Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

In a response to yesterday’s HNT post, frequent commenter Cathy said something that, I think, really cuts to the heart of my contention that a viewer’s sense of agency is the key to appreciating erotic text or images.

I’ve … discovered that I could enjoy watching two gay men having sex (though the video was highly censured, which is silly). Two women having sex? No, I can’t go there and I’m not sure what that means.

I’m guessing watching two women doesn’t work for Cathy for the same reason two men don’t work for me — if we’re motivated by agency and not passive receptivity then instead of being able to identify with both participants (who could be doing what we’d like to do) we’re interested in neither (even though they’re both having done to them what we might enjoy having done to us.

That’s what I mean by “agency” being a big factor in porn appreciation. And I think it’s why porn made for men doesn’t seem to work for so many women, or even “porn for women” produced by porn-for-men producers: even when there’s the much-asked-for plot and narrative women are mostly just put there for men to do something with, without necessarily being there for themselves because they want to be.

Consider the standard stuck-in-the-elevator trope in porn: woman gets on the elevator and almost immediately jumps the nominally hapless guy. But here’s the, um, rub. Her actions are presented as reflexive — she’s presented as already horny, possibly helplessly so. This is fine for guys, because it’s fun to think of getting into a situation with someone like that. But look at it from the other side. Do any of us, men or women, identify with starting out so horny you have no control instead of becoming that horny? No, I think for most of us it’s harder to project agency into a situation where “your” character has none.

That possibility of adding agency, by the way, is what I think what drives women (most prominently, and stereotypically) to call for more plot and motivation in pornographic films. (And let me stop here a second to say that I disagree that either all women “need” plot or that no men do. It’s a story we tell each other about gender, and sometimes even ourselves, but there’s more than enough overlap to make it questionable. The market for mainstream porn is not 100% of all men or 0% of all women. But I digress…)

I think the predominantly women’s call for plot and motivation comes not from an intrinsic requirement for that, it’s just that since mainstream porn is so male-agency oriented, when an effort is made to add depth to the characters or stories it increases the chances that some potential opportunity for women’s agency will emerge.

I have two possible ways to back up this admittedly wild-assed-sounding proposition.

First, long before the infamous Seinfield episode where the George character is prompted to masturbate to the ads in a women’s fashion magazine people have pointed out that at least superficially advertisements in, say, Vogue or Elle are only slightly less explicit, and often no less erotic, than pinup layouts in the more mainstream men’s magazines. After quite a lot of careful consideration (fueled in part by two summers of endless debate with two feminist-but-fashion-conscious roommates) I finally recognize that there really are differences and they cut along the lines of agency. Women in men’s magazines, both in the photo spreads and even more in ads, tended to be presented. (Consider the standard Black Velvet booze ads where the women sits or lies expectantly while gazing adoringly.) The reader is invited to get into the photo and be with the women — in other words they’re there as objects in the sentence “If I was there with her… But when women appear in women’s magazines, while they’re still “presented” there’s generally an implicit or even explicit invitation in the stance or setting for the viewer to get in and be them. In other words they’re there as subject of the sentence “If I was her…” In other words, those ads — despite having more plot or narrative than the average porn clip — provide and entry large enough for you to bring your own context to, in a way that porn, or ads, for men don’t. And thus, I think, the “no context” critique of mainstream porn is a red herring — if ads can create agency for women in a single panel, then so could porn if anyone bothered to try. (That they generally don’t speaks volumes….)

Second: Quite a few commenters responded very warmly to mthat HNT photo yesterday. A highly objective description of the image would sound pretty boring: grainy photo of man standing next to a dining room chair in a predominantly red room; he’s wearing incongruously casual blue clothing; his belt is draped over the back of the chair. (What can I say — it was getting late and I didn’t have anything new to post so I quickly snapped the shot with the camera built into my laptop.) Here’s the deal though. While it might be an objectively nondescript photo to me, to others it had quite a few elements that, despite not having much to do with the post it came in (no provided context) and despite it being only a single photo (no narrative context) it seemed to present opportunities for viewers to bring themselves in the scene (self-created context) as they saw fit. In other words, I think that if that could create agency for women in a single photo, then so could porn, again if anyone bothered to try.

Yeeks! This is way more than I intended to say, and way further out on the skinny branches than I intended to climb. But even if the particular examples miss the mark I’m still pretty convinced that agency (being able to contemplate going there instead of being placed there) is the key to whether or not a particular textual or pictorial image works. For women or men.

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Clarification: when I say “agency” I’m not talking about entering an image with control or dominance as opposed to receptivity or submission. A number of people, both submissive and dominant, responded to the belt over the chair in my photo, and I got the strong impression it wasn’t the belt itself (it’s just there) but that it invited people to determine for themselves what would be done with it, whether it suggested to you that it was the first thing I took off, to it being something you could secure me with, to it being something I could spank you with, to… I dunno… for someone who really does enjoy the “men folding laundry” fantasy it could be being something you could watch me tidy up. :-) But the point being that the photo lets you be the agent in charge of what happens, it’s not determined by the subject of the photograph or the photographer. And that’s what I mean by agency.