Oh Yeah, Then Pornography Happened
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Kerry, I agree with you that the "daring" misogynist sexuality portrayed by literary lions of yesteryear that get Roiphe all excited has disappeared because the novelty has worn off. Roiphe, in her favorite note that she likes to hit, blames feminism for being prudish, an argument that relies on the questionable assumption that sexuality is the same thing as misogyny, and nothing is hotter than a man who cares more about degrading you than getting you off. But the change she notes is easily attributed to an obvious cause she apparently wishes to ignore, which is that in the era she describes, pornography exploded in popularity to the point where it's ubiquituous.
Let's face it; pornography owns the narrative about male virility demonstrated through dominance over women who are portrayed as dirty whores who don't deserve any respect. That wasn't so in Updike and Roth's heyday, but if a male writer nowadays wants to write a story about bullying and dismissing women as eroticism, he has to contend with the fact that porn does so harder, longer, faster, and with an often alarming brutality. The male writers she quotes mostly seem to be contending with this reality; they don't even need to directly reference porn to grapple with the way that it creates a comical distance between sex as it's actually experienced and sex as our culture collectively imagines it.
Roiphe's angst over what she perceives as the feminist murder of male sexuality has a lot of bizarre assumptions underpinning it, so many that it's hard to untangle them all. The casual assumption that the only real male sexuality is cruel and contemptuous of women doesn't really square away with any reality that I know of, though I suppose if you watch a lot of mainstream porn and/or reality TV shows, you might start to think that way. But even if you accept that the only real male sexuality is one that dismisses women's safety, pleasure, autonomy, or humanity, I still question the idea that feminists have beat it into the ground because of aforementioned reality TV shows and mainstream porn. Or maybe Roiphe doesn't live in the world that I do, where the word "facial" tends to only mean the skin treatment as an afterthought.
I find simple-minded Roiphe's assumption that characters like Alexander Portnoy or Rabbit Angstrom are straightforward celebrations of what she appears to think is the only legitimate expression of male sexuality. When I read those books back in college, I honestly and naively took those characters to be the literary equivalent of mustache-twirling villains. Now, of course, I realize that the characters are somewhere in between, meant to be pathetic or disturbing, but also sympathetic. Going back to what you said, those stories don't resonate anymore, because the world has changed. A man who seeks to define himself through a form of sexual bullying of women doesn't seem daring or an interesting statement on modern ennui anymore; he just seems like someone who watches way too much XTube. It's hard to care much about Rabbit Angstrom when we have his modern form, Jon Gosselin, running around in Ed Hardy shirts with the babysitter on his arm. Maybe a great writer could complicate Gosselin as a character for us, but right now, most of us are too busy laughing at him to care.
Comments
Simple-Minded
By: Regina | Wed, 01/06/2010 - 18:36
This post is a great example of why Feminism blandifies art. Everything has to be moral (according to Feminism's moral compass, of course); literature is good if the protragonists are "good," literature is bad when the protagonists are "bad" (or selfish, sexist, etc.) There's no room left for complexity, humanity, reality.
It's Manichean, it's school-marmy, and it's boring.
(Also, the notion that Updike and Roth somehow ushered in porn is laughable. The sex in those books is vivid, fleshy, sweaty, smelly and often leads to misery. Anybody who's ever read them -- really read them -- would be turned off forever to the plastic artifices of porn. We have porn DESPITE Updike, not because of him.)
As a lady who watches porn...
By: weatherwax | Tue, 01/05/2010 - 11:14
I don't deny that the "take it, bitch" porn exists, along with double penetration, etc, etc. But the thing is, porn isn't ALL about dominion over females. Porn is about feeding kink. If your kink is dominating women, take it bitch porn is for you. But there is plenty of porn where female orgasm is the goal, as, surprise! tons of guys get off on girls being pleased. Girl-on-girl stuff, while still directed toward straight men, is often gentler and uses a variety of toys. And unless you think female ejaculation is a myth, (not so!) those girls are getting off. Then we come to domination porn, where the female doms the male. How is a woman whipping a man somehow more derogatory towards women then men?
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I think this anger towards characters like Rabbit, and the common contention many feminists have against porn, comes from the same misunderstanding about sexuality. Too many women I know are fed this line that women only want safe, sensitive, caring, vanilla sex. And if they are attracted to the idea of being pushed around in bed, they must have been damaged somehow by men in the past. I'm sorry, but I find that to be just as sexist towards women as the idea that women are asexual toys for men. Women have complex sexual drives, and some want to be just as degrading in bed as men like Rabbit. And some want to be degraded in bed by men like Rabbit. And some, believe it or not, swoon to the words "take it, bitch."
You haven't watched much porn, have you?
By: Amanda Marcotte | Tue, 01/05/2010 - 09:21
Or you'd know that facials, calling the woman names, offering to pay and then reneging, spitting on her, double penetration, and using expressions like "take it" while jackhammering the woman are all standard. There is something euphemistically called "couples" porn---i.e. porn that isn't misogynist, so that women can watch it (though the assumption is still that it's for men) without getting upset about being hated on---but it's far from most porn. Even porn that doesn't go all gonzo rarely, as you claim, involves everyone having a good time, since there are no acts that would result in a "good time" for women---even pornographic depictions of cunnilingus have no relationship to the kind that produces orgasms. And even in non-misogynist porn I've seen, female orgasms are all faked, and male orgasms are all real.
Not that I think porn is some special expression of misogyny or anything. It's everywhere. Roiphe isn't wrong to say it was endemic to sex scenes in 60s era literature, for instance. But "take it bitch!" is a very specific misogynist narrative, and like I said in the post, porn owns that narrative now. Literature has nothing to add, and the widespread nature of porn has demonstrated that this idea, that sex is about a man dominating a woman to show his virility, is a fundamentally silly and boring idea. Far more interesting is looking at how sex can be complicated, and it is, if you presume that women are human.
What porn are you watching?
By: Teaser38 | Tue, 01/05/2010 - 06:07
Most porn goes like this: Boy meets girl. Girl undresses boy, boy does the same. They go to and make some noise. Both have a good time and then.. well, the next part must be were the misogyny happens because I've never watched more than that.
I'm sorry but most pornography watchers I dare say don't find cruelty sexy.
Yawn.
By: patron002 | Tue, 01/05/2010 - 00:25
Meh, maybe she assumes it because that's the world she knows. You like to pretend that everyone has had your life experience, while pretending others who only see one view are closed minded. Maybe that is what excites her, guys who dominate her, do you think that is wrong? Just because you do not enjoy feeling out of control does not mean others don't. As for your argument that there are other forms of sexuality, true, I find it must more fun to worry about pleasuring a woman than myself, but truth is, sometimes you just wanna go at it like wild animals. Which brings me to the point that sexuality is mostly violent, if you watch animals they don't play sweet, when its time to breed that is what they do. Luckily human males are clever creatures they have realized its easier to give a facial, while pretending to care about, well your facial. Of course men have other forms of sexual expression, but that doesn't mean aggression and domination is wrong, as long as both parties like it, hell, in case you haven't noticed, sometimes even women enjoy being dominant. Yeah male sexuality has been stripped, who cares? As long as we still get off we don't really care. So I disagree with your argument that only disgusting males can be dominant, I don't dispute that the other author was absurd.