{"id":11260,"date":"2010-09-27T20:26:58","date_gmt":"2010-09-28T03:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11260"},"modified":"2010-09-27T20:26:58","modified_gmt":"2010-09-28T03:26:58","slug":"fragments-of-evolving-manhood-thinking-about-pornography-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11260","title":{"rendered":"Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Thinking About Pornography 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warning: This post contains a graphic description of a scene from video pornography.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A white woman\u2019s mouth in the act of swallowing a white man\u2019s penis fills the screen of my TV. Almost directly in the center of the picture, the shape of his organ glides back and forth against the inside of her left cheek. Panning back, the camera shows her kneeling on all fours in front of him, her lips engulfing and expelling his genitals as if she were the only movable part of a well-oiled machine. She looks up at him and asks, with a lust-filled and mischievous grin, \u201cDoes that feel good?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou suck a mean cock, Cherry,\u201d he answers, his tone flat, as if he were reading her name out of the phone book.<\/p>\n

In response, she gazes worshipfully at his erection, sucks air hungrily through her teeth, and moans with the pleasure of pleasuring him, with the joy of being able to take him in her mouth; and then the scene changes to a picture of the same woman doing the same thing to a second man. Then the scene changes again, and again, and again, and each time the woman is with a different man, and each time the man shows about as much passion as he would if he were lifting heavy boxes. His erection signifies both his desire and his arousal, but he rarely moves his hips, he makes almost no sound that could be mistaken for an expression of pleasure, and, throughout the oral sex she performs on him, his face remains more or less emotionless.<\/p>\n

From the way the camera is aimed at the point of oral-genital contact, I know that I am supposed to imagine the penis on the screen and the perspective of the lens as mine. I know that my hand is supposed to acquire the shape of the woman\u2019s lips, that the orgasm to which this movie\u2014a compilation called \u201cInside Christy Canyon\u201d\u2014is intended to help me bring myself is supposed to become the orgasm to which she has brought me. Yet neither my pleasure nor the pleasure of the men who stand in with Christy Canyon for me seems to be at the center of what the movie is about. Instead, the film focuses on her, minutely transcribing each of her responses to the sex she is having. She moans, she screams, she gyrates her hips. Her arms and legs flail with pleasure, and when she is fucking, she grabs at her partner to pull him further inside herself. Even when he orgasms, at the moment when his body and his pleasure should logically occupy the movie\u2019s foreground, Christy Canyon almost always dominates the picture, grinding, panting, moaning beneath the ejaculating penis as if it and the pleasure it is supposed to represent were her own. I\u2019m reminded of the stereotypical scenes of idol worshippers working themselves into an ecstasy, hoping vainly to elicit some sign of life from the stone or wooden figure that is their god. In Christy Canyon\u2019s case, however, the worship works. God speaks. The phallus ejaculates.<\/p>\n

Yet if the \u201ccum-shot\u201d is supposed to represent the pinnacle and proof of male pleasure, I find\u2014except for my prior knowledge of the physical fact\u2014little male pleasure in it, and even less pleasure in watching it. A man thrusts into a woman, or a woman takes a man into her body. He exhibits little or no sign of the sexual pleasure, the tension towards orgasm, that must be building in his body, but then, when the \u201cmagic moment\u201d arrives and he pulls out of his partner\u2019s body so we can see that his orgasm is real, he allows himself the further release of a scream or a grunt. Yet I know that I am supposed to identify less with what this man feels physically than with what he does, or with what is done to him. This is the homophobia at the core of most mainstream heterosexual pornography. When he enters Christy Canyon, I am not supposed to imagine his interior experience of that fact; rather, I am supposed to imagine that I have entered her. When she takes him in her mouth, it is not his pleasure that is supposed to arouse me, but rather the fact that she has, metaphorically, done the same to me. Everything sexual this movie wants me to feel, in other words, is directed not towards an identification with the body that is like mine, but into the experience of possessing the filmed image of her body. Our roles, in other words, have reversed. I have become the worshipper who, with the sympathetic magic of my desire, desires to breathe life into the inanimate body of the film that is all I have of her flesh, while she has become the inscrutable object before which I must finally know that I am alone, holding in my hand the proof and the residue of my own mundane humanity.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted on The Poetry in the Politics and the Politics in the Poetry<\/a>–the new name of my blog, which describes more accurately than It’s All Connected where I’d like to take the majority of the writing that I do there. The blog is now the home page of my site, which I am in the process of giving a redesign, since I discovered that the WordPress theme I had been using did not display well on Windows PCs.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warning: This post contains a graphic description of a scene from video pornography. A white woman\u2019s mouth in the act of swallowing a white man\u2019s penis fills the screen of my TV. Almost directly in the center of the picture, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,55,63,134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender-and-the-body","category-men-and-masculinity","category-pornography","category-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}