There are some film theorists out there who have taken it upon themselves to examine pornography as a film genre just like any other, and they do so without any examination of the organized crime behind so much of it, whether or not it is inherently dangerous to women and children, contributing to STI outbreaks, or destroying the interactions between men and women. They leave those questions for the sociologists and to some degree I think that’s fine, there are some very good reasons to study the history of pornography (and how it has contributed to the development of film and video in the first place), and there was an era where there were actually feature-length narrative films with actual storylines that weren’t really any worse than the average movie, they just occasionally broke out into a sex act, much like a musical.
I am not trying to legitimize pornography, I believe it should be outlawed, but I have learned a lot from studying its history. The major problem with pornography today is that it’s everywhere. It’s online and anyone can access it at any time at a moment’s notice, and furthermore, anyone can produce it. Any shitty boyfriend can coerce his girlfriend or just take video of her in her sleep or hide a camera and upload it to a tube site. If the only pornography in the world was a feature-length musical-style film you had to see in a public theater, the world would likely be a different place with regard to trans shit. I still wouldn’t support it, because among other things, it would still contribute to fetishism.
To return to the point, the specific film theorist in question is Linda Williams, and the theory up for discussion comes from her book,
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible". It’s a fascinating book, and to boil down the thesis, pornography is about what’s visible, and the interior of the female sex organ is not visible, nor is the female orgasm (she wrote this before “squirting” became a common in popular culture and pornography, and porn tube sites, of course). The primary viewer of pornography is male, so it’s all meant to appeal to them, and they want to
see it, and when it comes to the female organ and orgasm, they can’t. They can, however, see the whole entire dick and the semen that comes out of it as a definite sign of maximum pleasure: orgasm. Because there needs to be some kind of conclusion to the sex act and satisfaction for the men who desire to see the women in the pornography, the focus becomes the
male orgasm, but only as a replacement for the female orgasm. Because the female “gem” is the invisible god being worshiped, the primal male brain needs to put his energy and focus and expectations onto an impotent fetish object: the “money shot.” Linda Williams digs deep into the anthropological study of “fetish” objects in primitive cultures and its application here. This book really has helped shaped my framework of understanding what’s happening in larger culture today.
I recently read the first few chapters of Douglas Murray’s
Madness of Crowds and I can’t recall the citation or the exact quote, but he mentions that gay men have a different relationship to one another than men do to women because men already know all about what’s “inside” the other man, to paraphrase. It was a library book so I can’t look it up but it reminded me a lot of the fetishization of the so-called money shot. I wish I could provide a clearer example, but it all makes a lot of sense to me.
So now you have women who have been exposed to male-gaze-infused pornography since they were in middle school, sometimes even younger, and they have learned to prioritize and fetishize the male orgasm instead of being interested in their own. I’m sure there are other factors to pooning and other avenues to the same basic fetish, but whenever I see one of these sad little girls talk about wanting to be The One Who Cums, I get the feeling they’re identifying with an anonymous male porn actor’s POV more than their own, and they’re putting all their energy and focus and expectations onto an impotent fetish object, transition.
That’s all I had to say, I appreciate your time.