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

[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.