex in desexualized terms, queer writers (and indeed the queer population at large) have no such luxury. If I want Character X and Character Y to have the kind of sex I have, or to have the kind of sexuality I have, I have to say so. I have to explicitly demonstrate in my fiction precisely what is occurring and how, because for me (and thus for my characters), there is no prearranged sexual dance as there is in heteronormativity.
And talking of that prearranged sexual dance, who's to say it's not a form of deviant sexuality in and of itself? What we have going on in our culture, as my partner noted recently, is a fetishization of the mainstream. Essentially, most people are sexually attracted to, and indeed sometimes sexually aroused by, the gender role of the opposite sex. The more socially normative the person, the more sexually attractive they are to the fetishist. Thus explains the marriages or partnerships we often see between people who don't seem to be able to offer one another anything outside of conformity to the roles of Husband and Wife or Boyfriend and Girlfriend. We just don't normally see this as a fetishization because it's not treated as such.
But if you're one of these people, you can talk about it with other people in public, make friends and have positive social interactions as you discuss the many facets of this sexual preference for the status quo. "I just want a nice girl to settle down and raise a family with." "He's the man of my dreams; the one my mother always said would come one day to sweep me off my feet." "He's so manly." "She'll make a good mother." Again, here are allusions to the speaker's sexuality, but as they are heteronormative, they are desexualized in our society since they are so normalized.
But I, to use one example, like nerdy people. Show me a pair of glasses and button-down collar and a string of well-intoned technobabble and I'm yours, baby. But I can't talk about this in public. I can't say "You know, old lady at the bus stop, I'm just looking for a submissive nerdy boy to have a few good times with." To use another example, if I preferred manly men, I could say that I really go for a man with muscles, but if I were a foot fetishist, I couldn't even mention my preferences. Both are bizarre fixations on a bodily attribute for sexual gratification; one is considered perfectly acceptable, one is considered laughable at best (from Wikipedia: "Fetishism is diagnosable as a paraphilia in the DSM").
We can see here that to discuss heteronormative sexuality is to discuss "dating" or "relationships" or "love", but to discuss deviant sexuality is undisguisably sexual. So if I have any kind of deviance in sexuality, it must remain hidden, and so I lose that bond I may have forged with others by discussing it as others do and possibly finding commonality. But perhaps more importantly, if my sexuality is deviant enough from heteronormativity, then not only am I alien to others, but they become alien to me as well. Marriage, for example, means nothing to me as a queer person except as an institution of exclusion and oppression. It is not beautiful or romantic; in fact I consider it an insult.
As another example, imagine if, instead of slash, I penned beautiful heterocentric romances between original characters, involving only dominant men and submissive women jerking helplessly along in a pre-scripted social dance culminating in marriage and children and happily-ever-after. This would be a hobby I could share with family and co-workers, and for which I could be appreciated. "That's my daughter the writer," my mother might have said when I was a teenager, and beamed at me with pride as I entered my well-penned prose into scholarship contests. I might have majored in the art I love so much, had my talents honed by a professor who took an interest in my style. But I'll never know, and I'll never be able to avail myself of those sources.
So gender and sexuality are not airtight; they affect so many areas of our lives. But worse, the silence mandated by our sex-negative society regarding anything pertaining to sexuality assures that we will continue to be alienated and ridiculed.
Defense of slash porn almost always comes in the form of pointing out that it has merits in spite of its being pornographic. But that is a defense of slash itself, not slash porn. I maintain, however, that slash porn has merits not only because it is slash, but also because it is pornographic. Further, it has many times been suggested to me and other slash writers that perhaps we should remove the erotic sections from our stories to make them more palatable to a wider audience. But I'm not going to do that, and here's why:
For one, I'm not going to be silenced. As I mentioned above, people with sexualities and sexual preferences which deviate form the norm are harmed by the silence imposed upon them, particularly in conjunction with the constant cultural crowbarring of heteronormativity into every aspect of a person's life. I not only refuse, through slash, to be an instrument of heteronormativity, but through erotic slash, I refuse to remain invisible in doing so. It is not enough to simply ask our society to accept that queer people are different in a vague and undefined manner; it must be understood and accepted that we are sexually different.
Along these lines, I write slash porn that deals with a wide range of sexual topics such as BDSM and fetishism. Because slash porn is inherently queer and usually sex-positive (or at least sexually open), it lends itself quite naturally to these issues. The validation this affords us as sexual deviants is incalculable; it is empowering on a massive scale to find that someone else shares the very same secret you've been ashamed even to admit to yourself. No other place can be as consistently expected to be safe for sexual deviance as slash writing.
The erotic text also stresses a sex-positivity absent from virtually all other media. I love Character X, and I love his relationship with Character Y, and I want to express that sexually, so I write X/Y. The reader, the other part of this equation, not only receives my expression of appreciation for these characters or this pairing, but may identify with it and find it a worthy sexual expression. Porn writers are aware of the purposes for which their stories can sometimes be put to use, and I find this to be just as legitimate as any other use where the reader finds fulfillment or enjoyment. An audience who wants porn is just as valid as an audience who doesn't, particularly if I feel a kinship with that audience.
And slashers are kin, whether they'd like to admit it or not. In their appreciation of slash, they're already sexually deviant, as this is not currently a socially acceptable interest. As a fellow slasher, I want to give them what they want, and I will not make a value judgment on the pleasure taken from slash simply because it happens to be sexual in nature. Pleasure is pleasure, and I am honoured to think my writing ever pushed any fellow slasher's proverbial buttons. So my writing is not just about expressing my appreciation of Character X, but it is about celebrating my sexual deviance with other queer people through Character X. To remove that would be to remove one of the main purposes of my writing. Not to overestimate the quality of my writing in making this comparison, but to ask me to remove sexual content in a story would be as inappropriate and ignorant as asking Harper Lee to remove the African-Americans in To Kill A Mockingbird.
So much has been said so much more eloquently regarding feminism and slash that I don't feel I could add much to it. But I do feel I should point out again that what is written on the subject often deals more with slash than with NC-17 slash in particular. Again, sex and gender are hugely intersected with sexual issues. It is not enough to recognize that women are gaining empowerment by writing male characters, but we also need to recognize that women are gaining sexual empowerment by writing about sexual situations involving males, and that this is no small victory.
So get out there and read and write that slash, and enjoy it like you've always been told you shouldn't. It's very, very important that you do. If anyone knocks, tell 'em you're busy saving the world.