Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (33 page)

For many lesbian separatist feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys, the use of dildos in lesbian sex is a reinscription of a patriarchal model of what sex constitutes; it reaffirms that for sex to take place, one partner has to penetrate, the other must be penetrated. Pro-dildo feminists have countered that there is a radical distinction between the
phallus
and the
penis
, and indeed there are several models of dildo that resemble ears of corn or the figure of the goddess instead of the anatomical penis. This defense of the dildo is not watertight, though, because the dildo has an indexical relationship to the anatomical penis; even as an ear of corn or a figure of the goddess, the dildo points to the absent penis. The homophobic mind can construe the very fact that such shapes are pleasurable to the female sexual anatomy as “proof” that vaginas are designed only for receiving penises, which would thus confirm, once again, the originality of heterosexuality and the inferiority of lesbianism as its replacement.We have seen that for Jenefsky and Miller anything that imitates heterosexuality in
Penthouse
casts lesbianism as derivative and inferior.Therefore, using the same axioms, it is entirely possible to argue that the deployment of dildos in girl– girl pictorials would constitute a form of heterosexism.Thus, penetration or no penetration, for Jenefsky and Miller the heterosexual male consumer of girl–girl pornography is
always
guilty of invading and “colonializing” a hitherto unsullied lesbian space.

Lesbian Utopias and Heterosexual Space Invaders

What we have examined so far points to a deeper question at the heart of the anxieties surrounding heterosexual men and girl–girl pornography. That is, how are we to understand the relationship between lesbians, understood as oppressed by a system of sexual and gender norms, and heterosexual men, understood as the beneficiaries of that system?

As Annamarie Jagose has made clear, in the past feminist theorists have found the project of conceptually distancing lesbianism from heterosexuality politically necessary.
⁷
They have articulated several theories that place lesbianism as an identity in one of several spaces
outside
that system of sexual and gender norms. Monique Wittig’s claim that “Lesbians are not women”
⁸
is exemplary in this regard, for it works on two levels. It relies on an understanding that the term “woman” does not make sense unless that term is placed inside a social context of presumed heterosexuality. It also argues that the lesbian, as a woman who is not heterosexual, confounds that context’s logic to the point that the lesbian really cannot be understood as a woman as such.The lesbian is therefore outside of that system.

Formulations of the lesbian such as Wittig’s thus draw a distinction between the lesbian herself and the networks of patriarchal power that are understood to oppress her.They therefore partake in what the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault has termed “the repressive hypothesis”
⁹
– the notion that in the realm of sexuality human beings experience power from the outside, in the form of prescriptions, regulations, and exclusions. Foucault takes pains in his
History of Sexuality
to spell out the fact that he does not deny the everyday reality of certain forms of oppression.Yet, in the Foucauldian schema, power is not merely something that one person uses against another person; instead, it is relational, existing between subjects and the institutions that govern them, and radically
productive
. Foucault’s point is that power does not always repress; in fact, it
creates
new identities, especially sexual identities.Thus, although medical and psychiatric institutions of the late nineteenth century spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to understand and cure the pathology known as “inversion” or “homo-sexuality,” the proliferation of knowledge about this pathology allowed people who were attracted to members of their own sex to understand that they were not alone.They now had a name, were recognized as a unique subspecies of the human race, and could therefore band together and work for political change.

The consequences of this understanding of power are significant for theorists of lesbianism, for if it is the case that power structures are not merely oppressive but also enabling, then it logically follows that the lesbian is a product of the very systems of patriarchy that theorists such as Wittig believe she exceeds. Such an understanding of the complex and enabling interrelations between lesbianism and the seemingly repressive heterosexual norms that produce it cuts to the heart of the question of heterosexual men consuming girl–girl pornography. For if it is the case that lesbianism as an identity cannot be said to escape heterosexist power systems, then we must ask why it is that so many people, gay and straight, have such an emotional investment in declaring this to be the case. Such an understanding produces an intriguing new possibility for understanding why heterosexual men consume girl–girl pornography: that instead of seeking to invade and colonize a female-only space, the heterosexual reader of
Penthouse
might seek instead to create an erotic illusion of a pure female-only space by disavowing the links between lesbianism and his own social world. If this is the case, then his pleasure is not one of
being present
at the scene of girl–girl sex, but rather one of
being absent
.

A Crazy Little Thing Called
Jouissance

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his anglophone interpreters provide us with two important (and related) conceptual tools to understand how this type of pleasure might work: “projective identification”
¹⁰
and
jouissance
. One way to introduce these terms is to think about what happens when the average heterosexual man consumes pornography. A received psychoanalytic argument states that the heterosexual male consumer of pornography identifies
with
the man (or men) in the scene as the bearer-of-the-phallus.That is to say, the viewer imagines that he
is
the man in the scene: his pleasure derives from imagining that the women in the scene are having sex with him. (Consider here the fact that men in pornography are frequently near-anonymous, often faceless.)

The problem with such a model begins when we note that in order to identify with the male performer as
subject
, the male viewer of heterosexual pornography must, in fact, look at an actual penis. In porn, men can partake in the pleasures of curious examination of another man’s penis, as long as a woman is present.The male performer is therefore just as much an object of the consumer’s gaze as the woman (or women). This by no means renders the consumer homosexual, for heterosexual pornography remains obsessed with visually presenting female genitals as a means of exploring sexual difference. But just as the male performer is both subject and object for the consumer, so too is the female starlet (or starlets) both the object of the consumer’s voyeuristic gaze but also a subject with which the male viewer can identify. In this form of projective identification, “the male viewer does not merge with the female on the screen . . . rather, he projects his own feminine traits of passivity and sexual urges onto the body of the woman as ‘other.’ Only then is the spectator free to desire the very qualities he himself has expelled.”
¹¹

This idea of more complex mechanisms of identification challenges Jenefsky and Miller’s argument. If it is not the case that the consumer of heterosexual pornography merely identifies with the male performer and objectifies the woman or women, then it cannot be the case that when the same consumer looks at images of two women having sex he objectifies the women and imagines himself outside the scene, ready to enter when necessary. Instead, the women would be both subjects and objects of the consumer’s gaze.This profoundly ambivalent process of identification appears in the interviews conducted by David Loftus in
Watching Sex
. In this book, Loftus interviews over 100 self-professed consumers of pornography, including three who derive especial pleasure from girl–girl pornography.These men describe their pleasure in ways that suggest that they, on some level, identify with the women in girl–girl pornography.
¹²
Here, pleasure is not tied to colonizing women’s spaces, but in the dissolution of heterosexual masculinity.

Francophone psychoanalysts and theorists distinguish between two types of sexual pleasure:
plaisir
, usually rendered in English as “pleasure,” and
jouissance
, sometimes rendered as “bliss,” but often left in the original French.
¹³
Plaisir
is connected to ego-formation and contentment: it is that form of sexual pleasure that gives comfort and helps define the self as a self separate from others.
Jouissance
, on the other hand, is a more radical form of pleasure: it is a pleasure in which the integrated ego is destabilized, possibly shattered. Rather than being comforting, it is terrifying, an extreme experience. Naturally, this distinction is political in nature.
Plaisir
is understood as a conservative form of pleasure, whereas
jouissance
is understood as radical. Importantly, though, the distinction is gendered, with
jouissance
understood as a decidedly feminine form of pleasure. Indeed, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, in their collection
New French Feminisms
, claim that the word
jouissance
represents “that intense, rapturous pleasure that women know and men fear.”
¹⁴
But if
jouissance
is the form of self-shattering pleasure that men fear and women know, it can at least be said that the consumer of girl– girl pornography wants to know what the women know. He has a libidinal investment in his own erasure; his pleasure is therefore a form of ego-dissolving
jouissance
.

Conclusion:The Ethics of Heterosexual
Jouissance

Jouissance
has at least one nasty side-effect: as a form of destabilizing pleasure, it cannot itself be made stable. In this way
jouissance
is similar to those logical puzzles that used to leave Socrates and his cohorts in bewilderment: can something be
by definition
destabilizing? Wouldn’t that destabilization therefore extend to its own definition? For Roland Barthes, this means that it is impossible, in principle, to rigorously separate
jouissance
from
plasir
: “there will always be a margin of indistinction; the decision will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete.”
¹⁵
The paradoxical nature of
jouissance
means that it is impossible to make a habit of experiencing
jouissance
. For
jouissance
to become habitual it would have to be tamed, no longer threatening; that is to say, no longer
jouissance
as such. Instead, such a habitual
jouissance
would imperceptibly tip into
plaisir
. It would be a
false jouissance
, one that promises an extreme experience of self-dissolution but delivers mere sexual pleasure.

This, of course, is the situation of the heterosexual consumer of girl– girl pornography. As much as he may want to experience the unknowable pleasure that only a woman can experience – a woman, furthermore, in an elaborate erotic scenario devoid of men – he cannot escape his identity as a heterosexual man. For even if he takes pleasure in removing himself from the picture, after his moment of
jouissance
he will find himself a resolutely heterosexual man, engaging in one of the most heterosexual practices imaginable: masturbating to pornography.

Despite this, we can still argue that heterosexual men’s responses to girl–girl pornography are not exhausted by Jenefsky and Miller’s explanations.There is indeed something curious about heterosexual men consuming girl–girl pornography. Clearly, some men derive a great deal of pleasure from imagining themselves as the erotic conqueror of a pair of lesbians, ready to win them back to heterosexuality. On the other hand, it is equally clear that for some men what is most erotic about girl–girl pornography is their absence from the picture entirely. My point in this chapter has not been to adjudicate between the merits of these two claims, but to demonstrate that they are not mutually incompatible.

There is nothing, therefore, structurally progressive or retrograde about the consumption of girl–girl pornography.This entails that what is most ethically salient about girl–girl pornography has nothing to do with the genders of who is depicted and who watches. Even the most conscientiously non-objectifying,
jouissance
-chasing consumer of girl–girl pornography assumes that he has a right to access women’s bodies, even if only representationally, for sexual pleasure. In this way, the ethical problems raised by girl–girl pornography are no different to those raised by garden-variety heterosexual pornography. Eventually, the male consumer of girl–girl pornography must realize that he has always been inside the scene that he has found so much pleasure in trying to escape.

NOTES

1
Cindy Jenefsky and Diane Helene Miller, “Phallic Intrusion: Girl–Girl Sex in
Penthouse
,”
Women’s Studies International Forum
21, 4 (1998): 376.Throughout this essay I will retain a conceptual distinction between the terms “girl–girl” pornography (that is, images of women having sex with each other designed for consumption by heterosexual men) and “lesbianism,” which will refer not to a type of pornography but to a social and sexual identity.