Math Magazine and 'good' porn.

bitof I'm finding your contributions really frustrating because you started off defending mainstream porn producers who were "ethical" and have moved your position to including literature in porn, some kind of ethical porn that doesn't yet exist. At the same time trying to make out we all want all porn banned which is absolutely not what anyone has said. A couple of people have said they'd like mainstream filmed porn banned but not all porn including literature.

I second everything Mostly says about fanfiction; the world of fandom and fanfiction is a fascinating female-dominated sub-culture, and it actually has a lot of aspects (especially in the way it interacts with patriarchal culture,) that would be interesting to study and examine.

Haha, I'm glad the analogy made sense! Please do feel free to nick off with it

I too think that's a brilliant metaphor, Missie (I shall steal it asap... oops, I mean appropriate it in a respectful sort of way ).

I'm glad we've piqued your interest, Felas - because it is fascinating from an intellectual perspective (even though a lot is badly written and ill-thought-out), precisely because it gives a snapshot of women capturing, appropriating, reinventing and retelling popular culture in a female-dominated space - and throws up so many fascinating issues, like "this space is female dominated, but still filled with the male gaze", "this is a gay relationship, but a female author is applying sexist tropes about dominance and submission (not genuine BDSM, but rather one partner has to be weaker and in need of looking after etc) to it", "this woman is eroticising rape... why would a woman do this?".

Just wanted to chip in to say thanks for a really interesting discussion about fanfic, which I know pretty much nothing about

My interest is piqued, not particularly from a porn/erotica standpoint, but it sounds like there's some really interesting stuff going on in that area, and I'm intrigued.

And a big YES! to this bit: It's like...if you all live at the bottom of the sea, (patriarchy,) everything is going to be wet, (steeped in misogyny,) whether you like it or not. You have to get onto land (abolish patriarchy,) before you can make anything dry (non-misogynistic.)

I agree with the pervasiveness so strongly - which is why I don't think visual porn can be feminist. No matter how hard we try, we're all so culturally indoctrinated by a misogynistic view of sex that even feminist attempts at porn end up tainted by misogyny. Which imo isn't so bad when it's written erotica and clearly fictitious, but is when it's actual people performing the roles.
Oh, the Sherlock fandom...I've found a few fantastic and interesting slash love stories, but also quite a few ABOs, which...don't interest me. As you say, it's a return to the dominant "male", submissive "female" dynamic.
You've hit the nail on the head with how female love interests so often being shallow and two dimensional - it can be very frustrating, in that it shows how terribly women are portrayed. But Bucky and Steve (for eg) are both portrayed with depth, complexity, and chemistry, which is why Stucky makes such a wonderful romantic pairing.
But your friend is absolutely right!
Really though, as I said, the fact that there are still so many issues that creep into even in written erotica that attempts to conciously be feminist, is good evidence toward feminist pornography being an impossibility.
It's like...if you all live at the bottom of the sea, (patriarchy,) everything is going to be wet, (steeped in misogyny,) whether you like it or not. You have to get onto land (abolish patriarchy,) before you can make anything dry (non-misogynistic.)
And that's my dreadful metaphor for the day

Yes, slash (gay romances, predominantly MM) is fascinating isn't it? I grew to love it through the fics that are written to avoid cognitive dissonance and allow women space to explore what a relationship of genuine equals looks like. But I've noticed even that isn't immune to the whole dominance/submission thing - trying to shoehorn repressive gender roles into slash. Not my fandom, but there was a major debacle a few years ago in the Sherlock fandom with people having huge rows about whether one character was inherently and naturally meant to "top" (i.e. be the partner doing the penetrating). Ignoring the fact that many gay men don't even have penetrative sex, and where they do, as one (male gay) fanfic writer put it, often the choice in RL comes down to "who ate chipotle last night". Then there's the weird thing of "alpha-omega" fics, which are basically a sci-fi trope where you take all the worst aspects of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" and apply them to gay relationships (complete with a side order of "rape where the hero can't help himself" brought on by "heat cycles"). It's as if rape culture and the porn culture of women's submission is so culturally pervasive that some women writers can't even conceive of male gay partnerships working any other way.

And of course, I also have a bit of an issue with slash actually stemming from the epic Bechdel test failure of most of popular culture - even when there is a het relationship in the original source work, the woman is so often a cardboard cutout labelled "love interest" that if you want to explore a relationship where the protagonists have fully developed characters and a genuine emotional connection driven by their personalities and shared experiences, you're going to turn not to the hero and their cardboard cutout female love interest, but to the hero and their male best buddy.

(Though there's also the aspect, as a friend who writes Marvel slash puts it, of "one hot male good, two hot males better.")

MostlyHet
Yes, subverting all those ridiculous tropes is great fun. And I like to think that perhaps it gives young teenagers a different perspective to the norm - especially all the poor American ones with their lack of sex ed.
And oh... Marriage Law fics... A person has to be a very skilled writer to strike the right plot, tone, and characterisation to make such a fic work without being infuriatingly awful. I don't know if I've come across one yet, tbh.
But yes - there seems to be a very strong need among women to frame their own desire as external to themselves, or as a result to something forced upon them. And that comes through in forced marriage, rape, "trapped together," and "hero forced to rape heroine" fics.

Honestly I think it's because the cultural subconscious conception of females' role in sex (if that mess even makes sense,) is to view sex as inherently in opposition to women's desires. So even when women do want it, they express that desire in the terms they're familiar with, of not wanting it.

I think places like the US where women are expected to play "hard to get" especially suffer from this view of sex. It may sound ridiculous, but I really do feel like women are taught as a class, to some extent or another, to view sex as dangerous, undesirable - and with slut shaming etc - something a woman should resist lest she become "lesser" for embracing it.

(I also think this is partly why gay male romances are so popular among females, because it allows one to entirely avoid that cognitive dissonance around sex.)

Happy to agree to differ.

Unfortunately, Bit, I have not yet come across "feminist" heterosexual porn that does not ape mainstream porn, and the dynamics of misogynistic sexual interaction. And I've looked - not because I want to watch it but because I want to see if it exists.

And I don't think heterosexual pornographic films can be feminist.

The problem with feminist porn is that it attempts to make a feminist-friendly version of mainstream porn, which is impossible as mainstream porn is inherently misogynistic - without even getting into the working conditions. Feminist porn attempts to justify, explain, add disclaimers to, and reframe mainstream porn, and it just doesn't work because of that.

It also often seems to be that what is described as "feminist" porn is actually gay, lesbian, or "queer" porn, and not actually feminist at all.

The last problem is that porn is inherently fake, and in my opinion it fails to create a suspension of disbelief, and a proper fiction, in the way the movies and TV shows can, or indeed well-written fiction.

No matter how 'feminist' heterosexual porn tries to be, it generally involves an actual woman spending hours being penetrated in uncomfortable positions behind the scenes, in order to get her pay cheque. Even with something that purports to be feminist, we know that the sex acts were most likely not enjoyable (marathon sex efforts in front of cameras in weird positions to allow good camera angles, aren't usually fun,) if they were even consensual.

As a feminist, I feel ethically uncomfortable with what is essentially unnecessarily using someone else's body for my masturbation enhancement, when I do not know whether they consented, whether they had a childhood of abuse, whether they contracted an STI from the sex, whether it hurt and abraded them...

I feel that it is possible for non-penetrative female-focused sex to potentially be feminist, but even then, monetising and commodifying female sexual services does not seem feminist to me.

And the BDSM dom has always been in mainstream romantic fiction; it just hasn't been framed and labeled as that until now. Bodice-rippers have always had a good number of Stockholm Syndrome romances. Also, the BDSM aspect is what mainstream porn is in favour of, so it's easier for it to affect mainstream romance fiction. Whereas feminist porn, if it could be made, would be going against the mainstream and have a much harder time influencing the mainstream at all.

Mostly I do say "There are laws to control the production of porn. Laws that are totally and utterly ineffective. " In a previous post I also mention that female ejaculation is illegal in porn but there is no restriction on male ejaculation. The laws are ineffective and stupid!
As you suggest the police are overstretched and therefore it makes more sense to allow them to focus rather than to ban all porn - as has previously been suggested.

Oops, total edit fail - that final bit in parentheses was meant to go at the end of the first paragraph.

Missy - sounds like you think about fanfic in similar ways to me. (I hate the trope of the virgin bride ritually deflowered on her wedding night and find a lot of ways of subverting that. Humour is a great way of getting people to think about how crap some of their assumptions are about "the natural order of things" when it comes to sex.)

I've noticed the Harry Potter fandom has a lot of "marriage law" fics (for the uninitiated, they usually involve the Ministry of Magic bringing in what are in essence forced marriages). Now this for me is an interesting phenomenon (it's there in some form or another in all fandoms - it ties up with Vestal's point about "villain forces hero to rape other hero" fics), but I think it ties up with issues of the pervasiveness of rape culture, to the extent that often women can't even see some forms of rape for what they are, even when it's happening to them and they're being made deeply unhappy by it. A lot of the people writing these fics don't seem to realise they're writing about forced marriage and while in their imagination, because the couple are "meant for each other", it won't be rape, out there in the real world the situation described would be.

Bit - the problem with saying "the extreme forms are illegal already" is that those laws are utterly toothless. They date from the days before the internet, where it was a case of trying to police dodgy VHS tapes being smuggled in from Amsterdam or whatever. That stuff is out there on the internet, only a click or two away, and it is impossible to shut down. The specialist police units dealing with this are already stretched to the limit by trying to deal with internet film footage of the sexual abuse and rape of children - they don't have the resources to chase up supposedly consenting women being buggered while their anus prolapses to ask them if they really enjoy that sort of thing. (I've often been tempted to write a realistic one, where the woman intially hating the man is not a device to ramp up sexual tension, but in fact a considered opinion based on his history of being a murderous little shit, and she finds herself forced into an abusive marriage which she has to escape in some way...)

Missi - you describe mainstream porn. As I have discussed at some length previously this not what I am proposing. Your assessment of mainstream porn is correct and I agree with you. Vanilla porn is still mostly mainstream.

I am suggesting niche feminist porn may be able to be produced ethically and this may be able to influence the mainstream. In the same way that the domme character in BDSM erotica is slowly creeping into mainstream romantic fiction.

Abhorrent genres exist (please don't feel the need to list and describe them) and this type of porn is already prohibited under the law. Bear baiting is cruel and like cruel genres of porn is rightly illegal. There are laws to control the production of porn. Laws that are totally and utterly ineffective.

Italian - I don't want to put words in your mouth but having read your posts it seems your objections to porn are moral not ethical. Even if we could prove it was entirely consensual you would still not support any sort of filmed erotica. I have no moral objections to filmed erotica, my concerns are ethical and political. I fear we must just agree to differ.

As someone who writes a lot of fanfiction (Harry Potter - Draco/Hermione aka Dramione mostly, and also some Captain America - Steve/Bucky) which includes a lot of smuttiness as I am a filthy, shameless person, and as someone who hates porn, here's my two cents:

Porn is all about male gaze, male dominance, male pleasure, and it's fake and hollow.

It's a woman slathered in about 5 pounds of makeup, who is probably tired, bored, sore, and chafed from hours of awkwardly postured sex acts. The man is probably suffering similar issues.

Safe sex is absent as condoms are not used, and consent may be coerced. The woman may be (and often is,) a naive 18 year old who thinks porn will be an easy way to make heaps of cash and ends up starring in a handful of films, blowing any money she makes (often on drugs that make the reality bearable,) then slinking home and living with reality of her pornography being available to all on the internet forever after.

It also involves abhorrent genres (heard of rosebud porn? If not I'll save you the horror of googling it; it's anal prolapse pornography. It is apparently a niche, but growing genre. And it is not faked anal prolapses, it is real women with anal prolapses being anally penetrated for (male) consumers to enliven their masturbation with.

This is to be expected; apparently, it is quite common for those who watch porn regularly to become desensitised to the content they watch over time, and need to escalate the taboo nature and extremity of what they watch. Hence, a large percentage of boys who begin watching vanilla clips on the internet at age 12, will be watching brutal incest rape porn or some such by the time they're adults. And worse, it will seem normal to them.

Even vanilla porn objectifies women, presents an entirely unrealistic view of sex that does negatively impact young women's (and men's) sexual explorations, and promotes the abuse and injury of women even in the more vanilla genres as a normal matter of course during sex.

Whereas erotic fanfiction is about female gaze, female dominance (in terms of being the author,) and female pleasure. Being a written medium, one is aware of characters' feelings, desires, and whether or not consent is there. It also does not involve any actual humans being used to portray the fantasy. Even if it is 'problematic' (ugh I hate that word now,) it is clearly fiction.

It does indeed explore rape themes a lot (as well as other taboo types of sex.) I think this is because rape, sexual assault, and coercion are (sadly) normal parts of the female experience when it comes to sex. Society, media, and our own experiences prime us to see that as normal, if not 'okay', and I think in a lot of fanfiction you'll see (often young) female writers struggling with that fact.

We're trying to find our own sexuality, and what that even is, and if that even exists, in a world where young men talk about sex in terms like "I'd hit that," "I want to destroy her pussy," and "I'd wreck her cunt."

It is also commonly explored as part of a cathartic outpouring/exorcism for a writer who has suffered it herself. And often it is simply an easy trope for inserting emotional turmoil into the story, to give the characters (and reader,) something really terrible to agonise over.

Two of my own Harry Potter fics involve themes of sexual assault. In one, it is the male character who is raped by another man - I wanted to turn around that trope of the female character being the one to suffer the trauma, and I also shamelessly wanted to inject a great amount of emotional torment. In the other, I was attempting to write a realistic, non-gross version of a common Draco/Hermione fic trope.

But then I don't write the rape as erotica; for myself, I began writing erotic fanfiction because I noticed the reams of innaccuracies regarding sex that young writers had in fanfiction, that other young people were reading. And so I wanted to present realistic sex, that didn't involve tearing hymens, orgasms from vaginal penetration, and that had varied types of sex - from sleepy mediocre sex, to angry sex, to the very tender sort.

I think writers who write the rape itself as erotica do so in great part because that is the underlying, subconscious dynamic that society presents to women, regarding sex. It's not ideal, imo, but still better than live action pornography because no one is actually being harmed.

(Shite, I am so not concise, sorry! Congrats to anyone who read through all that ramble!)

Bitofacow Re "I think if it's going to happen why not make it ethical."

What about people who would like to watch bear bating? Could that be ethical? We could have vets standing by to bind up any wounds, and we could pay the bears to be abused publicly; they could buy a lot of honey with that!

That argument that 'it's going to happen anyway' could be used for 'domestic' violence, in fact any kind of abuse or violence. But I bet reading this some might say 'bear-bating' how bloody cruel. I want to live in a world where women and men say 'women being abused, hurt, or degraded, women being forced to have sex with multiple men to pay the rent, women being viewed as only sex objects... how bloody cruel... I don't want to buy into that.

Porn is heavily censored and restricted in law. Laws that are mostly totally and utterly ineffective. In the last round of legislation this quote from The Independent exemplifies some of the issues.
"Female-centred pornography seems to have been hit particularly hard, with female ejaculation completely banned, but male ejaculation remaining unrestricted."

One of the reasons I changed my stance on porn.

Apologies if I misrepresented your views, Bit.

I would like a bit more space for the acceptance of different moral stances. For instance, when a poster starts a thread on her partner's porn use in relationships, or chat, or AIBU, there's usually a pile on of people saying "all men do it, suck it up", "he's just having a wank", "you can't change human nature", and very few people saying "you know, it's okay to have ethical objections to porn, it's okay even if you don't have ethical objections, to say to your partner 'this is making me feel second best', it's okay to say 'why are you masturbating to porn rather than having sex with me?'" It's this that I would really like to change.

I'm probably on the fence about legally banning porn, but erring towards the ban side, in that there are other things we ban (hare coursing, hate speech, etc) which people could come up with arguments to defend on the basis of "freedom of expression". For me filmed porn comes close to a form of hate speech in many instances (the extreme forms are a form of incitement to violence against women, and are in fact often filmed evidence of actual violence against women). But I'd certainly like the space in society to say "look, although we don't (and shouldn't) make adultery illegal, most of us think it's immoral - and the same is true of porn use."

Mostlyhet - Nowhere do I say it "can only be done via an acceptance of filmed porn." I would never make a statement like that. Ever. I am tentatively suggesting some people might want it as an option and that a blanket ban on all porn is counter productive. I have frequently expressed my ambiguity towards my own arguments - I am not the zealot. I am struggling to make sense of a complex issue.

I don't feel able to tell people where to get their sexual jollies or what they should or should not enjoy. I think if it's going to happen why not make it ethical. I have had the discussion about the production of ethical porn previously on the thread and I accept it is a contentious issue.

I have read your posts and agree that the dominant man is a tiresome cliche. My point is that within some BDSM porn the domme is becoming much more common and much more mainstream. It shouldn't be an "alternative kink" you are correct, but where else apart from erotic BDSM lit do you find it at all?

Cross posted with you, Bit. Can I pick up on one thing you've mentioned: "BDSM also promotes dominant women and submissive men and this is becoming more common in erotic literature." I'm sure you didn't mean to suggest that the traditional "dominant man/sub woman" of conventional romantic fiction and the "domme/ sub man" in some BDSM were the only possibilities, but if you look at mine and Vestal's posts upthread, you'll see that there are a lot of women for whom these do seem to be exhaustive categories. Where is the space for equal, mutually enjoyable sex? Why isn't this celebrated? Why is so much of our picture (whether in porn, or in romance novels, or even in relationships in non-romance genres - the side plot where the hero in the action film gets the girl) centred round dominant men, with dominant women as an alternative "kink"?

Also, while I totally get the idea that celebrating one's sexuality and exploring it is good, I still don't get why you insist that this can only be done via an acceptance of filmed porn. For me, the objections (that the viewer can never be certain that the participants are consenting, and that the "ethical end" is nothing more than a fig-leaf to disguise the excesses of the mainstream industry) still stand. One can get one's vicarious sexual jollies elsewhere (written erotica, drawings, etc). (I can't think of a better word than vicarious - I'm trying to use it to mean activities "about" sex designed to turn people on, in contrast to actually having sex).

I'll find out for you, felas (I don't have a kindle, but I do have fanfic friends who download stuff as pdfs onto their kindle).

OK Buffy I've done my homework. I'll reply as concisely as I can as the essay I want to write will take too long. Disclaimer - I know I am using some sweeping generalisations time and space restrict content.

Love the analysis of women's body discipline and it draws into focus several issues.
I agree wholeheartedly with the description of the way society controls our bodies. During my twenties I rejected much of this pressure, didn't remove hair, androgynous haircut, little makeup and I disapproved of porn.

However, as I have got older I have realised that this did not make me happy. I know I have been socialised and pressured into wanting to remove my hair and pluck my eyebrows but want it I do.

So do I continue with what I know intellectually to be 'right' or do I make myself happy? Can I come to a place where I realise the pressures of patriarchy but act in a way that makes me comfortable and happy. Can I check my make-up and still be a feminist?

I realised to be fulfilled in my life I must compromise my intellectual principles. So I reviewed my stance on several issues one of which was porn. I researched changing feminist opinions and the concept of liberal rather than radical feminism was a compromise I could live with.

And this leads me to sexuality. For many (not everyone) the lure of the forbidden is a massive sexual turn on. Knowing being oppressed is wrong is the exact reason it is sexually gratifying. Within the BDSM community there is an understanding of this and sex is seperated from real life to the extent it can be.

It could be argued that BDSM promotes oppositional discipline, body types and shapes that defy the norm are welcomed and celebrated. This is reflected in (some) BDSM porn. By fetishising (sp?) aspirational appearances and celebrating other less conventional bodies it works against the patriarchy. BDSM also promotes dominant women and submissive men and this is becoming more common in erotic literature.

Subversive sexuality is doing more to undermine the social control discussed in the article because the whole point of much (not all) of BDSM is to subvert the norm. Subverting the norm is the whole point! In the same way radical lesbians promote a different female aesthetic.

And if feminists like me can't live up to the ideal of rejecting body discipline I think using this to change society may have a limited impact.

But I could be wrong......

het I think that's true of them as a genre too. There seem to be more women writing fantasy and more strong female characters. I find a lot of sci fi too male dominated and geeky.
I checked out AO3 last night. Love it! Is there a way to access content via my kindle? I find it hard to read long sections of text on screen.

Oh, and a quick thought on how much of fanfic is erotica - it's actually possible to crunch the numbers relatively easy, because the genres and age ratings are all listed, and it's easy to filter stories by these (seriously, fandom is a social scientist's dream laboratory!) The other main site, fanfiction.net, I checked out my fantasy world fandom - 48K of stories rated up to and including teen, 5K rated "mature". Of the 48K up to teen (i.e. not erotica), for 11K the authors have chosen to use the tag "romance" - so a lot are just straightforward adventure stories, enlargements on bits of the plot not covered in detail, etc. (That's a surprise to me, actually - I would have thought at least half would be romances).

Watch out, Felas, once you disappear down the rabbit hole you might never come out.

But since you've expressed an interest, here's another odd thing to mull over. I don't know whether it generalises across the whole of fandom (and fandom is huge - one of the two main sites, Archive of Our Own, otherwise known as A03, has 2.5 million works on it!) I write in two fandoms, one a sci fi world, the other a quasi-medieval fantasy world. Now you would think that the sci fi world would give scope to feminist explorations of relationships while the quasi-medieval world would be the one which would be mired in patriarchal attitudes. But weirdly, the reverse is true. Much of the romance in the sci-fi world could have come straight out of a 1950s Doris Day movie in terms of its attitudes. But the fantasy world (whose author was male, traditional, did write some good characters, but on the whole it's an epic Bechdel test fail...) seems to produce lots of women writers exploring how you can write strong female characters, celebrate traditionally feminine activities, value them, examine gender roles, subvert them... Maybe I'm rambling here, but it did strike me as strange.

I'm not sure about the implication that we Just need to identify our kink

I am however loving the fanfic convo. I don't know much about it. Might look into it. Very shocked that some people equate a sexually assertive woman to bdsm.