Agent of Desire
Transforming perceptions of female
sexuality
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The Agent Watching PornBecause pornography has bridged the gap between fantasy and reality, by getting real people to perform acts and behaviours that generally belong only in the imagination, it has eroded a common sense of sexual propriety. This has a damaging impact on sexuality as a whole. The way that women behave in pornography is how men fantasise about them, or imagine they would behave if they had women's bodies. There is no basis in actual female sexual behaviour (well not until women started to mimic the women in pornography). The women in pornography behave as though they are not sexually selective about partners, as though they gain pleasure from degrading and painful treatment, or even as though they are pleasured by things that are just plain silly - for example trying to lick their own nipples when they masturbate. There is nothing instructive about pornography as it only represents fantasies, in fact it completely misinforms about what women actually want. It is interesting that the vast majority of women in pornography were sexually abused as children, which forceably broke their boundaries and sense of propriety when they were too young to even know what those boundaries of propriety are. Alternatively they were ignored and belittled by their fathers and want to win back his attention - so they try their best to 'please' men at the expense of their own actual needs. Only the women damaged in this way are willing/easily manipulated to act out male fantasies in pornography, because the rest of women recognise the abusive behaviour for what it is and would not want to be subjected to it. There is nothing wrong with men fantasising, but imposing fantasies on others is abuse. In a sense the porn-makers take up where 'uncle' left off and carry on abusing these vulnerable, emotionally scarred women who need help, and the people who watch it at a safe distance are complicit in the abuse by creating the demand. However, Agent of Desire is about liberating female sexual agency not getting morally prescriptive about sexual behaviour. As female sexuality has been so thoroughly oppressed by patriarchy, it would be counter-productive to instill moral guilt in those women whose emerging sexual agency has been aroused by porn. Yet there are problems with pornography in as far as it reinforces the objectification of women and pressure on women to fulfil male fantasies, at the expense of their own needs. By watching it the viewer is filling their unconscious mind with imagery of power-relationships that are oppressive to women. They will carry that imagery with them once it is imbedded in their unconscious and this may well make a reappearance in their sexual fantasy life, sexual preferences, or perhaps even outside the sphere of sexuality altogether. By looking at pornography, people are willfully filling their unconscious minds with patriarchal sexual conditioning. Even though there are some progressive porn directors who allow the performers to choose what acts they will be doing before the shooting starts, so it might seem they would show more of a woman's genuine sexual wishes than the rest, those women are already porn stars used to 'pleasing others first', and the whole language of porn: the shorthands, scenarios, sex-acts, positions, mis en scene, etc, have developed within an industry created without female sexual agency in mind. As all pornography will make references to this language, when a woman watches it, she is to some extent looking with the eyes of a man and probably learning more about male sexuality than her own. It is quite reasonable to suppose then, that consuming porn damages female sexual agency more than it liberates it. To comment on this article, please click here . |