The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young Page A
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close-ups of female orgasms, and so on), but even these “feminist” preferences have been marketed to us, and arguably mirror simplistic cultural constructions of femininity, such as the notion that women’s sexuality is more mental or emotional than physical.
The recognition that gender and desire are socially constructed certainly doesn’t mean that all porn is politically neutral, or that there’s no need to reflect critically on what we consume. In my view, the first responsibility of all queer feminist pigs is that we take some time to observe our desire, and then think creatively about how our particular lust might serve our queer feminism. So, by way of example, let’s start with mine . . .
My Piggish Desire: The Elephant Chain
For the past few years, I have been watching—and writing about—the genre of college reality porn, with focus on a series called Shane’s World: College Invasion. In this immensely popular series of college reality porn, which Rolling Stone referred to as “the new sex ed,” professional female porn stars arrive at college fraternity parties and refuse to have sex until the frat boys have engaged in a series of feminizing and sexually intimate humiliation rituals with one another. The boys strip naked, put on pink bras and panties, “bob for tampons,” scream their assessments of theirfriend’s penises (for example, “Big fuckin’ donkey dick! Big fuckin’ donkey dick!”), and receive blowjobs from porn stars while standing side-by-side, surrounded by a circle of cheering male friends.
Intellectually speaking, what interests me about these films is the way they rely upon and promote the notion of homosexual necessity. The conceit of College Invasion —and of fraternity hazing rituals more generally—is that boys have no choice but to wear pink panties, to put their fingers in each others’ anuses, or to eat cookies covered in their friends’ cum. 3 They simply must do these things because the stakes are too high. If they don’t, they might not get to have sex with a porn star, or in the case of hazing, they might not be admitted to their fraternity of choice. Of course, this necessity is manufactured by the boys themselves, and then capitalized upon by the producers of college reality porn. College Invasion might just as well cut to the sex between porn stars and frat boys and bypass the homoerotic contests and rituals, but this is not what happens. Feminization and homosexual contact are precisely what makes the films a “realistic” portrayal of fraternity life, and therefore, precisely what viewers wish to see.
It turns out that I don’t have only an intellectual interest in these scenarios; I think they’re hot. I am impressed by the imagination required to manufacture them, the complex rules that structure them, and the performative and ritualistic way that straight men touch one another’s bodies or order others to do so. One of my favorites is a fairly elaborate and notorious fraternity hazing ritual called the Elephant Chain, wherein participants are required to strip naked and stand in a circular formation, with one thumb in their mouth and the other in the anus of the young man in front of them. Like circus elephants connected by tail and trunk, and ogled by human spectators, they walked slowly in a circle, linked thumb to anus, while older members of the fraternity watch and cheer.
I am not particularly interested in psychoanalyzing why anyone desires what they do; this endeavor is almost always essentialist and pathologizing (which is why Ariel Levy’s comments about my need for psychotherapy left me cold). But I will say this: these scenes remind me of the kind of sexual games my friends and I played as young girls (starting around seven or eight years old), before any of us knew what sex would later be. In the absence of a coherent and normative conceptualization of sex, we cobbled together the gendered and sexual tropes familiar to us as kids.
The recognition that gender and desire are socially constructed certainly doesn’t mean that all porn is politically neutral, or that there’s no need to reflect critically on what we consume. In my view, the first responsibility of all queer feminist pigs is that we take some time to observe our desire, and then think creatively about how our particular lust might serve our queer feminism. So, by way of example, let’s start with mine . . .
My Piggish Desire: The Elephant Chain
For the past few years, I have been watching—and writing about—the genre of college reality porn, with focus on a series called Shane’s World: College Invasion. In this immensely popular series of college reality porn, which Rolling Stone referred to as “the new sex ed,” professional female porn stars arrive at college fraternity parties and refuse to have sex until the frat boys have engaged in a series of feminizing and sexually intimate humiliation rituals with one another. The boys strip naked, put on pink bras and panties, “bob for tampons,” scream their assessments of theirfriend’s penises (for example, “Big fuckin’ donkey dick! Big fuckin’ donkey dick!”), and receive blowjobs from porn stars while standing side-by-side, surrounded by a circle of cheering male friends.
Intellectually speaking, what interests me about these films is the way they rely upon and promote the notion of homosexual necessity. The conceit of College Invasion —and of fraternity hazing rituals more generally—is that boys have no choice but to wear pink panties, to put their fingers in each others’ anuses, or to eat cookies covered in their friends’ cum. 3 They simply must do these things because the stakes are too high. If they don’t, they might not get to have sex with a porn star, or in the case of hazing, they might not be admitted to their fraternity of choice. Of course, this necessity is manufactured by the boys themselves, and then capitalized upon by the producers of college reality porn. College Invasion might just as well cut to the sex between porn stars and frat boys and bypass the homoerotic contests and rituals, but this is not what happens. Feminization and homosexual contact are precisely what makes the films a “realistic” portrayal of fraternity life, and therefore, precisely what viewers wish to see.
It turns out that I don’t have only an intellectual interest in these scenarios; I think they’re hot. I am impressed by the imagination required to manufacture them, the complex rules that structure them, and the performative and ritualistic way that straight men touch one another’s bodies or order others to do so. One of my favorites is a fairly elaborate and notorious fraternity hazing ritual called the Elephant Chain, wherein participants are required to strip naked and stand in a circular formation, with one thumb in their mouth and the other in the anus of the young man in front of them. Like circus elephants connected by tail and trunk, and ogled by human spectators, they walked slowly in a circle, linked thumb to anus, while older members of the fraternity watch and cheer.
I am not particularly interested in psychoanalyzing why anyone desires what they do; this endeavor is almost always essentialist and pathologizing (which is why Ariel Levy’s comments about my need for psychotherapy left me cold). But I will say this: these scenes remind me of the kind of sexual games my friends and I played as young girls (starting around seven or eight years old), before any of us knew what sex would later be. In the absence of a coherent and normative conceptualization of sex, we cobbled together the gendered and sexual tropes familiar to us as kids.
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