if we can accept that the porn that naturally appeals to submissive men is images of men being submissive, couldn’t the porn that naturally appeals to sexual women be of women being sexual? An image doesn’t need to be from the perspective of its intended audience to be “hot,” it can also be from the perspective of that audience’s object of desire and that can make it “hot.”

This comment got me thinking. Even after I responded to Kay in the comment thread, I kept thinking about it. I thought about it so much that I did some Google searching and some blog surfing trying to see if anyone else had ever had the sorts of thoughts I was suddenly having, but I couldn’t find anything relevant.

So, in light of the absence of something to link to, I want to share some of what’s in my head.

On Porn’s “Right Stuff”

Let’s begin with a question: what determines one’s satisfaction with some specific pornographic content?

When I think about why I enjoy some porn and not some other porn, a few obvious things jump out at me. Everyone I’ve asked who’s willing to answer the question also seems able to identify particulars of porn they like that contributes to their enjoyment. They may be physically attracted to the models in visual works, they may enjoy the character development in an erotic story, or they may find the depicted circumstance an exciting prospect to one day explore themselves. Often, one’s distaste for or affinity with a single pornographic image, story, or other artifact is most adequately explained by a combination of these and other factors.

Although details vary between individuals, one observation seems universal: everyone likes some porn, and dislikes some other porn. No one seems to like all porn, though many people certainly have less discriminating tastes than others. At the same time, no one seems to dislike all porn, either.¹

Some data on people’s enjoyment of porn is easy to find, although most of it is necessarily self-reported and anecdotal.² Take the headline poster from the original set of 12 Lady Porn Day flyers, as an example. I described this image as “A skinny white woman wearing nothing but a white fur-lined coat with big blonde hair and big glasses baring it all in a public venue.”

Personally, I find the woman attractive, both aesthetically and sexually. I think she’s beautiful (even though I think she’s dangerously close to hitting the unattractively too-skinny point for my tastes) and I think she’s rockin’ obvious sex appeal. To put it crudely, yes, I’d do her. However, I’m not particularly drawn to the image in general and I’m especially disinterested as a pornography consumer; there is little beyond the aforementioned aesthetic and sexual attraction that holds my interest.

Some might argue that aesthetic and sexual attraction of this sort is what defines “good porn.” The traditional pornographer’s formula seems to be:

1. find conventionally pretty people who fit contemporary standards of human physical aesthetics (e.g., “skinny white women”),
2. place them in sexually suggestive or overtly sexual situations (e.g., “baring it all in a public venue”), and
3. voila: good porn!

The assertion Rabbit, Lady Porn Day’s host, made that images like this one are “things I find hot” may at first suggest this formula is fool-proof. But if this were such an open-and-shut case, why did the same image get the following response from Beka?

You know, even as a lady who enjoys the other ladies, I… don’t really find those images all that arousing. I mean, obviously, it’s a matter of personal preference[…].

The image got an even more severe response from Remittance Girl:³

if I wanted lesbian porn, I’d go find it. The bottom line is, what makes people think women only get turned on by, primarily, other women’s bodies? I want porn that shows males […] I want pictures of hetero men, naked, aroused. Period.

Rabbit, Beka, Remittance Girl, and I each had differing responses to the image. If all it took for porn to be considered “good” were conventionally attractive models in sexual situations, all of us should have found this image “hot.” That (obviously incorrect) formulation divorces the viewer from judging the quality of the porn, yet we intuitively understand that pornography is theatrical; it is not only intended to be viewed, it is interpreted by the viewer, as all classes of art are. Therefore, we must consider the viewer’s perception in determining the quality of any given pornographic artifact. Nowhere is the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” more applicable than in the study of art—or porn.

If we just factored in the sexual orientation of the viewer, then the only classes of people who we’d expect not to find that picture hot are (exclusively) gay men and (exclusively) straight women. However, plenty of (admittedly anecdotal) evidence suggests that there are many straight women who are aroused by sexualized imagery of women and would agree such images of other women are “hot.”⁴ Clearly, what makes good porn “good” and bad porn “bad” is a complex topic.

Perhaps an understanding of the issues at hand can not be achieved through expositions of a purely sexual nature, but rather through a semiotic study of the viewing of the material. Otherwise, it should have been easier to find porn that is universally liked (or disliked). In other words, for you to understand why a person likes some porn but not some other porn, you must first understand the significance they place on the porn itself.

Sexual gazing: Objectifying to Embodying

In sexuality theories, discourses on gaze mingle with cinematic theory (i.e., media studies, specifically feminist film theory), which is where the notion of the male gaze first appeared. Put simply, a gaze identifies a viewer, or a gazer. When a woman’s curves linger on-screen, as they so often do in cinema, or when a picture of, say, a “skinny white woman…baring it all” is shown, as it so often is in pornography, the viewer is commonly—and often rightly—assumed to be a heterosexual male.⁵

However, this conceptualization of gaze is limiting. Knowing who the gazer is tells us very little about how they are gazing. Part of understanding a person’s pornographic tastes relies on understanding whether their gaze is objectifying or embodying. An objectifying gaze is one in which the gazer—the consumer of the pornographic artifact—imagines themselves as observing the model in a pornographic image, while an embodying gaze is one in which they imagine themselves as being the model.

The gazing behavior a consumer of pornography exhibits can be conceived of as a gaze orientation, similar to a sexual orientation. In 1948, the Kinsey scale⁶ graded sexual behavior along an ordered series of points from exclusively heterosexual (0) to exclusively homosexual (6). The grades numbered 1 through 5 represented the various degrees of bisexual behavior:

Imagine a similar scale as Kinsey’s, except instead of sexual orientation, we’re charting gaze orientation. We can call it the gaze scale.

On one end of the scale, just like sexual orientation, we place hetero-gazing (or, using more cinematic and less sexological terminology, subject-identifying) behavior (0) and on the other we place homo-gazing (or, object-identifying) behavior (6), with bi-gazing behavior in between. As the etymological prefixes imply, hetero-gazing/subject-identifying behavior indicates a preference for the viewed object to be different from the gazer, while homo-gazing/object-identifying behavior indicates a preference for the viewed object to be the same (or at least similar in respect to sociosexual makeup) as the gazer.⁷

As a framework for discussing the subjective satisfaction someone may experience from consuming porn, adding this sociosexual concept to the way we think neatly explains differing reactions to pornographic artifacts that can’t be articulated any other way. Since a person’s gaze orientation is a distinct facet of their sociosexual makeup, any given homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or asexual person can be any given degree of homo-gazing, bi-gazing, hetero-gazing, or non-gazing (a-gazing?).

For example, some straight women may enjoy stereotypical mainstream porn because they “identify with”⁸ the woman “getting fucked.” Or, given an image with a traditional “male gaze” such as the one above, some (heterosexual) women may enjoy it because they have conformed to hegemonic cultural ideals in which the female form is inherently sexualized; they have become their own sexual object. In each case, these can be described as homo-gazing women.

In much the same way, this formulation explains my significant affinity for pornography focusing on male-submissive objects. Male Submission Art is an intentionally homo-gazing project because I’m featuring submissive masculinity and I identify as a submissive man myself—arguably a highly narcissistic behavior. In other words, the experience of strong homo-gazing/object-identifying behavior while consuming porn can be described as the experience of desiring to be desired—an experience no less “natural” for men than women, despite the insistence of simplistic, gender essentialist analyses.

Meanwhile, the traditional “male gaze” in straight porn presumes the (male) consumer is both heterosexual and hetero-gazing. What else explains the pernicious idea that men “identify with” the male actors when their most prominent identifying feature—their face—is so often cinematically decapitated? What else explains that even these (exclusively) heterosexual men rarely, if ever, take issue with the proliferation of purposefully visible giant cocks? Showing the cock owner’s face challenges the suspension of disbelief necessary for straight, hetero-gazing men to identify with the well endowed subject, reducing the efficacy of the porn’s theatrics.

Sexism’s Influence on Gaze

Using the framework provided by gaze orientation, I can also articulate the intense discomfort of feeling as though I need to “change the genders around in my head” when I look at most porn, same as many (heterosexual, hetero-gazing) women do. Such gaze dysphoria is more evident upon examinations of asymmetric power. For example, in her analysis of the 1980′s TV show Cagney & Lacey, Danae Clark succinctly describes sexism’s influence:

Dominant theories of spectatorship maintain that traditional (male-governed) texts are founded on a subject/object dichotomy that places a male subject in control of the ‘gaze’ and positions the woman as object of his look. Since the woman becomes the passive raw material for the active gaze and visual pleasure of the male, the female viewer’s possibilities for identification become extremely limited; she must choose between adopting the voyeuristic (sadistic) position of the male subject or the masochistic position of the female object.

Clark recognizes the quagmire that power differentials along gendered lines (i.e., sexism) places on “the female viewer’s possibilities of identification,” implying that neither the position of the male subject nor that of the female object is desirable for female viewers. However, she seems constrained by theoretically coupling active and sadistic behaviors with maleness; the “voyeuristic (sadistic) position” is desired by some women. To escape this constraint, we can be aided by Dr. Staci Newmahr’s insights on BDSM play⁹ in her recently published book, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy.¹⁰

It is impossible to understand [archetypes of topping and bottoming] outside gender; they are themselves gender stereotypes. Beyond performances of powerful and powerless circumstances, they are active representations of being powerful and powerless, or of victimizing and being victimized. Topping and bottoming are both active processes undertaken to and as engagement in performances of victimization and power differentials. This is not to claim that these performances are therefore anti-feminist or otherwise philosophically objectionable[…]. There is, as SM researchers and practitioners have long insisted, an important distinction between victimization and consensual engagement in performances of victimization. Nonetheless, while the latter precludes the former, it is the existence and cultural coding of victimization that gives these performances meaning. In this sense, we can explore these performances within their gendered contexts, yet move away from the categories of “woman” and “man” as the salient hermeneutic constructs.

The existence of BDSM players who identify as dominant women or submissive men has long problematized socially conservative feminist discourse precisely because it challenges the hermeneutic constructs on which conservative social ideology depends. Similarly, the existence of homo-gazing/object-identifying women challenges the “male gaze’s” corollary. Flipping Clark’s statement on its head, if the “female gaze” can be understood as a subject/object dichotomy that places a female subject in control of the ‘gaze’ and positions the man as object of her look, then this female viewer is implicitly cast as hetero-gazing/subject-identifying. A (masochistic) woman whose satisfaction is derived from empathizing with other female objects suffers the reciprocal quagmire as the one Clark described.

This suggests that the efforts of various counter-culture pornographers, notably many creating “porn for women,” employ the same flawed dialectic as mainstream pornographers producing “male gaze” iconography. Rejecting this false dichotomy—adopting a both/and mindset—offers both emotional comfort (in validating common gaze-dysphoric experiences) and a sexologically and psychoanalytically sound explanation for, as an example, why some women find Filament Magazine sexy while others don’t. Notions of erotic satisfaction derived from consuming pornography are obviously best explored as a composite of the pornographic artifact itself and the experience of its consumption, but the atomic sociosexual parts engaged in such an experience have not yet been fully enumerated.

Just as Newmahr suggests we “explore [BDSM] performances within their gendered contexts, yet move away from the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as the salient hermeneutic constructs,” I suggest moving away from the categories of “male” and “female” when exploring the experience of porn consumption. Put another way, if you’ve ever longed for terminology that explains the difference between looking at porn and thinking “I want to fuck that girl” or thinking “I want to be that girl,” perhaps expressing the latter in terms of a gaze attraction, rather than a sexual attraction or a gender identity, will be useful.

When it comes to the consumption and creation of pornographic artifacts (viewing imagery, writing erotica, etc.), but notably not when it comes to patronizing and providing erotic labor (soliciting a prostitute, doing escort work, etc.), I posit that gaze orientation is the most significant, or at least unconsidered, hermeneutic characteristic relating to one’s satisfaction with pornography.

1. The only people who do seem to “dislike all porn” are, of course, absexuals—folks who find pornography abhorrent. These people are typically polemicistic anti-porn crusaders for whom any and all “porn” is ideologically incompatible with “erotica,” a category containing depictions many of them do claim to “like.” For the purposes of this discussion, I treat “porn” and “erotica” as synonymous since my intent is to explore any (sexualized) satisfaction acquired through any media, regardless of how the consumer categorizes said media or maintains any philosophical objections to it.
2. Also, as I am most assuredly a foreigner in academic lands, I don’t have as much insight into formal research results as others might. I am, after all, a middle school drop-out, albeit one interested in reading academically rigorous studies on porn. Links in comments welcomed!
3. Remittance girl elaborated in a follow-up post, which also has an interesting comment thread.
4. These anecdotes seem further supported by numerous studies in which women view porn and are observed for physiological and psychological responses. See, for instance, Sexual arousal in women: A comparison of cognitive and physiological responses by continuous measurement and Sexual arousal in women: The development of a measurement device for vaginal blood volume. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to gauge these studies’ precise relevance to this discussion in part because the particular pornography used is not publicly available (and as a starving activist, I haven’t the resources to purchase the studies’ full text or other materials). What is notable, however, is the prevalent cognitive dissonance among women studied.
5. I don’t have any numbers, but private correspondence with publishers of material explicitly designed around a “female gaze” informs me that there are literally near-zero female photographers who exclusively photograph male models. Don’t believe me? Read Where Are The Women Who Photograph Men?
6. True to his reportedly narcissistic form, the Kinsey scale is named after Alfred Kinsey.
7. I use “sociosexual” here and elsewhere in this post to refer to the sum of a person’s social and sexual constitution, not in the formal psychological sense as a behavioral orientation measuring a desire to engage in sexual acts independent from feelings of love.
8. It is noteworthy that psychoanalytic discourses on gaze describe the concept as observing the observation of the self, as in by literally watching oneself in a mirror. Psychoanalytic theory formalizes notions of imagination by passage through a “mirror stage” of psychological development, that is, when a child is able to recognize that their own image in a mirror is their own image. Such an understanding of the self is necessary to form a distinction between “I” and “you” and is therefore a prerequisite for developing at least a homo-gazing orientation, as the viewer of a pornographic image actively seeks to empathize with or project their identity onto the (objectified) model. (A hetero-gazing orientation may not rely on a prior “mirror stage” since in this case the viewer conceptualizes the sexual image as a mere extension of their own eyesight.) This also means that a gaze orientation is not necessarily inborn, as other usages of the “orientation model” may imply.
9. Since BDSM play explicitly references both relationships of asymmetric power and theatrical ritual, it is an outstandingly useful lens for this analysis.
10. See Playing on the Edge, p. 114, paragraph 2.

1. I hate Kink, Inc.^{1 2} That does not mean I want them eradicated—they have been doing a shitty job of it, but I believe have made the world a (slightly) better place on balance—it means I have incredibly negative feelings for them that are far, far stronger than mere disapproval or dislike or disappointment. As a result, you may feel that the rest of this post is tinged with anger or outright rage. And you would be correct.
2. The title of this post is intentionally provocative. It equates murder and attempted assassination with what I view as the long-running corrosion of sex-positivity perpetrated by a darling of the supposedly sex-positive porn movement. That may not be fair, an argument for which I’ll only be ready to entertain after I express my indignation, and only from people who make evident they have read this post. Nevertheless, I do not think it is ill-concieved to take the events from one context and apply them to another in an attempt to better understand one another and the world we inhabit. That is my intent here.

Now, there were two events this week that made me feel unspeakably angry. In the first, America sat in horror as Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and 6 others were killed by a gunman in Tucson, Arizona. In the second, people reacted with a mixture of support, indifference, unease, disgust, and resignation to a press release by Kink, Inc. advertising the purported “deflowering” of a (real, live!) “virgin.”

The numerous different reactions (and resulting questions) to the porn company’s press release are pretty interesting. I first heard about the press release on Twitter by way of Dr. Petra Boynton, who caught some flak (more of the conversation) for expressing concern about the way “hymen” was being represented in the company’s marketing material. Several others, notably Heather Corinna of Scarleteen, and Miss Maggie Mayhem had similar concerns. Quoting Maggie:

I do not take issue with Ms. Blue’s fantasy and desire to have vaginal sex for the first time on camera. I do not take issue with the fact that it can be incredibly hot and sexy to watch someone have vaginal sex for the first time. I do sincerely hope that it is a rewarding experience for everyone because I am a big cheerleader for all forms of consensual activity whether or not I enjoy them myself. My life has been dedicated to fighting for that very thing.

I do have issues with press releases that perpetuate dangerous myths.

Maggie goes on to name and debunk several of these myths. However, she also touches on another point that I first made on Twitter and which I feel has been largely overlooked by the rush to correct all the anatomical misinformation.

I find the marketing and publicity around this shoot to be the issue at hand. […] I am not worried about Nicki Blue. I know that she is in very good and capable hands on set. It’s the rest of us that I’m worried about when the packaging of the shoot includes blatant misinformation.

Kink.Com has the right to say whatever they want about their content. I am experiencing disappointment by their unwillingness to rise to the occasion. A press release is, by its very nature, designed to spark interest and by that standard it was inordinately effective. Buzz words were selected with deliberation and it is true that if you want to sell a product, the press release may not be the best place to do so. However, when I look at the pride flags waving in the wind from the rooftop of the armory I have to wonder if they match the words in those press releases.

(Emphasis mine.)

Perhaps as a sometimes-model for Kink, Inc., Maggie needs to be tactful, which I can respect. Thankfully, I’m burdened by no such constraints. I very much agree with her, except mere disappointment is itself a disappointing reaction. Here’s my series of tweets on the matter, reproduced without others’ usernames:

Anatomy issue aside, I view this as yet another of Kink, Inc.’s sexist sell-outs. :( Kink[ Inc.] have become masterful at promoting sexist BDSM gender essentialist fantasy. Nothing wrong w/fantasy but something VERY WRONG w/not acknowledging the distinction. When majority is unable to make that distinction […] it’s not implicit. :( Incumbent on Kink[ Inc.] to do so. The product is not the place to make the fantasy/reality distinction. The PRESS RELEASE is the place to responsibly do that. I’m not concerned about Ms. Blue. I believe she’s well-treated & informed. I’m concerned about [the] irresponsible press release.

It’s also worth pointing out that Kink, Inc. CEO Peter Acworth may ultimately agree, saying he “regret[s] how the press release was worded.” While possibly genuine, I’m sure the company is aware of the economic model simplified in the retelling of John Nash‘s story in the movie A Beautiful Mind: what’s economically best for an individual is to do what is best for oneself and the group/community/others in the same sphere. Call me a cynic, bitter, or whatever, but I remain unconvinced Acworth’s apparent remorse deserves any leniency.

The sex-positive community is typically slow to criticize and quick to dole out praise for their darling Kink, Inc., but absolutely nothing the company does excuses the total self-absolution of their responsibility to promote their product with at least some shred of integrity. This is far from the first (see Adele Haze) and won’t be the last time they fail to do so. This press release—and I reiterate that I’m only referring to the press release, not the upcoming performance—while perhaps a marketer’s version of a wet dream, had none.

Here’s the thing. Phrases like “true virgin,” “the winner,” and “sacrificing Nikki’s innocence,” are (it needs saying again) totally acceptable fantasy. Go ahead, “winner,” call Nikki an innocent sacrifice while you’re fucking her—more power to the both of you. However, do not pretend it is acceptable for business as usual to include demolishing the line between business communications and fantasy sex. These phrases have absolutely no place in a press release being circulated to news agencies, and any company run by responsible sex-positive adults should fucking know better.

Undoubtedly, several self-identified pro-porn advocates will be breathing down my throat about this. How dare I tell a porn company what to do? Should you have the urge to toss this straw-man at me, consider for a moment your own views on things like occupational health and safety regulations, or asbestos regulations for contractors. The issue is not telling a company what it may or may not do, it is about how to create an atmosphere of genuine health for both the company, which is made up of individual human beings, and its consumers.

While I, personally, feel that there shouldn’t actually be regulations for how porn companies may or may not craft press releases, or use certain words, or anything as inane and utterly, mindlessly, pathetically stupid as that, this does not mean there should be no oversight on the matter.

Porn companies are companies, and they have a product. What makes their product different from, say, a steel mill or a coal mine is that their product is largely cultural, not material. They operate in a completely different arena; they do not have to deal with resource scarcity or distribution in the same way, for example. But this does not mean they do not pollute. They do. Kink, Inc. is a massive polluter.

What baffles me is that almost all of the simple-minded (read: the anti-porn lunatics) understand this intuitively yet a staggering portion of my peers seem oblivious to it. The simple-minded, in their never-ending idiocy, lobby for government regulation to solve this problem, but that is so obviously the wrong tool for this job. Their’s is the lazy solution, forcing us to work twice as hard to resolve things. The right tool is the more difficult road: corporate social responsibility.

What do I mean by corporate social responsibility? Well, let’s look at the Giffords shooting. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik immediately brought attention to the “vitriolic rhetoric” permeating the political climate in this country when he spoke of the tragic events this weekend. Although Sheriff Dupnik named no names, it is far too easy for any one of us to do so. And some unnamed examples aren’t merely rhetoric, they are literal calls to arms, and to violence.

Regardless of your political views, and setting aside the many entanglements this most-recent domestic American massacre has raised, most people seem to agree that one thing is far beyond dispute: words have consequences. Language matters.

In the wake of the Giffords shooting, scumbags all over the Internet are tripping all over themselves arguing about which rights we should restrict next in a sadly predictable, misguided at best and opportunistic at worst, fascistic attempt to prevent the next American gun massacre from happening. Bring back involuntary commitment! Stricter gun control! Even, and this is completely insane, let’s pass a law to ban violent rhetoric! (Oy, the stupid. It burns.)

Again, set aside your political views on any of these topics and look, I beg of you, at the paradigm each of these ideas have come from. More laws are not the answer. The answer must come from mindfulness not merely of our own political message but the environment we are in, the overarching context. Expediency through intellectual myopia is not an inevitability, nor an optimal long-term strategy.

Back to Kink, Inc.’s über-fail. I’ve long condemned that company for their utterly sexist attitude to porn-selling, if not porn-making (although there’s some of that, too). But I’ve been largely alone among my peers in this. That does not highlight Kink, Inc.’s most recent inevitable failure, it highlights the failure of my fellow sexuality community members.

Kink, Inc. is either not a company run by socially responsible people or it is one filled with people who, pitiably, are so disconnected from the reality of others (like me) that they are truly clueless about the effects of their actions. Worse, if we are to ascribe to them simple stupidity rather than malice, then they are like the global warming deniers who can’t tell the difference between weather and climate.

Sadly, the rest of the mainstream porn industry (and, yes, Kink, Inc. is part of the mainstream porn industry) is so much worse that Kink, Inc. still rightfully earns the gratitude of many performers, producers, and consumers. I have personally befriended numerous people who work or worked at the company and have only occasionally heard anything save positive things. For that, bravo. However, it should be seen as small praise, not a laudable accomplishment, to be the most perfectly formed piece of shit at the top of a steaming, stinking pile of the stuff.

Our culture is so thoroughly sexually unhealthy, and so totally poisoned by acrimonious greed, that we as a sex-positive community have become used to eating whatever shit-covered scraps of consensual sexual fulfillment we get. So when Kink, Inc. merely feeds us shit-laced scraps, many people swallow it with ease. Those who swallow this crap without a second thought may even disgust me more than the imbecilic anti-porn crusaders, because I’d like to think those people actually have the mental capacity to demand better, and then they lazily, selfishly don’t. And with astonishingly self-righteous self-gratification (“look at how sexual/sex-positive I am!”), to boot.

People who are shocked (SHOCKED, I say!) that Kink, Inc. would behave in such a way have been asleep for the last 2 years. They remind me of the people who were shocked (SHOCKED, they insist!) to note the violence in Arizona this weekend. I don’t blame Kink, Inc. They’re doing what they have always done: they’re making money. This is simply the latest public example of their (perhaps begrudging) buying in to the kind of self-debasing, racing-to-the-bottom cancer endemic of our economic system.

Instead, I blame you, writer with a sex blog who hasn’t demanded better, and loudly. I blame you, friends who purchase Kink, Inc. material knowing full-well what economic company you’re keeping. And I blame you, sex-positive-turned-sex-negative apologists who are so blinded by anti-porn arguments you have not yet done the difficult, painful work of self-reflection on your own priorities. You, like me, are part of the chorus of influencers on our own 24-hour news cycle who have, working together, utterly failed to shun this and other sexism in BDSM porn within our own metaphorical political party.

Those of you with a sense of loyalty stronger than a sense of principle are complicit in the failure of your own movement. On this occasion, shame suits you. And if Kink, Inc. gets blasted for this in the mainstream, I dare say that, this time, they deserve it.

Let us never forget that most of the rhetoric surrounding virginity is inherently sexist. Remember, also, it is far more pervasive than violent political metaphors. Appallingly, it is even the basis on which some men justify murdering their own daughters, sisters or would-be wives upon learning that the woman in question is not, in their mind, “sexually pure.” Let me say that again: some women around the world are literally killed for losing their perceived virginity, sometimes because they were raped. And for my own pain, which hardly pales in comparison, I’ve written at some length how unabashed sexism negatively affects sexually submissive men, and I will be continuing to do so for as long as I have the will.

So, tell me, why does spreading misinformation about virginity, or tearing down the distinctions between fantasy and reality not amount to sexually violent speech? Why are those creepy men who open conversations with “May I rub your feet, Mistress” not viewed as our community’s equivalent of Jared Lee Loughners? And from that perspective, how can Kink, Inc.’s press release be viewed as any different than Sarah Palin’s gunsight poster?

And, most importantly, what are you going to do to help make sure it never happens again?

Update: Maggie wrote a somewhat verbose and generous follow up, which is worth reading. You also may find my comment, reproduced here for posterity’s sake, interesting:

Pardon my soap box, you’re probably correct that it’s not as much fun as your porn shoot. That said, I suppose you didn’t feel compelled to dispel the misinformation in Mr. Acworth’s apology, just his press release?

…Nicki feels that Kink is the place where she can best live out a fantasy she’s had for many years – to break her hymen during her first vaginal sex experience…

Or did we all just uncritically read past that little slip?

So, sure, why don’t we all go back to sucking on our little Kink, Inc. pacifiers. Or maybe I’ve just already gone mad by trying to push you people onto the next small steps towards actual social justice for so many fucking years.

Augh. Still totally disgusted.

1. I beseech you, we must begin to call this company by their name—NOT the endearing, self-promotional “Kink.com” but Kink, INCORPORATED, for that is what they are, and we would do well to remind one another of that at every opportunity.
2. Several people have correctly pointed out to me that “Kink, Inc.”‘s business name is actually Cybernet Entertainment, LLC. For the interested, their business entity number is 199821910013, which can be retrieved at the Secretary of State’s Business Search page. I use “Kink, Inc.” as a colloquialism, in case that isn’t obvious to you.

If you’ve read even a little bit of this blog, you’re probably already well-versed in many of my rants about how paltry the available porn is for submissive men like me (and, by extension, dominant women like Eileen). But the problem is actually two fold. One problem is, of course, that there’s simply an insanely disturbing general lack of the stuff. In fact, it’s so bad that if you Google for the three words “male submission art,” you actually get female submission links littering the first page of results.

This is actually even worse if you go actively hunting for porn with the hopes of finding erotica depicting men who are submissive. Instead, you’re much, much more likely to find erotica depicting women who are dominant. This is actually a major nuisance for a lot of people—including many submissive men, I might add.

Arguably even more frustrating than that, however, is that what male submissive porn is out there is total shit relative to the porn available for other sorts of orientations. In such erotica (unless it’s gay imagery, of course) men are portrayed as impotent, ugly creatures. That is not sexy. It’s also insulting.

Announcing MaleSubmissionArt.com: Art and visual erotica that depicts masculine submission

My proposed solution? I launch MaleSubmissionArt.com and have people send me hot pics of men being submissive. I figure there just has to be enough people out there as fed up with this situation as I am, and if I can get some of them to send me contributions from their personal stashes of erotica or while they are browsing the Internet hunting for more, I’ll be able to crowd-source the content for a shared porn collection full of the kind of stuff we actually like.

Best of all, even though this project is based around me wanting to have one easy place to go get beautiful pictures of sexy tortured men, it has the potential to really change the way people think about creating erotica around the notions of male submission. Specifically, as the site description states:

We showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the “pathetic” submissive man.

I’d be thrilled to be able to get a steady stream of hot male submission action into everyone’s RSS feeds daily, but to do that I need your help in scouting out sources for this kind of porn. I’m very much hoping that those of us in the sex blogging community will spread the word about the site. I’m also hoping that those of you able to contribute will do so in any of the ways I’ve outlined on the MaleSubmissionArt.com project page.

So, do you think we’ll be able to stem the tide of portraying submissive men in horribly unattractive ways?

• I realize this will probably be “too techy” for some of my readers, but what the hell. This not-so-recent article on Read Write Web has caught my attention a while ago and I’ve been musing about this sort of thing ever since. Marshall Kirkpatrick summarizes sociology and technology researcher Corinna Bath’s findings as he asks “Will the Semantic Web have a gender?”
  

  […]the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn’t until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities.

  Too often, Bath argues, “binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use.”

• Speaking of the Web, Elizabeth writes about her concerns with WordPress.com’s censorship of what it deems “mature” content. This is precisely why I host my own blog on my own server, and part of why I’ve helped Kink in Exile and Essin Em do the same for themselves. If you need tech help doing the same, feel free to contact me, and since I reserve the right not to reply, you should have no qualms about “bugging” me with a request for help.
• Ranat writes what is very probably the funniest and sexiest post I have read in a long time called Pon Farr and Other Ways to Get Away With Non-Consensuality (because we love Vulcans). I’m not sure if I had a geekgasm or a trekgasm while reading it, but some of its ideas could certainly fuel a number of fantasies capable of giving me just a plain old orgasm!
• As he is wont to do, Axe humorously writes about the unequal door fees for women and men at most kink/fetish venues, and quotes my response to his question:
  

  Perhaps it goes back to the age old question: If women are just as into this stuff as men, where are these women? Why are men paying a hundred bucks to get into a swingers event and women can walk in for free? Are the men like myself who want to go to events like these so horrible and disgusting that the only way a woman will go is if she has nothing better to do?

  I posed this question via twitter and a few people responded.

  […]

  Maymay gave me some of his wisdom via twitter. “The reason kink/fetish events are cheaper for women is blatantly obvious: sexism. Women are products, men are the consumers.”

  Oh how I wish this wasn’t true. If only I were being the one consumed and used like a product.

  I also replied to his post in the comments:

  [W]hen I go out to kink events like this with a significant other, here’s how I expect to look at the costs:

  $5 for women + $25 men / 2 people = we each pay $15 entry fee

  I’d consider any woman or man in a supposedly equal relationship, D/s or otherwise, who doesn’t also do that sexist.

• Tom Allen informs us about the Boy Scouts’ decision to include (some) sex ed topics in their program. Tom has this to say about the move, which I can’t second strongly enough:
  

  The sooner we, as a society, can kick off the notion that morality is tied to sexuality (or more specifically, sexual enjoyment among consenting partners), the better off we will all be.

• Last but certainly not least, today FetLife.com announced the addition of a “Fluctuating/Evolving” option was added to the list of possible options for users to list as their sexual orientation on their profiles. John Baku had this to say about his choice to add the option:
  

  Things can not get simpler then being a straight guy which to be honest I find is a bad thing in my position. It basically means I have to wait until someone opens up my eyes to the different types of orientations and as well the issues and politics behind the different sexual orientation.

  I believe FetLife is the first site to get this right. Ever. Congratulations to them, and I hope more sites follow suit, not just for sexual orientation but for gender identity and other options as well. I eagerly anticipate the day when the notion of radio boxes for “male” or “female” will not be the only options!

As we usually do, when we reconnect like this, we talk. A lot. Recently, though I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, the huge blocks of time I’ve set aside to work on writing about web development professionally have also yielded some time to write erotica on the side again. (As an aside, that, and crossing paths with the intriguing Ranat has led to some renewed interest in my hypertextual porn experiments.) I actually have the beginnings of a very promising short story based on a more-or-less off-handed remark that Kink in Exile made, which I found really sexy.

Anyway, one thing led to another and in the conversations Eileen and I have been having, the fact that I find it ridiculously hard to speak about my fantasies came out. It may be surprising to some of you, but it’s true: verbalizing my fantasies out loud is unusually difficult for me. Writing about them is for some reason relatively easy. Making my mouth move (which I can do) so that sounds come out of it and form words that describe my fantasies (which I rarely do) is inexplicably hard, even when I’m alone with her. I often literally just lose my breath. This clearly poses a few challenges to discussing such things, and it’s something both Eileen and I would like to see me be more comfortable with.

On a largely unrelated note (no, really), tonight’s also my 31^st day denied an orgasm, which is the longest I’ve ever gone since, well, since I was 9 or 10 and began masturbating. This is significant not due to the time span, but rather because it happened thanks to an increasingly apparent shift in Eileen’s attitude and comfort level with my being denied.¹ As she put it, “I simply no longer have any sense of guilt about denying you.” Then she paused for a moment with a thoughtful look on her face before casually adding, “You should probably be scared about that, by the way.” That was the comment that has hatched a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, which—since last night—has yet to dissipate.

There’s quite a bit more to say about this that I’ll be saving for later. In the mean time, suffice it to say that I was given a few tasks today, one of which was to write and then read a short fantasy “snapshot” (a brief moment or vignette) to her. Coming up with what to write was unsurprisingly easy, but reading it aloud at dinner tonight was actually very, very challenging. This is what I wrote and then, yes, read to her.

The thin rope tasted dry and scratchy in my parched mouth. I opened my mouth wider and extended my tongue as far as I could just so I could feel the cool air. Some of my muscles felt cramped, the cause of which was not the immobilizing bondage I was in but my own exertion. Although she was quiet now, her earlier words still sounded deafening. “Be good, my beautiful toy. Hush and hold out until I want you to come,” she had told me in her kind, almost charitable voice, for what she was doing to me now was indeed generous.

For the first time in longer than I care to recount, one of her hands had spent a pleasurable eternity slickly caressing, gripping, pulling, stroking, and pumping my cock. Her other hand alternated between doing the same to my balls, thighs, and perineum. Occasionally, when she would tire of her manual ministrations, she played with the remote controls of the large, self-propelling vibrating prostate massager she had inserted into my ass and I could hear her giggling with enjoyment as she varied its intensity. Eventually, she would always find a combination of settings for the machine that she seemed happy with and resumed stimulating my penis, complete with a fresh dollop of lubricant. The only indication I had as to how long she’d been playing with me was provided by the increasing wetness dripping onto my thighs and torso, and my own growing incoherence after each frustrating edge, as I had lost all sense of time early on.

After a while, I could no longer decide if her actions were merciful or torturous since for ages even prior to this she hadn’t given me any indication whether some sort of relief was in sight. I couldn’t see through the opaque bondage tape that covered my eyes, but somehow I could tell she was smiling. She loved watching me struggle—and suffer—and so she would make games out of tantalizing me more and more. This was her most satisfying form of amusement and I am, after all, one of her favorite toys.

There’s no doubt that intense control, teasing, and orgasm denial are on my mind of late. (I mean, hell, it has been over four weeks now!) The fact of the matter is that since this particular kink is a fetish of mine—orgasm control is an integral part of my understanding of my own sexuality—for me, when we play with such things and when Eileen actively takes control of my sexual pleasure to choose when and how I get it, it’s a wonderful tool for catalyzing lots of other possibilities.

Now, I look forward to a cozy night of cuddling, snugly locked in my chastity device. If only I had checked that store’s hours earlier in the day, I might have had other things to look forward to, as well….

1. For more insight regarding this shift, this comment by Eileen comment on Thumper’s blog is relevant.

“Why don’t you write hypertextual porn, then?” Of course, leave it to us to turn a conversation that geeky into a conversation about sex—but still. It’s a really great idea: leverage the power of today’s Web to explore the creative potential of story telling. I started to do some research on the matter when I got home that night. Turns out, this idea is hardly new.

Indeed, this idea even has a name: hyperfiction, or hypertextual fiction. Nevertheless, there aren’t any really good sites out there that have compelling, engaging hyperfiction content.

Why not? I think it’s because hypertextual media is, by its nature, social. It’s social in the same way sex is social. For it to be really engaging, well, you have to engage other people. You have to link to other people. You have to share, and share-alike. You have to be social.

I know this because I tried to start a web site about hypertextual erotic literature. Well, okay, hypertextual porn—or htporn for short (and for funny geek references which I sincerely hope some of you will get). It’s in my playground. However, for the reasons above, it’s become clear to me that the way to successfully create this kind of content is not to do so alone. Besides, I don’t have anywhere near the amount of required cycles (free time) to really get a project like this—one whose direction is still undetermined and whose purpose is still largely an experiment—off the ground by myself.

So, consider this my Call For Participation. I’ve set up an introduction to the theory of htporn and a handful of other stuff on the web site. I’ve also set up a mailing list website with a specific hyperfiction discussion list that I encourage you to join—just send an email introducing yourself and your interest in writing (or reading, or whatever) htporn.

I’m not-so-secretly hoping lots of people will express interest in this idea and put forth their ideas. Right now, this project is really just an infant. It needs a bit of TLC and attention from folks like me and you. It also needs a bit of guidance and (dare I say it) discipline so it can grow up big and strong, knowing what it is and what it’s doing. And, along the way, there are going to be questions we’ll need to answer for it.

Even though I’m hosting this project, I don’t want to be the sole driver. I just really want to see this happen. That’s why I’m asking for your participation. Won’t you please come play with us?

If you say, “Can I come on your face?” or if you try to come on my face, I’ll assume you’ve watched a great deal of porn in your life.

Indeed, porn influences men’s (and women’s) expectations and ideas of sex, what it should feel like, what it should look like, and what we should think about it. I first discovered pornography back in 1994 when I was ten years old and was given free reign to explore the Internet. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” most parents would cry in knee-jerk outrage, but I’d urge adults to entertain a more level-headed approach to the situation (which is not to say that I, nor my parents, approve or have ever approved of minors having free access to pornography by any means at all—but that is neither here nor there at the moment).

Since then, I do see certain and undeniable ways in which my exposure to pornography has affected my sexual development, and it has definitely impacted how I have sex today. I have, of course, seen a lot of visual pornography. Despite this, I think anyone who knows me would agree that there’s a distinct difference between how I approach those parts of social interaction that are sexual and how people of whom they say have “seen too much porn” do so.

This is why I was looking forward to Debauchette’s second piece: why are some men’s exposure to porn seen as the cause of an issue that I clearly know can not possibly, in isolation, be the entire story that explains the malicious intent these “porn-addicted” men seem to have? Turns out, she didn’t write the post I thought she might have, which makes me smile and want to take her out to diners to keep on talking about it over coffee re-fills somewhere.

When I take issue with porn, it’s the quality I dislike, not the genre. I dislike the tedium, the predictability, the fake tans, the plasticky breasts, the baseball caps, the lack of imagination, the boredom, the soundtrack, the lighting, the dialogue, the inauthentic orgasms, the lingerie, the decor, the overall assault on my sensibilities. But when porn’s good, it blows my fucking mind.

Nodding as I read this, these reasons are also why I consistently decry porn, even “alternative” porn, to be monotonous representations of the very same going-through-the-motions activities that are just not exciting on anything other than a vicarious, or worse, detached experience after the first or second viewing.

Yet two things beyond Debauchette’s well-made points struck me about her post. In this paragraph,

When I say that I can sense if someone’s watched a lot of porn, or too much porn, what I mean to say is that I can sense that their relationship to sex is largely visual. […] Since 90% of my libido is fueled by the physical chemistry and psychology (or, in rare cases, emotion) of the experience, in those situations I just prefer to go home and jerk off on my own. Sometimes to porn.

Debauchette claims that 90% of her libido is fueled by the “physical chemistry and psychology” of the experience of sex. Only rarely, she says, are her emotions involved in the lust. This is very interesting.

It’s interesting to me because, with recent analyses of my own thoughts and feelings, mostly regarding no-strings-attached (or “NSA”) sex, my explorations are increasingly leading me to discover what it is about sex that I find arousing, and therein lies a new distinction. Things that I find arousing are not necessarily the same things or the same reasons that get me to orgasm. In other words, things that make me attracted to a person are not necessarily the same things that I want to get off to.

The best example of this is intelligence, a display of which is the easiest way to get me to crush on you. Meeting someone who displays intelligence and talks about sex that way makes my dick rock hard. I mean real hard, and real fast.

Anyone with enough intelligence can probably turn me on in one way or another. Even exceptionally smart people I despise, I’ll admit, have sometimes appeared in fantasies torturing me with their arguments with which I disagree—and with a lot of psuedo-consensual, psuedo-forced sexual advances, of course! (Seriously. They’re some of the absolutely nerdiest fantasies I have ever had.) Smart people are sexy to me by virtue of their smarts.

However, that said, I don’t always (though, again, I do sometimes) find that their intelligence is what I’m after when I ask them for play, or for sex. To put it really painfully bluntly, the horribly politically incorrect phrase “it doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her” holds true.

When it comes to sex, the reasons I’m attracted to someone are often the reasons why I want to have sex with them, but they’re not necessarily the same. Maybe the key to understanding “casual” sex, then, is to be able to consciously shift my focus from the thing that was attractive to the thing that is hot. Practically, still using the intelligence example, this means that I’m not going to be very attracted to a gorgeous bombshell who can’t put a sentence together, which means I’ll never have sex with that person in the first place.

This is enlightening because it highlights a distinction between what is attractive and what is orgasmic, for want of a better word. That’s an important distinction, because it plays right into the reasons why some people can find themselves fulfilled by cruising for no-strings-attached sex and why I seem to have been unable to do so, yet it also offers an explanation (or at least hope of one) to explain why my interest in “casual sex” (and, to a lesser extent, “casual play” in the kinky sense) is not a doomed endeavor.

The second thing that struck me about Debauchette’s post was this following part, not because of any unique insight but because of its common-sense value:

Porn will get better. But also, I suspect extensive sexual experience and a modicum of self-awareness will mitigate its influence.

Specifically, extensive experience with sex is valuable, when tempered with self-awareness. Those of us with a sex drive know this intuitively, and we are drawn to sex by our instincts. It’s a part of what makes us happy, and human.

Sex, especially the kind of sex I like to have, is also risky. Kinky sex is much riskier than vanilla sex for a whole host of reasons, many of them plainly obvious; my kind of kinky sex typically involves the heavy use of restraints, percussive implements, lots of roughness, and intense psychological stimuli that crank up the volume for things like power inequality skewed to my disadvantage. If I place this power in the wrong hands, such as someone with malicious intent, it’s obviously going to be dangerous and perhaps even downright lethal for me.

Yet even for vanilla people, sex can be dangerous, and is risky. This is why extensive experience is often denounced as a “Bad Thing”; the more you do it, the higher the chances of something going wrong. Nevertheless, extensive experience is obviously valuable, because it’s the only way to corporeally understand (duh!) what’s going on physically, emotionally, and even spiritually (if you’re into that sort of thing). This isn’t to say that it’s necessary to do this with multiple partners, unless the whole many-partners-thing is what you want to corporeally understand of course, nor is it to say that there aren’t other ways of learning about these things that aren’t intrinsic to the physical experience, but—especially for me—experience is the greatest teacher.

So how do you balance this risk with its obvious potential reward? Like anything else, you have to become educated about the topic in general and, more importantly, about you specifically. It’s nothing new, and you’ve heard it before, but it’s true: “know thyself,” and then when it comes to sex, I’d like to add “and then explain thyself.” As it happens, pornography can be a very helpful tool to learning more about your sexual self but it can’t be expected to be a good substitute to corporeal self-examination or emotional self-awareness.

As a brief interlude from all the heavy-hearted posting, I thought that, instead of making associations between this holiday and the fear of sex (I mean, as I understand it, people all around the world are generally celebrating immaculate conception, which doesn’t sound like any fun at all to me) I’d give you all a few moments of “mmmm, that nice!” in pictorial form. Enjoy.

As an aside, if anyone has information as to the identity of the artists, I would love to give them due credit as, unfortunately, I do not as yet know the original source.

• It is an obviously gendered inequality; that is to say it is downright sexist. Women, again regardless of their sexual orientation, role, or other characteristics, are never seen wearing such anonymizing devices unless the purpose of the pornography is to accentuate (presumably) consensual objectification (which I have no problem with and think is very sexy).
• It tells men that our sexuality is expendable and replaceable. This is probably a bigger issue than I can do justice (due to a lack of education on the subject), but this is also showcased quite profoundly by the fact that men are universally paid less for their participation in pornography—if they are paid at all—than women are.
• It tells men that we are unsightly. I’ve even seen gay porn in which the only actors are men who are all wearing masks. I mean, really, what the fuck? Do these pornographers think that gay people do not like seeing the faces of their sexual partners?
• It makes ignorant or uninformed people believe that participating in sexual acts such as the ones portrayed is something to be ashamed of, so much so that even the actors fear for their identity.
• It makes for worse porn.

First of all, I am not talking about the kind of sex that happily incorporates hoods and masks into the sexual act. I am instead talking about the kind of porn that uses hoods and masks specifically for purposes so obviously not related to the sex I’m watching that their mere presence becomes distracting in the best case and downright insulting in the worse. Frankly, I am insulted by the insinuation that the only valid part of a man’s body worthy of being filmed is his penis. It’s simply untrue and unfair.

It is absurd to watch Men in Pain clips in which the naked guy is being interviewed about his experience while he is wearing nothing but a locking leather hood. It is similarly absurd to see clips or pictures of bound women being fingered by men who walk in and out of the frame, fully clothed and masked, in an obvious attempt to be as stealthy as possible.

The standard disclaimer from the pornographers is this: most people who buy our porn are men, so we want to make it as easy as possible for men to feel like they can imagine themselves as the man in the video/picture/whatever. First of all, completely sidestepping the circular point that most porn is made for men and that’s obviously why most of the pornographer’s customers are men (it really isn’t rocket science), they need to understand that as a submissive guy, which is indeed part of their claimed target audience, the person I see myself replacing is the submissive. If the submissive is faceless because he is hidden by a hood when he shouldn’t be, then I lose a big chunk of information about how that submissive is feeling and thus the porn becomes less valuable to me.

In other words, I would prefer to wank to pictures of men being tortured than pictures of women torturing men. This is why I tend to enjoy femsub porn more than most malesub porn out there. At least in those instances I can actually get the emotional content from the submissive’s point of view and vicariously feel that. Porn that hides the submissive man behind a hood is taking the hottest part of the picture, the bottom, out of focus.

In every instance of viewing the hooded or masked man the message is the same: the man is just “some guy.” He could have been replaced by anybody, and the effect would be identical. All the value to the product is brought by the women. And in gay porn where everyone’s wearing masks? Again, what are they thinking the value is in that if it’s not some sort of plot device?

There is a paradox here. The women are at once more valuable and less protected than the men. Think about it. Why else would someone want to hide their identity while doing porn? Duh, it’s not okay to do porn. Doing it is wrong, something to ashamed of, something you need to hide for fear of being outed, as sex worker, a pervert, or maybe something even worse. Yet only the men are hiding. Does the fact that they are mean they are so much more fragile than the women? Please.

What is most personally disturbing to me is the instance when submissive men are involved in some porn scene and yet the porn scene is so obviously not about submissive men that one would think submissive men was not actually a sexuality.

The most striking recent example of this occurred the other weekend at Black Rose XX, where in the Oasis Room a table full of fetish photography postcards was laid out. Out of the more than 20 available photographs, a grand total of 2 showed submissive men at all. One image showed a woman looking over her shoulder (dressed in formal fetish fatigues, you know the kind) and in the background, literally about 2 centimeters high, was a small image of a submissive man—hooded, of course—doing absolutely nothing interesting. The second postcard was a close-up picture of a torso in a waist-cincher, extremely shapely and made-up, whose only hint of maleness was the few pixels of clear testicle peeking out between the legs.

The experience of seeing those postcards was saved a little when Eileen and I overheard two women looking at them muttering to themselves, “It’s all female submissives.”

“Didn’t you know?” Eileen sarcastically jabbed at them, “Men aren’t pretty enough to photograph.”

This sent one of the women on a very welcomed, short rant about that fact, paraphrased below.

[The photographer] told me he doesn’t photograph men because those pictures wouldn’t sell. Hah! I laughed at him, and told him I’d have bought pictures of men and how could he possibly think there wasn’t a market for such work? Just look around us! Most of the women here have come to this event with their men, dominant or otherwise. I mean, one picture, he can’t do one picture where maleness is the focus?

Of course, people know that women aren’t “the real market” for images of men, because only other men are, right? This woman clearly didn’t seem to think so. Neither does this more famous one.

More to the point, though I hate to admit at times because it lets people too easily lump me into that category of men-who-would-buy-porn-of-men, I would like to see porn of submissive men where submissive men are actually the focus of the porn because then I could actually believe that I’m not the only man in the world who wants to do those sorts of things. Why else do you think people look at porn? It’s because they are using it as an instructive example of figuring out their sexual likes and dislikes. I look at porn to go, “Holy fuck, that looks awesome, I want to have the things that that girl is having done to her done to me!”

I’ve gotten really good pretending all the tied up women in porn are really tied up men, but it still angers me that I have to do it. It is endlessly frustrating to see an endless stream of so much very good pornography, excellent bondage, extremely hot fantasies-come-true only for the women who bottom. There is precious little good male bondage, and even then, there’s no sex. This is why so much of my personal porn collection that has anything to do with men getting fucked is drawn art.

Bitchy’s a self-described “dominant slut.” That is great (really); I’m all in favor of pulling stagnant gender binaries out of the penetrative experience of sexual power play. (Penetration being equated to power was first discussed when strap-ons made their debut in my corner of the blogosphere.) Bitchy basically made the oft-but-never-oft-enough-made argument that any sexual act is not inherently dominant or submissive, kind of like this:

it wasn’t being penetrated itself that was submissive. It was just that all femininity was equated with submission – that everything a woman did in sex had been made to look as if it was a priori submissive.

But there is no way that such simple basics – being the hole or the plug – are on their own submissive or dominant. It only has further meaning in context.

Then she talked a lot about how awesome getting fucked is, kind of like this:

You know what I fucking love? I fucking love to get fucked. […] I like fucking for the same reason I like hitting men, looking at bondage porn or eating steak and chips. I like pleasure.

So I suppose I’m a submissive slut, and I’m happy to say so. I like fucking, too. Catch is, (and I hate that I have to qualify it) even though I’m a guy, my dick just gets harder for the getting fucked part way more than the doing the fucking part. Kind of like Bitchy. In fact, except for all the dominant context, exactly like Bitchy.

Sometimes I have to wonder where men like me fit into the picture. Here’s a hint: It’s not here.

A guy who prefers to get fucked instead of preferring to do the fucking. Well, that’s hardly a mystery: “Must be (a) gay (bottom).” Or, “must be a sissy.” Or, “must not be an alpha (aka. best kind of) male.” I can’t even begin to imagine how I might defend myself against these things because that would imply that these things are bad to be (they’re not) or that they aren’t true (parts are, though they’re not universally true).

I’m not gay, I’m bisexual. I’m not a sissy, but I’m clearly not the hegemonic masculine man, either. I’m not what sociologists would describe as an “alpha” personality, but I can piss on the alphas with the best of them (and I’ve had to in the past). Often I feel that nobody bothers to look at this nuance. Robert Heasley, a gender theorist, began exploring some aspects of this in Chapter 5 of Thinking Straight as what he calls straight-queer men. While some of what he writes about strike very close to home for me, I am not straight because there’s that whole quibbling eroticism of homosexual encounters thing.

So I’ve never known what language to use while doing any soul-searching, or how to present myself so others know what to make of me sexually. I never felt like I had a place in either mainstream kink or femdom kink, so I keep trying to make something up.

I might naively say “I’m just me,” but I refuse to accept that I’m just that unique. I’m not that special (no matter what my father keeps trying to tell me). There are other men like me—and if you’re willing to put some money down on it, I’d bet there are lots of them. But, let’s get back to the having sex part.

I like fucking. I like it when I’m getting fucked on my penis. Yes, that’s perfectly possible. When I’m talking about getting fucked, I’m not necessarily talking about getting penetrated. A man with an erect penis can actually get fucked—fucking or getting fucked does not have a one-to-one relationship with one’s anatomical genitalia. That said, I don’t see why men who top shouldn’t be able to get it up the ass if they want to. Again, topping or bottoming does not have a one-to-one correlation with whether you are the “active” or “receptive” partner in a sexual encounter. So, it follows, that I also like getting fucked in my asshole.

Hell, if it weren’t for all the “must be gay (or a sissy)” crap which not-gay and not-sissy submissive guys (i.e., that’s me, in case you lost track) are pelted with all the time I might have even felt like I got the best deal of all: I have a plug and a hole to use while getting fucked. Actually, I have two holes if you count my mouth, and I do. It sounds like the perfect recipe for a foursome to me, and I bet you can figure out how I’d put the puzzle pieces together. (I always liked Tetris.)

Only, frustratingly, very few other people seem to be putting the puzzle pieces together the same way I am. This leads to some very upsetting experiences, like trying to jerk off to stuff that instead of turning you on increasingly makes you bitter. Yeah, I thought that was pretty fucked up, too, but I’m going to save that rant for another entry.