Peggy Lee’s I’m a Woman was playing on the stereo. In neurotically declarative tones, she busted out about her supernatural powers as a woman. Starching shirts, cooking grits, kissing men and giving them the shivering fits…
And she – the woman- for reasons now that cannot be solely attributed to red wine and whisky, took the last days of her young body and danced, naked, awkwardly, like a Fantasia broom, being lifted and shifted by something else.
A man sat with a double fistful of himself and watched her like a live news broadcast. Horrified, enthralled. Watched her fight like a bruiser against a landscape of internet pornography so dense, so prolific, so opportune, that furling through it was like falling, for years, through a rain-forest canopy. How impotent of her to even try! “Look over here! Look over here!” With a waist too wide and breasts sinking quickly like finger tips shifting into sand. But then again, there is no waist too small or set of breasts too perky for the male voyeur…
Though I do worry in heterosexual relationships about ‘nudes’ replacing porn, and how women who do not want their partners to watch porn feel pressured to send nude photographs of themselves, and how we as anti-porn feminists should feel about that.
Sarah
How would she explain her complicity in being treated like a hyper sexed mule-cum-street performer? But then, how can we talk, think or deliberate on pornography at all when we, former or current, girlfriends, wives, lovers (there is a word that requires some explanation) are either to be taken as objects that have everything to do with pornography, or nothing to do with it at all? And a masculinist assumption that the extent to which the health or hindrance of porn, as it relates to us mere women, is theirs to delineate?
We are either facets of the male, sexual playscape, within which we must polish ourselves ruggedly and thoroughly – disavowing any idea of our own pleasure or comfort – so that we fit it. Or indeed we are utterly distinct from it – and thus rendered asexual. These are our choices.
He said black women were the best (to watch in porn) because they’re lower than low and disgusting and he’d never shag one, they are disgusting.
Jemima
The propaganda sold to us, in the latter case, is that we are not bendy bitches fit for a quick jizz, but partners in true love. That our beloveds turn off their steamy screens plastered with endless gigs of sexual theatre – so carivelesque as to be, at best, a sick joke – and become Mr Darcys. Citizens of open, equitable sexual exchange.
And indeed almost all men (because almost all men use internet pornography) tell us that they are capable of this; even that it is an innate part of their being. To treat or enjoy the busting of ‘lesser’ women as fucking roughage, but to turn to their lady mates with respect and admiration. It is, I am afraid, a false deal, that too many women fall for.
I remember having intercourse and he started saying, “you like it rough, don’t you….huh?” and he grabbed my hair. I looked at him incredulously. No, please no. He let go of my hair, and continued saying, “you’re a woman you like to be called bitch.You are a slut” and he’s having intercourse. And, my heart is dying.
Cheryl
One boyfriend of mine, when I cried at feeling ugly compared to his internet playmates – webcam girls, porn stars – said, “It is not that you are not good enough to be them, but you are too good to be them!” Of course, what he meant in the end, was that I did not fit the description of a perfectly toned body, matched with an obsessive interest in self manicuring, so I had to be found another use. Domesticity.
How do we get tricked in to this?
I knew he looked at porn and he spent a lot of time at the start of our relationship recounting previous sexual exploits to me and pointing out other women he fancied. I hated it but the general advice to women in this situation is its your low self esteem that is the problem.
Jo
Recently I spent some time talking with women about their experiences with porn addicted men. Of course, the notion of porn addiction itself is troubling, because it presumes to disentangle men who have a negative relationship with internet pornography away from those who have a neutral, or even positive one. A differentiation which cannot be cleanly made.
One of the salient things I encountered with the women I spoke to, was the comparable trajectory of their narratives; the dynamic of their relationships. The women, of different ages from different places, began their relationships by thrusting themselves full hearted into the fantasies of their boyfriends or husbands, acting out actions adopted from video pornography; actions designed to have a visual, not a sensual effect. Or, indeed, began self alteration after noticing the stark differences between their own bodies and physicality, with the women in porn films.
It made me think about how he must look at and talk about women when he was with his mates or not with me. What he was thinking when he was out with me and looking at other women which he did a lot. Pathetically I tried to change myself to try to be more like he seemed to want. He had lots of pictures of girls with tattoos so I got more tattoos. Against all my principles I shaved my pubes off. He told me that ” red is the horniest hair colour” so I briefly died my hair red which I hated and he didn’t even seem to notice. I did hold back from getting piercings which he was always trying to persuade me to get done . He had lots of pics of girls with piercings and an ex of his who had been 18 he’d been 40 had pierced nipples and labia which he loved. I said I’m me stop trying to turn me into her. He just didn’t get it. My self esteem about my looks never very good anyway was now fucked. No matter what I did I never felt good enough, attractive enough, sexy enough to compete with a deluge of porn and tales of stunning young exes.
Jo
I’ve suffered with bloody anorexia for years, he has sparked many anorexic episodes by making me feel that I can’t match up.
Jemima
Of course, men often wish to avoid being seen as unkind – despite their attitudes – and attempt to soothe such anxieties. If for no other reason than to enable a maintenance of their cake’and’eat it; their sugar cave of porn and prostitution and their comforting usage of a female, domestic house pet. Whose purpose is to keep them from their own worst excesses.
But the lines are never clearly drawn; the sex act nonetheless becomes a site of inadequacy, dissatisfaction and eventual hostility. Despite his attempt to make you his mother he can forever cuddle and cleave to, as though he were still a boy, and his porn’gal his teenage kicks, your unwillingness to take ass-to-mouth, or swallow his cum, lead him to resent you all the same. Perhaps his haranguing you to play sexy circus monkey is all a part of his great swizz; his long term plan to forgive himself when he shuts you out of his attractions entirely, when he begins making lusty assaults on his work colleagues or indeed, shows up, fist full of dollars, at the brothel door.
Indeed women’s intelligence lead them to an ineluctable logic: if their male partners compare their unwillingness to act out the performances they enjoy consuming in porn films, then why should we imagine they are blind to the bodies they consume in porn films? Or indeed, the very fact that sexuality becomes itself a modus for consuming bodies in its entirety. And that you, therefore, become another such body, but one that has the raw cheek to be imperfect, questioning. Female, thus inherently problematic, but with the added puke of being a particularly underwhelming specimen. There is no cake and eat it in the end; there is no perfect whore or perfect wife.
Over 8000 pics of naked woman. He’d also set up a tumblr page to share these pics with others. I sat on it for a couple of days then asked him about it. The best I ever got from him was ” I got a bit carried away . ” I asked him to stop and he said he would and told me to delete the pictures. Oh course I deleted them. Then restored them. Then sat there for hours watching them on slideshow torturing myself trying to see what he wanted which basically appeared to be not me. I’m 48 for fucks sake.
Jo
So we give up the ghost. The drunken dances, the bad porn moves, the overpriced lace tat. Instead of traipsing through male sexual fantasy, only to be found wanting – as though we are all ladies of heft trying to keep up in a marathon wherein the male referees keep shifting the finishing line further away – we cave in. We asexualize. We submit to domesticity and shoulder shruggery.
When I hear men say their wives have just ‘given up’ on sex, as though it were an inevitable outcome of being female, I wonder how many times his eyes have flickered over a screen at an 18 year old more-or-less girl being gangbanged, and how many times she has stared at her body in the mirror, and condemned herself. I wonder how many times she has tried to model some lacy confection only to have him think – and bare it on his eyes – “If only she were such and such a porn star, that trashy piece of cheap, factory lace would have been worth an outing.” How many times she has agonized over bowls of dressing-less salad only to have the scales sit stubbornly against her, or even if she does manage to starve herself back in the direction of his sexual affections, her skin stays too loose, her face too old, her pubis, even her vulva remains untrimmed.
Indeed, if one is to remain sexually active, one is encumbered with the images of women – fat, old, cheap poor – being utilized as some nasty joke in a sexualised freak show. Better to just zip up your own sexuality and put it to the back of the wardrobe, with the jeans that don’t fit you anymore, and the romantic, sexual aspirations you used to have, that now seem foolhardy and earnest. Or, of course, there is escape. If it can be mustered.
I’ve been celibate ever since Ralph. I married myself. I am monogamous with myself, I’m always available. And, I have done self-pleasuring, a lot of masturbation.
Cheryl
Men will never adopt the mea culpa position, they will never let you know that they have not love for you (and certainly not respect as equals) but an ideal use for you as extensions of, or alternatives to, their sexual diet.
I feel like young feminists are often gaslit by their boyfriends into watching porn so they can be ‘the cool girl.’
Sarah
Hence the insistence on vagueness, obfuscation. Less around the actions they wish you to imitate, or their general unhappiness with their sexual ‘lot’, but on how those feelings relate to you, to us, as women. The dogged insistence that their ritualised objectifications and comparisons do not extend to you, or do not affect them.
Indeed, it is how some women are able to convince themselves that this bleak, sexual topography is OK, because either they have been convinced, or are convincing themselves, they are winning in it. If their sexual lives and porn lives are blurred, then they are as sexy or satiating as any other female operative within that world. Or if porn is kept distinct, and they and their husbands tacitly accept a condition of asexuality, or worse, sexual perfunctoriness, then they have triumphed by being a higher variety of woman. Perhaps not worthy of the attentions of his cock, but at least his heart.
Porn has told me I am wrong and it is right. It’s drained all the desire out of me and replaced it with pure anger.
Jemima
How sharp and shoddy would it be to learn that in fact, you have neither. That no amount of dancing naked or turning your head in your prudish gown will elevate you to his status, as he imagines it, whether he wishes to own to it or not. He is making the rules, the game is dependent upon your inhumanity, and therefore, it is one that you cannot win.
