The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young Page B

We crafted highly detailed narratives about ourselves (we were beautiful fairies, rebellious teenagers, wealthy movie stars, doctors, and patients), and our circumstances (the various events that presumablyresulted in the need —whether we liked it or not—to reveal/touch/kiss certain body parts). We knew we were playing. We invented scenes. They had to be negotiated. There were rules. People were bossy. Body parts were gross. But we touched each other anyway.
    One of the things I love about homosexual encounters between adult heterosexuals is that they constitute a unique erotic domain characterized by many of the features of childhood sexuality. This is not because it is a “childish” act for adult heterosexuals to have sex with one another, or because straight men in fraternities (or military barracks, prisons, and so forth) are less evolved or self-aware than men in other contexts, or for any other reasons that might stem from such a simplistic and moralizing reading of sexuality. Instead, it is because homosexual sex enacted by heterosexuals—like sex between children—occupies a liminal space within sexual relations, one that sits outside of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and is sometimes barely perceptible as sex. Like childhood sex, it goes by many other names: experimentation, accident, friendship, joke, playing around, and so on. Participants must painstakingly avoid being mistaken as sincere homosexuals by demonstrating that the sexual encounter is something other than sex, and in many cases, they do this by agreeing that the encounter was compelled by others (such as older fraternity brothers) or by circumstances that left them little choice (such as the dire need to get into a particular fraternity). Avoiding homosexual meaning requires that heterosexuals must get really creative. And this heterosexual creativity speaks to my queerness, even as it is arguably motivated by heteronormativity, or a seemingly compulsive need to repudiate gayness.
    College reality porn is not queer or feminist porn. It is not porn worthy of queer praise. But even within this less-than-liberating genre we can find ideas, gestures, and scenes that unintentionally provide fodder for queer orgasms, and opportunities for queer reflection. All of us can take queer meaning from mainstream, raunchy, and typically sexist and homophobic porn. We can actively disindentify with its intended meaning or impact, even as we are deeply critical of the oppressive systems that produce a demand for such images or that encourage the most normative readings of them.
    If the Buddha Watched Porn
    To return to the vision of “Porn This Way!,” the song I discuss at the outset of this essay, we might ask how watching or making porn can actually “change the world”? Certainly it cannot do so in isolation, but workingwith and on porn—the representational branch of the erotic—is a vital part of the effort to have a creative, humane, and loving relationship to sexualities, rather than one that does violence. At the very least, our relationship to porn must be one that strives to cause no further harm, aims to delink our sexual longings from various systems of oppression, and stays in touch with our queer and feminist impulses. This is a practice that we can, indeed we must, be able to do despite the content of the images provided to us.
    I am a lazy and inconsistent follower of American Buddhism, but I have read enough to know that one of the goals articulated within its framework is to observe our less than ideal behaviors—addiction, escape, distraction, etc.—with curiosity and compassion. We are surrounded by less-than-ideal circumstances—such as, for instance, bad or problematic porn—that trigger our less-than-ideal responses. This, according to many Buddhist teachers, is the human condition. The challenge is to avoid getting wound up with shame and judgment (for example, “This is disgusting and offensive. I can’t believe I am