#1 01-08-23 14:45:05

Hangdog90

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Mari Ruti on the Reinvention of the Heteropatriarchy and Heteroporn.

The feminist author Mari Ruti died in June 2023, of cancer, aged only 58.

Her death made me revisit some of her writing - she published books both for an academic audience and for the public.

Below is an excerpt from her 2018 book, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings, in which she discusses the reinvention of the heteropatriarchy and the place of porn in modern society. Much food for thought. If you are new to Mari Ruti, I hope you will find her writing to be  lucid, entertaining, amusing but also illuminating and challenging. She is a great loss.

Book passage follows and there is a link at the end to an interview in the LA Review of Books.

THE REINVENTION OF HETEROPATRIARCHY

That women are trained to work harder at intimate relationships than men is related to another pronounced social trend: many straight women translate our culture’s ideal of constant self-improvement into the idea that it’s their bodies in particular that need improving.

Women are of course also engaged in other types of self-improvement projects: career progress, for instance, is important to many. But  being female in twenty-first-century American culture is so centered on the body—on physical appearance and desirability— that female self-esteem is often directly linked to having the kind of body that men find attractive. This is yet another reason that the female body as a site of discipline and punishment is a particularly good example of Foucault’s notion of biopolitical control.

Because the body is always imperfect—because it could always be more beautiful—there’s in principle no end to the process of improvement it can be subjected to.

Consider, in this context, the importance of “the makeover” to contemporary feminine culture. Makeover shows such as America’s Next Top Model, which elevate the manipulation of the female body to an art form, are only the most obvious manifestation of a collective attitude that tells women that their happiness depends on being “made over” (which in turn implies that the “original” doesn’t  deserve happiness or isn’t good enough to procure it).

The makeover is a standard feature of romantic comedies, television shows, and women’s magazines, which routinely deliver detailed instructions on how to do your makeup, style your hair, and shop for accessories to attain a whole new you (in some magazines these instructions sit nicely next to instructions on how to give the perfect blowjob). This makeover mentality implies that a physical transformation is what women need to land the perfect man, the perfect job, and the perfect life. It teaches women that to be successful in today’s society—professionally as well as romantically—demands the ability to regulate, manage, and constrain their bodies. In this sense, not much progress has been made since the days of the corset and the sidesaddle.

I recently visited a makeup store catering to young women’s beauty concerns because I needed a birthday gift for a fourteen-year-old girl. It was startling to see how much more complicated things have gotten since I myself started to wear makeup: besides the overwhelming array of colors and precision tools on offer, particularly striking were kits that are designed to recontour your entire facial structure by the clever usage of different shades of foundation. I’ve always known that makeup artists employ this strategy on actresses about to enter a scene and models about to enter a photo shoot. Seeing that teen girls are now expected to undertake this task in their everyday lives was telling. There may be pleasure in the process—a point I’ll return to shortly—but there’s also a lot of pressure, for within this mentality, no obstacle is insurmountable, no imperfection is beyond repair.

If feminists during the 1960s and 1970s demanded freedom from gender discrimination, today’s postfeminist women seem more focused on freedom from bodily flaws. Freedom from wrinkles, cellulite, body hair, and other forms of physical “deficiency” is presented as a prerogative that women should claim—you guessed it—by spending loads of money on expensive products. For many women, the commercial construction of femininity has become a way of life and perhaps even a means of bandaging the foundational discontents of human life; feeling desirable not only offers an antidote to bad feelings such as depression or insecurity but also promises a solution to the general malaise of existence. Finding the right props for femininity in the commercial realm brings a temporary sense of satisfaction, healing wounds, concealing inadequacies, completing what appears incomplete. Unfortunately, this means of alleviating existential anxiety is inherently precarious, threatened by every slice of blueberry pie, every pint of ice cream, every bag of cookies, and every bowl of pasta that crosses your path.

For many women, anorexia, bulimia, and pervasive body anxiety are the painful underside of today’s appearance-oriented society. Even those who escape acute distress can feel ashamed and frustrated by the fact that their bodies rarely become as flawless as they would like them to be. Indeed, so many women are in the habit of monitoring every aspect of their physical being that it seems reasonable to argue that there’s something compulsive about contemporary female subjectivity. It’s not just the random guy on the street who is assessing women’s looks: women themselves are constantly judging their appearance, constantly comparing themselves to other women and worrying about their desirability to men. Notably, such self-surveillance tends to be primarily self-critical: instead of focusing on the pleasing aspects of your being, it lingers on all the ways in which you’re falling short of the feminine ideal. In this sense, women’s self-scrutiny can adopt a masochistic tone, eroding their confidence at the precise moment in history when they’re being told that they’re fully liberated, that they’ve never had it so good.

In our culture, (straight) men are programmed to look at women. And women are programmed to be looked at: they see themselves as being seen, through the eyes of the men (real or imaginary) looking at them. This means that their relationship with themselves is mediated by what film scholar Laura Mulvey in 1975 famously dubbed the male gaze: an assessing gaze that explicitly positions women as objects of male desire.

This isn’t to say that men aren’t these days presented as objects of female desire: modern media culture often breaks the dichotomy between man as the bearer of the look and woman as its object by presenting us with gorgeous male bodies to admire; a quick survey of television shows—particularly ones aimed at young audiences—immediately illustrates the mass appeal of the shirtless man (it’s not just for the fight scenes that I watch Arrow). In this sense, media culture normalizes the objectification of both men and women. But in the case of women, there’s a greater emphasis on conscious self-fashioning: many women adopt a third-person perspective on their bodies, deliberately objectifying themselves.

We know that the images of femininity that stare at us from the pages of fashion magazines, roadside billboards, and television shows are manipulated. But we still frequently can’t keep these images from insinuating themselves into our psyches in ways that make us feel intrinsically defective; many women are fully aware of the degree to which contemporary body ideals are unrealistic and punishing, yet they’re unable to shed the power of these ideals; they see through the ruses of media culture but buy its products anyway. There are obviously women who are either explicitly rejecting the accouterments of femininity or not really thinking about the matter a whole lot. But unquestionably, “looking hot” is one of the main priorities of many women, sometimes even their main goal in life.

THE MASQUERADE OF FEMININITY

I don’t want to deny that many women enjoy what Freud’s disciple Joan Riviere in 1929 called “the masquerade of femininity”: the art of producing a seamless façade of femininity.  I grant that deploying the props of femininity can be lighthearted fun; the artifice of self-fashioning can be a genuine pleasure. Many women love the process of altering their facial structure by the skillful application of makeup; changing the shape of their body by wearing a padded bra, stiletto heels, and tummy-flattening underwear; and adding volume, shine, and curls to their hair with the right products and styling. I’m not saying that there’s something inherently wrong with these actions. I myself would never walk into a classroom without wearing some makeup even though I know that by the end of the lecture most of my mascara will be running down my cheeks, possibly creating an effect closer to The Adams Family than Pretty Woman.

I have a smart graduate student who runs a blog on feminism and floral fashion. And I have hyperfeminine feminist friends who are skilled at combining their badass politics with their Jimmy Choo shoes. So I’m definitely not proposing that women should stop wearing makeup, dressing up, and trying to look attractive. But I don’t think that there’s any way to deny that the commercial construction of femininity—and the attempt to squeeze female bodies into restrictive molds—is one of the main ways in which heteropatriarchy is reinventing itself:  women may have made political and economic gains, but the emphasis on appearance that has always been one of the burdens of female subjectivity seems to have merely intensified in the aftermath of feminist victories. On some level, this is a backlash against feminism. At the very least, it’s a means of compensating for increased gender equality in other areas of life: I know that many young postfeminist women experience looking hot as empowering, but from a more critical perspective, this component of contemporary culture looks like an attempt to assure men that women haven’t gotten too powerful.

This was Riviere’s explanation for the masquerade of femininity already in 1929, for she argued that professional or intellectual women sometimes choose to wear an exaggerated version of femininity—an excess of femininity, as it were—as a mask to compensate for their usurpation of “masculine” power. In other words, Riviere described a defense mechanism that’s familiar to many successful career women: the attempt to alleviate the sting of female ambition on the male ego by flamboyant displays of femininity, including a girly demeanor, sexy appearance, and a flirtatious attitude.

For women, adopting the mantle of power, grabbing the portable phallus, too convincingly can result in retaliation from men who feel cheated of their birthright and from other women who don’t appreciate women who meddle with the established gender order. The masquerade of femininity seeks to offset such retaliation by reassuring onlookers that the gender system hasn’t been irreversibly altered, that the successful woman hasn’t actually usurped masculinity (or masculine prerogative) but remains a woman.

Riviere explained that much as a thief turns out his pockets to prove that he hasn’t stolen anything, competent women can resort to the masquerade of femininity in order to prove that they haven’t stolen the power that in heteropatriarchal society belongs to men. This is one reason I opt for a short skirt and high heels when I’m about to give a talk in a male-dominated domain, such as a philosophy department, and I do so especially if I know that I’m about to challenge some of the ideas that this domain cherishes. As ridiculous as this feels, it’s better than the aggression that ensues when colleagues suspect that I might have nicked the golden phallus from their display cabinet and am now trying to smuggle it out of the department underneath my skirt. I know that if my skirt is short enough to make this untenable and my heels are high enough to make it clear to everyone that I won’t get too far before I’m caught, they’ll like me more.

This is a sad state of affairs, isn’t it? It’s a way that I keep apologizing to my male colleagues for having made it into the ranks of academic professionals. Likewise, I find it hard to read contemporary female makeover culture as anything but a massive apology that women, collectively, make to men for the successes of feminism. On some level, the makeover craze is of course just an aspect of the generally narcissistic tenor of neoliberal society, a society that markets self-expression—taking the right selfie, posting it online, getting noticed, standing out from the crowd—as the epitome of empowerment. In this system, looking good becomes a way of getting validation for one’s uniqueness, a way of being “somebody.” Even those who are struggling to make ends meet can buy into this mentality in the sense that they keep hoping—in a cruelly optimistic manner—that one day they might be able to join the hordes milling around the mall in search of the inner glow that comes from finding just the right item for one’s arsenal of self-fashioning.

Still, I can’t help but interpret our society’s emphasis on female attractiveness—its attempt to reduce female subjectivity to its physical manifestations—as a means of asking forgiveness for increased gender equality in other arenas of life.

WANTING TO BE WANTED

In some societies, heteropatriarchy takes the form of suppressing outward signifiers of female sexuality through practices such as veiling. In contrast, Western heteropatriarchy has long displayed female sexuality for male consumption. Within older versions of this paradigm, men were explicitly portrayed as active subjects of desire—as individuals who get to “own” their desire—whereas women were portrayed as its passive objects. Until recently, the only form of desire that was available to women was the desire to be desired, to be the pleasing object of male desire. In this sense, women’s desire was indirect, so that the closest they came to expressing desire was by desiring men’s desire; essentially, they wanted to be wanted.

As I already noted, things seem to have changed: even if society still reads female sexual penetrability as a signifier of passivity and submission in the manner that I discussed in the previous chapter, it’s now acceptable for women to look at men, assess them, and desire them. If anything, acknowledging active female desire has become one of the main advertising tricks of the twenty-first century, used to sell us everything from clothes, makeup, and perfume to cars and condos. However, the makeover culture I’ve just described illustrates that traces of the old order of things still linger, and arguably quite emphatically, in the sense that many women are still working overtime to elicit male desire; they still primarily want to be wanted.

If one wished to insist on the accuracy of the mythology that tells us that men are more sexual than women, one could point to this predicament as the reason for this phenomenon: being asked to desire one’s own objectification is much more complicated than the process of objectifying another person. According to this interpretation, it’s not biology that might make some women hesitate in the face of their own desire but rather the psychological contradictions of having to eroticize their subordination as passive objects of someone else’s desire. Granted, the play of desire can take unpredictable forms. For example, it’s possible that the bearer of the look fails to dominate the object of the look but is instead flustered by it. Being able to capture another person’s attention can be a form of power, so that it’s legitimate to propose that the one whose gaze is arrested by a beautiful object—whether animate or inanimate—in many ways surrenders to that object, allowing himself, his desire, to be disoriented by it.

This is why contemporary movies and television shows repeatedly offer us women who use their sexuality to manipulate men, why the guy who drops his stack of business documents when a stunning woman walks into his office is such a familiar trope.

Yet in the world of straight romance, women are still in many ways expected to signal their desirability rather than to approach the object of their desire directly; they’re expected to send (usually discreet) signals of availability in the hope that the man they’re interested in will act on these signals and approach them. Although women obviously feel desire, many of them conceal its outward manifestations because they’re afraid to come across as unfeminine or too aggressive. Indeed, I’ve always thought that those who believe that men are “naturally” more sexually eager than women are letting themselves be duped by the dexterity with which many women hide their desire. As a result, as much as we might want to think that the days of relegating women to objects of the male gaze are over, the imprint of this dynamic persists: in most instances of budding straight romance, a woman is expected to (more or less) passively wait for a man to decide if she’s desirable enough to be pursued.

Street harassment is one of the many ways that our society tells women that when it comes to the male gaze, they don’t ultimately have any choice but to submit to it: any man, at any time, appears to possess the right to publicly assess a woman’s desirability. Obviously not all men participate in this charade. Many consciously reject it, wanting nothing to do with the heteropatriarchal legacies that still shape our culture. Moreover, there’s no doubt that women often deliberately play into the male gaze, that women sometimes feel empowered when they know that they’re activating this gaze, as when they walk into a party knowing that they look great.

But the flipside of such moments of empowerment are the moments in public places when a male stranger feels that it’s his unquestionable right to appraise your physique. One only needs to make a trip from Harvard Yard to South Station—the Boston bus station—to know that what’s empowering in one environment can be hugely disempowering in another, that, for instance, the style of clothing that professional women use to their advantage in work environments can elicit a deluge of sexual (and often even hostile) commentary on the streets, in the subway, and in bus station staircases. This is why I use my office in the same way that Clark Kent uses a telephone booth: at the end of the work day, I shed my miniskirt and heels (the Harvard Yard superwoman uniform) for jeans and sneakers (the South Station everywoman outfit—an outfit that’s less likely to attract unwanted attention when I’m rushing to catch the bus).

THE EROTICIZATION OF OBJECTIFICATION

At the beginning of this book, I suggested that if so many women fail to protest their denigrated status under heteropatriarchy, it may be because they have been taught to eroticize, to take pleasure in, their subordination. I hope that you can now see how easily this can happen. And I hope that you can see how confusing things have gotten: on the one hand, I think that I’m not wrong in proposing that female self-objectification (hyperfemininity) on some level (and at least in some instances) functions as an apology for increased gender equality; on the other, many women genuinely experience it as empowering. As is the case with Rosin’s attempt to recast formerly denigrated “feminine” traits as desirable ones, postfeminist culture strives to transform sexualized images of hyperbolic femininity that have historically been used to disempower (objectify) women into signifiers of female empowerment.

This explains why so many postfeminist women eagerly participate in their own objectification. Some even reject feminism on grounds that it robs women of the power of femininity, not to mention the pleasures of the masquerade of femininity. Those of us who are familiar with the history of feminism, who recognize the ways in which today’s women are the direct beneficiaries of feminist victories, find this attitude baffling, for it implies that young women believe in the justness of heteropatriarchy; it suggests that women think that men should be politically, economically, and socially superior to them. I can’t imagine that this is what they actually think. Yet somehow things have developed in such a way that many women recoil from feminism as hopelessly outdated: prissy, bitter, uncool, aggrieved, forbidding, and miserably frumpy.

It’s in part because they see feminism as hostile to femininity (and to sex with men) that some postfeminist women end up implying that if their choice is between heteropatriarchy and feminism, they’ll choose heteropatriarchy. What they don’t realize is that contemporary feminism doesn’t see feminism and femininity (per se) as antithetical. It merely criticizes the damage done to women when the worship of (commercially constructed forms of) femininity is taken to an extreme; it asks women to develop a greater degree of self-awareness about their complicity in the very system that oppresses them, that causes them to feel uncomfortable in their skin. Nor are most of today’s feminists the dowdy anti-sex advocates that the media have portrayed them to be. Indeed, the notion that feminism opposes sexuality is utterly wrong: even feminists who criticize misogynistic aspects of pornography—as I’m about to do— aren’t opposed to sex or pleasure; if anything, female sexual pleasure has long been an important feminist goal.

For feminists such as myself, the battle is—and should be—between feminism and those who uphold rigid gender  stereotypes rather than between feminism and femininity (or sexuality). Still, I can see how things can get perplexing, given that women who adhere to hyperbolic forms of sexualized femininity are on some level doing exactly what gender stereotypers want them to do. In addition, when women try to manipulate men erotically in an effort to gain power, they participate in the  instrumentalization of intimacy I’ve criticized. I—naïvely perhaps—adhere to the notion that relationships, particularly intimate ones, shouldn’t be approached with the calculating mindset of a war strategist, that they should be a matter of forging meaningful connections (however short-lived) rather than of striving to control one’s partner, either sexually or otherwise. Furthermore, women’s erotic power over men can fade over time, so that women who have built their self-esteem primarily by brandishing this power may one day find that they don’t have a whole lot left.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not among those who believe that a woman’s erotic life ends at the age of forty. One of the many things that irritate me about evolutionary psychology is the field’s insistence that older women hold no appeal for men, that only women in their twenties can arouse a man’s desire. My point is merely that any person who develops one dimension of their being at the expense of all others risks feeling impoverished when the privileged dimension no longer brings the rewards it once did. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir offers a piercing commentary on this predicament, pitying women who have been so focused on fanning men’s erotic fantasies that they have failed to develop other aspects of their lives, with the result that in the absence of sexual adventures, their existence feels empty.

The problem is part and parcel of the overvaluation of romantic love - those who bank everything on romance close off alternative avenues of fulfillment. A related dilemma is that postfeminist femininity offers an illusion of power without challenging the systematic devaluation of women that characterizes heteropatriarchal society. In the same way that the American dream—and related happiness scripts—silence political opposition by promoting individualistic solutions to social inequalities, postfeminism implies that it’s each woman’s personal responsibility to tackle all the obstacles on her path, that the only thing holding women back is their lack of exertion. If a woman can be the attorney general or the secretary of state, what’s keeping you from climbing up the career ladder?

You want to complain about the glass ceiling, the lack of childcare, or your boss’s assumption that you don’t deserve a promotion because women don’t perform well under pressure? People in our postfeminist world don’t want to hear about it. They want you to find a way around the impediment. Whining about obstacles won’t solve anything, so get over it. Adjust your attitude. You’re not one of those uptight feminists, are you? Don’t you know that gender equality has been accomplished? Haven’t you heard that feminists keep women down by making them insecure about their ability to compete as men’s equals? They are a defeatist bunch, complaining about minor issues. Surely you won’t let trivial hindrances conquer you! Surely you’ll find a way to make something of yourself. Surely you’ll beat the odds.

As media scholar Susan Douglas remarks, today’s media present an endless parade of savvy female doctors, lawyers, detectives, and corporate executives, which might give you the impression that feminism is obsolete—that there truly is nothing but your own lack of effort that can keep you from thriving. The female go-getter—the woman who overcomes impossible obstacles on her way to the corner office (while still looking appropriately feminine)—has become the ideal that women are asked to emulate. This is by no means entirely bad: Alicia Florrick (The Good Wife) in a courtroom is nice to watch. But the downside of the spectacle of female competence is that it suggests that structural impediments have been overcome, that those who are still lagging behind are to blame for their lack of accomplishment. Contemporary media images that imply that sexism has been superseded—and that feminists therefore belong in the dustbin of history—obscure the fact that, when it comes to gender (and racial) relations, we’re still far from an equal playing field.

THE LATEST EDITION OF HETEROPATRIARCHY

Today’s postfeminist women want to retain basic feminist political, economic, and social victories without calling themselves feminists. Opportunistically, they appropriate the successes of feminism while simultaneously rejecting feminism as too grim. In this sense, heteropatriarchy hasn’t been defeated; it has merely reinvented itself. It has mutated into stealthier, more elusive forms that are harder to fight because they’re harder to detect.

The latest edition of heteropatriarchy is much better at hiding its inegalitarian underpinnings than older, clumsier versions of male dominance. It even manages to make heteropatriarchy enjoyable to women for the reasons I’ve outlined: it exploits the fact that women have been taught to eroticize their own objectification by convincing them that it’s through sexual display that they’ll attain true power, the kind of power, moreover, that men won’t resent; true power, according to this reasoning, is a matter of getting men to lust after you and other women to envy you. This is heteropatriarchy made palatable to women; it’s female “empowerment” stripped of its feminist bite.

What could be better than female empowerment that men find just as agreeable as women? This version of female “empowerment” suggests that now that gender equality has (supposedly) been achieved, it’s safe to resuscitate sexist stereotypes.  Douglas explains that this attitude is frequently accompanied by a “knowing wink”: the idea that guys are such idiots, such salivating slaves to their crotches, that the objectification of women is actually a joke on them. Hypersexualized women may appear objectified but they’re actually the ones with power because in choosing to objectify themselves, they manage to reduce men to ogling, stuttering nitwits. It’s all done in an ironic, self-reflexive tone that implies that it’s not to be taken seriously, that it’s all tongue-in-cheek, so what could possibly be wrong with it? It announces that a girl is confident, not embarrassed about her sexuality. Only prim, old-fashioned feminists would condemn this—right?

In her critique of this phenomenon, Ariel Levy proposes that in today’s American society women have two alternatives: either they must accept a hypersexualized culture that tells them that being fuckable is their most important asset, or they must consent to being read as being prudish and uncomfortable about their sexuality. Understandably, the second of these alternatives is hugely unappealing.  I grant that bold female sexual display can be a way of rejecting the idea that men are intrinsically more sexual than women, that women find sex vaguely distasteful, a chore they undertake merely to please men; it can be a way of rejecting obsolete models of female sexual passivity. At the same time, in uncritically embracing their own objectification, women may overlook the fact that the parameters of this objectification are still set by a heteropatriarchal society governed by a heteropatriarchal sexual imagination. As one of my students summed up the matter, it feels a bit like women have simply given up—discarded feminism—because they have realized that they can’t defeat the heteropatriarchal system; neoliberal pragmatists that they are, they have decided that since they can’t beat the system, they might as well join it.

All things considered, the hypersexualization of women may be a better option than the curtailment of female sexuality. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to the repressed female sexuality of earlier eras. Yet I also sense that our victory over archaic views about female sexuality is not as clean as it could be, that somewhere along the line, major compromises were made, and that it may only be now, in hindsight, that we’re starting to understand something about these compromises.The issue for me is not female sexual display, let alone female sexuality. Nor am I saying that sexual objectification is always wrong, for being an object of desire for another person, and wanting to be as enticing an object as possible, may simply be a part of human sexuality (not just for straight women but for everyone). Rather, the problem is that today’s postfeminist women rarely seem free to express their eroticism in ways that deviate from the dominant heteropatriarchal script. Stated more strongly, the problem is that the only style of female sexuality that gets a serious hearing in our society is the one that has historically been favored by a notoriously misogynistic porn industry: an industry that, at its most aggressive, disseminates images of women being gagged, bound, raped, pissed on, and otherwise humiliated.

I need to be precise: I don’t think that porn is intrinsically immoral. I don’t think it should be banned. I don’t even think it should be censored. I know that many women enjoy it as much as men do. I also know that alternative, feminist, and queer porn exists, and I’m glad it does. It’s possible that the most effective antidote to misogynistic heteroporn would be to expose more people, including straight women, to different types of porn. As a result, what I’m about to say has little do with the ethics of porn as such. Rather, I’m interested in a more specific problem, namely that (straight) female sexuality has become more and more difficult to dissociate from pornography.

I’m equally interested in the fact that many straight women today find themselves in a porn-related predicament that can be as confusing as it’s painful, namely that now that they’re sexually liberated rather than repressed, they’re asked to tolerate men’s porn usage even when this usage involves types of porn that demean women, and even when this usage deprives them of sex with their partners. In other words, some straight women are up against a peculiar quandary that has yet to be clearly articulated: they’re faced with sexually reluctant men; they find themselves in the bizarre situation of being entirely secondary to the sex lives of their partners.

These two arguments may at first glance seem mutually contradictory: on the one hand, female sexuality has become
pornified but, on the other, some women aren’t getting enough sex. But a closer look reveals that these problems are interrelated: today’s straight women are literally competing with porn images for the attention of men. Sometimes they lose even when they do their best to pornify themselves, which is how they end up pornified yet deprived of sex.

In addition, there’s virtually no cultural space for them to complain either about the misogynistic inflection of heteroporn or about the fact that many straight men seem to prefer the world of such heteroporn to sex with them. It may not be too much of a stretch to say that one of the main dilemmas that straight Western women face today is that they don’t have a whole lot to do with their sexually liberated bodies because men are looking elsewhere: women may have gained their sexual freedom but in the process some of them lost men to the enticing entrails of online sex.

THE DILEMMAS OF PORNIFICATION

Much of the porn that straight men consume (and I would place the emphasis on that word: consume) is undeniably sexist, which means that the sexual culture straight women are forced to operate in is inherently sexist. To be sure, contemporary porn culture includes images of whip-wielding women who dominate men. But its most common trope remains the woman who either eagerly worships at the altar of the penis—who just can’t wait to give that blowjob—or who invites male sexual aggression. This produces the following paradox for those women who equate female empowerment with emulating the dominant sexual symbolism of our culture, who believe that embodying the ideals of this culture is what will earn them parity with men: in order to feel empowered, such women have to adopt a misogynistic attitude toward their own sexuality; they, essentially, have to learn to appreciate their own sexual degradation.

This is an extreme manifestation of the phenomenon of women being taught to take pleasure in their own objectification that I’ve analyzed. And sadly, the history of academic feminism is in part to blame for the fact that many straight women feel like they don’t have the right to complain about either the content or the prevalence of heteroporn in our society. Academic feminism in the 1980s, during the so-called “sex wars,” saw an enormous rift open up between those who criticized the misogyny of heteroporn and those who emphasized the fantasy aspects of sexuality, arguing that these aspects could (and should) not be policed. The latter camp came to be known as “pro-sex,” while the former, problematically, got labeled as “anti-sex” even though most of its supporters were looking to liberate women from misogynistic forms of sexuality rather than to argue that sex in itself is evil.

Admittedly, vehement critics of pornography such as Catherine MacKinnon sometimes gave the impression that they
believed that all forms of heterosex are a matter of patriarchal violence—that heterosexual intercourse is invariably a matter of men raping women—which understandably irked those feminists who enjoy sex, sometimes even the kind that puts men on top. But despite the “anti-sex” tag that was pinned on them, most feminist critics of misogynist porn didn’t hate sex. In retrospect, I would say that they merely wanted more interesting sex lives than what the heteropatriarchal imagination made available for straight women; they wanted better sex and they didn’t think that mainstream heteroporn was the way to get it.

Like most sex-positive feminists, I’ve always carried the flag for the “pro-sex” side. I’ve been among those who insist that heterosex can be dissociated from patriarchy and male aggression. And I’ve been wary of the rapidity with which the critique of pornography can lead to a moralistic condemnation of sexuality as such. This is why, when a student asked me after a presentation I gave on the topic of this chapter why I was so cautious in my critique of the content of heteroporn, I didn’t have a good answer: I could only say that I’m so aware of the history of the feminist porn wars that I’m afraid that any critique of heteroporn will instantly earn me a reputation for being anti-sex (which couldn’t be further from the truth).

The fact is that my intellectual formation took place during the rise of queer feminism in the 1990s,  which tends to be
emphatically “pro-sex,” and vocally anti-MacKinnon, with the consequence that for two decades I flinched at the very mention of MacKinnon; like many pro-sex feminists, I thought of pornography as a way to sidestep a 1950s type of sexual prudery. It was interesting for me to discover that the twenty-something feminist (some of them do still exist!) who challenged me on this point was much more critical of the content of heteroporn than any of my closest colleagues have been willing to be—or that I myself have been willing to be.

In recent years I’ve had to reassess things, not because I want to endorse an anti-sex agenda but because I’ve come to see that the fact that the pro-sex side won the sex wars has contributed to a sexual culture that tells straight women that it’s never cool to grumble about porn (because supposedly it’s invariably sexually liberating and socially progressive). In other words, I’ve come to see that unqualified sex-positivity—the kind of feminism that, out of allegiance to the idea that erotic fantasies are intrinsically beyond reproach, celebrates all forms of sexuality—has closed off important critical avenues: it has made it virtually impossible to criticize heteropatriarchal sex culture without immediately being labeled puritanical and sex-negative. I’ve even known straight men who use “feminist” pro-sex arguments to bluntly silence their female partners who are bothered by their porn consumption.

The contemporary feminist nonchalance regarding the misogynistic (and racist) aspects of heteroporn is weirdly out of step with the generally critical attitude that academic feminism takes toward other components of mainstream culture. Notably, the same feminists who adamantly refuse to criticize porn adamantly criticize more or less every other aspect of biopolitics (in the same way that I’ve done in this book). This, I believe, is the biggest flaw in their thinking: it’s not logical to use Foucault’s theory of biopolitical conditioning to pick apart every element of present-day culture without admitting that the straight guy who cruises misogynistic porn on a nightly basis is getting an education on what sex is supposed to look like and on how he, as a sexual being, is supposed to act. It’s not intellectually plausible to exempt sexual fantasies from otherwise intense critiques of the biopolitical fashioning of human subjectivity, for it seems incontestable that today’s multibillion-dollar porn industry is one of the most powerful tools of this fashioning, fundamentally shaping the sexuality, and perhaps even the entire modality of being, of new generations of people, especially young men.

Paul Preciado may be right in speculating that if critics of biopolitics discreetly leave porn out of their analyses, it’s because they’re among its avid consumers.18 Preciado, who otherwise adopts a queer- and trans-feminist approach, stands virtually alone on the pro-sex side in having the guts to call a spade a spade, admitting that the mainstream porn industry—which he calls “the porn factory”—revolves around women servicing the cock, of making this cock hard. All the talk about the (supposed) liberation of sexuality that porn accomplishes can’t change the fact that much of heteroporn is designed to get men off on the abjection of women; it’s designed to make men feel powerful in relation to women whose main role is to serve them sexually.

Much of heteroporn folds the denigration of women into its basic understanding (and portrayal) of sexuality, which explains why some women—myself included—find it extremely difficult to watch; the truth is that I’ve always been bothered by the visuals of (not all but a great deal of) heteroporn but too afraid to admit this for fear of being called a bad (MacKinnon-esque) feminist. Again, I don’t mean that all porn is condemnable. And if couples like to watch porn together, I couldn’t care less.

I’m not making an argument against all porn. But I’m no longer willing to pretend, out of an allegiance to a certain type of feminism, that all of it is beyond reproach, let alone invariably an instrument of sexual liberation. I can see how for some, such as queer individuals isolated from queer communities, pornography can function precisely as such an instrument. But that’s not what’s happening with straight guys who tell their girlfriends to shut up about the objectification of women in mainstream heteroporn. As is the case with most cultural phenomena, how one interprets pornography is (should ideally be) contextual and related to questions of social power (to questions about who has this power and who doesn’t).

Misogynistic heteroporn that men consume alone in large quantities reinforces the pillars of traditional—and for me unquestionably objectionable—heteropatriarchy by locking men and women all the more securely into the binary of the
desiring man and the woman who is relegated to the position of the (often passive) object that titillates this desire. Online porn sites in fact give men absolute control over the images they consume: although they may lose control sexually, the women they “interact” with have absolutely no say in the way in which sex unfolds: porn images of women can’t talk back, which means that they’re the ultimate sexual “object.”

Porn may also participate in the biopolitical creation of productive workers. Consider the common practice of using online
pornography to take a break from work, to recharge one’s ability to tackle the next task or to endure the dullness of the day. This is the epitome of neoliberal efficiency: it’s quick and clean, devoid of the messiness that often characterizes “live” sexual encounters.  You take your break and then you go back to work, back to performing. The libido, in this scenario, is not repressed, as it was in earlier models of sexuality, but instrumentalized in the service of increased productivity. The sad fact is that, at the very  moment when we experience ourselves as sexually “free” (better off than earlier generations), we’re getting a very precise tutoring in how to desire. We’re being taught to desire in ways that allow the system to make money off our desire, whether directly through pornography or indirectly through our improved productivity.

Many of the young men at the presentation I mentioned above admitted to viewing porn on a regular basis. One of them
was amused by the irony of being able to turn to some feminist texts to justify his porn consumption (he didn’t appear to view it as a profeminist act). All the women in the group acknowledged that they know that the men they date or hang out with as friends spend a lot of time on porn sites. Most found this disturbing, though a few did not. Some of the men complained that porn was complicating their real-life sexual interactions (more on this shortly). But many seemed to view it as a largely pragmatic matter: a way of saving time and effort.

Since the 1950s at least, progressive social critics have equated sexual freedom with rebellion, with countercultural transgression, resistance, and subversion. For a long time, this equation made sense: it’s not a coincidence that sexual liberation in the United States took place at the same time as antiwar protests, the rise of second-wave feminism, and general public unrest. But by now, capitalist consumer culture has coopted sexual liberation to the extent that these days sex, including sex that used to be considered “perverse,” often merely facilitates our ability to successfully participate in the game of keeping up with a multitude of psychological, emotional, and work-related pressures; it props up rather than challenges the status quo of our competitive culture. Furthermore, the very practice of picking and choosing from among a profusion of online sexual scenarios—akin to the  practice of picking and choosing from among the profusion of pasta sauces at the grocery store—reinforces the capitalist mentality that presents consumerism as a solution to all of our problems; it explicitly promotes the idea that it’s our inalienable right to “enjoy” the offerings of our affluent societies.

Online porn consumers exercise “choice” like any other capitalist consumers in the sense that they can cherry-pick their
favorite sexual scenarios. On the one hand, most of the scenarios they have access to have been produced by global conglomerates, which means that their choices have been largely predetermined; on the other, because capitalism thrives on the proliferation of goods and services, porn consumers are given the same illusion of choice as the consumers of pasta sauce who browse among a large array of jars whose labels make them seem distinctive even though they all contain more or less the same ingredients. In addition, porn consumers are trained to think that their satisfaction should be immediate, constant, and without exertion, which seems a whole lot like yet another iteration of the capitalist creed. This is a mentality that tells us that everything should be readily available to us, that we should not be asked to make any sacrifices, to set any priorities; it tells  us that our options are infinite, which is one way of producing
people who think that they’re entitled to everything.

I feel the effects of this reality concretely—in ways that make a difference in how I feel (often pretty bad)—whenever I walk into an undergraduate classroom: I’m aware that I’m standing in front of dozens of young men, some still teenagers, whose principal sexual engagement with women has been through porn images that I would most likely find troubling. The idea that this formation has no bearing on how they approach women in the real world, including their female professors, is unrealistic. I don’t think that it’s possible for people to move in and out of online venues without carrying traces of those venues into their offline lives. I find it hard to dispel the mind-altering fumes of spending fifteen minutes on Amazon .com. So I can’t imagine that the young men who started watching misogynistic porn when they were ten haven’t been in any way impacted by this practice.

Generally speaking, online porn has changed my relationship to men: whereas a couple of decades ago progressive men seemed like allies, friends, intellectual buddies, and potential lovers, these days I mostly want nothing to do with them. Something in their eyes has changed. Some men I’ve talked to admit that there are unwanted results to their porn usage. Some admit that they feel ashamed of having enjoyed watching pornography that humiliates women, that they don’t quite know what to do with the images that saturate their imagination, and that they consequently find real-life sexual encounters challenging and bewildering; they find it difficult to reconcile the female-degrading images that they have relished with the reality of being attracted to women they admire, with the result that their offline sexuality is timid and self-conscious. This conflicted attitude seems common among profeminist men who want to treat women well but who simultaneously find online porn too seductive to resist.

Among such men, guilt about their online activities can even give rise to a desperate effort to idealize their partners, to see women as virginal creatures who are entirely divorced from the “dirty” images they see online; it can give rise to an attempt to redraw the age-old heteropatriarchal dichotomy between virgin and whore as a line between offline and online sexuality. One man even mentioned that he would rather receive a kind smile from a woman than have sex with her; his desire is sublimated into gentleness, an idealizing love that flees from the disorganization of passion. Though this attitude may seem protective of women, it undermines women who would prefer robust sex lives, who would like to actually have sex with their partners rather than be worshipped as icons of purity.

It’s surely an irony of ironies that at the same time as the cultural hype about men always wanting sex is ongoing, pornography is creating a generation of men that, actually, don’t seem to much want it. Having constant access to online porn can be sexually numbing: people who open their laptops the minute they feel the slightest stirring of libido may after a while no longer know what desire feels like. If I’ve just demolished an industrial-sized bar of chocolate, I’m not going to want to turn around in thirty minutes and devour another such bar. At a certain point, I start feeling nauseated. So I can only speculate about the libido-killing effects of a constant stream of wet pussies on one’s computer screen.

A French colleague of mine told me a few years ago that he’s haunted by the vague impression that the young men sitting in his classes are largely drained of desire—perhaps because they are. I’ve also had young men tell me point blank—because I’m curious enough to ask—that they experience sex with real women as a tedious chore because it’s never as fuss-free or good as sex on the internet: it takes too much effort—you have to try to actually please the woman—and it’s less exciting because there’s a limit to what you can do. Plus you have to worry about your performance. So why bother?

THE SAME OLD STORY

I trust that this is not how all men think, but I’m not surprised that some of those whose entire sexual formation has taken place online do reason along these lines. And what’s certain is that the basic message our society is sending straight women is that they have no choice but to learn to live with porn. You catch your husband looking at girly pictures on his laptop? Look the other way and count your blessings that he’s not watching hardcore rape porn.

One man I talked to—let’s call him Rick—attempted to convince me that men simply can’t live without porn: supposedly it’s as necessary to them as breathing, water, and food so that, really, there’s nothing to be done but to accept it. I find this argument, which we increasingly hear in our public culture, including in advice directed at straight women, absurd in the sense that there are many things in life that we may want but can’t have. For starters, I would like a shorter working day, a higher salary, quieter neighbors, and students who know the difference between it’s and its. But I’ve learned to accept that I can’t always have these things. So it seems to me that the idea that porn is the one thing that men simply can’t live without is part and parcel of the heteropatriarchal mythology that naturalizes the male sex drive as intractable (while pretending that women have no trouble suppressing their urges, that they don’t much care either way).

This is one way in which antifeminist evolutionary (pop “scientific”) arguments enter mainstream culture, for nothing is
more important to conservative evolutionary psychologists than the idea that male sexuality is the kind of force of nature that nothing can stop (whereas female sexuality barely merits mention). Rick told me that he once forgot about porn for two whole weeks because he fell madly in love. He reported being shocked that he could go for that long without an online fix. He also revealed that he doesn’t choose girlfriends on the basis of their sex appeal—he knows he can get instant satisfaction online—but rather on the basis of their “presentability” to his parents. Essentially, he assesses the suitability of his partners by using a 1950s measuring stick: he’s looking for a Wife rather than a sexual partner, a woman who is respectable, who will be a good mother, and who reassures his parents.

The idealizing attitude I referred to above here takes a decidedly retrograde inflection: if some of the guilt-ridden men I
talked to feel conflicted about sex with women they admire, Rick wants his girlfriend to act like one of the virtuous wives of bygone eras. He has stepped back into a time when men didn’t sleep (much) with the women they loved (and married) and didn’t love (much) the women they slept with. Rick is also among those who admit to finding real-life sex lackluster in
comparison to its online counterpart. This seems to directly contradict his claim that his girlfriend shouldn’t be bothered by his porn usage because “it doesn’t mean anything.” Clearly, if online porn satisfies him more than sex with his girlfriend, it means something. That Rick’s girlfriend isn’t allowed to complain about his online activities is (for him) a given. When I pressed him on what he thought his girlfriend should do with her sexuality, it took him a while to understand what I was asking, because he assumed that women’s level of desire is not very high: “Everyone knows that they only fuck to please men.” When I said that I didn’t think that this was necessarily true, that I knew many women who liked “fucking” just fine, he finally seemed to grasp the dilemma: “So, you’re saying that if I get most of my sex from the internet, my girlfriend might feel deprived of sex that she thinks she deserves as my girlfriend?” Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. “Ah,” he said, as the lightbulb went on.

My conversation with Rick gave me my first, and thus far only, panic attack. To say that I felt bad is an understatement
(even though I had absolutely no interest in dating this guy). I felt utterly defeated as a sex-positive feminist. Even though I know that Rick isn’t Mr. Every Guy, I don’t think that he’s entirely unusual either, and this terrifies me, for I recognize that when men like Rick tell their girlfriends that complaining about their porn consumption is prudish, heteropatriarchy has found yet another way to tell the same tired story: men get to have what they want (in this case, porn) whereas women’s preferences, including their sexual preferences, are deemed insignificant.

Heteroporn perpetuates a gendered economy of sex that unapologetically reinforces the notion that men’s desires come
first. It really would be convenient for men like Rick—and for the entire system of heteropatriarchy—if women just learned to “live with it,” if they simply just stopped quarreling about it. Indeed, when I floated the possibility that Rick’s girlfriend might be complaining about his porn consumption because she feels slighted by it, he said that he didn’t care. He clearly expected her to accommodate his needs, whereas it didn’t even occur to him to try to accommodate hers: in this case, the need for a porn-free sex life. He expected her to respect his way of taking his pleasure, whereas he had no interest in catering to hers. Essentially, he expected her to admit the superiority of his needs without question. For Rick, there seemed to be no such thing as active female desire.

When I finally told Rick (because the conversation was making me livid—this was not a “controlled” interview) that I
didn’t care what he did with his sex life but that I would never want to date a man like him, a man with no regard for my preferences or feelings, Rick insisted that, like his girlfriend, I don’t have a choice because every guy out there is like him (even if they don’t like to admit it). Fortunately, I know that I do have a choice. Even though I certainly recoil from men more than I used to, I haven’t found it impossible to find ones who are willing to enter into the give and take of negotiating a mutually satisfying sex life.

Rick’s unwillingness to accept the idea that I have some say about the kinds of men I date came across as an attempt to erase my subjectivity and to make his sexual attitude more palatable by claiming that all men, by virtue of being men, are like him. Rick also clearly assumed that he should not be asked to make any choices in life, that of course he should be able to have his girlfriend’s love at the same time as he gets to keep his porn. This mixture of entitlement and pure gluttony characterizes many aspects of our consumer society. I learned a long time ago not to be surprised by the fact that it’s frequently expressed by young men of anticapitalist, in this case explicitly Marxist, inclinations.

For all these reasons, I’m not convinced that our postfeminist sexual culture is taking place on women’s terms. Men like
Rick silence women who seek to voice their bad feelings about pornography, sometimes even—if they’re clever enough— claiming that being critical of porn turns a woman into an antiquated antifeminist. These are men who tell their girlfriends  that if they’re feeling bad, they should learn to feel differently.

This is one of the oldest tricks in the heteropatriarchal handbook: if you do something that makes a woman feel bad, make sure that she feels terrible about feeling bad, so terrible in fact that she’ll do her best to suppress that bad feeling. Gendered thinking that tells us that men can’t live without porn whereas women don’t mind going without sex merely puts a new spin on this old trick: it implies that women’s desires are so trifling that, really, instead of complaining, they should feel relieved that men are getting their satisfaction elsewhere.

There are some women who are genuinely okay with their partner’s porn habits. Others may say that they’re okay with
these habits when in fact they aren’t; they may say so because they feel cornered or because they don’t want to appear uncool. If so, they probably can’t keep up appearances indefinitely, in which case their relationship will eventually run into trouble. When this happens, men like Rick are likely to try to turn the tables by telling their girlfriends that they’re being too sensitive or straitlaced or both; they’ll try to make them feel bad about feeling bad.

Many men are getting away with this strategy. But fortunately, more and more straight women are becoming aggravated. Some of them are starting the protest (“I’m sex-positive but still . . .”). The contradictions of pornification—the contradictions of a culture that presents itself as female-friendly at the same time as it tells women that they have no choice but to reconcile themselves to men’s fascination with misogynist porn—are becoming too immense to ignore; they’re making it impossible for the world of heterosex to fully conceal its paradoxes. Perhaps one day things will truly explode. Perhaps there will be another wave of feminism. I hope it’s going to be a tsunami.

by Mari Ruti (1964 - 2023)

from Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life

published 2018

Interview: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ide … mari-ruti/

Last edited by Hangdog90 (04-08-23 19:59:45)

pole1cat

Member

Registered: 20-03-15

Posts: 94

Re: Mari Ruti on the Reinvention of the Heteropatriarchy and Heteroporn.

Hangdog, unless the book you are quoting from is in the public domain, I suspect there may be copyright issues with the inclusion of a passage this long on a forum such as this one. As forum members, we have not paid for the use of this book.

Cheers,

polecat

privignus

Member

Registered: 29-12-15

Posts: 545

Re: Mari Ruti on the Reinvention of the Heteropatriarchy and Heteroporn.

I'm not a fan of this kind of essay because its based on one person's limited experience plus hearsay and imagination about "the culture" or how things used to be.  It also shares other people's mistaken ideas and brokenness about sex when I can't help with either in the way I could talk to a friend who was having girl or guy trouble (and also, its impossible to know whether the poor guy who thinks women don't like sex is a real person or just made up for rhetorical effect). Being sad about people I can't help does not help me figure out a kind of relationship that works for me in 2023, it just makes me withdraw from people.

She seems to have the idea that its mainly men who fantasize about disturbing things.  A glance at the romance section of a big bookstore (let alone Archive of our Own or Kindle!) provides some counterexamples.

I wonder if she is taking some Christian ideas of sexual fidelity as the way relationships OBVIOUSLY OUGHT TO BE?  Rather than starting from the premise that the terms of a relationship (including interactions with people across the gym or across a smartphone) should be negotiated to work for the people involved and their own feelings?  I have also heard of Americans who think that people in a relationship should not masturbate and that seems like weird Christian stuff by people who don't know it comes from Christianity.

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Res est arduissima vincere naturam,
in aspectu virginis mentem esse puram

privignus

Member

Registered: 29-12-15

Posts: 545

Re: Mari Ruti on the Reinvention of the Heteropatriarchy and Heteroporn.

Also, I don't think its just women who have troubles around body image because of the proliferation of photoshopped, carefully framed photos of carefully selected people.  There are all the stories about (eg.) German guys getting more reluctant to be nude in public.

And while American cultures and technology put some barriers between straight people and sexually and emotionally satisfying relationships (doing so many things across a screen or at home reduces face-to-face encounters with people who might strike your fancy), it also gives queer and kinky people opportunities which they did not have 50 years ago, and the availability of porn probably reduces the amount of rape.  I'm not good at finding people I want to fuck and/or date who want to fuck and/or date me, but not having something good in my life is different than having bad things in my life like sexual assault or being arrested for who I am in to!

There is nothing wrong with being tentative and pointing at things which go in different directions (eg. "acknowledging active female desire has become one of the main advertising tricks of the twenty-first century" but the story about the guy (student?) who thinks women don't like sex, or being sure that all men see her as a sex object out of misogynistic porn but "A French colleague of mine told me a few years ago that he’s haunted by the vague impression that the young men sitting in his classes are largely drained of desire—perhaps because they are"), but its really easy for essays like this to slip into women complaining about men and men complaining about women.

Last edited by privignus (03-08-23 19:04:02)

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Res est arduissima vincere naturam,
in aspectu virginis mentem esse puram