Erisianisms

This is one of those areas of discussion in which I tend to look around at other women and go “WTF?  Are we living on the same planet?”

There is this cultural trope that there’s a huge lack of hot guys in porn.  Maybe it’s because the kind of guys I prefer are often not conventionally good-looking, but it’s always been obvious to me that porn actors aren’t plain or ordinary looking at all.  Don’t believe me?  Try this experiment: go anyplace where a lot of porn might be gathered, and actually LOOK at what is offered.  How many of the men pictured:

• Are over age 40?
• Have lots of flab, or a potbelly?
• Still have their hair?

And that don’t even begin to scratch the surface of things like penis size, wrinkles, moles & blemishes, and the myriad of other bodily details that we judge masculine beauty by.  The fact is, the guys who work in porn are not “unattractive” at all.  They are above average in looks just like the women are.

This noxious bit of bullshit bothers me more and more every time I hear it.  And ESPECIALLY when I hear it coming from the mouths of women who bitch & moan about impossible beauty standards for women.   Because seriously, how poisonously hypocritical is it to do the EXACT thing to someone else that you are complaining about being done to you…and then pretend that you’re not even doing it?

(Source: soccerdomme)

There are plenty of reasons to watch porn besides the obvious one of enhancing your masturbatory pleasure.

For instance, partaking of his/her favorite porn with your lover(s) gives you tremendous insight into their erotic mind.  You can also watch porn to get ideas of fun new things you might like to do with your lover(s).  And porn can be an excellent addition to a certain sort of social gathering.  Lemme tell you it’s a lot more mood-setting to look up and see a porn video on the tv screen at a kinky sex party than it is to see a football game!

I am one of those people whose tastes in masturbatory viewing material are very different from the things I like to do in real life.  (And let it be noted that I’m one of those allegedly rare women who actually BUYS porn for herself!)  This blog is my first ever attempt to collect visual examples of things I actually want to DO.  And I’m finding it…weird.  Not in a bad way.  But it’s like this is the very first time in my life that I’m looking at porn in the same way as (almost) everybody else does.  Like I’ve suddenly, out of nowhere, been granted membership to the club everyone else has always been a part of, the club I never especially cared about joining, the club I’m still not sure I like belonging to.  Like I said, it’s weird.

(Source: slavegirlsissy.com)

You know, I WANT to be wholeheartedly in favor of Kitty Stryker’s Andro-Aperture Project.  I think she’s a way cool chick & has a great eye for creating hot smut.  I agree with the principles that the world could use more imagery of the sort she is looking for, and that it’d be swell to encourage more men to be performers and more women to be makers of porn.

Where she loses me is with all the talk of how “female” gazes are this that and the other, and soooo different from “male” gazes.

From a purely philosophical perspective I don’t see how this can be anything other than gender essentialist bullshit.  The whole idea of a “female gaze” in porn equates the shape of your genitals with BOTH your gender AND your porn viewing preferences.  And if making such an equation in any other area would be challenged as BS (and most likely by people like Kitty!) then why on earth should I accept it just because it comes from the ‘feminist’ camp?

My instinctive dislike of projects like this isn’t based solely on this philosophical objection however.  I have a more personal stake in it.  Namely, that I am a WOMAN, with a factory-standard female pussy, who  has been enjoying and even ~BUYING~ porn for herself for two and a half decades.*

To a person like me, projects like this send the message that I must not be TRULY ‘female’; that I don’t qualify as a really real woman since my “gaze” isn’t like all the other female’s gazes.  That, moreover, I’m a bad girl since I’m not actively offended by the nature of existing porn or the (alleged) lack of a certain sort of imagery.

So yeah, my gut reaction is, shall we say, negative.

That said…after having been on the business end of these things for a while I can now recognize that what is really going on here is not about the content of the images at all.  If it were, then all these women who are (allegedly) longing for hot pictures of beautiful men would be out there consuming scads of gay porn, or coaching the thousands of guys who send unsolicited dick pics in how to take better ones.  (Talk about porn intended for women!)  No, what this is about is MARKETING: framing the produced images in such a way as to seduce buyers who have been told their entire lives that they couldn’t possibly like/buy porn, for one reason or another.

This is an issue that has been much on my mind recently.  You see, the porn I make would qualify as feminist porn by almost any standard.**  For various reasons I’ve avoided marketing my smut as “feminist” or “ethical” porn.  And this is a decision I am currently reconsidering.

So anyway.  It may be true that there’s an under-served market for a certain sort of porn.  Insisting that’s it’s a “female” thing is a whole ‘nother story, and one that I find deeply problematic.  Which totally doesn’t mean I would try and shut it down, or that I wouldn’t shoot for the Ando-Aperture project if I got the chance.

p.s. I voted “Other” in the survey, and noted that I like tall, gangly and decidedly not masculine guys.  ;p

* Hell, I buy more porn than my husband does!

** Any standard that doesn’t require a knee-jerk condemnation of forced femme play.  Bitchy Jones would still hate my smut. :p

I have learned about myself today that I don’t like pictures of guys being fisted any more than I like pictures of girls being fisted.  Which is not to say I have anything against fisting in real life; it’s not a huge fetish of mine but if my playmate enjoys it I’m totally game.  But large object insertions as porn…meh.

Which just goes to once again show that what one likes in porn & what one likes to actually DO are not always perfectly correlated.  A lesson I wish I had learned much earlier in life.