March 7th, 2021
Some months ago I wrote an essay entitled “Pornography as Art?” in which I discussed my realization that at least one such artist was creating pornography with meaningful artistic content. The thought intrigued me and so I continued exploring the world of pornography on the Internet.
I hasten to add that this is not the first time I have looked at pornography on the Internet; I have a healthy curiosity and have occasionally poked around the dirty pictures. But I never found them interesting. How many breasts can you look at before becoming bored?
This time, my exploration has been more systematic if occasional. I have developed a number of general observations, but I have yet to produce a Grand General Theory of Pornography. For the moment, all I have is a scattered collection of thoughts.
By the way, I will not be illustrating any of the works I reference here. I won’t even provide links. You’ll just have to settle for my verbal descriptions.
I just lost half my readers, didn’t I?
#1: Diversity
When I was a kid, pornography was something that we all wanted to see but wasn’t readily available. Occasionally one of my friends might pilfer a copy of Playboy from his father’s hiding place and we’d all go through it, gawping at the pictures. There really wasn’t much to it: just nude photos of buxom babes smiling invitingly. That’s about all there was. Its only value was in giving us a good idea of what breasts look like, and a vague notion of what the vulva looked like. It wasn’t much to go on.
But the Internet has radically changed pornography. Before the Internet, pornography was sold in special shops and the market was small, so pornography was targeted at the “general audience”. There were only two kinds of pornography: pictures of naked women, and depictions of copulation. But the Internet opened up a cornucopia of pornography, and the medium evolved to address the entire range of tastes. Through trial and error, it has revealed what those tastes are, and the range of possibilities is quite impressive. Combine human creativity with human sexuality and you get quite a collection of stuff. This diversity provides the basis for my analysis.
#2: Misogyny in its most extreme form
The most striking pornography — the stuff that elicited the strongest emotional responses from me — is the misogynistic stuff. Indeed, the word “misogyny” seems entirely too tame to describe the vicious material that is out there. Fortunately, there’s not much of this stuff (or perhaps it’s tucked away in dark corners of the Internet), but each time I have bumbled upon such a piece, I have gasped at it. These are images of men subjecting women to the most horrid tortures. I’m not talking about merely killing women, or stretching them on the rack. No, this stuff is explicit in its attacks on female genitalia. I couldn’t bear to look at it for long, so sickening is it.
But let’s not waste time condemning this material — let’s learn what we can from it. It illustrates intense male anger at women. The audience for this material harbors white-hot fury at women in general. The reason for this fury should be obvious: women control the sexual experiences of men. All men are drenched in a hormone (testosterone) that drives them crazy with lust, and they cannot satisfy that lust without the agreement of a woman. Suppose that you wanted something more than anything you’ve ever wanted, but you had to gain the approval of another person to get what you wanted — and those people always turned you down. You’d get pretty mad, too.
This arrangement is not a case of evil women abusing helpless men; it is imposed upon women and men by the requirements of civilized society. An individual can accumulate a lot of property, and when that person dies, we need an organized system for distributing that wealth among survivors. From time immemorial, the primary component of that system is inheritance by children. Inheritance works only when the paternity of children is clearly established, which in turn requires a scheme for clearly assigning paternity to children: the institution of marriage. Society instructs men that they can have sex with their wives — but only after they have officially and formally married them. Society further instructs women that they can have sex only with their husbands — and they have to nail down the guy in a formal marriage to clearly establish their rights.
Society has learned the hard way that ambiguities in sexual relationships can generate lots of personal violence over the rights to inherit property, so society is pretty fierce in enforcing its requirements. While this system works well for society as a whole, it always leaves a few men out, men who just can’t get laid no matter how hard they try. Why do you think that men in their late teens and early twenties are so violent? In some men, those violent impulses emerge as hatred for women, which expresses itself in this horrific pornography. We can take some reassurance in the fact that this kind of pornography seems to be rare.
#3: Murder
We humans use a lot of symbolism, especially when it comes to sex. There’s an enormous amount of stuff that we don’t even count as pornography that nevertheless represents a form of rape. A good example of this are the many movies that show beautiful young women being killed. The victims are never old women, ugly women, or otherwise unattractive women. They’re always beautiful, innocent, nubile women. That’s not an accident or a coincidence — that’s part of the appeal. Note also the methods used to kill the women. Hanging seems to be the most common form of killing. I don’t know why hanging is so alluring to so many people. Perhaps it’s the fact that hanging doesn’t damage a woman’s attractiveness. I note that a lot of the hangings like to show the victim’s legs kicking — is this a veiled reference to copulation? I don’t know. There are some variations on hanging: garroting and strangulation. I don’t have an estimate as to the frequency of these methods of killing.
The second most common form of female murder is with knives. This is clearly and strongly symbolic, as the knife is an obvious phallic symbol. Knives are in fact a lousy way to kill somebody; the usual knifing in cinema involves strokes to the torso, which seldom works well. Most such killings in the real world require several dozen stabs to finish the job, during which the victim resists, makes a lot of noise, and splashes blood all over the room and the murderer. The only way to quickly and silently kill somebody with a knife is by cutting their throat, and making a deep cut that severs both carotid arteries. But they almost never kill a woman that way in the movies.
After that we have burning at the stake, which is usually presented from a discreet distance. Burning is an agonizingly painful means of execution, but they never show the agonized writhing or frantic screams of the victims.
I have seen other means of murdering women in pornography: beheading, crucifixion, exposure to wild beasts, “The Pit and the Pendulum” arrangements, and buzz saws. In the case of buzz saws, the woman is always laid out with her legs spread so that the buzz saw will first cut her in the genitals. But we never see the actual killings; the pornographic content lies in the desperate fear of the woman as she realizes her fate.
Strikingly, there are some forms of killing that are never shown or implied. We see few murders that damage a woman’s physical beauty. We don’t see women whipped to death, clubbed in the head, or beaten to a bloody pulp. We don’t see them drawn and quartered. We occasionally see women drowned, poisoned, or thrown off a cliff, but in these last cases the smashed body is not shown.
In almost all cases of murder as pornography, the woman is depicted BEFORE she dies. Much emphasis is placed on her dread and anticipation of her death. This, I think, strengthens the metaphorical connection with sex.
#4: Bondage
Here we come to one of the most striking aspects of pornography: there’s one form of bondage pornography for women and a different form of bondage pornography for men. I can tell them apart most of the time. Here’s how to differentiate them:
a. Breast Size: the men’s form has women with big breasts. The woman might be imagined to be saying:
“I’m such a sex bomb that I’d never deign to have sex with a pathetic man like you."
b. Innocence: the female form presents the woman with an innocent facial expression
“Oh, dear me, I’m so innocent, but it looks as if I’ll have sex forced upon me!”
c. Fear: the male form presents the woman with a fearful facial expression
“Oh, shit, I’m really fucked now. He’s going to fuck me nasty and hard."
d. Pain: the male form presents the woman in some sort of discomfort.
“You’ve got me, and you’re proving it by making me suffer pain."
e. Helplessness: the female form emphasizes the helplessness of the woman
“Oh my, I can’t move a muscle to resist an assault on my virtue."
f. Overdressing: the male form often includes high-heeled shoes and long painted fingernails on the woman
“You snotty, arrogant bitch, you think you’re too beautiful for me, but now I’m going to rape you."
g. Prettiness: the female form often presents the woman as demurely pretty, not super-hot
“I’m not some sort of sex bomb, just a nice-looking young woman.”
h. Isolation: the female form presents the woman all by herself.
“Here I am, ready for the taking, all by myself."
i. Ugly Rape: the male form often presents the woman being raped by a decidedly un-handsome male. This could be a fat old man, a disgusting zombie, or a huge ogre.
“Your freedom to choose your sex partner is egregiously denied. You can’t reject me now!”
j. Background: male form has a filthy background, female form has a pretty background.
“Raping you is a filthy experience. Ha!”
“Sex with me is a beautiful experience.”
There’s a crucial point here that few people seem to recognize: social repression of female sexuality encourages female bondage and rape fantasies. The term “rape fantasy” is misleading, though, because the female does not harbor a desire to be raped; she desires to enjoy sex without becoming, in her own mind, a “slut”. Her fantasy is to have sex forced upon her — but she doesn’t want rape, which is brutal and ugly. She wants involuntary lovemaking. She may of course fantasize about rough or brutal sex, but ultimately the point of the fantasy is to enjoy sex without suffering the loss of self-esteem that society has taught her to feel. Remember, the human psyche is capable of going to great lengths to satisfy its needs.
As social pressure to deny women the enjoyment of their sexuality diminishes, I would expect that women would at first feel more free to explore fantasies such as bondage; I suspect that American women are approaching this point. As the pressure continues to diminish, however, and female lechery is accepted as freely as male lechery, then I would expect the female interest in bondage would decline. A good indicator of this development would be the appearance of genuine female pornography in which the woman is the predator and the man is the prey. I have seen a few examples of this, but they are notable for their rareness.
#5 Torture
In its most extreme form, this blends into #2, but there are lesser forms that do not express misogyny. Again, there is a female form of torture and a male form of torture. The female form is expressed with tickling. The woman is firmly tied and “tortured” by tickling her. This is a metaphor for “nice rape”: the woman is forced to undergo a pleasurable experience. The male version of torture is definitely nasty, but in differing degrees of viciousness. Most such pornography draws a line at depicting actual injury to the woman.
Explicitly sexual torture is common. Especially common is the hanging of weights from a woman’s nipples. Less common is the hanging of weights from her labia. Most common is the insertion of large or barbed phalluses into her vagina; insertion of objects into the anus is also shown.
Another common form of male torture pornography seats a woman on top of a device with a triangular cross section. The woman’s entire weight is supported by her vagina at the narrow top edge of the device.
#6 Vore
This form of pornography is, in my estimate, strictly a form of female pornography. Women will sometimes say to a loved one (especially a child) “I could just eat you up!” I suspect a metaphorical association between eating and sex. This appears in vore pornography, in which a woman is presented either being eaten or inside the belly of a large creature. The act of eating never entails mastication; the woman is transferred from the external world to the belly without any harm. Thus, snakes are the most common form of consumer in vore pornography. The woman is always presented as consenting to or even enjoying the process.
#7 Exposure
This is another form of female pornography. The female is forcibly presented to the public without any clothing. Usually she is spread-eagled so as to maximize her exposure to public view.
#8 Resigned Acceptance
I am often struck by the facial expressions of the women depicted in violent pornography. The woman experiencing torture never screams in terror, nor does she cry hysterically. There is usually a single symbolic tear running down her cheek, but we never see the desperate sobbing of a real woman. Instead, we usually see an expression of resignation. The implication, I think, is that the woman recognizes that she is the guilty party (for rejecting men) and fully deserves the horrific punishment visited upon her. I saw a few images in which the woman appeared to be in a trance, or possibly even experiencing an orgasm. Again, this emphasizes the metaphorical aspect of torture as a sexual violation. I suspect that few men could take pleasure if the woman was blatantly suffering.
#9 Drawing a Vehicle
I have never understood this one. One or more women are tied to a wagon and forced to pull it as if they were horses. This form has strong stylistic standards: the women wear a special headdress and have tails attached to their butts, as if they were horses. The driver of the vehicle wields a short whip. Apparently this is a form of objectification of women, but I cannot divine the sexual content.
#10 Slave auction
This is another example of objectification of women. The women are only partly clothed and in chains.
#11 Female Masochism
I have my doubts about this; female masochism can be a cover for male sadism. Most of this pornography seems too nasty to truly representative of masochism. I have, however, seen a few examples that might well represent female masochism. In these, the woman does not suffer any physical injury, but is instead imprisoned in an uncomfortable and humiliating manner for a lengthy period.
#12 Female Torturers
This is almost universal. I’m not sure whether it represents male guilt or male possessiveness. The former case would apply if male viewers feel guilty over the prospect of a male hurting a female. Such torture would be too close for comfort to the true nature of the male’s feelings. Interposing an additional layer between the male’s misogyny and the fantasy he entertains might permit the male to enjoy the fantasy with lessened guilt. The latter case would apply if the male would feel more comfortable if there were not another man involved. In all honesty, I cannot imagine which of these forces is at work. I am confident, however, that pornography showing a woman tormenting another woman does not represent female pornography.
#13 Japanese
Japanese culture has two special elements to consider. First, the Japanese have developed a unique form of bondage that builds an intricate network of ropes surrounding the female body. I’m dubious that this reflects a mechanical system to suspend the female body safely or comfortably, but I can’t be sure. My guess is that it is intended to be more artistic than mechanical in intention. Second, Japanese pornography can get pretty vicious. Japanese culture has always treated women wretchedly and Japanese pornography reflects this.
However, there is another consideration. Japanese culture has traditionally treated female sexuality as existing only to satisfy male desires. Thus, Japanese women have been subjected to strong social inhibitions regarding their sexuality. This would suggest that Japanese women would be inclined towards bondage and rape fantasies. I have no empirical data on this point. I expect, however, that as Japanese women continue to liberate themselves, their inclination toward bondage fantasies will decline.
#14 An Example
Finally, I offer an example of a single pornographic image — a very tame one — that illustrates a number of these principles:
Here we see King Kong assessing his newest acquisition. Note that the woman has her arms spread to emphasize her helplessness. Mr. Kong is clearly impressed and pleased with this latest offering (a little bit of racism here: apparently past victims were not to his taste. Apparently, gentlemen prefer blondes.) This is also a case of #4i, an ugly brute taking a beautiful young female. She doesn’t get to choose among a bevy of handsome young swains — no, she has an ugly brute chosen for her. There’s also a bit of #6 (Vore) in the subtext that King Kong dines on his victims.
The sexual undertones of the movie were made even more clear in a scene that was later deleted from the movie, in which Mr. Kong begins to undress his lovely prisoner:
(Note the fragment of her dress below his wrist in the upper left image.) He then sniffs the fragment of her dress (apparently Mr. Kong is a bit of a pervert.) In the lower left, you can see how much of her dress is gone. In the lower right, he fondles her breasts.
By the way, the movie includes a subtle female subplot: that of the woman conquering the male brute with her charms. We also see this fantasy at work with the fascination of little girls with horses: the female uses her superior emotional intelligence to gain control of the physically powerful but rather weak-minded force. Hey, what else can you do with so much sexual dimorphism?
