baby, keep your hands off my laptop

A power surge last night meant a shut-off breaker today, and with that, half the outlets in the house were down, including the one hooked up to the office computer. I was at work when the boything called, and said, offhandedly, “Do you know your mouse pad doesn’t work?”

I did know this, but instead of saying, “Yes, I do know that thanks for pointing it out,” I screamed, ”WHY ARE YOU ON MY COMPUTER?” I felt sick, queasy, horrifically uncomfortable, like bugs were crawling all over my skin. It was not nice, to say the least.

Now, this boy is cool and open-minded and doesn’t care what’s on my hard drive or browser history, but be that as it may, I didn’t want him poking around in there. It’s not like my hard drive is all porn, but there is enough of it, in all its complicated niche glory, to give me acute anxiety.

I’ve spent the last two years coming to terms with the enjoyment of visual pornography as a pretty-much-straight woman. I’ve read some decent books on the subject, and it’s been blogged about beautifully, here.  

Coming into your own kinks is a weird process. Finding out that there are other people who share your predilections can be comforting. Of course we all keep secrets, and we are entitled to do so.

For years, most of my adult life, actually, I found pornography weird and dull. I would look at it, on occasion, and try to find a hint of something that did it for me. But in the endless parade of the same visual tropes — blonde girl, collagened lips, pigtails, mouth on an erect penis looking out at the viewer, wearing an item of clothing with no discernable purpose, and fingering herself FROM ABOVE (please) — I’d rather watch a nature documentary. Cue up the Attenborough.

Not that I care. If there are heterosexual men and women who dig this sort of stuff, that’s all well and good. For me it was a snoozefest, and now, when I go back to it, it is with a kind of anthropological curiosity. It doesn’t do anything for me, pants-wise.

This is the kind of porn I assumed I was supposed to be into. These were het people, like me, doing het things; these were supposed to be my people, sexually speaking.

So why didn’t I care?

For one, the sheer level of artifice. The fake tits, the full-face of makeup, the spray tans and implants. I like women, and I like women’s bodies, but not these, not even remotely.

But wasn’t this meant to be for me? Was I not the audience?

Well, no. The POV shot in those closeups was not functioning as a prosthesis for a dick of my own. I’m perfectly happy with my own equipment. And I didn’t identify with that girl, the one doing the cocksucking.

So why then not watch porn that wasn’t made for me at all?

The penis in the POV shots in gay porn functions in almost the same way: there is a man with his mouth on a dick that, presumably, stands in for the viewers’ own. As in straight porn, the gaze is often identical, though many of the other trappings are missing.

And this? This totally does it for me.

Like any narcissist, I spend enough time trying to work out the etiology of my own kinks, overlaying them with my no doubt idiosyncratic take on human development. So why do I love gay porn?

Is it because the erect male penis represents desire made manifest in a way a woman’s body does not? Is the penis the sole signifier for visual pornography? Does it perform a complicated double prosthetic function — encoding my own desire as viewer coupled with my own attraction to men? Is this any more complicated than the mental gymnastics required to transpose oneself into the correct gender role in penis-POV porn?

Discovering that I liked gay porn was a shock and a revelation. More so because the common wisdom says that what I want, as a woman, is narrative, and romance, and heaving bosoms and an alpha male. When what it turns out, really, what I want is interethnic gangbang porn with a heaping side order of erotic humiliation. And, preferably, blindfolds.

That in and of itself isn’t a problem for the gay men that this porn is made for. But for me, with all my liberal-arts intellect and layers of semiotic analysis, fourth-wave feminism, ideas about kink-positive and ethically made pornography, not to mention the very real concern that my avoidance of female bodies is telling of a misogyny and self-hatred so deeply internalized that I can’t even recognize it — well, all I’m saying is, you can see why a girl might worry about her hard drive.

5 months ago  /  6 notes