Today's work/fandom collision

[rivkat]

So I am at this intellectual property conference, and the first panelist (who I like a lot) started with two provocative questions: How many in the audience thought of themselves as authors? (All of us.) How many had had positive experiences producing or performing in pornography? (Nobody raised a hand.) And here I am, sitting in the audience with the fic nicknamed “Kryptonian Sex Secrets” open on my desktop. How am I supposed to react? Would I have been more honest to raise my hand? I do think of some of my fiction as pornographic, even though it’s not a great term and even though it causes me some discomfort.

The panelist was talking about porn made with real bodies, not porn made with words based on imaginative conceptions of real (actors’) bodies. So she didn’t mean me, not exactly. But should she have?

Comments

[chase820.livejournal.com]

I would rather grade 100 freshman comp papers without benefit of caffeine than admit to any of my colleagues that I occasionally indulge in smutty fanfiction. But I am ashamed of my shame. Does that make me any less cowardly? Not sure.

I bet one would be amazed just how many people with lots of letters after their names are masquerading as part-time ficcers. It makes sense, since fanfiction is all about playing with text, and who enjoys that sort of diversion more than an academic?

In answer to your question, she didn't mean you but she should have. Many women who'd never download people porn have no compunction about storing gigabytes of NC-17 fic on their computer and sending of reams of praise to the authors of it. Amazing, how much attention this quirk of feminine sexuality still doesn't get. Or if it does, you can almost hear the lurking accusation beneath all the dry academic prose: "What's wrong with these women?"

I'm reminded of Valerie Steele's academic work on fetishism, when she very deftly points out that the one truth about pornography and BDSM that so few cultural critics want to address is the pleasure of it. Women don't strap themselves into eighteen inches corsets only to make some kind of comment on the strangling effects of the patriarchy, nor because their daddies did something hideous to them.

My Daddy is/was the best of all possible fathers. And I don't write slash simply because I find it a welcome relief from the crushing heteronormative politics of male/female romances. That's one reason: I also find it really hot.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of Valerie Steele's academic work on fetishism, when she very deftly points out that the one truth about pornography and BDSM that so few cultural critics want to address is the pleasure of it. Women don't strap themselves into eighteen inches corsets only to make some kind of comment on the strangling effects of the patriarchy, nor because their daddies did something hideous to them.

This has to be related somehow to the way that, over in the literary studies corner of the academy, nobody ever admits to picking a particular genre or period or author to specialize in because they think that reading it/him/her is more fun than a whole day at Disney World.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

Is this an American thing, I wonder? That if you admit your work is somehow fun, it's not really work? Goes back to the old Puritan "suffering and denial are good for you" philosophy, I s'pose. We're such freaks.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

In some ways, I think we take that as read. But it's always worthwhile to say that I do this because I love it. Too few people get to love their work to take it for granted.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I feel pretty much the same way -- in a different world, I'd want to be further out, but that's not my world.

And I think she had some good points about how porn starring real human beings is produced, even setting aside its effects on mostly male consumers. I do feel acutely a discomfort with what turns me on when I'm thinking as a feminist, and sometimes I wonder whether there is an invisible spillover between my fantasies and my actual behavior. I worry more about the possible spillover between men's fantasies and their actual behavior. It's kind of attractive to split the baby by saying "use text and virtual images all you want, just don't use real people in your productions." But that gives me what I want and denies some people, mostly men, what they want, and maybe it's just special pleading. I don't have good answers.

I think you're absolutely right about discomfort with pleasure. And yet the speaker was asking about whether performers in filmed porn actually experience such pleasure; I'm sure some do, and I'm sure some don't. The question that her framing of the issue made me confront, not for the first time, is whether my pleasure comes at someone else's expense. I think the answer is "no," but I wish I could be sure.