The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China

K. Jacobs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137485175
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137479143
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Chinese artists, activists, and netizens are pioneering a new order of pornographic representation that is in critical dialogue with global entertainment media. Jacobs examines the role of sex-positive feminists and queer communities to investigate pornography's "afterglow" (a state of crisis and decay within digital culture).

Chapter 1

Women’s Drifting Eyeballs and Porn Tastes

Introduction

Within the context of a global turn toward feminine taste cultures, this study sets out to examine how Hong Kong women are sensing and rating hard-core and alternative pornographies. Since Hong Kong (like many other cultures) lacks a flourishing porn industry and a confident tradition of feminist and queer-produced erotica, how are Hong Kong women rating male-oriented porn traditions and the newer taste cultures? In order to do research about this topic, I received a Direct Grant from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2012–13) to organize workshops in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States. In these workshops, several segments of culturally diverse hard-core, female-friendly, and queer pornography were screened in classrooms and community spaces and were commented on informally and through in-depth discussions. For this chapter, I will mostly focus on the reactions of Hong Kong Chinese women who attended these workshops at the Chinese University of Hong Kong or at the community centers of the lesbian organizations G-Spot and Women’s Coalition of Hong Kong.

The chapter will discuss their reactions to segments from five different movies—a Japanese hard-core movie called A Young Wife Violated before Her Husband’s Eyes (2010) featuring Sola Aoi (蒼井空); a female-friendly soft-core movie called Tokyo Lovers Life (2010) produced by the Japanese company Silk Labo; the American queer porn movie Crash Pad (2005, first DVD edition) made by Shine Louise Houston; an American gay porn movie called Kyler and Myles “Dick Around” (2014) from the American company Bare Twinks; and the Hong Kong “3D porn movie” 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (3D肉蒲團之極樂寶鑑, 2011). The Japanese and US movies were originally marketed for private home viewing, while the Hong Kong movie was released for the general public in movie theaters as an X-rated movie (“Category III,” 三級片).

In detailing reactions to these segments, it will be shown that Hong Kong women are rewriting the rules of taste and arousal. As a new generation of educated and media-savvy browsers, they are familiar with hard-core genres while in search of novel tastes. They are not shocked nor unequivocally enamored by these film segments. They sense and react to porn with a wide range of contradictory attitudes (pleasure, analysis, laughter, disgust, cynicism) and are also affected by political developments in Hong Kong that at a first glance seem to have very little to do with pornography.

Pornographic Resonance

Susanna Paasonen has shown that online pornography today is mostly consumed and sensed within a postcinematic framework, in which people pursue personal rhythms of browsing fragmented audiovisual imagery without getting immersed in longer narratives (Paasonen 2011). She argues that people are no longer identifying with narratives but are sensing pornographic data and media textures as a type of resonance. As she explains, “It matters how objects feel since such ‘feeling’ gives rise to different kinds of attachment and resonance. The feel, tactility, and texture of pornography are intimately tied to its technologies of production and distribution” (Paasonen 2011: 99). Florian Vörös has further developed Paasonen’s notion of resonance through ethnographic interviews with French adult male porn users. According to his analysis, porn users “resonate” or “re-activate” porn products by downloading, archiving, and commenting on them and also through bodily techniques such as nipple touching and breast stroking. Vörös argues that pornography and its potentially clichéd scenarios do not “subjugate” users. Rather, these products are skillfully selected and eroticized, archived, discussed, and gradually “domesticated” amid everyday thoughts and experiences (Vörös 2013).

People wade through databases and watch snippets of movies on sites such as Youporn.com and X-tube.com, massive portals of endlessly stratified hard-core and gonzo-style products. Even though users themselves can upload personalized content, most of the segments are produced by corporations and still foster a formulaic way of representing sexual intercourse. Linda Williams has described in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” that a key feature of American hard-core pornography is that of “maximum visibility.” Viewers get physically aroused when exposed to detailed depictions of genitals and the sex act. It is an universalizing feature of hard-core aesthetics “to privilege close-ups of body parts over other shots, to overlight obscured genitals; to select sexual positions that show the most of bodies and orgasm, such as a variety of ‘numbers’ of the externally ejaculating penis” (Williams 1989: 46). The externalization of male strength in the “cum shot” has become an obvious and literal phallocentric symbol of male strength, which has been adopted in commercial hard-core pornography in various cultures and industries. In Japanese hard-core pornography, there is an added element of inequality and abuse between genders, and females are almost always cast as helpless and passive partners waiting to serve the goal of male satisfaction, which often also ends with a cum shot on the female face.

Drifting Eyeballs

While hard-core aesthetics still easily dominate the content of online video segments, feminist and queer porn styles have also solidified into alternative taste cultures that can be accessed on niche-porn portals such as pinkwhite.biz or in film festivals such as a the annual Porn Film Festival in Berlin (Jacobs 2007; Stüttgen 2010). There is new wave of queer porn stars and celebrity bloggers such as Madison Young, Jiz Lee, and Violet Blue who combine their alternative styles with activist and educational initiatives on YouTube channels like QueerpornTV.1

The notion of “drifting eyeballs” postulates that women would be open to these different pornographic styles and aesthetics without settling on an ideal choice. This openness can be due to consumerist attitudes, as women have access to male-oriented and female-oriented pornography, but it also has been explained by sexologists as women’s capacity to get aroused by images of various tastes and orientations. The most publicized scientist is Meredith Chivers, whose study “A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal” found that heterosexual women and lesbians respond positively to a wide range of straight and queer pornographic video selections. In this tradition of arousal studies, levels of male genital arousal are compared to female genital arousal by measuring actual physical stimuli and changes in brainwave responses. Chivers focused on female arousal and found that women identified more easily with varying sexual preferences, while heterosexual and homosexual men were less flexible and tended to favor one specific type of sexual or pornographic genre. Female arousal thus became characterized as more open ended than male sexuality, with “greater intra-individual variation in preferences, behaviors, attitudes, and responsiveness to cultural influences” (Chivers et al. 2004). Chivers was inconclusive about whether this type of flexibility was innate or culturally bound and technology-influenced, but she seemed to favor the former explanation. Her work became widely known in Canada and the United States, and her results were also criticized by other scholars who argued against the categorization of feminine arousal as inborn or innate.

Designing the Postcinema Workshop

Even though the ideas of Chivers are primarily based on an analysis of private experiences, they can also be applied to how people process pornography within public spaces. I set out to further test the theory of drifting eyeballs within a public space of edutainment, by inviting women to enjoy and react to multiple porn segments. Women’s testimonies were solicited by means of workshops in three different cultures that consisted of screenings of different movie segments followed by discussion. Ten workshops were held over a time span of six months between March 2012 and August 2012, in which a mixture of heterosexual, lesbian, and sexually “undecided” women were recruited for each event. The groups were kept fairly small (about 15 participants) so that the atmosphere would be comfortable, casual, and allowing for in-depth dialogues and discussions. The research project was initiated and coordinated in Hong Kong, which has a porn industry and erotic film culture of its own, but Hong Kong people are highly influenced by overseas products and specifically those imported from Japan. The project then traveled to Japan and the United States to get reactions from groups of women schooled in their local taste cultures.

In refining our research question, women were asked to respond to and rate varying samples of hard-core, alternative, queer, and soft-core pornography, as well as erotic cinema. In this way, the workshops simulated browsing rhythms through which porn users are exposed to multiple segments and selections. I collaborated with a Hong Kong woman in compiling video segments and then made an informed selection of segments that we could show and discuss in 90-minute sessions. It would have been different, and perhaps even better, if women had been able to bring in their own personal archives, but it would also have been more difficult in recruiting participants, many of whom were sex-positive but quite timid about the topic of pornography. Moreover, since these workshops were taking place in public spaces, women were discussing experiences of arousal rather than actually allowing themselves to get turned on. I admit that there would be many inconsistencies between private physical and publicly stated experiences of arousal, but I was interested in how small groups of women would publicly express their preferences.

Most of the workshops were held in sex-positive and queer-friendly community spaces that would typically attract a mixture of straight and lesbian women. In Hong Kong, I collaborated with the feminist and queer organizations Women’s Coalition of Hong Kong (香港女同盟會) and G-Spot. In San Francisco, women gathered in the Center for Sex and Culture, which is known for feminist and queer activism, while in Japan, the workshop was held in the feminist sex shop Love Piece Club. From the outset, the participants defined themselves as open-minded heterosexual women and lesbians, while others defined themselves as polysexual or “undecided.”

The workshops were conducted with the help of simultaneous translators for Cantonese in Hong Kong and Japanese in Japan while participants used their native languages and the English language to share reactions at different intervals throughout the workshops. Before starting the video screenings, a 20-minute introductory discussion set out the topic of women and pornography. Then a handout was distributed with basic notes about each of the video clips. I slightly changed the selections for each of the workshops but tried to keep them as constant as possible. Participants were encouraged to write or voice reactions during screenings and then verbally discuss feelings and reactions after each screening. While some audiences ignored the handouts and easily chatted with us and with each other, others were quiet and meticulously followed our handouts while writing extensive comments. Some of the sessions were loud and “resonant” throughout the screenings, while others were quiet and more analytically focused.

The women who decided to participate in our workshops were briefed about the goals of the project in advance and also signed a release form stating that their anonymity would be preserved. Since the workshops invited participants on a voluntary basis and were intended as small group gatherings, it is fair to say that they did not survey a majority of women or female consumers. For instance, the project did not attract women from different socioeconomic layers of society, nor those who would have negative associations with or moral objections to pornography. Rather, the project focused on recruitment within porn-tolerant student groups and lesbian groups, who would mostly consist of educated middle-class women, but nonetheless with divergent attitudes toward pornography. Most of the women were sexually active as lesbians or straight women and were active or tentative consumers of pornography. A smaller number of women were sexually inexperienced and had rarely or never watched pornography. Needless to say, it would have been difficult to recruit more widely across different age groups or socioeconomic classes of society, as it is not a common activity for women (or men) to publicly watch and debate sexually explicit media in these social and cultural settings.

The project also tried out different logistics of using public spaces and screening technologies that can help people feel more comfortable and alert while processing embodiment and arousal. Sometimes we decided to meet during weekends when university classrooms are typically deserted and porn screenings could go unnoticed. We also met with very small groups of women in hotel rooms or gallery spaces where we could experience even more intimacy and privacy to carry out this project. Since we were attracting a generation who were more acquainted with pornography, we wanted to provide an environment of overindulgence yet also a comfortable space to have frank and spontaneous discussions. The public spaces and screening technologies necessary for basic video editing and data projection are now readily available, while the employment of smaller (computer) screens and tablet technologies gives participants freedom to take some distance from the screen. Viewers are more distracted and distanced from these smaller screens, which are very different from cinematic viewing in technologically advanced, immersive movie theaters.

Finally, the workshops also questioned the accepted criteria of academic performance itself, in that it allowed women to bond erotically and share expertise within a novel space for “edutainment.” Even though women represented different sexual orientations and educational backgrounds, they were united through their public reclaiming of the act of porn viewing. They took a moment to step out of daily responsibilities to join an unusual classroom—becoming hedonistic, sexually active, intellectually conversant, yet unproductive in all other ways. Such space for leisure and education was set up to make room for women’s sex-positive pornographic agencies, alongside a questioning of their engrained gender roles and responsibilities.

Trans-Asian Feminine Porn Cultures

As a research project traveling from Hong Kong to the American West Coast, the project archived a wide range of individual and localized reactions while also observing the potential of a trans-Asian porn culture. It is known that cultures as far apart as Australia, the United Kingdom, and China have seen a dramatic increase in the number of female consumers of pornography. A 2003 Australian online survey garnered a thousand responses and reported that 17 percent of its self-identified users were women (Lumby, Albury, and Mckee 2008: 17). A 2011 UK survey of five thousand people reported that about 31.6 percent of porn users were female and specifically noted that younger women in the 18–25 age group showed more interest in pornography when compared to older women (Smith, Attwood, and Barker 2012). At the same time, statistics about porn usage in China in 2011, compiled by sex resea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Women’s Drifting Eyeballs and Porn Tastes
• Chapter 2: Wandering Scholars and the Teachings of Ghosts
• Chapter 3: Message on the Body in the Chinese Netsphere
• Chapter 4: The Art of Failure as Seen in Chinese Women’s Boys’ Love Fantasies
• Chapter 5: The Master Class of Leftover Women
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References