S.M. Berg: “The Harms of Gay Male Pornography: A Sexual Equality Perspective” (explicit)

S.M. Berg is a radical feminist activist against pornography and prostitution. She runs Genderberg.com. She has kindly given us permission to reprint the following article, which also appears in Off Our Backs (July/August 2005) and the Against Pornography website.

by S.M. Berg

A report on Christopher Kendall’s presentation at the 2005 Captive Daughters conference on pornography and international sex trafficking. Kendall is a professor of law at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and author of the book Gay Male Pornography: An issue of sex discrimination.

The Harms of Gay Male Pornography: A Sexual Equality Perspective

Kendall effectively narrowed an area fraught with complicated identity politics into its most basic unit, the actual contents of gay male porn. Most of his speech focused on the issues raised in the 2000 Supreme Court of Canada case Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Canada. Several lesbian and gay groups, including one directly involved with getting Canadian law to recognize the harms of heterosexual pornography years prior, attempted to justify gay porn as liberating and integral to constructing healthy gay identities. Canada’s highest court decided unanimously that simply being gay pornography does not make the depictions egalitarian or harm-free.

Key to making his case was giving specific examples and examining what they suggested about gay male sexuality. If gay pornography is free speech, suggests Kendall, then what would a paraphrasing of the speech look like? Turns out it looks a lot like the same old homophobic, humiliating pornography for heterosexuals that eroticizes domination and sexualizes violence between a hypermasculine “top” and a feminized “bottom”. Instead of breaking down heteronormative gender binaries, gay porn reinforces oppressive sex roles regardless of the actual gender of the participants.

The following are two examples Kendall gave:

From Manscape Magazine,

“I pushed his meaty pecs together. They wrapped around my dick perfectly as I started tit-fucking him like a chick. His hard, humpy pecs gripped my meat like a vice. Of all the things I did to him that night I think he hated that the most. It made him feel like a girl.”

From Advocate Men, in a scene where a non-gay male convinces another non-gay male to rape a gay man,

“‘The man’s got a tight, tight pussy, man,’ Phil told me. He wrenched his hand free and slapped Saul in the back. ‘Lean over and show this man your pussy ass.’”

In this way, feminized gay men are the subjects whose rape, battery and degradation are meant as a stand-in for women’s usual roles in pornography. Traditional masculinity is glorified and femininity is an instrument of abuse. Predatory, violent men attain the usual male position of superiority by mistreating less masculinized men to make clear one of them is the “bitch” or “cunt” and one of them isn’t. Such pornographic depictions promote inequality and subjugation as the preferred model of gay male sex as well as reinforcing homophobia and racism.

Kendall’s critique of the supposed liberatory effects of gay male porn continued with observations about the intersections of sexual and racial identities. In heterosexual porn the hierarchy of dominance is evident from the fact of the males and females portrayed; with mixed genders we all know who’s the top and who’s the bottom, the alpha and the beta. While some plots reinforce traditional roles, placing scenes into thematic context is not as necessary with heterosexual porn as it is with gay porn. With two men, two alphas, the question of how to decide which man assumes the beta role is more complicated. Racial identity is the most common method gay male pornography uses to decide who is the “man” and who is the “woman”.

As heterosexual porn portrays Asian women in sexualized racist stereotypes, so does gay porn present Asian men as physically smaller, servile inferiors willing only to please. Black men are commonly portrayed as animalistic aggressors with huge penises who try to rape white men or who express the desire to sexually submit themselves to their white masters. Straight, white, middle-class men are at the top of the porn hierarchy whether the intended audience is gay or straight.

Many feminists have been trying for years to help people comprehend how rape is less about sex itself and more about eroticizing and abusing gendered power, and some feminists have been trying to show the basic premises of pornography are not so different from other parts of rape culture. The picture of gay male porn that emerges from Kendall’s investigations is one focused more on dominance, cruelty and power over others than explorations of alternative sexualities based on intimacy, dignity and mutual pleasure.


See also:

AP: “Widespread Teacher Sexual Misconduct Reported” (explicit language)



Sexual Ecology: Porn, Promiscuity, and AIDS (explicit language)
This acclaimed and controversial book by gay activist and journalist Gabriel Rotello examines why the AIDS epidemic hit the gay male community, and why it persists 20 years after its causes and prevention strategies were discovered. Rotello’s study is useful to the antipornography movement in several ways. First, it shows how malleable and culturally determined our sexual behaviors are, as opposed to porn defenders who represent certain sex acts as what all people “naturally” crave.

Crashing Waves: Young Feminists Working Against Prostitution (PowerPoint presentation)
Samantha M. Berg, Genderberg.com, & Jill, oneangrygirl.com, Portland, OR
Discussion centers on the anti-pornstitution movement and use of the Internet to educate, activate, and motivate the growing number of young women fed up with what Ariel Levy calls the “raunch culture.”

I Was a ‘Self-Esteem Vampire’: A Woman’s Journey Out of Watching Porn (explicit language)
I asked myself honestly, what was I getting out of porn? The answer surprised me. It terrified me. It shamed me…

I was getting a sense of power from watching the humiliation and degradation of the women on the screen.

I was claiming power, the all-elusive power that women strive for their entire lives, from degrading and enjoying the degradation of other women. I had absorbed a lesson from the patriarchy: women are easy to degrade, weaker, and more vulnerable, so much so that even another woman can take their power. Watching women being slapped and hurt was filling that void within me that was taken so many years before by men. It allowed me to feel powerful and in control…

D.A. Clarke: Women Adopting Men’s Bad Habits Is Not the Answer
The symbols, language and style of lesbian sm chic are the symbols and language and style of male supremacy: violation, ruthlessness, intimidation, humiliation, force, mockery, consumerism. Words like respect, tenderness, gentleness, are boring and pass­e, according to our new fashion leader
s. What we want is excess, and lots of it: extreme experiences of every kind, a great bazaar of fantasy for our shopping pleasure…

Ruthlessness, hardness, force and intimidation have characterised the successful businessman, soldier, gangster, politician and pimp from the very beginning. If we admire those qualities, we implicitly endorse the world these men have created – perhaps we subscribe to the fantasy that women can become hard enough and mean enough to compete with men on their own turf. Suppose we do so, and suppose some of us win: will a world that contains a token handful of lesbian aristocrats among its ruling class be a better world?

Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Bridges: “And we’re actually going to get back to one of the issues that was brought up earlier today, which is, ‘Well, you know, maybe we just go out and make ‘fem-porn’, we get more females to direct it. And then, it’ll be more egalitarian, it’ll be the kind of thing that we can all embrace and say, ‘Yes, this is what we want.’

“Well, of the popular films that we coded, less than 7% were directed by females. It is still dominated by very male-directed films. And we are now in the process of writing our second article from this study [where] we look at female-directed films specifically. And guess what. They’re not different. Not the bestselling popular ones. They’re on the whole just as violent, just as aggressive… One difference we’ve noted consistently is that they tend to show much more female to female aggression.”

Kara Nox: Adult Movies I Have Been In
The Violation Of Melissa Lauren
Melissa decides she needs to take a break from her suburban lifestyle and journeys out to the Ozarks looking for some fun. But what begins as a ligh hearted adventure soon becomes a nightmare when redneck locals descend on poor Melissa and have their way with her.