While searching for “adult entertainment” recently, I found porn star Angela White in a “gonzo”-style video. It shows the busty Aussie starlet in a variety of rough scenes shot in a hotel suite, culminating with her getting sodomized with her head stuffed in a toilet. Gonzo porn has a reputation for being degrading and misogynistic. “I wanted to release a gonzo DVD that challenges the assumption that women cannot or should not enjoy rough sex,” White said. “[It] is as much a political statement as it is another step in my sexual exploration through porn.”
Gonzo movies are, according to Chris Hedges, “porn verite.” “Gonzo films push the boundaries of porn and and often include a lot of violence, physical abuse, and a huge number of partners in succession.” They discard stylized cinematography, scripts, and storylines, focusing almost exclusively on the physical action. Philosopher Robert Jensen examines it in the context of the evolution of porn. “[Porn] could have explored intimacy, love, the connection between two people…. It has descended to multiple penetrations, double anals, gagging, and other forms of physical and psychological degradation.” It’s found an audience. “And many men–maybe a majority of men–like it.”
Gonzo porn is, writes Hedges, “not about sex.” That’s a common critique of pornography. Gail Dines complains, “Porn sex is not about making love” in Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. “And when porn men are done, they are really done–there is not the slightest show of postcoital intimacy with the woman they have just ejaculated onto to.” Porn promotes “an orientation to sex that is instrumental rather than emotional.” Actually what’s compelling about porn is that it’s only about sex. Jensen’s lament about the absence of intimacy, romance, and connection betrays a naive conception of sexuality. “Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted,” critic Camille Paglia writes. Jensen’s definition of “patriarchal sex” comes close to capturing the essence of all sexuality: “Sex is fucking.” He continues, “What matters…is the male need to fuck…. A man is a male human who fucks.”
“Sex wasn’t a bestial pursuit, but something elevating.” That was the feminist message Natasha Vargas-Cooper received in the 1990s. In an article in The Atlantic a few years ago, she conceded the folly of that presumption. “[T]he egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.” The men in porn “fuck with impunity.” Vargas-Cooper continues:
The heated act of sex often expunges judgment, pushing the participants into territory they hadn’t previously contemplated. The speed at which one transgresses, the urge to reach oblivion, the glamour of violence, the arbitrary and shifting distinction between acts repulsive and attractive—all these aspects that existed only in sex are now re-created through Internet porn. You could be poking around for some no-frills Web clips of amateur couples doing it missionary style, but easily and rapidly you slide into footage of two women simultaneously working their crotches on opposing ends of a double-sided dildo, and then all of a sudden you’re at a teenage-fisting Web site. All of this happens maybe by accident—those pop-ups can be misleading—or maybe, and more likely, it happens because in that moment it’s arousing, whether you like it or not. Consuming Internet porn, then, mimics many of the sensations found in sex. It’s overpowering and immediate; it is the brute force of male sexuality, unmasked and untethered.
She relates a revealing vignette from her personal life to illustrate the “brute force of male sexuality.” She once had a one-night stand with a fellow who couldn’t stay aroused without the prospect of having anal sex. “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable,” he candidly told her. And she submitted to his request.
Both conservatives and feminists miss the point when they condemn porn for its “unrealistic” portrayal of sex. Porn is shocking because it is all too real, shattering the illusions of a domesticated sexuality.
Lutheran Guilt 