Kim told her mom she’d be studying all night for an exam on the digestive tract, but, at her friend Mylene’s place, her focus is on an entirely different set of organs. Anne has filched a couple of tapes from the back of her father’s cabinet. On the TV screen, a pallid and rather pebbly-looking penis slips over and over again into a neatly-shaven vagina. The girls howl with laughter. One for the diary, Kim thinks. She wishes she could see a real live penis for once, but this will do. The scene changes without warning, and a male voice with a cowboy accent comes over the soundtrack: “Suck my big c—k, you f—g b—h.” The barkada lets loose a collective shriek, watches the fellatio to its white shuddering conclusion, fast-forwards the tape to a lesbian scene.
To Kim and her school friends, pornography is an adult experience to be savored as a group. Though sex magazines and videos are right within their own homes, somewhere among their fathers’ or brothers’ paraphernalia, porn remains a forbidden thrill. None of them watch porn to get aroused. None of them have even had sex yet.
“Curiousity and, of course peer pressure, got me watching pornography in high school,” says Lillie, 21, who works for an international organization in Ortigas. “It wasn’t so that we could find out about making love. Porn is just sex. And we weren’t really interested in learning techniques. For that, you read magazines and books.”
Just Another Thrill
Graphic sex has long been an integral part of contemporary Pinoy life: not a taboo any longer, not even for women, something worth noting in a society fraught with double standards of behavior.
“In the ‘90s, when men and women increasingly and easily trade their traditional roles with each other, the specific market characteristics and preferences of male and female audiences have become ‘unisex’,” says filmmaker Marilou Diaz-Abaya, whose work has dealt with both male and female sexuality.
To Diaz-Abaya, it is not gender that influences people’s tastes in entertainment, but their educational and cultural upbringing.
“As a new middle class emerges in Philippine society, people have more options to leisure,” she continues. “These days they want to do it all: watch movies, read books, go to plays and concerts, travel, etc. Even porno is just another thrill.”
But although men and women can and do access pornography in their own living rooms, their responses to it are generally poles apart. One of the more indelible moments in Aissa’s short-lived affair with Jeff consists in watching Internet images bloom up on his computer screen, thanks to his super-fast hard drive. Jeff’s eyes are glued to the show, but she knows he’s watching her to see if she will flinch. He blows up a photo to full-screen. It is a blonde with long legs bent back at an impossible angle, ankles behind her nape, and one end of a two-foot fluorescent dildo shoved into her bared vagina. She is sucking on the other end, which is shaped like the glands of the penis. Despite the pain that such a position must cause, her expression is one of delirious ecstasy, “O, kaya mo ‘yan?” Jeff demands.
Hairy and Humid
“When I see the perversity, I feel disgusted,” says Mayann, 28, a graduate student at De La Salle University. “Parang sinasaktan, walang pleasure. It’s really sick when you have to get off through someone else’s discomfort.”
The perversity that Mayann is talking about, and which men like Jeff obviously enjoy, is not limited to the array of “oozing cocks” and “split beavers” that are given in pornography. Porn has grown so specialized that a random sampling will often bring you straight to the dark underbelly of human sexuality, where “M” and “F” refer to adult men and women, and “m” or “f” to children (the number of repetitions indicating how many players are involved), where a story or video clip can be designated M/FFF just as easily as ff/M. It’s a rank and humid place where a “furry” scene involves half-human, half-animal creatures, where cartoon characters go at each other, where urine flows fast and free (“watersports”), where people get trussed up and hurt (“BSDM”), where non-kinky, man-woman sex is just another subgenre, “vanilla”.
To many people—male or female—this “other side” is irresistibly seductive. To others, it is absolutely unacceptable, dirty, violative of religious beliefs, immoral. To others still, radical feminists like Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin among them, pornography is not a moral issue, but a matter of power.
Dworkin in her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women goes back to the word’s roots: “Pornography, derived from the ancient porne and graphos, means ‘writing about whores.’ Porne means ‘whore,’ specifically and exclusively the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens. The word (pornography) simply means the graphic description of women as vile whores.”
Violence or Celebration?
Gloria Steinem, in an article anthologized in Take Back the Night, essays on pornography, further elucidates: “The word porno also has another meaning, which is what these brothel whores were. The subject of pornography is not mutual love, or love at all, but domination and violence against women.”
This perspective on pornography, which originated among the radical feminists, has been adopted by women and men who refuse to catalogue themselves in any way. It is borne out of commercially-available images of real people (women, children, Asians, Blacks) being, in essence, passive receptacles of penises and other objects. In the documentary film, Not a Love Story, a North American porn film producer declares that the one act calculated to get all men off is to have a women kneel before him, take his penis in her mouth, and then look up into his eyes as she sucks him. Porn actresses rarely climax, but the actors will end a sequence in a “cum shot,” their penises dribbling semen over their partner’s face and breasts. It’s a formula that sells: in North America, the porn industry is larger than the recording and movie industries combined.
What the power theoreticians like Dworkin tend to dismiss are the many real women out there who do patronize pornography, apparently without emotional damage. Gloria, a sedate English professor in her late ‘50s, is one example. Some 15 years ago, she underwent a sexual renaissance with her husband. They would drive up to a motel in their pickup, sign in under assumed names, rent pornographic videos, and make wild love.
“We watched all kinds of videos. We didn’t choose,” she says, apparently puzzled by the suggestion that porn humiliates women. “At first I just wanted to know what this X things was all about. But it went on for three or so years, and those were the sexiest years of my marriage.”
The plucky if disturbing voice of feminist Camille Paglia must be listened to at this point. Paglia thinks Dworkin camp’s statements are “idiotic” and that “pornography shows the deepest truths about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.”
“What feminists denounce as a woman’s humiliating accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has become a bountiful fruit tree and where growth and harvest are simultaneous,” she declares in her book Vamps and Tramps.
The Power of the Erotic
Paglia makes no distinction between “pornography” and “erotica,” apparently believing that pornography for the most part is “erotic,” and favoring the shock devices in porn that break down bourgeois notions of decorum, reserve, and tidiness.
Many women would make the distinction, and express a preference for “erotica”. Louise, 22, a self-confessed expert on Internet porn, has stumbled upon some graphic stories that are a cut above the usual porn in that the characters are thoughtfully depicted, and the sex is sensitive and true to the author’s experience, not some bestial arabesque.
“They show the sexual side of the human spirit in a lift that makes it beautiful and empowering, not only to the viewer, reader or audience, but also to the artist, actors or writer creating it,” she says.
In fact, the women interviewed for this article unanimously believe that “erotica” does for women what “pornography” does for men—and it empowers them (but not at the expense of someone else), and it gets them thinking about their lovers, it relaxes them, it puts them in touch with their own bodies.
Erotica would not be about genitalia. It would, as Marivi, 26, a Cebu-based journalist, puts it, “be focused on the auditory aspect, the play on emotions. It would have to have more shots of women’s bodies being touched and caressed.”
In an essay in a magazine, in which she differentiates erotica from pornography, Gloria Steinem speaks of a “sensuality and touch and warmth” in images of people making love—an “acceptance of bodies and never endings, shared pleasure.”
It might not even be about coitus. Mayann cites the scene in the movie Out of Africa where Robert Redford shampoos Meryl Streep’s hair: her expression of enjoyment as the water streams from the pitcher. Chris, 35, a teacher, mentions Mariah Carey’s “My All” video, which has touching and a suggestion of sexual languor.
Andre Lorde, in her essay in Take Back the Night, describes the erotica as “an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in…our work and lives.”
Filling a Gap
That Steinem’s and Lorde’s descriptions are safely nebulous illustrate, first, the diversity of human sexual preference, and second, the dearth of frank material about sex that women can claim for their own enjoyment, being both truthful and non-exploitative.
We have been so burned by the voices all around that devalue women’s sexuality as being base and whorish that we often retreat to the safety of “soft-porn” bodice rippers and Harlequin romances that are belittled for their brainlessness and the feminine delusions they encourage. There is even a theory, proposed by feminists like Ann Douglas and Anne Snitow, that romance novels are “women’s pornography”—that these books are the closest women can get to indulging in sex because of our lack of sexual courage and the way we have been repressed. (Porno magazines, however, would certainly not be “men’s Harlequins.”)
We don’t have to go through an adult video shop or bookstore to access this kind of material. There are soft porn novels galore at National Bookstore and used book shops. And women who can’t stand the terrible acting or pedestrian prose of pulp entertainment may be pleased by the occasional indie film that offers a few precious minutes of simulated sex in a thought-provoking presentation.
But apart from the Internet, where surfers must expose themselves to a rain of disturbing words and images just to find a good story, there is no one place where we can find smart erotica that we can take to bed. Apart from a diffident and highly poetic anthology, Forbidden Fruit edited by Tina Cuyugan (Anvil, 1992) and now out of print, there is no erotica being produced by and for Filipinas. No one dares to write it. Publishers fear the wrath of self-proclaimed moralists and the censors. In 1995, six Miriam College students were expelled for publishing sensual work in their school’s literary journal. No one has picked up where they left off.
It didn’t take long for the pornographic industry to perfect itself, because men have never had a problem figuring out what turns them on. Women, by contrast, especially Filipino women, must deal with a double layer of guilt and shame, the deeper one born of religious conservatism, the later one acquired by education, something we owe to the likes of Dworkin and McKinnon, something rather angry. Complicating matters is a third force, male sexuality, which puts pressure onw omen through the icon of the moment, and drives us to defensive levels (“I’m not like them.”)
Filipina erotic identity survives in the interstices. Pinays talk about sex a lot, graphically describing penises, but are shy about their own bodies. We rarely discuss among ourselves the sensations that tell us we are approaching orgasm, or the way our vaginas smell and feel different at various times of the month. We resort to pretty imagery, like Alice Walker’s wet pink rose (The Color Purple). We hardly even pleasure ourselves, let alone translate our rare experiences of pure sexual bliss into film or writing. When we encounter sexually-explicit material, our initial reaction is, if not revulsion, then fear. Of vicarious debasement, of comparison to the beautiful actresses, that our erotic lives may not be as rich as the author’s.
The erotic has often been confused with the pornographic, and because both deal graphically with sex, the lines will occasionally blur. Ultimately, it is up to the viewer or reader to decide whether or not she likes what she sees and when to stop. No censor, magazine editor, or college instructor can rightly say: “This is bad for you; this is okay.” To enjoy a rich erotic life, we must know how our sexuality is viewed, and whether we are comfortable with that view or would like to change it. Women must understand the many different ways in which our bodies can give us pleasure, because sex is one area where the more we know, the better it becomes.
0 Comments
Add Comment