Viewpoints on porn

Given that recently a particularly poorly drafted bill became law, it seems a reasonable time to think some more about porn. I'll admit to not have seen a lot of porn, possibly because brushes with vanilla porn in my early teens left me wondering what all of the fuss was about (tangerine inflated bodies grinding in a bored fashion over other tangerine inflated bodies). Of course, looking back on it this lack of interest makes perfect sense: vanilla sex holds little or no appeal, why should the porn for this market turn me on?

One of the bloggers I read talked recently about the lack of porn for women, noting the violent tendencies in some of the porn available for men. Whilst I applaud and actively encourage people to make porn for women, I would also like there to be violent porn for women, by women, I of course mean, me. The gender bias within both the porn industry and the film industry at large is fairly obvious and has been widely documented, porn is generally made by men, for men and if women happen to enjoy it well that's more by accident than design. Theorist propound the notion of the camera as the male gaze, the female body as the eternal subject, always looked at, never doing the looking. However, when I look through the lens at a piece of porn I do not automatically take the view of the (male) director, any more than a person reading a book automatically agrees with the thoughts of the author. I think that the way in which I enjoy porn is perhaps different to the way that a man might.

In the BDSM porn I've been watching recently, the participants are almost always female. They are tied up, whipped, penetrated in any number of exciting ways, and The Photographer and I have been taking notes. The effect of being a submissive female watching other (apparently) submissive females is probably different to the standard viewing of such material. I empathise with the women, I wonder what it would be like to be encased in that much rubber, tied in such a position, fucked with that particular object. When they wriggle, or moan I think about what they are experiencing, rather than wish I was there to touch them or to cause those noises. It's no surprise then, that my favourite pieces are those where the women are "real" women, volunteers who want to be put through their paces by bondage experts, rather than the somewhat plasticised features and wooden expressions of the professional porn stars. Reality TV for porn: it's easier to put myself in the place of the women who look like they are enjoying it rather than the ones who look like they are being paid to enjoy it.

Thinking about it a bit more, this is probably less of a female perspective and more of a submissive perspective - after all, I'm having fantasies of being done to rather than the doing and I would never wish to automatically conflate "female" with "submission" under any circumstance. A Domme watching the same clip might get their kicks from imagining tying those cords, rather than the feel of the rope being pulled tight. Clearly a night in with a number of friends of different persuasions and a stack of hardcore porn is called for. All in the name of science, of course.