This paper rejects this trend, arguing that when we examine what gay male pornography presents and what it actually says about being gay and male today, what we find is a model of behaviour more concerned with self-gratification and the right to dominate and control than with self-respect and respect for others. Indeed, the identity politics on offer sexualises a role play that rejects compassion, affection and equality between gay men and instead promotes (through sex) homophobia and sexism, self-hate, hate for others and harm to others. As such, it must be rejected and any rights strategy that depends on it re-thought.
Gay Male Pornography: The Reality
In early 2000, I was part of the legal team for the human rights lobby group Equality Now in litigation before the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium.2 In that case, Canada’s highest court accepted Equality Now’s argument that the production and distribution of same-sex pornography causes the same harms to equality that the Court had previously recognised within the context of heterosexual pornography in the case of R v Butler.3
The pornographic materials at issue in Little Sisters, and others like them, have been defended and promoted as gay male identity and a source of equality and liberation by pro-pornography and pro-gay advocates alike. An analysis of what these materials actually say about gay male identity, however, reveals that this commitment to pornography is short-sighted, anti-equality and anti-liberation.
In answering this question, it is worth noting the quotation below, found in an article in Manscape Magazine, not an issue in Little Sisters, but available nonetheless from the Plaintiff’s bookstore prior to the case being heard. It, like many of the materials defended in Little Sisters, reminds the reader that to be ‘male’ is to be empowered, but that to be male requires conformity to a clearly defined, gendered norm – a gender role according to which some are entitled to sexually abuse and control, while others, because they are descriptively less ‘male’, are socially less relevant, less equal, and not entitled to the respect, compassion, and human dignity that only true equality can provide:
I pushed him lower so my big dick was against his chest; I pushed his meaty pecs together. They wrapped around my dick perfectly as I started tit-fucking him like a chick. His hard, humpy pecs gripped my meat like a vice. Of all the things I did to him that night I think he hated that the most. It made him feel like a girl. I sighed, ‘Oh, my bitch got such pretty titties! They was made for tittie fuckin, made to serve a man’s dick’.4
As in a great deal of written or pictorial gay male pornographic presentations, what one gets from the above is a ‘source of liberation and equality’ in which the physically more powerful, ostensibly straight male is glorified. This linking of manliness with heterosexuality and overt masculinity is a common theme throughout many of these materials with masculinity often gained at the expense of a woman or ostensibly gay male’s safety and self-worth – all in all, the antithesis of both equality and liberation.
To the extent that women are not used or ridiculed in the pornography sold as gay male (and women frequently are ridiculed and used as objects of sexual debasement), the effects of sexism and misogyny are not eliminated. These materials, while free of biological femaleness, continue to promote violence and/or the sexual degradation of others along the lines of gender as socially defined, interpreted, and imposed through systems of sex inequality. They often sexualise large, hyper-masculine men – many of whom are described as ‘straight’ men who find sexual arousal through the infliction of pain on socially feminised sexual subordinates (read: gay men) who, in turn, are shown enjoying the pain, humiliation and degradation to which they are subjected.
Frequently, sexual subordination is enforced through extreme forms of torture and violence, with masculinity again epitomised and celebrated in men who ridicule and emasculate others in the name of sexual pleasure. Humour, we are told, is found in the sexual debasement of another, assertiveness tied to aggression, resulting in an identity politics that creates, packages and re-sells a sexuality that epitomises male supremacy. Femininity in turn is linked with emasculation, linked with inferiority, linked with inequality on the basis of sex. Indeed, those who are emasculated in these materials are often specifically described as gay male, while those who abuse them and who are iconised as sexual role models are described as heterosexual.
Note, for example, MAC II 19: A Drummer Super Publication, Volume 19.5 This magazine contains an article entitled ‘Prisoner’ that details the torture and sexual mutilation of prisoners of war during a fictional military coup. Many of the prison officers are described as ‘straight’ and ‘real men’ whose masculinity is shown through the sexual abuse of their prisoners, most of whom are belittled as gays, queers, sissies etc.6
A similar theme is found in Bear: Masculinity Without the Trappings.7 The emphasis in this magazine is on overt, hyper-masculinity. Like MAC II 19, many of the stories mock gay men, describing them as ‘too feminine’, ‘sissy’ or ‘queer’. One article, for example, quotes a trucker who, while bragging about the men who have ‘serviced’ him at truck stops, says:
… truckers sure know about the clean finger nail faggots taking up stalls all day playing footsies, tossing toilet paper and love notes at any pair of boots along side. Most truckers ignore them. Some want to kill them and others figure a blowjob for free is one hell of a lot better than tossing dollars at a whore.8
This publication, like many others, promotes violence and aggressive, non-egalitarian behaviour. The theme throughout is hyper-masculinity found at the expense of someone else’s liberty and self-worth. Merit is found in degradation. Rewards attached to one’s ability to use or be used. Equality, if at all, is found only in reciprocal abuse.
What all of these examples provide is a sexualised identity politic that relies on the inequality found between those with power and those without it; between those who are dominant and those who are submissive; between those who are top and those who are bottom; between straight men and gay men; between men and women.
From these and other materials, we are told to glorify manliness and those who meet a hyper-masculine, muscular ideal. The result is a sexual and social reality in which men who are more feminine, less male, are degraded as ‘queer’ and ‘faggots’ and subjected to degrading and dehumanising epithets usually used against women, such as ‘bitch’, ‘cunt’ and ‘whore’. These men are in turn presented as enjoying this degradation. In sum, these materials reinforce a system in which, as Catharine A. MacKinnon explains, “a victim, usually female, always feminized” is actualised (1989, p.141).
In examining the exhibits before the Supreme Court of Canada in the Little Sisters case, we also get materials that sexualise racist stereotypes and degrade members of racial minorities for the purpose of sexual arousal. The message conveyed is one in which gay Asian men, for example, are presented as smaller and more feminine than their Caucasian counterparts and thus willing to be sexually subordinated by a more dominant, more stereotypical white male. An example of this type of publication is found in the magazine Oriental Guys (OG). This magazine is, as its title indicates, a pictorial and written collection of articles and photographs of, and about, Asian men. A quick review of the magazine makes it clear, however, that, although ‘about’ Asian men, the magazine is directed at the Caucasian gay male market.
OG presents photographs of young Asian men, usually posing by themselves. These photo spreads are often accompanied by articles with titles like ‘Be My Sushi Tonight’9 or ‘Behind Bars in Thailand’10 which discusses sex for sale in that country – a country where the sale and sexual use of young boys, via sex tourism, is rampant. The magazine does not present more than one young man at any one time. There is no apparent presentation of violence or physical pain. The magazine does, however, focus on and sexualise the youth and race of those used to produce this publication with the stories throughout the magazine describing, among other things, older white men cruising Asian boys and
male prostitutes. In this context, young Asian men are described as ‘pearls of the orient’, ‘easy to find’, ‘accessible’ and ‘available.’ Often, the photo spreads of young Asian men, shown face down with buttocks elevated, are accompanied by ‘news’ articles that tell the reader how, for example, to recruit young Balinese men.11 These, in turn, are accompanied by ‘letters to the editor’ that detail the success of the magazine’s Caucasian readers’ ‘foreign’ sexual conquests.
The focus and content of this publication sexualises racism and sexual exploitation. This is its intended result and it is marketed as such. While degrading to Asian gay men, the theme promoted also justifies through sex the types of attitudes and inequalities that make racism and sexism a powerful and interconnected reality. The white male is described as one who seeks out an inferior Asian other; the young Asian is described and presented as ready and willing to serve his sexual needs and fantasies. The white male is superior; the Asian male inferior. The resulting harm is an affront to all persons seeking equality.
In a similar vein, the reader is offered materials in which African-American men are presented as violent sexual predators with large sexual organs who care only to emasculate white men through rape or in which the same men are presented as sexually desiring to be the slaves of white men needing to reaffirm a masculinity threatened by the Black male.
With titles like ‘Native American Drifter Hustles Man in Abandoned Mall’ and ‘Hawaiian Cocksucker Licks Cum From Peepshow Booth Floor’, the collection of essays in Sex Stop: True Revelations and Strange Happenings,12 is typical of this type of gay male pornography. Many of the stories contained in it sexualise racial difference, sex with or between young boys and incest. In the story, ‘Boy Buys Bicycle by Riding Man’s Face’, for example, the author describes how he and his friend were paid by an older Black male for sex when they were boys. The story concludes with an editorial comment in which the editor of this collection of stories explains that “this gentleman is married and has grandchildren. He says he has no regrets and just loves to chase old Black men when he can get away from his wife to do it.”
Throughout many of these materials rape is also normalised, consent implied. For example, in the story, ‘Sucks Brother Off Before Wedding’ from Juice: True Homosexual Experiences, the writer describes being raped by his older brother and other men. Explaining that these experiences formed the basis of his preferred sexual experiences as an adult, the reader then details another of his sexual encounters as follows:
Once when I was about 25 I got raped by a powerful young guy that I had taken home to blow. I always say that was the best sex I ever had. Rape at that stage of the game was enjoyable. God he was good. He knew just what to do to a willing asshole that kept saying no. He took me with force and I fought him right to the bitter end and – thank God – he won out. When he got through with [me] I knew I had had it. The bastard never came back though.13
The identity sold is one in which violence by one man against another man or men is normalised through sex for the persons involved and for the consumer of these materials.
This is a common theme. The magazine Dungeon Master – The Male S/M Publication,14 for example, presents men torturing other men in sexually explicit ways with hot wax, heat and fire, while sexualising this abuse as sexually arousing for the abusers, the persons injured, and, again, for the consumer. The magazine Mr S/M 6515 presents photographs of men being defecated on and who derive pleasure from eating and drinking excrement. The film Headlights and Hard Bodies16 includes footage of men sexually using other men who are being pulled by neck chains, hit and whipped while tied to poles, penetrated by large objects and/or subjected to clamping, biting and pulling of their nipples and genitals. Men presented as ‘slaves’ are shown in considerable pain but finding sexual enjoyment from the abuse inflicted on them by others. Those released from bondage kiss the man or men who have just beaten them and thank them for putting them in their place with whips and verbal degradation. MACII magazine,17 in turn, glorifies sexually explicit torture in a military setting, while detailing the kidnapping, torture and sexual mutilation of prisoners of war. In a photograph in the same magazine, two young men are shown confined in a cage. One, face down and bent over, is being slapped by an older man in a Nazi military uniform. Another is chained and hung in stirrups with a hand shoved down his throat.
What one sees in these materials is an almost pervasive glorification of the idealised masculine/male icon. Through them, inequality is sexualised, homophobia entrenched, sexism normalised. Dominance and non-mutuality, submission and inequality remain central to the sexual act and in those photos where men are alone, positioned, posed, humanity is removed and replaced with an object. As ‘Men Against Rape and Pornography’ (a US activist group) accurately explain, the man exposed becomes a non-human, an object waiting for you to do something to it or wanting to do something to you because he has what it takes to do so. The message sent is that some people want and deserve to have sex forced on them. They solicit this and they deserve this.18 Either way, the result is a sexuality that is hierarchical and rarely compassionate, mutual or equal.
No Women, Just Men: Harm-Free?
Some have argued that any perceived inequality evident in gay male pornography is rendered non-harmful because in it, unlike in heterosexual pornography, women are not sexually exploited within the heterosexual context. That is, men are presented with men, not men with women, and the sexuality presented is used and experienced by gay men, not straight men.
Arguments that focus predominantly on the use of men in gay male pornography risk claiming that what makes heterosexual pornography harmful is the use of biological females by biological males and that it is this biological polarity that makes women unsafe and unequal. This is misleading, as well as sexist and homophobic: sexist because it implies that harm to men isn’t harm, and homophobic because it implies that harm is avoided if it is done to gay men. Gay male pornography does not eliminate harm simply because there are no women in it. At a basic level, this argument assumes that there is something about men hurting and violating men that makes the resulting assault non-harmful, normal and acceptable – an assumption that only reinforces already dominant assumptions about acceptable male behaviour and male aggression generally. Sexualised violence is violence and the biological capabilities of the person who harms or who is harmed are irrelevant.19
Moreover, any analysis that rests on biology is dangerously naive. Power does not depend on the biology of those who assert it. Straight pornography is harmful not simply because it presents a biological male violating a biological female, but because of the model of behaviour offered the biological male and presented/sexualised as normal, male gender behaviour. The mere absence of biological ‘opposites’ does little to undermine the very real harms of rape, abuse, assault, harassment and discrimination resulting from materials in which ‘male’ equals masculine, equals dominant, equals preferable. The fact that a biological male can also be a ‘bottom’ is in many ways irrelevant if in order to be that bottom, he is required to assume those characteristics which ensure that those who are ‘men’, socially defined, remain on top.
The coupling of two biological males does nothing to destabilise sexual and social power inequalities divided along gender lines if those behaviours – central to the preservation of gender hierarchy (cruelty, violence, aggression, homophobia, sexism, racism and ultimately compulsory heterosexuality through which heterosexual male dominance is preserved) – are not themselves removed from the presentation of sexuality as power-based. Because gay male pornography sexualises gender stereotypes and the inequalities inherent in them, it reinforces those behaviours and characteristics that ensure that heterosexuality remains the norm and is compulsory, because it does little to advance a model of gay identity that subverts those socially prescribed gender roles that ensure and enforce heterosexual male privilege.
Playing Top and Bottom: Reciprocal Abuse Marketed as Equalit
y
It has also been argued that any inequalities evident in straight pornography are undermined in gay male pornography because the men in gay male pornography, and gay men generally, have the ‘option’ of participating in a role reversal not normally afforded women – that is, they can ‘take turns’ being top and bottom. As a result, they further challenge the idea that gender roles are fixed or immutable and thereby question the assumption that men must always be on top (see Burger, 1995).
Central to arguments of this sort is the idea that you can somehow subvert gender’s harms if you simply ‘play’ with it. You can’t. If gay men and men generally were willing to give up male privilege, then maybe playing with gender would work. But they are not. Accordingly, many gay men seem obsessed with getting, and taking advantage of, that which their straight counterparts have had all along, including pornography. For many, gender and male privilege promise a great deal in a world in which being a man still means something. As such, any medium that promises validation through gender conformity tends to lose its subversive potential and, on the contrary, ensures that those constructs that constitute and construct male supremacy, that make it what it is, remain in place. For many gay men, pornography is not a game. It offers them something very real: power. Over men, as men. There is nothing particularly challenging about this bit of ‘theatre’, regardless of the biological attributes of those who ‘perform’ it.
What this focus on role play and role reversal as a means of undermining gender hierarchies overlooks is the fact that the pleasure found remains the pleasure derived from dominance and submission. Although these roles can be reversed, there are still clearly defined roles. There is always a top and there is always a bottom, articulated along gender lines so as to differentiate between those with and those without power. Hierarchy – inequality – thus remains central to the sex act. While there is mutuality, it is in the ‘pleasure’ found in shared degradation – the pleasure derived from controlling or being controlled by someone else. Mutual abuse does not eradicate abuse. It doubles it and risks trivialising it through sex.
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Page 12