Slutever Page 7

  And sexual objectification goes both ways. I remember, in middle school, my mother told me that there are three things I should always look for in a partner: He should be loyal, he should be handsome (but not too handsome), and he should be able to fix things around the house. She specifically noted that it’s very important to find a man who can fix the sink when it’s broken. I remember thinking, Mom, you’re basic. But now I get it. It’s not about the convenience of having an in-house handyman. It’s about the simple fact that seeing a man hit something with a hammer is really hot. (Female gaze, anyone?) Sure, it’s a gendered cliché, but there’s truth in it—seeing a man be “manly” in a Don Draper, motor-oil-under-the-fingernails sort of way can be like porn. I guess everyone is basic at heart.

  Malcolm was a master objectifier. On multiple occasions, he’d tell me to shut up and cover my face with a pillow, and then just basically fuck me like I was a decapitated RealDoll. But I was objectifying him, too. Sure, I cared about him deeply as a person—I loved our conversations, I loved the way his mind worked—but I also got off on the fact that he was this hot, older British guy in a tailor-made suit and a stupidly expensive watch, whose decadent apartment was aesthetically aligned with my Helmut Newton–esque sex fantasies. He was the perfectly cast pervert of my dreams.

  Today, it seems like a no-brainer to me that being used for the sexual pleasure of another person can be really fucking hot. But it took me a while to get here. Unfortunately, the “Is this degrading?” question is difficult to escape as a woman. But why is this a particularly female anxiety? Is it because we have to work so hard to gain respect in real life that we prioritize a certain “respectable” code of behavior in the bedroom, even when it means sacrificing our own pleasure? And if that’s the case, doesn’t that suck? Just think of all the women who are currently not being spanked for the sake of their so-called respectability. A tragedy.

  A few years ago, a girl in her midtwenties emailed my Slutever advice column, asking my opinion on facials (i.e., when a guy comes on your face). She said she knew that a lot of people find it demeaning, and wanted my thoughts on the matter. However, she seemed really confused when I told her that I had “no thoughts” on the issue. To me, asking, “What are your views on facials?” felt equivalent to asking “What are your views on bicycles?” They are both just things that exist in the world—you may like them; you may not like them; they might be particularly useful in certain situations, but ultimately neither of them warrants a political stance. There are certain matters in life that deserve careful consideration—like what lube to buy, for instance (can’t risk fucking up your pH)—but some casual jizz on your face just doesn’t feel like one of them to me. If you’re having consensual sex with someone you like, and you’re both turned on by the idea of him coming on your face, then what’s the big deal? It’s bad to analyze sex to the point where it loses its spontaneity and hotness. Perhaps we should all stop being so hyperaware of the sociopolitical context of our sex lives, and start focusing on other, more important things, like managing to have a fucking orgasm.

  I understand that there are complex emotions involved in sex. But I also think that sometimes women’s brains become so clouded by societally imposed values and “feminist” ideals—“thou shall not be treated like an object”; “thou shall always be offended by men’s pervy remarks” (as if we are not equally adept at dishing them out)—that we spoil our own fun. It’s definitely an “easier said than done” situation, but I generally try to remind myself not to take sex so seriously. (As my scary Russian bikini wax lady once told me: “Dick is not that serious.”) I just think that, in the midst of doing something we want and enjoy, why stop and think, Wait, should I be getting off on this less and feeling exploited more? Talk about self-sabotage.

  We determine what is or isn’t degrading based on sociopatriarchal norms about how a woman should behave, which should make it obvious that the whole “Is this degrading?” debate is just another way of policing women’s bodies and behavior. But ironically, even though most women suffer under the degrading/not-degrading binary, it isn’t just men who impose these constraints. There are a lot of women out there, and many who identify as feminists, who are quick to tell other women what they should and shouldn’t do, and what is and isn’t immoral or degrading. (As bell hooks loves to say, “The patriarchy has no gender.”)

  About a year ago, I interviewed the legendary porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley. We were specifically discussing a Netflix documentary called Hot Girls Wanted (2015), which follows a group of young women who are getting into the porn industry. The documentary, produced by actress Rashida Jones, took a familiar, mainstream, puritanical stance on the situation—essentially, that female porn performers are victims, and that doing porn is degrading. One scene of the documentary that’s particularly hard to watch involves a young woman shooting a scene for a site called Latina Abuse, which features “facial abuse” porn, where girls are face-fucked until they vomit. It did seem awful, and the film effectively made you feel bad for the performer involved. So I asked Hartley what she thought about it—specifically, is there a point at which we just can’t deny that some sexual acts are degrading? And also, is it the business of a group of documentarians to make moral conclusions about the sex lives of a group of young women?

  “Degradation is a subjective experience,” Hartley told me. “Just because you don’t find what’s happening in a scene arousing doesn’t mean the performers in the scene aren’t having a great time…We watch these [facial abuse] scenes and we become outraged for her, we become concerned for her, and we become angry at her. But we don’t know what is going on in her head. She may be going, ‘It’s so fucking weird and cool that I’m getting paid for this.’” Ultimately, according to Hartley, if a woman is consenting to something—be it doing extreme porn, or having a guy come on her face, or having her sort-of-boss pimp her out to his artist friends—that is the woman’s decision to make. Hartley went on, “As a woman and as a feminist I have to give you the dignity of making your own choices, learning your own lessons, and not rushing in to save you from yourself. Because how patronizing is it of me…to rush in and say, ‘Oh no sweetheart, you don’t want that.’ It’s like, ‘Fuck you!’

  Men, on the other hand, almost never get told they are being degraded during sex. For instance, we never even think to discuss the male porn star who’s doing the face-fucking. Like, is that degrading for him? Does he like doing that? Well, apparently no one cares, because men are somehow above sexual degradation and unable to have a sexual experience that isn’t high five–worthy. But when a woman wants to experiment with engaging in extreme porn, as a performer or a viewer, somehow she always ends up the “victim” of the situation.

  It should be self-evident, but the distinction between being a victim and not being a victim is consent. To quote one of my favorite porn performers and directors (and the creator of one of my all-time fave porn series, Public Disgrace), Princess Donna: “People don’t understand that the main ingredient to everything is consent. I don’t believe that there is any fantasy too extreme or too out there to enact between two consenting adults in a safe environment. I actually think that it helps people grow and become comfortable with who they are. And that little step to admit what you like in the bedroom will bleed over to the rest of your life and allow you to be more open with yourself and with others about what you need and who you are.” To me, this is the ultimate slut scripture.

  I watch a lot of porn, and have for years. Like many people my age and younger, I saw my first porn video while I was still a virgin. I remember once, after letting Malcolm tie me up in some insane Japanese shibari tie, he looked at me with wonderment and said, “Girls your age are amazing, because you’re a product of porn.” He was obsessed with the idea that the proliferation of porn had changed the way that people fuck, particularly people like me, whose initial concept of sex was largely formed by on-demand HD pornographic videos. Of course, this isn�
�t necessarily a new or enlightened idea—if we copy the stuff we see on TV and in movies, why wouldn’t we also mimic porn?

  But it was funny to hear the argument from Malcolm’s perspective, as someone who’s been slutting around both pre- and post-PornHub. He said the biggest difference he’s noticed is that today, women are turned on by things that don’t necessarily stimulate them physically but instead excite them psychologically. “It’s a mental thing,” Malcolm told me. “They’re excited by becoming something they’ve seen as powerful in a porn movie—they want to be ‘that girl’ who can deep-throat or whatever. When women my age were in their twenties, their image of a powerful woman was Princess Diana. For your generation, that woman is Sasha Grey.” I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but I don’t think he’s wrong.

  Of course, pornography has long been one of the most controversial issues in feminism. But whenever someone tells me that porn degrades women, or that porn is sexist, I always just think, That’s because you clearly haven’t seen enough of it. When compared to other forms of media—like TV, movies, and fashion magazines—porn is far more diverse, featuring women of all body types, races, ages, and physical abilities. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from porn, it’s that literally no matter what you look like, even if you’re obese and have one eye and are lying in a pile of hay in a barn, there’s someone on earth who’s going to want to have sex with you. And that’s reassuring! I think that watching porn can be really good for women (and men) in terms of normalizing kinky or extreme fantasies, and also in terms of inspiring sexual confidence. Any world where you regularly see groups of men worshiping a giant ass full of cellulite is a world that I want to be part of.

  Personally, porn helped me a lot with my body image when I was a teenager. I was a typical high school girl, perpetually obsessed with losing five pounds. I got boobs and hips before any of the other girls, and I felt insecure about it. I envied my friends whose thighs somehow still looked thin even when sitting in a chair. But then I saw the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape (this was literally the first porn film I ever saw, which I specifically remember took about four hours to download on our hellish dial-up internet) and suddenly everything changed. I quickly realized that I naturally gravitated toward watching porn where the women were more curvy, even so-called chubby, because their bodies had more bounce. I wanted to see flesh—girls with something to grab on to. Not that there’s anything wrong with being skinny, but when you’re fifteen and all your favorite magazines only feature models who look like baby aliens, porn is a welcome diversion from the norm.

  Porn can certainly be problematic in the absence of sex education. Porn is sensational entertainment that’s fun to jerk off to—it’s not a how-to on making a woman come, and people need to be educated on that basic fact. But to make the blanket statement that porn is degrading to women denies the reality and complexity of female sexuality. Some women are exhibitionists, or like to play sexual power games, or get off on submission. Some women simply want to be paid to fuck (and to that I say: Respect, yo). Pornography is the ultimate representation of human sexuality—it reveals the deepest, most animal truth about our desires. Porn is democratizing. It teaches us what’s on the menu. And it’s just really fun to watch other people fucking, so, like, everyone chill out and let me live my life.

  The seemingly inescapable “Is this degrading?” anxiety is so pervasive that not only does it influence our sexual behavior, but it even affects our fantasies. (Or at least, the lies we tell ourselves and others about what we fantasize about.) Have you ever noticed that when faced with the question “What turns you on?” almost all women have the same answer? It goes something like: “I’m turned on by someone who’s smart, funny, well dressed, creative, successful,” blah blah blah. Sounds suspect if you ask me. Sure, all those things are stimulating, but that’s only half the story—frankly, the boring half. But I, too, often stick with the stock answer (at least when I’m in polite company), because saying some version of “I’m turned on by intelligence” sounds way less scary than the reality, which is that I’m mostly turned on by a weird genre of faux surveillance porn where teen girls are caught shoplifting and then blackmailed into giving security guards awkward blow jobs. Is that bad? I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe that anyone’s ever come thinking about how their boyfriend is a good listener.

  Evolutionary biology tells us that what we find sexy is ultimately indicative of what’s best for the survival of the species, meaning that being fit, having clear skin, and sending well-crafted emails—all qualities that evoke health and competence—make someone more fuckable. But can evolutionary biology explain my gang-bang fantasy? I guess the Darwinians would argue that sleeping with ten guys at once makes you ten times more likely to get pregnant, which is all part of my inherent desire to procreate. But I kind of don’t buy that. All I know is that in order to come during sex, I usually have to close my eyes and focus extremely hard on the idea of being violated by a gang of meathead bros. Some might argue that it’s a result of my growing up in Generation Porn. And yet, that fantasy certainly predates dial-up.

  I remember the first time I read Nora Ephron’s famous essay “Fantasies,” when I was twenty-four. In it, Ephron discusses the rape fantasy that she’s had since she was eleven. I was genuinely amazed that this woman—a feminist icon—had a rape fantasy, too. (You may remember that in Ephron’s film When Harry Met Sally, Sally has the same fantasy; art imitates life.) Reading “Fantasies” was an intense moment of realization for me—like, It’s not just me? I’m not a lonely perv?! It felt reassuring, but also slightly disappointing, if I’m honest. For years I had thought I was deviant in this special and unique way, only to find out that not only was I not a deviant—I was actually boring.

  When “Fantasies” was first published in the early 1970s, it received some serious backlash. Liz Dance discusses the essay and its aftermath in her book Nora Ephron: Everything Is Copy (2015). Dance writes that Ephron’s essay “provoked an outcry from some quarters, particularly by those in the Women’s Movement who were outraged that Nora, a declared feminist, should write about rape fantasies. ‘Fantasies’ provoked criticism because Nora not only confessed to having a sexual fantasy, a rape fantasy in which she is ‘dominated by faceless males who rip my clothes off,’ but it was a fantasy that she thought of as ‘terrific.’”

  Essentially, these women defined Ephron’s fantasy as not-so-feminist. Talk about perv shaming! The term “safe space” literally makes me want to barf, but in the classic sense, our fantasies—and our bedrooms, ideally—should be a safe space to act out our creepiest desires. And on that note, I don’t think we need to file all our actions under “feminist” or “not feminist”—especially since consensual sex kind of exists in a political vacuum. It’s pretty much the one place that we can just do things and move on, no angry think piece needed.

  Clearly, I am a proud feminist. But I believe at its core, feminism is about freedom and a woman’s right to make decisions for herself. And if that means masturbating to the idea of being mobbed by a group of personal trainers, or getting paid to deep-throat until you puke, so be it. One thing that’s certainly not feminist is suppressing your desires because you think what you want is “just not something a respectable woman should do.” As slut prophet Sasha Grey once said: “What one person sees as degrading and disgusting and bad for women might make some women feel empowered and beautiful and strong.” Sometimes, in order to get to that place where we feel free to unleash our inner sex maniac, we have to kick feminism out of our fucking beds. Because at the end of the day, as long as we’re not hurting anyone (who hasn’t explicitly asked us to), then we should be free to have whatever type of sex we want.

  In Defense of Sex Maniacs

  I do not always make the wisest decisions. I wish I could tell you that my perverted love triangle had a Casablanca-esque ending, where I was forced to choose between two men who loved me, and in the end chose Ma
lcolm, because of the harmony of our sexual politics. Yeah, not even close. In reality, neither man seemed to care about dating me, but in a bizarre plot twist, I somehow ended up in a relationship with Max for the next two years. I guess opposites attract?

  When I first met Malcolm, it was thrilling to be with someone so driven by sexual adventure. Put simply, he was a sex maniac, and that was a turn-on for me. In the years since meeting him, I have continued to be attracted to people of that particular breed—often called playboys, Casanovas, hedonists (or more recently “sex addicts”). For me, the turn-on is the idea that someone has no moral obstacle between them and their sexual desires, even if those desires sometimes get them in trouble. (Not to the point of harming someone, of course, but to a level of sheer stupidity is cool.) I think there’s something about debauchery that’s very liberating. There’s just more on the menu when you’re screwing a sex freak.

  The trouble with sex maniacs is that they tend to make difficult or at least challenging partners. It wasn’t easy being with Malcolm, even in a fuck-buddy-slash-romantic-friendship capacity. As time wore on, I naturally grew more possessive of him. Suddenly, his stories about the fivesomes he was having with a group of Norwegian fashion designers made me more jealous than wet. But I dealt with it—I mean, I knew what I’d signed up for. Until I hit my breaking point: the time he slept with one of my close friends, and was annoyed by the fact that I was annoyed. In our inevitable fight afterward, his defense was literally: “We weren’t having sex. I was just teaching her how to give a blow job.” Adding, “Really, it was more like a business meeting.” How does he get away with this shit?