In my newfound libertine persona, strangely comfortable in my skin after years of self-mortification and angst, the sneaking suspicion that once the door is opened to permissiveness it’s a fast track to a seedy decadent hell, is being proven in my life.

Yesterday, I was asked to be in a porn movie. Now I am quick to assure you that I declined, but the feeling of jumping-in-the-air chuffedness is something that I have to share. Oh, you pretty things, preening with the erotic power that youth confers, you may take such an invitation in your stride and recognise it as the inevitable dividend of your unearned sexual capital, but for me, using and tolerating the word middle-aged as a self-description for only the second time in these pages, it was a red letter day. It will never happen again, but it never happened before, and I never thought it would. Once is just right. And, for me, to decline is just right.
The late, and for me, lamented Andrea Dworkin, the scourge of porn, together with her partner John Stoltenberg, waged war against the portrayal of women in porn as objects, as things for use and abuse by men. They and their supporters succeeded in getting legislation on the books in the States in 1984 which defined pornography as a violation of women’s rights. I disagree with her profoundly, but I respect her for raising consciousness about the emotional and political aspect to sex, and the undoubted appalling exploitation of so many women involved in it. Too often, sex and its symbols and iconography is unconsidered, unthought-through; emotions, soul and intellect are padlocked away. But pornography and the kind of sex that goes with it – fantasy, role-play, visual stimulation, fetish, ritual, power and control, objectification at its most colourful and intense, is part of the human condition; it’s how we play. They can’t be erased by the law, whether canon or civil.
When exploring the psychic charge around heterosexual porn, especially that which portrays women in subjugation, one cannot remove what is being portrayed from its social and economic context. In the seventies, when this crusade against porn began, western women were becoming aware of, and increasingly sensitive to, their political and economic inequality; it was rubbing salt in the wound to contemplate that anyone could take pleasure from that inequality being dramatised in images or sequences. A woman in bondage became a potent symbol for the emerging awareness of how women are impotent in so many ways in this culture. Anyone who got turned on by those images, ie the pervy pigs that are the male of the species, needed to be educated, corrected, disabused, which is what John Stoltenberg has dedicated his life to.
Being politically aware at that time in the eighties, I took on board a lot of this ideology, and in a funny way it seems to have innoculated me against porn since – I only have one porn video to my name, (featuring bootboys, naturally), and about five crummy badly touched-up naked hunk mags, and one Tom of Finland book; I have no stash of porn on my hard drive, except webcam shots of a personal nature which kind strangers have sent me in online chats, in order to help me see what was on offer, as it were. But for me, most porn seems to be a distraction, a waste of time, a pale imitation of the live theatrical and sensual psychodrama that is sex in real time. Most porn, to me, is merely evidence of a scene that once happened between those people; I end up wanting to know more about them than how good their tits are or how well they can say “Oh yeah, man, give it to me, man, oh fuck man, do it”. Most porn bores me to tears.
But my political stance against porn did not, nor could it, make sense of the phenomenon of gay porn. Exactly the same scenarios and dialogue and bad acting could be seen in both heterosexual and gay porn, but one represented something dreadful and denigrating, the other didn’t. It was very confusing. If a man was photographed in sexual extremis, his face blurry and vacant with sheer abandonment to his pleasure, his submission to carnality evident for all to see, joyfully praying at the phallic altar, I could not register anything but a stirring in my loins. I tried to see it in negative terms, but couldn’t – was it confirmation of his low self-esteem, his low economic status? Was it a symptom of internalised homophobia, demonstrating that he couldn’t grow up and enjoy the “real” kind of sex, that which, we all agree, can only be the expression of love between two people? Was he being exploited, raped by the system that made capital out of his looks, youth and energy, his passivity and submission, at the expense of his dignity and soul?
I struggled with these contradictions for years – wondering about the differences between male and female porn actors, about the differing psychological dynamics, and about what it said about me, the Sadean observer, the one for whom it was all being acted out. If I were heterosexual, and found myself similarly aroused by man-woman sex play, would I be guilty of violating the woman’s rights? And I wouldn’t care about the man’s rights in a similar situation? Why not? Couldn’t he be just as economically deprived as the woman, couldn’t he have a crack habit to support just as voracious as hers? Couldn’t they both have low self-esteem issues, the money they earn from skinflicks a poor substitute for making a living decently? All these broken kids from broken abusive homes, I thought, making a buck the only way they knew, poor things.
If only they had counselling, I thought, as I started training as a counsellor – I’d sort out their kinks, make them see sense, get them happy to work in a McJob and study part-time and have happy monogamous relationships and become a happy paragon of civic and moral propriety. Never trust a counsellor, we all have delusions of power, fantasies of changing people to suit our own moral code. Anyone who denies this is a liar. In the end, it’s a question of being aware of them, for that’s the only way in which they can be reckoned with, tested, challenged, and negotiated.
Porn, and the myriad of emotional, political, relational, cultural, psychological, economic and gender associations it stirs up, remains a transgressive and ultimately irrational phenomenon, defying convention and challenging us to examine our basest instincts and our highest aspirations.
But, I’ve seen some good porn in my time. The fucking theatre of it, the human projector screen of it, the passion and the shock of it, the losing oneselfness of it, the union in it, the isolation of it. The universality of it, the specificity of it. The camaraderie of it. The anarchy of it. The existential crisis of it, the sensory detonation of it, the annihilation of all inhibition and constriction and anal-retentiveness of it. The abandon of it, the sharing of it. The variety of it, the sameness of it, the itch-that-needs-scratchingness of it. The possession of it, the grotesquery of it. The adventure of it, the carnival of it, the masquerade of it, the drive of it, the play of it.
The fun of it.