by Annie Oakley
Aware that the condom’s lubricant has been completely sucked off, and equally aware that she is so repulsed by this bloated man, perspiring brine and beached upon the bed, that her vagina has sealed itself shut, Sharon searches the room once more, then gives in to his urgency. She lies down and spreads her legs.
“Pussy,” says the Fisherman as he rolls on top of her. Then, as Tia Lee forewarned, the pussy mantra begins: He describes different colors and shades, states of pussy being, pussy synonyms, and three word subject-verb-object sentences, the subject always being pussy, such as pussy squirting juice, pussy eating cock. Except that Sharon’s pussy wasn’t eating anything. Sharon’s pussy spat out the Fisherman’s waning erection minutes ago. She reaches down and tries, unsuccessfully, to redirect him. Holding it in her hand she waits for it to come to life once more. It doesn’t. Still, the Fisherman marches on to the beat of the pussy. Sharon does not ponder the strength of imagination that allows the Fisherman to feel that he is giving it to her hard and nasty. She does not decide that he is a liar, or a fool, or practicing some sort of bastardized tantric meditation. Instead she opts to join him. To abandon this ship of failed erections and half-hour time slots and dive into the deep blue of her mind.
It is an uneasy transition from reality to fiction. Although Sharon finds herself briefly in daisy fields and flying through space, she keeps returning to her soggy and dismal position beneath the Fisherman. She looks up at his face, sees a ring of dried blood around his left nostril, and shivers. She closes her eyes and tries to sing to herself. Sadly, the theme song from Flipper gets stuck in her head. Then, from somewhere, a slow and heavy tempo descends upon her. A rock anthem from the not-too-distant past beckons her like a pied piper of disassociation. There is no resistance, she gives herself to the dark rhythmic guitar and precision drumming . . .
Everything seems different. Now the shadow of him moving repetitiously on top of her is a dance of dark and light, of purples and greens upon the ceiling. Her legs, spread so wide, now span the entire room, knocking down walls, kicking holes in the roof, letting the stars fall in to the room. And there is Chloe, flashing beautifully behind Sharon’s eyes. And when there is Chloe, Sharon feels her pelvic muscles tighten and her back arch. The Fisherman, still held in her left hand, has managed to flop his way inside her inner lips. Her clit aches from the friction. Sharon wonders, Maybe this is what it’s like to fuck another woman. The sweet and painful wanting between her legs. The weight pressed against her body. Images of Chloe come faster than Sharon can manage. She touches the Fisherman’s skin, and it is soft, and it is hers. A mix between a moan and a gasp of shock leaves Sharon’s lips. She tries to recover, desperately inserting images of Jon Bon Jovi and Rambo’s glistening brow. But Chloe is unmoving. Chloe with the tiny baby hands and squeak-toy laugh. Chloe whose lips move as she reads her books of poetry in the staff room. Chloe who squeezes Sharon’s arm when she is excited. Chloe going round in her head like a chant. Like the Fisherman’s pussy mantra. Pussy . . . Chloe . . . pussy . . . Chloe . . . pussy . . . Without the money and the clock ticking and words like whore and trick, they are just two people held captive by unrealized desire, doing whatever they can to break free. Pussy . . . Chloe . . . pussy . . .
porn piece
Bruce LaBruce
Sauntering into an international magazine store recently, I caught a glimpse of a row of a dozen magazines with covers graced by scantily clad females posing in provocative positions which would tend to signify, by the conventions of almost any civilization on earth, pornography. I took a few steps back and looked up at the store’s sign to check that I hadn’t wandered into a dirty bookstore by mistake. But no, it was indeed a regular retail outlet selling mainstream periodicals. When exactly, I though to myself luridly, did the world become so smutty? I felt my cheeks flush. Could I, Bruce LaBruce, international pornographer, be blushing?
Well, actually, let’s not forget that I am, according to the title of my premature memoirs published a few years back, The Reluctant Pornographer, which may explain my ambivalence toward the notion of pornography taking over the free world.
Let’s get one thing straight, or at least as straight as an intercontinental homosexual icon can manage: I don’t watch porn. I don’t collect it, I don’t keep tabs on the latest porn stars and their exploits, I don’t even incorporate it into my sex life. One reason for this may be that like many gay men I tend to live my life as if I were a porn star anyway, so passively watching it becomes almost redundant. Another reason may be that I encounter enough “found pornography” in the regular world, those quotidian ad hoc images which can be utilized as jack-off material: black gangbangers, clothes scissored off, operations in the emergency room of Trauma: Life in the ER, for example, or Eddie, the hot, one-legged house member of Big Brother lying shirtless in bed, or, in a pinch, even good old-fashioned men’s gymnastics. I find these images, or the amateur pornographic self-portraits that everyday people send me over the Internet, much more sexually stimulating than your average adult entertainment video.
But wait a minute—I’m a porn star. Or at least, as someone who has made a number of sexually explicit avant-garde films in which he has performed oral sex and sodomy, I’ve been stuck with the epithets “porn star” and “pornographer.” Shouldn’t I be steeped in a world of split beaver, gang bangs, and leather slings? And shouldn’t I be immune to the moral ambiguities engendered by such staples as bestiality, rape fantasies, and snuff?
It’s a strange phenomenon that since I crossed that dark threshold into the adult netherworld, that ethereal region inhabited only by those who have dared to commit their sexual practices to celluloid or videotape for public consumption, I’m not supposed to blush or get embarrassed or presumably feel any other normal human emotions, especially visà-vis sex. For me, nothing could be further from the truth. Although I consider myself merely an artist who works in pornography, it’s still a world that I’ve had to negotiate through, and I’ve discovered it’s not one in which you can survive for long without a normal set of human responses, and yes, a strong moral compass. With so much emphasis lately on the mainstreaming of pornography and on the blurring of the line between art and porn, very little attention is being paid, particularly by those who are indulging in it, to the depth and darkness of the sexual imagination and the implications of toying with the dark side. The multibillion -dollar porn industry, which nonetheless still operates as a kind of dirty little secret, is nothing less than an adjunct of the collective unconscious, and to bring it to the surface, to mainstream it, may be unleashing something we’re not prepared to handle. Think Pandora’s box.
Back in the last decade, when gender studies and postmodern courses on desire introduced academics to the milieux of sex trade workers and pornographers, there was a tendency to overvalue these phenomena and to confer iconic status on their denizens. Some academics I knew in fact literally segued into various sex trades as part of their research, often with disastrous results. The making of pornography or the practice of prostitution unavoidably becomes a demystifying experience whereby one learns quickly that there is nothing particularly noble or glamorous about getting fucked for money. As I stood on the set of my first “legitimate” porn movie and found myself obliged to walk over and wipe the ass of one of the performers who was experiencing a little anal leakage, I didn’t feel particularly glamorous. Once a participant in the sex trade, you must also be prepared for the inevitable wall of moral disapprobation that you will at some point run up against, a cold disapproval that may come from the most surprisingly liberal sources. Factor in all the other annoying occupational hazards—STDs, emotional instability, the ubiquity of drugs in the industry—and you may find yourself longing, like Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, for a life a little more humdrum.
But I reckon today we’re supposed to be beyond all these mundane, practical considerations. The debate raging now is about aesthetics, about how pornographic images are mediated in the mains
tream, and about the lexicon that has developed to accommodate this imagery. It’s all very trendy.
i’m quite willing to bracket everything I’ve said thus far about pornography (I certainly didn’t intend to be an alarmist) and consider the aesthetic dimension for a moment, because I think that’s what ultimately civilizes porn and makes sense of it. The fact that 95 percent of the pornography that is produced today is unwatchable pap can be directly attributed to the advent of video and the concomitant decline of aesthetics. When pornography was being produced exclusively on film in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the emphasis on camera style and narrative and the formal mediation of content—the artistic considerations—were easily as important as the capturing of the sexual moment, which today has become the singular, all-consuming focus.
The digital revolution in general has ushered in an era of literalism, an unimaginative unity of style and substance that reduces meaning to a set of monolithic stylistic imperatives devoid of any complex interplay between the two. The notion that formal aspects may engage content in such a way as to produce contradiction or paradox or synthesis has been subsumed by the slavish capitulation of meaning to technology and production, to pure form. This is probably one of the reasons why the signifiers of the mainstream entertainment industry and of the adult film industry have started to become somewhat indistinguishable. Their shared fixation on the means of production instead of on the production of meaning has resulted in a somewhat dumbed-down, sexually extreme aesthetic proven to be the most commercially viable: sex sells. Mainstream stars and porn stars alike are forced to conform to the same hypersexualized image, regardless of the nature of the product they’re currently promoting. It’s a bland standardization of sexuality which has little or nothing to do with liberal or progressive attitudes towards sex.
So for me, when talking about the new incorporation of pornography into art and the mainstream, considerations of desire and pleasure, whether sexual or aesthetic, have become a little outdated and naive. (“Desire,” like “gender,” seems like such an antiquated, ‘80s term today—just a phase, I suppose, like the hula hoop.) My initial motivations for getting into pornographic representation, back when I was a punk in the ‘80s making underground fanzines and experimental Super-8 mm movies, were not only aesthetic, but also political and, well, revolutionary. I was a sexual idealist. My work since has been as much about the intersection of race and class with homosexual representation as about the filming and photographing of hot, sexy boys, as much about examining sexual stereotypes and iconography as about getting off. I can’t deny that there was pleasure in the text, but the text itself was always easily as important. Audiences today, however, are so inured to the blandification of extreme sexual imagery that it no longer has that same kind of subversive impact. It’s just meat now.
smile you’ve just been dominatrixed
Ana J
My phone pounded and flashed from the coffee table. “Welcome to the Jungle” was blaring, which meant Ellen was calling. I decided not to answer. I’d been sitting on my couch for the past ten minutes, staring at the ripped seam of the throw pillow on my lap. I felt ugly and cartoonish. I tried to laugh to myself out loud, but it sounded contrived. I rolled my eyes. I lifted up my arms and put them down again. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing.
It had been one hour since Darren came by to drop off my black and pink shoes. The broken ones with the permanent scuff marks around the heel. One hour ago, he threw his real genuine silver ID bracelet into the street. It slid across the pavement and disappeared into the darkness. The ID bracelet had been a gift from his grandmother, who had been recently murdered. He immediately regretted the hastiness of his decision. We had been repeating ourselves. Our argument, as usual, seemed unauthentic.
I was sitting in the middle of the alley, in an olive and beige canvas foldout chair. The chair was his, and I was giving it back. It was recently retrieved from my basement, where it had been buried underneath a pile of burnt-out tiki torches. It was now time for us to give each other’s things back. He was slumped against the ledge of a very low window. Due to the complaints from my downstairs neighbor, we had transplanted our theatrical argument to this alley half a block down the street.
I was yelling, saying that he never really knew me at all. He looked distracted and said something totally unrelated. He reached into his pocket. His hand was clenched tight around something shiny. He held it out to me anxiously. I stood up and threw my cigarette on the sidewalk. He wasn’t listening to me. He never really did. He only liked hearing the sound of my voice when I was angry. Or watching my eyes when I spoke.
“I don’t want that. Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” I said angrily. I turned and began to walk toward my house.
“Please, take it.” he begged.
I pictured him standing behind me with his arm outstretched, and I wanted to run. I knew he had thrown it even before I heard the tiny metal chain rattle across the concrete. I listened to it slide across the ground for a moment, then stop. He sighed dramatically, and then there was silence. I quickly walked up the steps to my building and locked the door behind me. I was still for a moment, listening for footsteps, but there were none. I slumped with relief.
darren had been studying up on professional domination every night for the past four weeks. He had finally come to the conclusion that our disaster of a former relationship had been nothing but a scam. He decided that he had been tricked, that I had tricked him. That I had “dominatrixed” him without his consent. It was hard to take it seriously at first. I had no idea that he had been spending hours on his computer every night. I didn’t know that he had been scheduling fake appointments with local mistresses, making elaborate inquiries, trying to figure out exactly what a guy could expect for $250 an hour.
Then the text messages started. He bombarded me daily with ridiculous messages, each one more offensive than the last:
“Yeah, power fucking destroy men, makes us love you so you can ruin our lives. Really fucking cool, yeah feminism.”
“I only want to be with you, I’m sorry I can’t make you happy.”
“Sorry my dick was not big enough to make you a powerful strong woman. If I kill myself you will be truly fucking powerful. I loved you, and I am shit to you.”
I never meant to tell Darren I was a dominatrix, I just blurted it out one day. It was late afternoon, and we had spent most of the morning at the beach. We were buying beer at the corner store, on our way to a barbeque. While we were in the store, I smiled at him and said, “You know, I feel like we are really starting to be friends, and it’s nice.”
He smiled and looked distracted. “Did you know I used to be a dominatrix?” I said to the back of his head as he reached into the cooler and grabbed a six-pack. He closed the glass door slowly. I felt my stomach tighten. For some reason I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Instead, I quickly told him I that I was retired. That I had just done it for a while a few years ago. And that I didn’t really do it anymore. And that was that.
I was, of course, still working professionally at the time. Very much so. I had been throughout most of our relationship. It was, I firmly believed, my right to take care of myself. That was my business, and it was none of his. As a matter of fact, I had no interest in discussing my job with anyone. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to discuss. Especially not with him. The thirty-two-year-old emotionally unstable alcoholic. The adult infant. Just telling him that I was a retired dominatrix had been such a fiasco. He didn’t have the capacity to understand. So I made a choice. You see, I did actually like him. In fact, I helped him. I confronted him constantly, even though I knew he would repeat his behavior. Like a client, confrontation made him feel better. He asked me to please help him get his life under control. To show him how to behave. He actually said that. He said I was the only reason he had stopped drinking, even though I knew that he hadn’t. I played along even though I smelled beer on him all the time. I pretended not to notice.
I accepted his generic displays of affection. That’s what made him happy. He gave me rides. He bought me things. He felt needed. I thought we had a mutual understanding. I never lied about my feelings for him. He just didn’t believe me. He wanted something different.
“Welcome to the Jungle” began to blare from my phone again. This time I answered. “Where you been, bitch?” Ellen demanded. “Ugh, these shoes are driving me crazy today. What are you doing on Sunday? Jim is in town, and he wants to see both of us.”
Jim is in his late forties, and he enjoys business casual. Jim has been embezzling money from the company for years. Ellen and I find this out one day by eavesdropping on a private phone call. We don’t know what to do with this information. On the one hand, we could do the right thing and turn him in. We might be rewarded with a hefty bonus or a promotion. But on the other hand, this is the kind of information that people would kill to protect. Some people would do anything to make sure their secrets are kept. And I mean anything.
Ellen and I think about this. We discuss it over coffee. We have a girly pajama-party-and-pillow-fight talk about it. What Should We Do About Jim? we wonder as we braid each other’s hair. Should we rat him out? If he knew that we knew, we could get him to do just about anything we want, Ellen points out as she rubs lotion on my legs. I confess that I am a little nervous about the whole thing. I tell Ellen I have been really stressed out lately planning my lesbian sister’s bachelorette party. She is getting gay married in June to a Brazilian lingerie model.
The next day Ellen invites me over for a surprise. I am thinking she must have just closed the Rogers account, because she sounds so excited on the telephone. I stop by the store and pick up a bottle of champagne. I slip on my sensible heels and smooth my taupe hosiery. I pat my hair into place and straighten my librarian glasses. I knock on Ellen’s door softly. I call out to her, but there is no answer. The front door is unlocked so I let myself in.