Mainstreaming Sex

The Sexualisation of Western Culture

Feona Attwood

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781845118273
• eBook ISBN: 9780857731722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

From cyber porn to striptease culture, this trailblaising book uncovers the shockingly fascinating new ways that western society is being sexualized. We don't realise how far the 'pornogrification' of culture has reached - this book does and discusses it graphically but responsibly. Media interest in this subject is huge."Mainstreaming Sex" uncovers the significant impact, hitherto only half glimpsed, that striptease culture is having on our media, relationships, educational and working lives. It is a welcome and much needed book.Western culture is exhibiting its fascination with sex in new, often surprising ways. Pole dancing is a form of keep fit, porn stars find work as agony aunts, pornography itself is just 'a mouse click away', and phone sex, email affairs and cybersex are now part of our everyday lives. This sexualization of modern culture is the subject widely discussed here.In original chapters, the contributors confront the reality that in all aspects of social and cultural life, sex is being 'mainstreamed'. They explore film, print and online pornographies; representations of masturbation in film and television, supersexualized advertising, and problem page sex.
They also examine young people's views of sex in mainstream media; women's use of sexual media in the home; and, pole dancing as exercise and performance and third wave feminism and the sexualization debate.

Part 1

PORNOGRAPHY AND PORNOGRAPHICATION

Chapter 1

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHIES: REPRESENTATION OR REALITY?

SIMON HARDY

Most academic analyses of pornography have been predicated on a clear distinction between representation and reality, or the ‘real’ world. In the light of postmodern thought, the latter category cannot, as the obligatory quotation marks suggest, be taken for granted. We may perhaps, as Jane Gaines suggests, maintain a cautious distinction between mediated representations and the world of lived experience, which is not just representation, in order to ‘temporarily get us around the problem of the ostensible “reality” of the world’ (Gaines, 2004: 32). But the trajectory of pornography has always been towards the vanishing point of this distinction, and this is most evident in its newest manifestations. It is, above all, in the recently emerging pornographies of gonzo, amateur and sexblogs¹ that we seem to have reached the point at which any clear separation between the real and the representational has collapsed or been turned inside out.

These new types of pornography are heterosexual and essentially mainstream. I have chosen them because they carry forward into new media a longstanding tradition of pornographic representation, and it is therefore possible to see clearly how new media assist the objectives of that tradition. At the same time, they also demonstrate the broader process of the sexualization of contemporary culture – the preoccupation with confession, the public revelation of private intimacy, the media exposure of the lives of ‘ordinary people’ and the everyday lives of celebrities. This chapter will trace the emergence of these new pornographies and consider the potential significance of these developments for the relation between pornography and ‘reality’.

There has been a long history of concern that the obscene content of pornography will invade and corrupt mainstream culture, and a long history of legal and administrative attempts to prevent it doing so (Kendrick, 1987). The great research effort by social scientists, between the 1960s and the 1990s, to investigate the social and psychological effects of pornography was essentially a response to this anxiety. Here the problem was formulated in terms of a hypothesized causal relation between pornographic representations of sexuality and measurable consequences in the real world, defined as moral degeneration or increased rates of sexual violence. Yet this empiricism was never really able to bridge the gap between the real and the representational that its own epistemology insisted upon.

At the same time those who opposed the censorial implications of this type of research (Segal, 1993) and those who subscribed to a more sophisticated theory of mediated communications as having a limited, complex and negotiated impact on their audience (Hardy, 1998) also maintained the conventional distinction between representation and reality. They assumed that there were clear boundaries between the various points in the communication circuit of production, text and audience reception. Part of the reason why modern media theory sustains boundaries between these points is that each is a legitimate field of research in its own right, although the idea of a simple cause–effect relationship between media stimuli and human response has been rightly rejected. The representational text does not determine what happens in lived reality: human subjects may read texts in unexpected ways, use them for unintended purposes and know that the texts are not truth. From this viewpoint, audiences have been aware that they were looking at a representation and not at a truth about the real world. But can we still rely upon such a comfortable distinction between the representational and the real?

THE PORNOGRAPHIC QUEST FOR ‘TRUTH’

One of the defining characteristics of pornography as a representational genre is the need for authenticity. This has driven it to attempt, by various strategies, to shorten its distance from real experience – a purpose for which it has recently and decisively been assisted by new media technologies. As this chapter will argue, pornography is a mode of representation that seeks to exceed its limits and thus can be seen as the ‘limit case’ (Gaines, 2004) for the theory of representation. The longstanding practices by which pornographers have sought to achieve greater realism include female first-person narration, the use of audio-visual media to document the performance of sex acts, and the exploitation of amateur participation. Although none of these practices are unique to new media pornographies, it is in the latter that they find their ultimate expression. It is worth considering the development of these practices, because they contribute important components to pornography as it functions today within the new media.

As a genre, pornography has always been characterized by a marked gender asymmetry in its circuit of communication. It has been produced predominantly by men for a male audience, and, material for gay men notwithstanding, with the primary object as female. Yet, pornographers have always sought to disavow this fact in order to produce a more authentic-seeming representation. In the case of written textual pornography, this disavowal has usually been affected by the adoption of a female narrative voice, which insists upon the content as a record of first-person experience. We see this even in the precursors of pornography: Greco-Roman sex manuals, Renaissance dialogues and the erotic novels of the eighteenth century typically all have the characteristic of being written by men in the assumed authorial character of a courtesan passing on wisdom gained from personal experience (Hunt, 1996). In those forms of modern pornography where the written word has remained the medium, this device is predominant. For example, the readers’ letters and stories supposedly sent in to porn magazines by female readers are actually produced at the editorial office (Hardy, 1998). The truth is that pornography has almost always been the product of men as subjects of erotic discourse, who in the process of creation have also produced an imaginary female subject of erotic discourse. So deeply ingrained is this cultural pattern that even where the hand is known to be authentically female, the suspicion remains that the voice is male: for example, in the tradition of women’s erotica from the ‘beginning efforts’ of Anais Nin, to such classics as The Story of 0, to the modern Black Lace imprint (Hardy, 2001).

It is this long history of the male as subject and the female as object, and of the simultaneous denial of this fact, that today impels us towards the revelation of female erotic experience, now that women really are beginning to participate in the production and consumption of sexually explicit material on a significant scale. We see evidence of this compulsion to hear women speak about sex in the contemporary fascination with confessional memoirs, diaries and sexblogs written by women. For example, Catherine Millet’s memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2002), reflects on a career of promiscuity and group sex and has been heralded by Edmund White on its cover as ‘the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman’. The text appears to combine elements of memory and fantasy that cannot be distinguished, but which together attest to a woman’s guiltless abandonment of herself to a life of radical sexual adventurism. The diary of an Italian teenager, Melissa P. (2004), offers the experience of a younger generation of women, for whom, the blurb tells us, ‘love may be hard to find, but sex waits at every turn’. This kind of episodic confessional text naturally lends itself to sexblogs, such as Abby Lee’s Girl with a One-Track Mind (2006), where the record of events is ongoing and so has a stronger sense of the unfolding reality of someone else’s life.

What all these narratives offer is the combination of frequent descriptions and references to sexual experiences with extensive passages of personal introspection. The latter element seems to establish a subjective identity and sexual orientation, which, although not marked as feminine, is clearly that of a real woman and in many ways bears a close resemblance to the narrative voice familiar from chick-lit. But these experiences are then rendered in the only available vocabulary, that familiar from textual pornography. In the book version of Abby Lee’s blog (2006), the narrator describes a sexual encounter like this:

I finally got naked with a man for the first time in months. I ripped off my pants and begged Tony to fuck me hard from behind as he bent me over the edge of the bed. He was just as charged up as me; he’d made me climax four times before even entering me. We both came together and I felt like months of frustration were relieved in one go.

Here the subjective context of frustration and relief is combined with terse sexual description, including instant, pornotopian multiple orgasms. Works like this put explicit sex into the mainstream, using an authentically female voice to speak those very ‘truths’ about female sexuality that pornography has always claimed to express.

The use of female authorship and first-person narration is clearly one strategy by which the pornographic genre as a whole, within which we may now include women’s erotic memoirs, attempts to invoke the real, and to close its distance as a representational practice from the empirical reality of its object: human, but especially female sexuality. This strategy applies, of course, to the written word, but for more than a century pornographers have also used the visual image as a medium. This, as Linda Williams (1989) has shown, offers a quite different avenue through which the truth of sexuality may be rendered into a knowable form. The essence of hardcore photographic and cinematic pornography is the literal documentation of bodies and sexual activity. There can be no literary devices or deceits here, just the plain facts recorded on film and thus captured and preserved for unrestricted contemplation. By its heyday in the 1970s, hardcore film had a clear formula of sexual numbers that were performed in the making of a movie: masturbation, genital intercourse, lesbianism, oral sex, threesomes, orgies, anal sex and sadomasochism. Here again there was an important gender asymmetry. The camera was not equally interested in all possible combinations: it focused on female masturbation, lesbianism and the anal penetration of women by men. This is not to deny that the image of the erect penis and of male ejaculation onto the face or body of the woman is of defining importance as proof of the truth and reality of the sex that is shown. But the ultimate limitation of hardcore, as Williams (1989) has pointed out, is precisely that it cannot deliver what it most desires: visual proof of the involuntary spasm of sexual pleasure in the female body.

The strategy of visual documentation is a second means by which pornography has attempted to eliminate the boundary between representation and reality. While the images themselves appear as a representation of sexuality, they invoke real sexuality in two ways: firstly, because they depict actual sexual acts that have taken place at some specific point in time between live performers, and, secondly, because the image is assumed to have the power to move the body of the viewer to arousal in an involuntary way. The real erection and ejaculation of the male performer is echoed in a second plain of reality by the erection and ejaculation of the male viewer. But the limitation of this strategy is also already apparent: we cannot know for sure whether the body of either the female performer or spectator is moved in a real sense.

Although this fundamental limitation of hardcore can never really be overcome, the advent of video technology in the 1980s opened up new avenues for advancing the project of realism, which digital technology and the Internet are now further assisting. These developments include gonzo and amateur porn. Both rely on the availability of increasingly cheap and accessible technologies of recording and distribution to close the gap between the producers and consumers of pornographic images. The gonzo format largely preserves the range of numbers from hardcore film but does not place them in a fictional narrative. If there is a narrative at all, it is a highly naturalistic one about what is actually taking place: a man or group of men with a camera ‘picking up’ a girl or girls and persuading them to engage in the various sexual numbers already cited. Typical of this type of format is John Stagliano’s ‘Buttman’ series, including such titles as Buttman’s Rio Carnival Hardcore (2002). There is obviously an element of artifice in so far as the girls will have agreed beforehand to participate in exchange for money, while the construction of the text makes it appear that the initially unsuspecting girl eventually gives herself for free. Nonetheless, gonzo gets closer to the experience of a one-off sexual ‘conquest’ as it might take place in everyday life. At the same time it should not be forgotten that the gonzo format, which is both financially and artistically undemanding, has provided the staple for a vastly expanded porn industry and a consequent proliferation in the number of people involved as producers, performers and consumers. Thus, in terms of both content and reach, gonzo has brought pornography closer to the lived realities of greater numbers of people.

If gonzo closed the gap, in some limited senses, between producers and consumers, amateur porn has done so in a much more radical sense. It is necessary to distinguish between the use of ‘amateur’ models and codes of representation by commercial pornographers, and genuinely amateur material. The former is simply another, well-established device for giving a sense of authenticity to the product. This practice is not new: it goes back to the glary, over-exposed realism of the ‘Reader’s Wives’ section in downmarket porn magazines, which offer an image of the physical imperfection and therefore potential accessibility of the ‘girl’ or ‘matron’ next door. Even today a large proportion of ‘amateur’ porn on the Internet is professionally produced (Patterson, 2004). But the video revolution of the 1980s created the technical means for the development of informal networks for people to exchange videos of themselves having sex – a practice that was always going to be quickly absorbed by the facility of the Internet. The application of video to amateur performance helped to extend the transition from the representation to the presentation of sexual action, which hardcore film had begun. Amateur performers are seen to be acting for the intrinsic gratification of the act itself rather than for money; they become absorbed in what they are doing rather than consciously performing for an audience, or they perform in the expectation that any audience will themselves belong to the same coterie of amateur performers/viewers. Once again, what people are seeking from this material is not the representation of sex, but the truth of sex. What the hardcore image in itself cannot prove, namely the veracity of the female performer’s erotic engagement, can instead be deduced from the circumstances surrounding amateur performance, where it is known that the motive of the performers is sexual rather than financial.

However, it is important to remember that the amateur performance of sex is still performance: people do not really act as they do when having sex in private. As Minette Hillyer (2004: 56) observes, ‘the women perform their amateurism’, looking into the camera or moaning and groaning for it. There is an inherent tension in amateur porn between the two imperatives of authenticity and the visual gratification of the viewer. The more under-performed the sex, the less gratifying the spectacle, and the more over-performed the sex, the less authentic the action. As can be seen from any hardcore material, the positions in which it is comfortable and pleasurable to have sex are not necessarily the ones that make a good visual display of the act to a third party of the camera and the audience it implies. The celebrity sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, discussed by Hillyer (2004), is a case in point. Although obviously untypical of anonymous amateur porn, it has many of the sub-genre’s characteristics. Much of the tape takes the form of a home video. This provides an authenticating context for the sexual action, but the action itself must still exhibit the trademark sexual numbers of fellatio, fucking for the camera and the external ejaculation of Tommy Lee’s penis over Pam’s body, in order to function effectively as pornography. In many ways the ‘money shot’ (capturing the moment of external ejaculation) can be seen as the ultimate distinguishing marker between private sex and porn performance, insofar as it requires the sacrifice of what many people would consider the crucial moment of tactile, inter-bodily pleasure in exchange for the visible, outward signification of ‘pleasure’.

This section has traced a series of authenticating strategies adopted by the makers of pornography using the established media of writing, film and video. It concludes that, in all these cases, there remains an easily perceptible element of inauthenticity about the product that ultimately marks it as representation rather than reality. But does this remain the case when new media technologies are applied to the most authentic-seeming format, amateur porn?

THE LIMITS OF CYBERPORN

It is in the new media technologies of digital cameras and the Internet that amateur porn, and other forms of pornographic realism, find their true home. This is partly because these technologies make it possible for almost anyone to produce and distribute their own pornography, with the result that in recent years amateur porn, which is reckoned to be worth £1 billion in Britain alone,² has advanced from being a niche in the market towards becoming one of its dominant formats. But it is also because these media seem to offer two things that pornography is apparently able to descend from the remote heights of mediated representation and get closer to the personal needs and lived experience of the consumer: choice and interactivity. The optimistic presumption is that these technologies allow greater freedom f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Sexualization of Culture
• PART 1. PORNOGRAPHY AND PORNOGRAPHICATION
• 1. The New Pornographies: Representation or Reality?
• 2. Pleasing Intensities: Masochism and Affective Pleasures in Porn Short Fictions
• 3. ‘Choke on it, Bitch!’: Porn Studies, Extreme Gonzo and the Mainstreaming of Hardcore
• 4. From Porn Chic to Porn Fear: The Return of the Repressed?
• PART 2. SEXUALIZATION AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA
• 5. The Mainstreaming of Masturbation: Autoeroticism and Consumer Capitalism
• 6. Supersexualize Me!: Advertising and the ‘Midriffs’
• 7. Whatever Happened to Cathy and Claire?: Sex, Advice and the Role of the Agony Aunt
• PART 3. STRIPTEASE CULTURE
• 8. Too Much Too Young?: Young People, Sexual Media and Learning
• 9. Some Texts Do It Better: Women, Sexually Explicit Texts and the Everyday
• 10. Keeping Fit in Six Inch Heels: The Mainstreaming of Pole Dancing
• 11. BUST-ing the Third Wave: Barbies, Blowjobs and Girlie Feminism
• Film and TV Guide
• Bibliography