The follow excerpt from this article, ‘Dick Picky, in The New Inquiry articulates what would be a basic understanding for queer persons. It is also part of the reason why I am curious about porn. I would go one step further and say that it is not just about the gaze; the gaze is just one aspect, and not necessarily the deciding factor, of an embodied encounter involving multiple registers of visceral responses. Because even if one doesn’t touch oneself, there’s the quickening of the heart, flushing of the face, etc, and all these happen without one’s active control as such (Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography is an interesting book that tries to think beyond the notion of the gaze, if you are interested).
And if you are curious, yes, I do engage with porn, but much less frequently than the ‘average’ hetero-male porn user identified by statistical studies that pop up every now and then – because, look, it gets pretty fucking boring, doesn’t it?
If I am curious about porn and refuse to take any simplistic anti-porn stance, it is not because I think it can be ‘liberating’ (the sexual repression-liberation is precisely the trap to break away from) but because it is dangerous. As the following observes too, the productive lines of flight enabled by desire and pleasure cannot be contained within the paradigm of straight-cut, white abled body heteronormative desire and pleasure.
When you take an interest in porn produced for women, you start to notice a pattern. A couple of years ago, I watched keenly as a woman launched a porn magazine for a female audience. She argued that most women aren’t turned on by what little porn is available for us and that few people were designing porn with us specifically in mind. (A lot of porn “for women” is actually repurposed gay porn for men.) I was in such strong agreement with the magazine’s ethos that I subscribed from the very first issue. Despite my best efforts to love it, though, my enthusiasm waned: I noticed that the magazine was gradually replacing old stereotypes of what women like (beefcake, white Fabio types with raging horse dicks) with a slightly fresher set of fixed ideas about what women like (slim, white Jared Leto types with star tattoos and ponytails). Neither of those things were my thing, and that’s a problem that’s bound to crop up with any material that purports to cater to the female gaze. There is no one thing that “a female audience” likes looking at, and any attempt to cover a category as impossibly broad, multifaceted and diverse in desires as “women” will always fall short.
It’s transgressive to be aiming to please women in the first place, and women who like ponytailed Jared Letos are still woefully sidelined by mainstream porn companies. But even more woefully sidelined—so far sidelined they’re off the court—are women who are into other women, or men who aren’t white, or fat people, or women with dicks, or men without dicks. And even the smorgasbord of porn available for men who are turned on by black and fat and trans people is usually gross and fetishistic, treating an attraction to people in these groups as a guilty and deviant desire. So magazines for women who like ponytailed Jared Letos are great, but they’re not enough. If the female gaze ends up boiling down to a collection of stereotypes about what heterosexual cis white women like looking at, then it isn’t radical; it’s a hollow rhetorical device that promotes the desires of a narrow group of privileged women while purporting to include us all. So while we shouldn’t stop putting women in the position of gazers, what we really need to cultivate is a plurality of gazes.
Mark D. Jordan, Convulsing Bodies. Religion and Resistance in Foucault, Stanford University Press, October 2014
spacetimemattering 