Unmasking Desire: Feminism, Pornography, and the Dominant Sexual Model
"A feminist sexuality must encourage women to prioritize their pleasure, emotional connection with their partners, and to learn about their bodies. It must be rooted in equality."
By Anusha (@pixiedustpilled)
The things we find sexy are not innate, both in terms of behaviour and aesthetics. They are shaped by culture, trends, our upbringing, and now mostly by pornography due to its permeating influence. I have to recognize that even in my own sexuality, certain things I find attractive and practice are a product of these influences. Most women relate to this, which is why the liberal feminist urge to paint these desires as harmless, and as our very own, is tempting. But it is better to be a flawed feminist with correct analyses, than one who furthers rhetoric that harms other women just because it makes one feel better about their own choices or desires—and pornographic fantasies are ultimately harmful to women as a collective.
These fantasies promote the idea of a plastic, mechanical intimacy that women are now readily accepting, instead of one that is rooted in emotional connection or mutuality. Some women are coerced into embracing this idea of degrading intimacy by their pressuring partners, and others become willing to endure, even find attraction in, sexualized violent acts like hitting, mutilation and strangulation.
I’ve grown up in a mostly conservative Muslim society in the Gulf, where sex education, and sex in general, has been extremely taboo. When I think of how damaging it is for those raised in such conservative cultures to have pornography be their first introduction to human sexuality, I remember an offhand remark by a male friend in high school. He seemed to think that sex was inherently painful to women and something they just endured for the men they love. This was a belief instilled in him by the degradation and violence he had seen enacted on women in pornographic media, and he still intended on recreating this with the girl he’d eventually have sex with.
For many women and girls in such cultures, including my teenage self, it feels rebellious, even feminist, to embrace these pornographic ideas. When you are taught to repress your sexuality and are subjected to extreme restrictions – ones that your male peers can break without consequence, while for you doing the same could mean the end of your freedom or life—the mere acknowledgment of your sexual desires feels liberating. But it inherently is not, because your sexual desires don’t exist in a vacuum. The pornographic, misogynistic version of sexuality pushed by the West is no better than the sexual repression we are taught to practice.
Even women who don’t consume pornography are only introduced to an idea of female sexuality that is rooted in servitude, such as appearing “pretty” for men and tolerating discomfort or pain during sex, as it is only “natural”. When liberal feminists uncritically root for sex positivity without dissecting and discarding the male supremacy present in our ideas of female sexuality, they only reinforce this issue and worse – give it the glittery mask of “female empowerment” which makes us reluctant to criticize it.
When we are encouraged to explore our sexualities, we must ask – are we really exploring our sexualities? How much of our sexuality is even ours? Increasing numbers of women are consuming porn, and even if they don’t personally watch it, they are exposed to its tropes and imagery from how much it has seeped into pop culture. In her book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Gail Dines described the extent to which pornography had influenced culture and women’s choices: “What is different about today is not only the hypersexualization of mass-produced images but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female. Today’s tidal wave of soft-core porn images has normalized the porn star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim, and downright boring.” She wrote this in 2010, and since then this trend has worsened significantly, with girls and women being blasted with pornographic impositions in their daily life. We are bombarded with softcore porn on our social media feeds, by our favourite artists, and in nearly all forms of media. Horrifyingly, the current mainstream beauty ideal is that of adultified girls and infantilized women.
Through its uncritical acceptance of BDSM, violent kinks and the dominance-submission sexual model, ‘sex-positive’ feminism has further acted as a vehicle through which pornographic tropes have been driven into women’s subconsciousness. This messaging has invaded films, music, visual art and even literary fiction.
Recently, I’ve developed an interest in gothic stories about women, our bodies, fears, and struggles. An interesting pattern I’ve noticed is that a lot of modern, gothic-feminist fiction has sexual overtones. Of course, this can be a good thing. I found the writing in many of these works exquisite, and after all, isn’t it a step in the right direction for women to write about our sexual desires? To discard the shame we are taught to associate with such desires in a patriarchal world?
That used to be my knee-jerk reaction to raised eyebrows at this kind of writing; however, it’s not so black-and-white when misogyny continuously mutates with culture and subcultures. This struck me particularly hard when I attempted to read Her Bodies and Other Parties, a genre-bending short story collection that used horror to explore women’s oppression. This was highly recommended to me by a friend, and although I found the symbolism in the book clever and the descriptions beautiful, the erotic elements it was laden with left a bitter taste in my mouth. Having read all the praise this book received for being feminist and queer, I came in expecting a reimagined kind of sexuality that centered women and female pleasure. What I found was the opposite: the eroticism was heavily male-centered with female pleasure being depicted as secondary, painful, and even sacrificial. If that wasn’t bad enough, the depiction of same-sex relationships and sexual encounters was even worse, tainted by male voyeurism. They even had much shorter descriptions and were filtered through a fetishistic lens. I stopped reading it after two chapters. Despite the feminist elements of the book, such as its focus on female experiences and our relationships with our bodies, its sexual overtones felt merely like an assemblage of male fantasies with droplets of female humanity sprinkled in.
I kept thinking, how do self-proclaimed feminist erotica writers and misogynist male pornographers have the same conception of female pleasure?
The pattern I’m describing isn’t exclusive to the book I read, or even to a particular genre. The majority of female-authored erotica, from teenaged girls writing “smut” on Wattpad to the erotica books written by middle-aged women, are riddled with tropes of female submission and male dominance. They generally sexualize violent misogyny, rape, and female degradation.
Even in certain queer subcultures, including lesbian and bisexual writers of erotica, the heterosexual dynamics of dominance and submission reinforce a hierarchy between “tops” and “bottoms” that feels indistinguishable from traditional gender roles and inadvertently, heterosexual porn. Traversing any erotica or fanfiction site forces one to encounter this dynamic, regardless of the sex or sexual orientation of the author. Mirroring real-world heteropatriarchy, there are subcultural trends like the fetishization of ejaculating strap-ons, mimicking heterosexuality to the point where the central erotic appeal is penetration, often with an exaggerated focus on power and dominance rather than mutual pleasure.
In these instances, queerness doesn’t become an alternative to patriarchal sexuality but rather an extension of it. It replicates the heterosexual model of female submission and male dominance through that of the penetrator and penetrated. Naturally, this manifests in the degradation of the penetrated partner, who is seen as an object to be conquered and used.
Although originally born from misogyny, this dynamic can be recreated in pretty much any relationship. Many people bring up femdoms (also known as dominatrixes or female dominants) to deny the patriarchal roots of the dominance-submission dynamic, but this flimsy argument crumbles upon closer inspection. The submission of men to dominant women in these BDSM scenes is performed through their humiliating feminization. The very misogyny that is being denied is used as a crutch in their sexual domination. They are called the b-slur, “sissies”, and other variations of misogynistic, as well as homophobic terms. It’s simply another way to relegate them to the role of the submissive, the penetrated.
Being as old as the patriarchy, this sexual dynamic has accumulated various different explanations and justifications, even from people with the supposedly contrasting ideologies. Traditional misogynists will tell you that women, and by extension those who take on the role of the penetrated, are inferior and naturally submissive. They will claim that it is an innate feature and the product of our biological wiring. Liberal feminists will claim that fantasies are just that—fantasies—and that all sexual practices are perfectly ethical so long as they are consensual. They will even encourage these fantasies, sanitizing them with empowering language: “Shouldn’t all women explore their sexualities? What’s the harm in that?”
Women who perceive the veiled layers of misogyny and degradation in these fantasies will be labelled prudes, both by liberal feminists and misogynists. Due to the ideological overlap such as the belief in the liberal ideas of “choice” and “agency” existing in a void outside of larger social structures, queer theorists will agree with the liberal feminists, overlooking the gender essentialism and misogyny that this sexual model is rooted in.
Lenin’s critique of bourgeois sexuality is particularly relevant here. In an interview with Clara Zetkin on the Woman Question, he stated, “I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc.—in short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. [...] No matter how rebellious and revolutionary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analysis thoroughly bourgeois.” This analysis can be applied to modern sex-positivity which disguises itself as liberatory while still functioning firmly within the very patriarchal-capitalist structures that commodify women’s bodies. The very origin of the dominance-submission sexual model is rooted in the reduction of women to objects, which arose from female slavery under the very first class societies.
The normalization of violent sexuality under the guise of feminism will never liberate women, only rebranding our subjugation as empowerment. True sexual liberation will free women from harmful narratives, not repackage them as progressive. This kind of sexual liberation will fully materialize in a socialist society, where constructs of gender start to collapse, women are not othered, and class society, the originator of our oppression, is withering in the transition towards communism. The dismantling of class and gender are interconnected processes — as class society crumbles, it brings down the pillars of rigid gender roles and binaries that are holding its foundations. An example of this is the degendering of society that started to emerge in China under the Mao era, where women gained freedom from gender roles as gendered beauty standards and patriarchal authority were militantly challenged. This is recounted through nuanced anecdotes in Some of Us, a collection of memoirs by Chinese women, which were compiled and edited by Xueping Zhong, Zheng Wang and Bai Di.
In our current world, we can only envision what a liberated society will look like. A truly feminist sexuality, or sex-positivity, must be starkly different from the tropes created by traditional patriarchy and pornographers. As Andrea Dworkin describes in Intercourse, “The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles—that is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it.”
A feminist sexuality must encourage women to prioritize their pleasure, emotional connection with their partners, and to learn about their bodies. It must be rooted in equality, instead of relying on real or acted out power dynamics. This begins with interrogating our own desires, criticizing the sexual double standards in the media we consume, and if possible, creating and consuming alternative media with feminist messaging, such as feminist fiction and erotica. Breaking free from this damaging model of sexuality is not easy, it requires much more discipline and introspection than the feel-good, hedonistic line of thinking that is promoted by liberal strands of feminism. But then again, breaking one’s chains takes much more effort than simply finding comfort in them.