Middle-Aged Women Are Writing Your Porn
During one of my boredom-fueled downward spirals through Wikipedia the other night, I came across the article for “slash” : fan fiction (aka amateur creative writing) that casts major characters(Buffy, Harry Potter, the members of Fall Out Boy) in gay entanglements.
Though “slash” seems to be the sort of thing that might be furtively written by horny and bespectacled boys, Wikipedia tells a startlingly different story: “According to polls, most of the slash fandom is made up of heterosexual women with a college degree..”
What. the. hell.
Why are educated and middle-aged women fantasizing about male homosexuality? Is this a reversal of straight men and their time-honored obsession with lesbian sex(cf: Courbet’s hilariously mis-named 1866 painting The Sleepers or, more recently, the no doubt soon-to-be-canonical Lez-Stravaganza #3)?
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Back in the day when I young and thought I was edgy, I worked part-time night shift in an “adult bookstore”. Being next to a gay bar, we sold a lot of gay porn and various accessories. But at our location the biggest market for gay porn was straight women. After actually watching it, I can see why.
Straight porn almost completely markets to straight (mostly white) men. It upholds every sterotype in the book. It shows boorish, unattractive men with overly-constructed women made up to look as close to teenage as possible. It’s version of sexy is a race to the bottom in think up new ways to portray women in humiliating and degrading positions.
In gay porn almost every man, pitcher or catcher, is good-looking. The sex is hardly ever truly degrading. Even in the BDSM videos there’s clearly an equal playing field in its roleplay. And it just looks like they’re having fun which is the sexiest of all.
My theory is that most college-educated straight women grew up never seeing heterosexual sexual images that were truly equal. The only thing out there in the adult world that even approaches that is gay porn so they use it as a framework to express sexual feelings.
Hmm…when you say the biggest market you actually mean that women purchased the bulk of your gay porn? I think I agree with you about equality in gay porn, although there are certainly counterexamples to be found, especially in a niche markets that thrive on perceived inequalities and reversals of power: think the most un-PC of interracial porn or porn that works along class lines(horny mechanics taking it out on spoiled trust fund boys) or daddy/twink scenarios.
As a middle-aged woman who is an occasional author and consumer of gay porn (though not slash), I thought I should weigh in. I’ve mused quite a bit about how I wound up in this strange club (I don’t like clubs and was aghast to find myself in one) and offer my reasons here, if anyone cares.
1) What swandiver said. The first image that comes to mind when I think of straight porn is of a woman with a painfully large dick stuffed in her mouth rolling her eyes upward with an exaggerated look of ecstasy as though gagging were the supreme turn-on. Do straight men really get turned on by that look?
2) Straight women are interested in looking at cocks. Gay porn has more of them.
3) For some reason I never worry about the boys being exploited when I see gay porn. I believe them when they look like they’re having fun. When I see a woman behaving similarly I still feel like she’s a pawn in a man’s game. This might be a curious double standard on my part.
4) Personal reasons: I was molested repeatedly as a child by my older adolescent brother (like most human interactions, it’s complicated). One of the things I was left with was an abiding fascination with penises. I’ll admit it: cock envy. It evidently gave him a great deal of satisfaction and I felt totally ripped off that I didn’t have one. There, I said it.
And yes, I have a master’s degree.
upallnight, what’s really interesting is that you have somehow turned hatred for the brother into cock envy which is awesome! I’m a middle -aged male and appreciated the perspective.
I think swandiver and upallnight are right — here’s an interesting essay on the subject, too: http://www.helenish.net/dominatrix.shtml
Her stories (strangely, especially the nsync ones — honestly) are great, too —
(I found your blog via Billy Collins, but the way. Ha!)
Ha, indeed! I wonder what Mr. Collins would have to say about his writing being in such proximity to such smut!
P.S. I like the essay.
I’ll admit it, I write a lot of slash. Reams of it. Entire books of it. And I read even more than that. And oddly, I’m a college educated lesbian, so I’m not a consumer of more traditional gay porn. So, why do I do it? First and foremost, I find it sexy. I like the idea of love overcoming social barriers, and homophobia is a serious barrier to put up in front of my characters. By having my men overcome that barrier, I’m indulging in a fantasy where people are reasonable and respectful of others’ sexual choices. So, you may ask why I don’t write two women. First, I sometimes do. But the simple fact is that most female porn has been so co-opted by male images that I have trouble enjoying it.