Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (12 page)

Simulation as a research program into the effects of pornography

The vast majority of empirical research on pornography is directed at the
effects
of viewing pornography. In particular, researchers investigate possible correlations between exposure to pornography and violent behavior towards women.To date, this empirical data is inconclusive. But researchers have largely neglected the cognitive processes that occur during the consumption of pornographic material. This is an important oversight because a model of consumption will make specific predictions about the effects of consumption.

Simulation theory is an established empirical research program.Thus the model of porn consumption set forth in this essay has important empirical implications. Consider that researchers have converged on a pattern of data that links the simulation of an action to future performances of that action. Here are two examples. Yue and Cole compared subjects who physically trained (contracted their muscles) to subjects who only mentally trained (no muscle contraction).
¹⁹
Subjects who actually trained increased muscle strength by 30 percent and those who simulated training increased strength by 22 percent! In another study, Coffman determined that the mental rehearsal of a piano chordal piece was effective in improving the speed at which performers could subsequently play the chordal piece.
²⁰
This study is consistent with the general finding that mental simulation can improve one’s performance in the
conceptual
demands of a task in addition to the motor demands.
²¹

Given this body of research, the simulation model of porn consumption offers a mildly amusing prediction and also a generally disturbing prediction.The mildly amusing prediction is that the school-yard notion that watching pornography will improve physical, sexual skill may actually have some merit. The disturbing prediction is that the motor and conceptual processes that occur during engagement with mainstream, aggression-themed pornography will likely facilitate one’s ability to transfer these processes into the real world.

NOTES

1
Originally from D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, “The Simulation Heuristic,” in D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (eds.)
Judgment Under Uncertainty
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 203.

2
Throughout this essay I will use the expressions “folk psychology,” “mind reading,” and “mentalizing” interchangeably.

3
See A. Goldman,
Simulating Minds
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); S. Stich and S. Nichols, “Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?”
Mind and Language
7 (1992): 35–71.

4
Folk-psychological ability
qua
simulative skill is a mundane and often unconscious process rather than an expert proficiency. This is an important point because it helps makes plausible the claim that we unwittingly and effortlessly bring this skill to bear in other areas (i.e., pornographic consumption).To get a feel for the degree to which folk psychology penetrates our lives, consider the phenomenon that is reality television. Here is a sample piece of dialogue from MTV’s
The Hills
(Season five, Episode five), replete with mental attributions and behavioral explanations/predictions:

To the extent that folk psychology is simulative, Brody, Frankie, and Doug are inexhaustible simulators. It is also quite plausible that the
reason
people tune in to watch this drivel is because they want to see folk psychology in action – to see how other people do it and to determine if they themselves are deviant (but this is another story, perhaps better left for “Reality TV and Philosophy”).

5
The calorie ratio of Coke Classic to Diet Coke is 97:1.

6
See S. Feagin,
Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); A. Goldman,
Simulating Minds
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

7
See N. Carroll,
The Philosophy of Motion Pictures
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

8
See G. Currie,“The Paradox of Caring: Fiction and the Philosophy of Mind,” in M. Hjort and S. Laver (eds.)
Emotion and the Arts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 63–77.

9
Produced by Naughty America, 2007.

10
C. Keysers, B. Wicker, V. Gazolla, J.-L. Anton, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, “A Touching Sight: SII/PV Activation during the Observation of Touch,”
Neuron
42 (2004): 335–46.

11
See J. Decety, “Neurophysiological Evidence for Simulation of Action,” in J. Dokic and J. Proust (eds.),
Simulation and Knowledge of Action
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002), pp. 53–73.

12
The insider slang of the porn industry reflects the central role given to the male performer’s erection.As David Foster Wallace decodes in his essay
Big Red Son
: “
Wood
is a camera-ready erection;
woodman
is a dependably potent male performer; and
waiting for wood
is a discrete way of explaining what everybody else in the cast and crew is doing when a male performer is experiencing
wood trouble
, which latter term is self-evident.” See David Foster Wallace,
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
(New York: Little, Brown, 2005), p. 23, n. 18).

13
S. Strager,“What Men Watch When They Watch Porn,”
Sexuality and Culture
(Winter 2003): 50–61, p. 58.

14
Ibid., p. 55.

15
Ibid., p. 60.

16
The objection comes from Robert Nozick’s analysis of why people would choose not to live in an “experience machine” that could give them any experience they desired.

17
Ian Hacking,
Rewriting the Soul
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

18
What I am suggesting here is an elaboration of MacKinnon’s well-known criticism of pornography, but I am developing that criticism in the theoretical and empirical context of simulation theory. See C. MacKinnon,
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

19
G.Yue and K. Cole, “Strength Increases from Motor Program: Comparison of Training with Maximal Voluntary and Imagined Muscle Contractions,”
Journal of Neurophysiology
67 (1992): 1114–23.

20
D. Coffman, “Effects of Mental Practice, Physical Practice, and Knowledge of Results on Piano Performance,”
Journal of Research in Music Education
38, 3 (1990): 187–96.

21
For a review, see D. L. Feltz and D. M. Landers, “The Effects of Mental Practice on Motor Skill Performance and Learning: A Meta-Analysis,”
Journal of Sport Psychology
5 (1983): 25–57.

CASEY MCKITTRICK

CHAPTER 5

BROTHERS’ MILK
The Erotic and the Lethal in Bareback Pornography

Why is it that when boys play, they always play at killing each other?

(Marge Sherwood in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
)

In an anthology with a title as provocative as
Porn – Philosophy for Everyone
, with such kinky intellectual offerings as bondage, domination, girl-on-girl action, role-playing, orgasm, and so forth, it may seem rather pointedly an erotic buzz-kill to bring up the subject of AIDS. Indeed, for over a quarter of a century now, the AIDS virus has killed much more than buzzes.Yet its arrival on the national and global scenes has had an enormous, and often unpredictable, impact on erotic identities, subcultural sex practices, and the pornography industry. It is here I want to begin, with a focus in particular on the ways that AIDS has both constrained and enabled different sexual practices and fantasies within the gay community. While AIDS has clearly had far-reaching effects outside of the US gay population, I take a portion of this community as the focus of this study to explain a particular response to the epidemic, and how that response has been expressed and aestheticized in the world of gay porn.

Specifically, I address the subculture and pornographic portrayal of barebacking, the erotic celebration of condomless anal sex. Despite, or perhaps because of, compelling scientific information that defines unprotected anal sex as a high risk activity in the spread of HIV, a small but substantial minority of gay men in the US have developed a sexual subculture centering on the risk of viral transmission, the circumvention of medical advice surrounding “safe sex,” and the formation of an outlaw sexuality that defies social convention and legal parameters.

In this essay I intend neither to defend nor to wholeheartedly condemn the practice and the pornographic representation of bareback sex; instead, I seek to account for the emergence of the bareback genre by exploring its potential pleasures and its attendant “seductive” qualities. I begin with a brief history of AIDS in the US and its semiotic ties to the gay community. I then explore some salient features of the bareback porn. I end by examining some of the psychic motivations that undergird the success of this medium.

AIDS as a Gay Disease?

It is a significant though often forgotten fact in the deeply sad history of AIDS in America that the virus, within the first two years of its appearance in the US, was (mis)labeled the Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease. In 1982, when reported cases still numbered in the triple-digits, the virus was given the name GRID, despite the fact that nearly half of its sufferers were not homosexual. It took several years for virologists to adjust the terminology to reflect scientific fact, whereupon it was given the name Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It took much longer for the virus itself to lose its cultural associations with homosexuality; arguably, in some circles, it never has.
¹

There are some understandable reasons for the initial impulse to see the AIDS virus as largely a “gay disease.” For years, the Center for Disease Control thought it had isolated the
primum mobile
, the first carrier of the disease to the United States, in the form of Gaetan Dugas, a promiscuous gay French-Canadian flight attendant, who was sexually linked to forty or so of the first reported cases. And in fact the initial infected population reflected a highly disproportionate number of homosexual men, almost all of whom resided in large urban areas – mostly Los Angeles and New York City.

It was not until the later 1980s, when a critical mass of heterosexuals were sero-converting – a number too large to ignore – that the Reagan administration brought the epidemic to national attention. By then, tens of thousands of US citizens had died.To this day, the Reagan administration bears much of the burden of guilt for waiting so long to inform the general public of the growing epidemic; its decision to sit on the information it had regarding the virus was based, in part, on the disease’s apparent ghettoization within the gay community – a portion of the American citizenry that Reagan had clearly relegated to second-class status at best.

Yet there exist other reasons for the persistent association of homosexuality with the AIDS virus. For the greater part of the twentieth century, homosexuality in America bore the status of a medical illness. Michel Foucault, in his
History of Sexuality
, remarked persuasively that the homosexual was “invented” as a social category in the Victorian era. Before this time, homosexuality was not seen as a condition, but as a criminal act. Therefore, homosexual sex was punishable as a discrete offense. Foucault argues that a paradigm shift occurred that saw homosexuality as an individual condition, rather than simply criminal behavior.Thus, for the past 100 years or so, homosexuality has been incorporated into medical discourse as a “deviance.”When AIDS arrived on the scene in 1981, it had only been eight years since the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality as pathology from its diagnostic manual, the DSMR-III. Thus, the equation of homosexuality with disease had long been entrenched in the American imaginary.

Lee Edelman, in his brilliant book
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
, delineates another pathologizing tendency in mainstream American culture concerning homosexuality. Edelman maintains that the Symbolic order is supported and naturalized through the valorization of a procreative sexuality that guarantees the social and biological reproduction of the same. Legitimate subjecthood, he argues, is assumed through taking on the mandatory cultural labor of reproduction. This procreative identity ensures the stability of the subject through the fantasmatic marriage of identity to futurity. Queer sexuality, in its non- compliance with this political futurity, registers as outside the Symbolic order, as a deathly shadow of the stable subject. In short, queer sexuality reads as the death of the subject, the end of a name and a bloodline. At the risk of sounding glib or reductive, I posit that, with the advent of AIDS, there came to be a truism that fed the straight/queer dichotomy:
Heterosexuals breed babies. Homosexuals breed viruses
. Later in the essay, I will return to this pervasive association of homosexuality with mortality.

As the evidence linking unprotected sex to HIV transmission became more persuasive, the gay community as a whole responded to the epidemic through large-scale campaigns for safer sex practices. Condom companies worked together with gay publications and other media outlets to put out the word on safer sex.They even tried, for a period of time, to advance the idea of eroticizing latex. In an attempt to align condom use with a sort of fetishism, they hoped to minimize the association of condoms with a restricted, sanitized, and prophylactic regulation of sexual practices. The gay pornography industry stood at the vanguard of this safer sex movement, both by requiring condom use in its depiction of anal sex (and less frequently, with oral sex) and by including a warning at the beginning of gay porn videos that identified the risks involved in the practice of gay sex. An analogous safety measure in the straight porn industry was, by and large, not to be found. While some production companies began requiring condoms for vaginal and anal sex, most companies remained condomless, perhaps further indicating the mentality that AIDS was not a heterosexual concern.

However, by 1997, a gay subculture began to emerge on the Internet advocating condomless sex.
²
Concomitant to the presence of websites and message boards devoted to discussions of bareback sex, amateur pornography depicting barebacking came into circulation. Many online barebackers and producers of bareback porn had simply grown tired of the restrictive measures taken to police gay sex after the onset of AIDS. They saw the closing of bathhouses in urban areas, the lingering criminalization of gay sex in the form of sodomy laws, and the ubiquitous reminders of the mandate to wear rubbers during sex as part and parcel of the regulatory regime that seeks to contain and constrict sexual practices outside the realm of social normalcy. This “condom fatigue,” coupled with the recent medical innovations regarding treatment of the AIDS virus, cleared a space for the growth of bareback sex, both as a subcultural practice and as a commercially viable pornographic genre. For some, the renunciation of safer sex practices constituted a powerful statement of political dissent surrounding the policing of gay male desire. For others, advancements in anti-viral medication allowed a new perspective on the AIDS virus that no longer saw the disease as a death sentence, but as a manageable illness akin to diabetes.

While major gay porn producers such as Falcon Video, Pacific Sun, Vivid, Titan, and Jocks have refrained from depicting condomless sex since the late 1980s, bareback porn has its roots in smaller, often amateur, production companies which were either downloadable online or offered for sale online through the mail. In 1998, production companies began offering their wares through their own websites, with pretty extensive advertising web space, advanced systems of credit card payment, and elaborate design. By that time, three major producers and distributors of bareback porn existed on the web: Treasure Island Media, Hot Desert Knights, and Gas Lamp Video. All three are thriving today (Gas Lamp now incorporated by SX Video) and comprise a large portion of bareback distribution and online exhibition; however, many smaller enterprises are currently their competitors. The product of these distributors ranges from amateur productions with hand-held cameras depicting real-time sex, to medium-scale productions with professional lighting, scene editing, and sound track. As of now, roughly 30 percent of gay adult videos within video stores are bareback productions.

Features of the Bareback Video

The typical bareback video is remarkable not only in its graphic depiction of sex deemed highly risky by health officials, but in its persistent focus on the visible exchange of semen in the act of anal intercourse. A salient feature of the bareback video is the
money shot
, the moment of visible ejaculation discussed in Linda Williams’ famous work
Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’
and elsewhere; however, bareback videos, unlike contemporary mainstream gay video, as well as what we now call pre-condom classics, are distinguished in large part by their depiction of a money shot followed by a reinsertion of the still-ejaculating penis into the submissive sex partner. This reinsertion, followed often by a display of the anus filled with semen, typifies the culmination of many sex acts in the bareback video.

It must be noted that many bareback scenes do end in a manner similar to mainstream gay porn, where the active partner ejaculates on the chest or face of the passive partner. However, a substantial number of bareback scenes employ this reinsertion shot to assure the spectator of his/her having witnessed the transmission of semen from one partner to the other.

The typical bareback video enacts many of the fantasies defined by online users – the transmission of semen, either in a one-on-one or group scenario. Like other forms of gay porn, there are between three and six scenes involving oral and anal sex. The word “bareback” is usually fore-grounded in the title.
Bareback Buddies
,
Bareback Boys
,
Bareback Lovers
are some of the inspired titles to be bought online or through magazine advertisements. Big-name gay porn performers are mostly absent in condomless productions, although a “star system” of its own is emerging in the bareback genre; there are several notable exceptions – Jeff Palmer and Jackson Price, once quite prominent in mainstream gay porn, crossed over into bareback video and have since been blacklisted by the larger companies for which they formerly performed. Both are also admittedly HIV-positive.
³
While new bareback actors are constantly being introduced to the viewing public, certain bareback production companies, like Hot Desert Knights, employ a core group of actors who can be seen in many of the company’s productions.

Mise-en-scène is typically at a minimum in these videos. There are almost never gestures towards plot or characterization (not even a perfunctory pizza delivery guy or gym buddy in need of spotting). The scenes are often very quiet, with no musical enhancement (there are some exceptions); the only recurring setting with any sort of elaboration is a dungeon; within bareback porn, there is some cross-over with leather, bondage, and fisting, although, to be sure, there is a large contingency within the leather culture that would disavow any affiliation with bare-backers.