Ok, so for some complicated reason I started thinking about headstands today. (Let’s just say the train of thought began with the Ghostbuster’s theme song in the corner store, then something about B-movie icon Bruce Campbell, then wondering how movie stunt people deal with colds, then wondering how I’m doing with the cold I’m coming down with, then thinking about yoga, then handstands, then wondering if I could still do handstands, then thinking about the old 80’s era gravity-boots fad, and so on.)

Anyway, my stream of consciousness came up short with the realization that in porn images you’ll sometimes see women models doing headstands in order to, say, perform oral sex or to let an ostensible partner perform it on her. I’m pretty sure I’ve never, ever seen a man doing it to make life easier for his ostensible partner.

It makes total sense, of course. Almost all porn lives square in the “no-sex” class paradigm of women as passive, almost aloof to sex without a man on hand to coax her into it. True, women in porn often initiate, but those that do are always represented as “wild” or “sluts” or tempted by offers of cash or t-shirts or too naive to “know better” or otherwise markedly unlike “normal” women who, especially in porn, wouldn’t do anything of the sort of their own volition.

Which is all sort of a shame because I think it would be kind of fun to stand on my hands or hang from gravity boots, partially immobilized yes but not by-definition in bondage, so that a partner could caress me as she saw fit, needing neither to stand on tiptoes nor sit or kneel to reach me, unbutton me, explore me, or arouse me, to rock or turn or gimbal my head, my hands, my heart, my cock, to direct me where she wanted my contact.

But that’s the thing. In the “no-sex” class view that doesn’t really happen, or at least not outside of “femdom” bondage — the signs and symbols of which again are expressly outside of non-dominatrix “normal good girl” behavior.

The tough thing about dominant paradigms isn’t that things that don’t fit the theory can’t happen. As we all at least covertly know, they happen all the time. Instead the problem is that when you’re wrapped up in a paradigm you can’t see them when they happen.

In fact in Thomas Kuhn’s book, which popularized the notion of paradigm shifts, the shift happens only when so many exceptions to the current view of the world crop up that it’s finally no longer possible to explain them all away as exceptions to the rules. (This is what I’m trying to do with this series of posts — keep kicking up exceptions we’ve been trying to explain away as aberrations or just-plain-not-trueisms till the old model tips over.) But I digress…

As I said, what’s tough about dominant paradigms in general, and sexual and gender-dominant ones in particular, is that you wind up closing off half the cool, sweet, sexy, fun, and highly pleasurable possibilities in the masses of cycles and epicycles that get tacked on to preserve a system that… sometimes aren’t worth saving in the first place.

—-

Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I’m not suggesting that when men learn to give up the “no-sex” class perception of women there’ll be equal numbers of upside-down men as women in porn. “Increased equality” doesn’t automatically equal “paradigm shift.” Nor am I saying that if we finally unload our luggage from that metaphor there will no longer be porn at all. I am pretty confident it won’t be like the porn we have now.