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 Equality
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.
Conclusion
Pornography tells gay men that they too can be real men. But at what cost? Becoming ‘a man’ does nothing for gay male liberation. It does, however, do a lot for male supremacy. It ensures that the rejection of male dominance, necessary for gay male liberation, will be more difficult and that those of us who do choose to do so will face more hostility from both straight men and those in our community who have sold out. It ensures that the ‘groveling faggot’, aware that he can never be the man he is supposed to be, will be just what gay male pornography and society says he should be: the object of scorn and male aggression. It ensures that the closeted youth, already attacked for being different, will stay closeted, afraid to express any ‘difference’ that might reveal his secret and make him the target of more hatred.
While pornographic reality, cloaked as fantasy, might promise the gay male vindication because he too can be on top, the struggle to become that top will only reinforce a social hierarchy straight men have supported all along – the result being gay male silence and subordination, male superiority and female inferiority. And any liberation strategy that normalises this inequality in the name of freedom is not really a politic worthy of celebration, despite the considerable efforts of those who continue to promote it.
Bibliography
Burger, John (1995)
One Handed Histories: The Erotic-Politics of Gay Male Video Pornography
. Harrington Park Press, New York.
Kendall, Christopher N. (2004)
Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination
. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver.
Kendall, Christopher N. (2004) ‘Gay Male Pornography and Sexual Violence: A Sex Equality Perspective on Gay Male Rape and Partner Abuse’
McGill Law Journal
49 (4) pp. 877–923.
Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v Canada (Minister of Justice)
, [2000] 2 SCR 1120.
R v Butler
. [1992] 1 SCR 452 (SCC).
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits (January 1990) Exhibit number 49,
MACII 19: A Drummer Super Publication
, Volume 19, published by Desmotis Publishers, USA (no longer in existence).
Little Sister Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 192, Film:
Headlights and Hard Bodies
, A Zeus Video Production.
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 200,
Sex Stop: True Revelations and Strange Happenings From Wheeler, Volume 3
.
Little Sister Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 216,
Mr SM 65
.
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits (1989) Exhibit number 197,
Bear: Masculinity Without the Trappings
, Issue 9, published by COA Publishers, USA (no longer in existence).
Little Sister Trial Exhibits (1990) Exhibit number 48,
Dungeon Master: The Male SM Publication
, No. 39, published by Desmotis Publishers, USA (no longer in existence).
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 262,
Oriental Guys
, Issue 4, Spring 1989 at 10.
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 6,
Oriental Guys
, Issue 6, Spring 1990 at 10.
MacKinnon, Catharine (1989)
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
. Harvard University Press, Boston.
Men Against Rape and Pornography,
Looking at Gay Porn
(1993), available from MARAP, PO Box 8181, Pittsburgh, PA 1517.
Willcox, William (1995) ‘That Old Time Religion’
Manscape Magazine
10 (11) pp. 15–18.
___________________________
1
BA(Hons), LLB (Queen’s); LLM, SJD (Michigan); Barrister, John Toohey Chambers: Perth, Western Australia. The writing that appears in this paper first appeared in an expanded version in the author’s book on the harms of gay male pornography. See Christopher N. Kendall (2004)
Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination
.
2
Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v Canada (Minister of Justice)
, [2000] 2 SCR 1120; see <
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2000/2000scc69/2000scc69.htm
> to access details of this case.
3
R v Butler
. [1992] 1 SCR 452 (SCC).
4
William Willcox, ‘That Old Time Religion’ (1995) 10:11
Manscape Magazine
at 15–18.
5
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 49,
MACII 19: A Drummer Super Publication
, Volume 19, January 1990.
6
Ibid. at 24.
7
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 197,
Bear: Masculinity Without the Trappings
, Issue 9, 1989.
8
Ibid.
9
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 262,
Oriental Guys
, Issue 4, Spring 1989, p. 10.
10
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 6,
Oriental Guys
, Issue 6, Spring 1990, p. 10.
11
Oriental Guys
, above note 10.
12
Little Sisters Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 200,
Sex Stop: True Revelations and Strange Happenings From Wheeler, Volume 3
.
13
Ibid.
14
Little Sister Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 48,
Dungeon Master: The Male SM Publication
, No. 39.
15
Little Sister Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 216,
Mr SM 65
.
16
Little Sister Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 192, Film:
Headlights and Hard Bodies
.
17
Little Sister Trial Exhibits, Exhibit number 49,
MACII 19: A Drummer Super Publication.
18
Men Against Rape and Pornography,
Looking at Gay Porn
(1993).
19
See generally, Christopher Kendall (2004) ‘Gay Male Pornography and Sexual Violence: A Sex Equality Perspective on Gay Male Rape and Partner Abuse’.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Pornography and Animals
Some things are incomprehensible. Why would anyone derive sexual pleasure from seeing a video of scantily clad women in high heels squashing, stomping, and torturing small animals (including puppies and kittens) who squeal in horror as they die? How could that be ‘sexual’ in any way where the word makes sense? Perhaps just as incomprehensible is the far larger number of people who insist that such videos are, or can be, ‘art’, or are examples of freedom of expression which must be defended even if, and perhaps especially if, we personally do not like the content.
These are snuff videos.
1
But how, one might ask, can anyone find this ‘sexy’. There is a wide body of feminist literature over the past 30 years that answers this question in detail. I merely wish to make some common-sense observations. Such as the fact that we go to zoos, and rodeos and circuses where we see animals exploited in ways that are not as obvious as in snuff videos. We may not find sexual pleasure in watching these animals forced to behave in ways that are completely unnatural, but something about the total control over them appeals to us. Or we would not attend such spectacles. (As people become more aware of the harm to the animals, attendance is falling off, I am happy to say.)
Some men obviously take pleasure, sexual pleasure, in control, sadistic control. If they cannot exercise it themselves, they want to see other men exercise it. Pornography involving animals satisfies both the urge to see women as animals, and to see animals as under the control of a dominating male. Some males wish to see both suffer. This is true even when there is a cover, for example pretending that the woman or the animal
likes
the suffering or in some sense
deserves
it. This is also behind the inexplicable suggestion that human/animal sex is consensual, that the animal chooses to have sex with the human and enjoys it. Again, male fantasy is at work. We see this in the whole genre of ‘incest’ or intra-familial child sexual abuse pornography where grown men rape young girls (or young boys) and insist that the children enjoy it. They have ‘chosen’ to have sex with these men. Some animal rights activists, notably Peter Singer, are on record as saying that there are some animals who freely ‘choose’ (or at least are not forced) to have sex with humans. But a moment’s reflection reveals that animals cannot make such a free choice, any more than can a child. The very words ‘free choice’ lose all meaning when we apply them in such situations. In law, but also in common sense, we recognize that a child is
not
free to make any such decision, because children cannot be expected to foresee all the ramifications of such an act, including physical, emotional, mental and social harm, a sexually transmitted disease, or even, for older children, pregnancy.
2
And of course, needless to say, the very power imbalance makes ‘no’ often impossible. The animal in question, of course, is even less able to understand the consequences of the act. Here is what Peter Singer wrote (Singer, 2001):
Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in a barren wire cage so
small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.) But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop.
The comparison is actually not a good one: yes, the way chickens are generally kept for eggs is cruel (which is why I am a vegan). But the people who practice this are often not aware of the cruelty involved (and certainly the vast majority of people who eat eggs do not recognize how terrible the conditions are for the vast majority (99%) of hens who lay eggs. People are not
deliberately
looking for a way to cause suffering. In the case of sex with hens, on the contrary, the whole point is to cause the maximum amount of suffering, culminating in death. It is the death and the agony that are the source of the male’s pleasure. Singer should not simply omit this important distinction. Moreover, to say that what happens between a dog and a person is ‘mutually satisfying’ is to degrade the use of the word mutual. Something is mutual only if it is consensual, and sex between humans and animals can never be consensual, because animals cannot consent. Singer also misunderstands the gesture of the dog: it only appears to be sexual; in actual fact, dogs engage in mounting behavior in order to test or display dominance. Much as I admire Peter Singer for his groundbreaking work on animal rights, his views on this topic (and I might add, on human euthanasia and infanticide for babies with disabilities) are open to serious criticism.
Just how common are crush (or squish, as they are also called) videos? In the USA, they are still, for the moment at least, common. Alas, so called ‘soft’ crush videos using invertebrates is legal, protected under the First Amendment as ‘free speech’. It is a shadowy world, similar to the world of snuff videos where hard information is difficult to find. A Humane Society investigation found that ‘customers’ can request a video over the Internet with a specific type of animal and a specific torture, and the video will be sent with 48 hours.
I had presumed it was a world inhabited by the dregs of society. That assumption may not be justified. Consider the fact that these videos have influenced ‘higher’ art. Many artists in England, America and Australia, have found their art to be highly appreciated when it involves the suffering of a living animal. A notorious example is the British artist Damien Hirst, the most celebrated of the ‘Young British Artists’ and Britain’s richest living artist. Many of his installations involve animals:
Away from the Flock
, consists of a dead sheep in a glass tank full of formaldehyde, and
Mother and Child Divided
, consists of a
mother cow and a calf sliced in half in a glass tank of formaldehyde (it won the prestigious Turner Prize).
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
consists of a shark in a vitrine, preserved in formaldehyde. Commissioned in 1991, the piece was sold in 2004 for $12 million to an American art collector who donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. It is considered the iconic work of art of Britart. The Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, in a well-deserved attack on his work, called Hirst’s shark the world’s most over-rated marine organism.
More examples abound. In 2000, the Chilean artist Marco Evaristti exhibited at the Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark. The display, entitled
Helena
, featured 10 blenders containing goldfish. Evaristti said that he wanted people “to do battle with their conscience” (why there would be a battle is not explained) so visitors to the exhibition were invited to turn on the blenders.
3
(As if any invitation had to be accepted.) How many is not clear, but some people liquidized the fish. Singer might claim this is no worse than eating fish for dinner, but he is wrong. It
is
worse, because it is deliberate cruelty masquerading as high art. (Fish were also part of an installation by the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles at the Tate Modern, where many of them died during the 13-week-long exhibition.)
Victorian artist, Ivan Durrant, is enjoying a retrospective of his work in Melbourne under the title ‘Paddock to Plate’ at the Monash Art Gallery. He is best known for having butchered a cow and left it on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne.
In 2008, Parisian artist, Adel Abdessened, opened an exhibit called ‘Don’t Trust Me’. Among other things, the show included something that has been correctly described as a snuff film using animals. The ‘art’ consisted of six video screens showing a loop of various animals being beaten to death with a sledgehammer. The animals included a pig, goat, horse, sheep, and ox. The point?
All of these artists claim that they are trying to hold up a mirror to society, basically saying: ‘You are all hypocrites. Look at what you do to animals’. But of course the problem is that they are doing exactly that, even as they say it. The hypocrisy belongs as much to the artist as to the society. And what about the gallery or museum that condones the exhibit, or the viewer who stands in front of the piece? None of these artists (Durrant is a wealthy farmer who owns a bull ranch) is doing this as an animal rights activist; rather the artist very much participates in the society he supposedly denounces.
If you put ‘bestiality porn’ into Google, you do not get Websites where such matters are discussed. You get hundreds and hundreds of sites containing the actual stuff. I confess I did not go to them to see exactly what they offered. It was enough to see the phrase ‘includes cruel fucking’ to know that what they offered would make me ill. (I made the same confession when I wrote a book about the feelings of farm animals: I could not bring myself to visit a slaughterhouse – but others have done it for me.)
However, Abigail Bray alerted me to a new trend, ‘pet love’ as some call it, a lucrative porn genre. One company, run by Doctor X and an animal sex prostitute ‘Stray’, sells 200–400 DVDs through their Website every day. New subscribers join daily; the majority are aged between 18 and 45. The owners have moved from the UK to a European country where they say “you can freely buy animal porn in shops and from news-stands … Pet love videos are routinely in the top three bestselling DVDs at sex shops” where expos screen “doggy sex shows on giant TVs” and the government is “very helpful with the business side of things.” University educated, Doctor X decided to market porn videos of women with dogs as a cool, sexually self-empowering practice for transgressive liberated women. His business partner, Stray, also frames ‘sex’ with dogs with post-feminist sexual self-empowerment rhetoric: “Getting fucked by dogs allows me to take charge of my own sexuality. I don’t have to rely on a man.” Stray says that it was reading pornographic bestiality fantasies by the libertarian writer, Nancy Friday, that encouraged her to explore bestiality. The online ‘pet love’ community normalizes her abuse of dogs.
Suddenly information was available, chat rooms, forums … Pet love sites would frequently get closed down, but I learned to recognise insider lingo – plus, as a single woman into pet love, I was a popular community member and fellow enthusiasts would ensure I was kept in the loop! Posts on an internet group drew my attention to one of Doctor X’s websites, which had been running for three years, and I thought it really spoke to women. It was classy and upmarket, not degrading … Money isn’t my main motivation, but I earn a good amount of cash too, and no-one takes a bigger cut than me from the productions I star in.
Every aspect of what I do is liberating and empowering
(emphasis added).
Stray also argues that Peter Singer’s argument validated her bestiality prostitution especially as the president of the animal group PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, endorsed his ‘ethics,’ although Newkirk later retracted the endorsement.
4
Pornography, in all its many variations, is the attempt to take away the
personhood or subjective identity of whatever is depicted. So it is not surprising that it is primarily used against women. Perhaps the first us/them in history consists of men feeling different and superior to women. Nor is it surprising that it would then pass over to animals: possibly the second us/them in history consists of men and women feeling different and superior to animals. Common cause should be the default position of feminists and animal rights activists; we are all fighting for the same thing: dignity and the abrogation of cruelty. Pornography is violence against women, children, animals, and all those who are falsely believed to have no claim to a soul. We are all, as the philosopher, Tom Regan, reminds us, the subject of a life.
Bibliography
Animal Rights (2005) ‘PETA and bestiality Round 2’, <
http://www.animalrights.net/2005/peta-and-bestiality-round-2/
>.
Arts Law (2003) ‘Animal Rights and Artistic Freedom’, <
http://www.artslaw.com.au/articles/entry/animal-rights-and-artistic-freedom/
>.
Singer, Peter (2001) ‘Heavy Petting’ (
Nerve
, 2001) and <
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/2001----.htm
>.
Tankard Reist, Melinda (2011) ‘Porn masquerading as an anti-animal cruelty video’, <
http://melindatankardreist.com/2011/02/porn-masquerading-as-an-anti-animal-cruelty-video/
>.
___________________________
1
They are similar to those far more dangerous, illegal and hard to find snuff films of women being killed for sexual pleasure of the person who watches the film. Just a rumor, some will say. Others call it an urban myth. But I have no reason to doubt that such films exist, are produced by killing real women and are watched by men (pretty much exclusively the audience for such films) from all walks of life. Much like incest, this is not something that happens only in the poorest of neighborhoods. Businessmen, lawyers, doctors, college professors and other elite members of society throughout the Western world pay to see these films in private showings. People who say there are no such things are being willfully blind. Even the daily news brings proof that they exist. Even as I write these lines the commander of Canada’s largest Air Force base, Colonel Russell Williams, who once flew prime ministers and served as a pilot to the Queen during a 2005 visit, pleaded guilty to 2 first-degree murder charges, 2 sexual assaults and 82 breaking-and-entering charges. Prosecutors warned the court that details of the killings were horrific before explaining how Williams bound, beat, raped, photographed, videotaped and asphyxiated Marie Comeau, a 38-year-old corporal, and Jessica Lloyd, 27. No mention is made of the purpose of the videotapes, but it is beyond doubt that such ‘movies’ are made-for-profit films and can be ordered on command, just as can animal crush videos.