Porn and the New Age Guy

The California Men's Gathering is an eclectic get-together of people affiliated with the I national men's movement. Participants are sometimes called feminist, antisexist or "changing" men. CMGs, as insiders call the meetings, are held two times a year, in late spring and early fall. The spring CMG is a men-only event, but the fall conference is also host to a few women. I was there to give a pro-pornography session with my friend David Steinberg, editor of Erotic by Nature. As a sex educator, sex-industry insider and unrepentant porn aficionada, I was prepared to discuss it all with a group of men who are encouraged, by the men's movement and by their feminist allies, to feel conflicted and guilty if they enjoy pornography at all. The conference gave us a view of this country's schizophrenic view of sexuality.

John Stoltenberg, longtime associate of Andrea Dworkin and one of the founders of Men Against Pornography, was the keynote speaker. His recent book, Refusing to Be a Man, inspires some feminist men and alarms others with what they perceive as his hatred of maleness. Take, for example, his analysis of male supremacy and sexual objectification: "Sometimes the mere regarding of another person's body as an object isn't enough; it does not satisfy a man's habituated need to experience physical and emotional agitation sufficient to set off sensory feedback about his sexedness. At times like these, a man learns, he can reproduce erectile results ... by being threatening, terrifying and dangerous to his chosen sex object. He can do this in his imagination, then in his life, then in his memory, then again in his life. The more dread he produces, the more desire he can feel."

"Nonjudgmental" is not a description that fits Stoltenberg, especially regarding his views on pornography. I felt strongly that his perspective, presented unchallenged to a group of men whose ideological base gives them no support for a positive view of sex work, would result in a lot of well-meaning converts to the antiporn cause. I also felt it would increase the feelings of conflict in those who do get an occasional hard-on from dirty books or movies.

Stoltenberg also led a workshop called "What Makes Pornography Sexy?" (a.k.a. "The Pose Workshop"). His formula was simple: He randomly picked several men (no women) and gave each of them a picture of a provocatively posed nude woman. He had chosen images from Hustler, Penthouse and Playboy, and the subjects were contorted in ways only the young, lithe, supple and incidentally photogenic can be. The bodies of his male "volunteers" were not all so toned. Stoltenberg told the men to assume the positions of the women in the pictures. The resultant attempts lacked the eroticism of the originals, I'm afraid. As each man struggled to give the rest of the group a pussy shot, we directed him in how to place his body so he'd most resemble the model: "Chin up. Close your eyes a little. Arch your back. Come on, spread 'em!" Essentially, each was asked to present himself sexually to a male crowd--and as a woman, yet! Discomfort in the room was thick as the men struggled with their bodies, their body image, their homophobia and their shame at presenting themselves as female.

Then Stoltenberg turned grand inquisitor. He asked each of our centerfolds to tell the group how it had felt to assume a porn pose. Predictably, most of them responded that it had been humiliating. A couple of men wailed, like violated ingenues, that they had felt like pieces of meat. And this, of course, was to be the deep message of the workshop--that posing for porn is humiliating and dehumanizing.

Stoltenberg then asked each audience member to describe how it had felt to witness the transformation of our fellows from sensitive New Age guys to split beavers. Again, predictably, nobody had felt good about it, except for one brilliantly ingenuous gay man who thought we were all being much too serious. For him it had been kind of fun, like dress-up. Of course, the playfulness of gender bending was not a point Stoltenberg was trying to make.

When it was my turn to speak, I was buzzing with adrenaline. I said that, first, I felt angry that only men had been allowed to participate in the exercise. Then I pointed out that it's always painful and infuriating when people are nonconsensually manipulated into humiliating themselves to make someone else's point--especially when they're being asked to assume the trappings of a sexual orientation or behavior that's not their own. Posing for porn and acting in dirty movies, I argued, are primarily sexually exhibitionist behaviors that are not for everyone. Asking a nonexhibitionist to strip or pose might certainly leave him or her feeling humiliated, but the exhibitionist would probably be turned on.

Stoltenberg had led his audience to believe that erotic models feel the same uncomfortable emotions his shanghaied assistants felt. This is like showing a straight man what it's like to be gay by asking him to imagine a prison rape. That, of course, is the kind of tactic Bible thumpers and conservative politicians use all the time. Because it's a less common ploy outside fundamentalist Christian churches, Stoltenberg's audiences don't always understand that he is using shit to describe roses, and that they are being manipulated. Further, this logic leads them to believe that the voyeur--the natural partner of the exhibitionist--is participating in the humiliation, not the appreciation, of the model. Most of us have a touch of the voyeur in our erotic makeup. Since our sex-negative culture shames this impulse (though it is encouraged everywhere, from MTV to billboards for Hanes stockings), Stoltenberg's workshop ultimately makes most of the participants feel just as bad about themselves as they now do about pornography.

While many in the circle tried to address the way in which they knew their sexuality was under attack ("I enjoy erotica," "I think nudity is beautiful and natural"), they struggled to phrase things in a politically correct way so that others in the group wouldn't suspect they enjoyed looking at a playboy centerfold. I figured that with all the stories antiporn activists tell about Linda Lovelace making her movies at gunpoint, it would help folks to hear that some models and porn stars actually like their work.

But Stoltenberg's next questions illustrated our schizophrenia: "What did you see in those pictures? What did I show you pictures of?"

I still don't know whether I heard the participants' political correctness or if I got the real feelings of the sensitive New Age men and women assembled there. Their answers suggested that they hadn't been looking at women but at things. "Body parts," said one man, even though the pictures had been of whole bodies. "Slaves!" said one woman in a voice that said she thought a sexual slave was a contemptible thing to be. "Shells without souls." "No heart. No personality." "Roadkill!" (This from the guy who'd found the exercise most upsetting and humiliating.)

I know porn is a stretch for some people, but roadkill? No wonder antipornography folks try to convince us we're dehumanizing the people in the pictures. They've dehumanized them already. What do porn actresses have to do to win back their personhood from these critics? Don pink gingham dresses with Peter Pan collars and teach Sunday school? Put on Birken-stocks and teach radical lesbian separatism? Only the ones who embrace the victim role, including Linda "He Had to Put a Gun to My Head to Get Me to Fuck That Dog" Lovelace, are allowed to become human again in the eyes of the antiporn crusaders and, apparently, to the masses who are ambivalent about the way explicit sexual images make them feel. I'd much rather put naked pictures of myself into the hands of guys who'll jack off on my paper tits than give them to people who'll say, "She is an exploited victim with no soul of her own." I mean, who's throwing around demeaning concepts here? Better to have completely anonymous sex with a person I'll never meet than be dehumanized and lobotomized at the service of someone else's politics.

So it was time for me to come out, to try to get through to that roomful of nice people whose good sense had been tied in knots by everything from their upbringings to the manipulations of John Stoltenberg. I told them that I didn't feel safe in that room because I had in fact done modeling and a sexually explicit movie or two, and I was hearing assumptions about erotic entertainers that were hard not to take personally. Please, I said, don't assume you know what someone else's experience has been just because you can't imagine enjoying it yourself. Please don't require that all people be one certain, correct way. Please don't assume I can't make my own decisions, that my exhibitionism somehow makes me a victim (or, I might have added, that it makes me want to be exhibitionistic all the time, with everyone). Don't tell me I don't have a soul.

Stoltenberg remained impassive throughout, and it was impossible to guess what was going through his mind. Some people seemed affected. Others had already determined which side they were on and looked through me as if my disclosure had made me seem printed on the magazine pages they'd taken as their enemy.

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After seeing a roomful of people driven through Stoltenberg's hoops, it seemed even more important that our pro-pornography workshop be permissive and honest, devoid of bullshit. We had no fancy tricks, no exercises, no pictures to pass around. We were simply going to facilitate a discussion in which men and women could feel safe telling their truths about pornography and the sex industry.

Twenty people gathered in a circle with us. David and I began by introducing ourselves and talking about our relationships to pornography. In the past, I, too, was antipornography. But that was a long time ago.

Feminists are not across-the-board antiporn; indeed, neither is feminism. The women's movement that I was attracted to as a rebellious teen got my attention as much for its promises that it would support my right to do what I liked with my body (and that definitely included my clit, cunt and brain, thank you very much) as for championing my right to equal pay for equal work. I say if porn gets me hot and wet and frisky, what's antifeminist about that?

I no longer expect perfection from a harassed and obviously imperfect art form. I've gotten in touch with how porn pushed my buttons and made me defensive about my own sexuality. I studied sexology, I watched a lot of porn and my judgments about my own erotic impulses and those of other people began to melt away. And an amazing thing happened to my uptight-ness--it turned into wet panties and multiple orgasms. I discovered the purpose of porn: to produce and enhance sexual feeling.

The next discovery--that porn wasn't only sexy to watch or read, it was also sexy to produce--couldn't have been made without the first. Whether writing, modeling or having sex in front of a camera, making porn put me in touch with my exhibitionistic self much more clearly than theater or public speaking ever did. Seeing my sexuality captured on videotape was the kind of leap in sexual development that having my first orgasm had been. It gave me a new sense of myself as a sexually powerful being.

Porn does not document sex as it should be had, or even the way porn stars have it on their days off. People who complain that porn doesn't portray people who look like them, having sex the way they do, are right. But such complaints miss the point. Using pornography, whether as entertainment, enhancement or substitute, is above all a way of acknowledging desire. It's a way of thinking about sex, a means of asserting to oneself that sex is good or, if that's going too far, that one wants it, anyway. People read or watch porn for the same reasons they read poetry or philosophy--to enhance a way of looking at the world. For some feminists, porn is an emblem of liberation, a tool for self-discovery and entertainment. Listening to the men in our workshop, I realized that pro-sex feminism lets women explore porn as a form of sexual discovery or rebellion that most men never experience. The notion that boys will be boys, or even that men will be men, is a formula for stereotypes, not growth. These men had come of age without guidance.

The men who formed a circle for our workshop had a lot to say. Many of them associated pornography with emotional pain precisely because they had used it as a substitute, and what it brought up for them was what was lacking in their lives.

They had used porn as adolescents to assuage curiosity about sex and to dream about the day when they would have a partner. They had used it between relationships to tide them over. They had used porn during relationships, often with feelings of guilt, usually hiding it from their partners. Using pornography was for them a way of wanting things more often than a way of avoiding things.

Using porn may be about wanting it, but porn itself is about getting it--to paraphrase the phone sex ads, "what you want, the way you want it, when you want it." Who really gets enough of either pleasure or love? Who ever fully outgrows the fantasy that someday they'll have everything they ever wanted? It's not really so surprising that a common reaction to porn is anger or sadness that the real people in one's life don't behave that way--the underside of desire. The men in our group seemed to feel that porn left them stranded behind enemy lines.

The problem is not porn but repression. Men's fear of their partners' responses often makes them hide their interest, and the secrecy feeds their guilt and their partners' paranoia. After the second or third man in the workshop talked about feeling bad about using porn while he had a lover, I explained what my lover and I do. We share it. We watch it together and masturbate or make love; we watch it while apart and share stuff we like with each other. We learn more about each other's turn-ons, get new ideas, get sparked into really hot sex. We use it to strengthen our bond. That's a far cry from hiding it or sneaking away to enjoy it. One of the most important gifts of feminism has been to expose all the lies we're told about how the sexes feel and behave. Why perpetuate this sex difference by naming pornography a male evil? The least we can do is turn it into an evil that both sexes can share.

One man's confession reminded me of an irony of the feminist revolution--our different attitudes toward masturbation. Betty Dodson teaches women how to pleasure themselves; men have never received the same inspired lesson. For men, masturbation is just another symptom, another sin.

Society hands out gold stars for monogamous relationships and labels everything else "dysfunctional." Worse, these folks tend to see masturbation as pathological rather than everyone's inalienable route to sexual satisfaction, self-nurturance or, hell, just plain fun. Many of these feelings of conflict expressed by the group about pornography boiled down to strong feelings of conflict about masturbation. Was it OK? Did they do it too much? Wasn't it second best? Until everyone honors masturbation the way the powers that be honor monogamy, the arguments of antiporn activists will have a toehold even in the psyches of many confirmed pornography consumers.

The bottom line is the need to honor desire. Why else take dick or pussy in hand? Whether it's a thought-out fantasy of the perfect partner or a hormone surge, we have to shed our cultural inhibitions about the healthy uses of desire. Anything less is thought control of the worst order, and as the assumptions and tactics of the antiporn crowd show, thought control is with us right here, right now. It was present at the California Men's Gathering, masquerading as concern for the oppressed. It is rampant and organized on the left and on the right. As long as antipornography partisans want us to see fewer, not more--and more realistic--explicit images, as long as they want to deny the heat of sexy pictures and dirty words to all who can appreciate them, as long as they insist on calling consensual work (and play) a form of abuse, the rest of us are going to have to be partisans of desire.

I don't know about you, but I am proud to take up the flag. These people are lying to--and about--us; they are hurting us. It's up to us, with our wet panties and hard dicks, to tell the truth. There's nothing wrong with sexual joy. If it comes illustrated, so much the better.

The women's movement I was attracted to as a rebellious teen got my attention as much for its promises that it would support my right to do what I liked with my body as for championing my right to equal play.

Carol Queen is the author of "Real Live Nude Girl" (Cleis Press).