The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (31 page)

“I just . . . I don’t want it all to be so happy, so cheerful, so polite, you know? What about aggression? Or power? Maybe I’m not normal? I want to, you know, be in charge.”

“You want to be in charge sexually?” I asked.

“Yeah, but also, just in interactions. I want to tell a girl what to do and have her listen to me. Maybe not even all the time—but sometimes. I don’t mean that I want to do stuff to her that she doesn’t want done. But I like that edge,” she said. “Is this reenacting the abuse? That’s what a friend told me. But I want her to want it. I just want to be in charge.”

I asked her about her fantasies of being in charge and she became silent. The images that turned her on, she said quietly, were from porn she didn’t really like or, she corrected herself, didn’t want to like. Images she was certain, as she prefaced her explanation to me, were made by and for straight men. Of feminine women being forced to perform sexually. In most of the images, the perpetrators were men. That was part of the reason she questioned her own gender. It had taken her a long time to realize that she didn’t want to be in their bodies; she just wanted to
do what they did. When my client did find pornography that showed two women together, both women were traditionally feminine with long nails, big hair, and fake breasts and seemed to not be enjoying themselves. The few porn films she had seen that were made by women felt tame to her, with no sense of power being exchanged.

My client took a big risk in telling me what she wanted, what turned her on. We continued to talk about her sense of her gender and her desire for power. Over the course of a few years surrounding herself in community—since moving to the Bay Area from a smaller city—she had become comfortable with her butchness. But she had not found her way into a community of BDSM or kink-identified folks where she could explore her desires for power, for a lover who’d consent to giving her control. What she had found were images that did not accurately reflect her or her desires, but she was attempting to project herself into these images because they reflected the kind of power that she was attracted to.

After the session ended, I turned off the tape recorder. I had a brief fantasy of erasing the tape, because I didn’t sound like any of the neutral-toned, psychoanalytic therapists in the case studies my supervisor had been giving me to read. My fantasies of erasing the tape, or even just misplacing it, were quickly supplanted by a sinking feeling of dread over sharing it with my supervisor.

My trepidation was correct. My clinical supervisor, a heterosexual, white, traditionally psychoanalytic, and conservatively feminist psychotherapist was not pleased with my work. She believed that all pornography exploits women, who must be coerced into performing, and she was concerned that my client’s interest in kink and BDSM was indicative of an unconscious desire to reenact the abuse. My supervisor was interested in the fact that my client imagined herself as the one in control. She thought it meant that my client was identifying with her abuser and desired to play out her abuse on another woman who would look the part of the archetypal feminine woman, and that through the interaction, my client hoped to be healed by externalizing her sense of powerlessness and femininity and projecting it into a sexual partner.

In my supervisor’s assessment, reenactments are always pathological—the desire to feed the perpetually overwhelmed state of the psyche and the nervous system.

I did wonder if my supervisor was correct, but I didn’t think that it had to be a pathological urge that leads us to reenact our past traumas, if we are conscious of the process and pay attention to how we feel and how we integrate the experience. In a healing enactment, some of that experience is symbolized. My client did not wish to actually violate the
boundaries of consent of a partner, she wished to have control given to her so she could have the
experience
of control and empowerment.

I argued with my supervisor about this for weeks. She was interested in my ideas about symbolized enactments, but still felt that my client was setting herself up to traumatize herself or someone else. Eventually she told me that I had to confront my client, to caution her against enacting her fantasies and urge her to explore them only verbally.

I dreaded that session with my client. We continued exploring a fantasy she’d had, based on a porn film she’d seen, of tying up a woman who struggled against ropes with fear in her eyes.

“Maybe this is too perverse,” said my client, shaking her head. “Maybe it is wrong to want this—maybe that fear was real, not an act. Maybe it
was
violence.”

I was acutely aware of the tape recorder on the table next to me, and imagined my supervisor listening to the tape. “Maybe that is true,” I said to her. “What if it was?”

I don’t remember much about the rest of the session, other than the lack of eye contact, the sense of great distance between us in the cramped, sunny space, and the amplified hiss of the tape recorder.

The therapy only lasted a few sessions after that. My client decided that she accomplished what she had wanted to in our sessions. Indeed, she was feeling more relaxed in social situations and more connected to her friends. But even as I affirmed those developments with her and told myself that they were true, I knew also that I had betrayed her, that I had confronted her most vulnerable, wounded self and made it clear that her desires weren’t welcome in my office.

In believing my supervisor, I shamed my client in the ways in which she had been shamed by others. I continued her experience of not seeing herself reflected, by her abusive family, by mainstream lesbian culture, by her therapist, or by the pornography that she found.

Fast-forward ten years.

I teach a class called Queer Bodies in Psychotherapy to graduate students who are studying to become psychotherapists. Often my students tell me that their education thus far has been filled with traditional psychotherapy texts—including minimal and often-outdated clinical information about sexualities and gender identities—and virtually no breadth of information about sex practices. They are studying for their degree to become marriage and family therapists in the state of California. My class is an elective.

The first time I taught the class, I endeavored to create a reader and
resource list that I thought would give my students the best survey of information I could find on the ranges of sex practices, sexual identities, and embodied responses to cultural oppressions of gender and sexuality, and their intersections with race, class, and other identities that have been discounted by mainstream academia and psychology.

I spent months culling thousands of pages of articles into an almost reasonable length for a one-semester class. The reader was relentlessly sexual and explicit. Out of good faith, I went to speak with my academic dean. She supported me in my assertion that we could not teach students to become therapists who are able to speak explicitly about sex and sexuality with their clients, without modeling for them in the classroom how to do just that, but she still had concerns about the extent to which sexually explicit material made up my course materials.

We struggled to explore why we aren’t supposed to talk about sex in academia. We agreed that the glossed-over, vague clinical teachings about the importance of emotional intimacy, and the insistent linking of all healthy sexual expression with emotional intimacy, is a part of the same shaming of sexual desire and agency that leads clients—especially women and queer clients—to our offices.

Ultimately the dean supported my curriculum and my explicit conversations about sex and sex practices in my classroom, but with one caveat: text and some photography only. No pornography in the classroom.

Most of the text I teach to my students isn’t writing that’s coming out of the field of clinical psychology. It’s from queer theorists, sex educators, self-identified sex radicals, AIDS activists, and sex workers who are interrogating issues of cultural (mis)appropriations and shame. So even without showing pornography in my classroom, there was always enough sexually explicit material to talk about. Or so I thought.

Students started reporting in class about their experiences in their clinical internships. As when I was an intern, many training clinics, where the majority of supervisory staff or clinicians are heterosexual, have a tendency to assign all of the queer clients to the queer clinicians, regardless of gender expression or sex practices. The result looks something like this: dyke interns unfamiliar with gay male sexual expressions find themselves as new therapists sitting with gay male clients struggling with questions of safer sex and HIV risk. White gay men who don’t know about the spectrum of possible trans bodies find themselves needing to talk about hormones and packing cocks with African-American, genderqueer FTMs.

It isn’t that I expect my students to become experts in all forms of
sexual and gender expression, but I do hope for them—and expect of them—that they become familiar enough, educated enough, and nonreactive enough to treat clients with respect and curiosity about their experiences and how they understand them, instead of needing their clients to educate them.

I assure my students that we all have ideas about sexualities and sexual practices that we have aversions to, don’t know anything about, or are simply not interested in, but that when we think about our clinical work, our own interest isn’t the point. I then tell them to go rent pornography and watch as many videos as it takes to learn five new things, and then do it again. Not necessarily sex acts or positions—though certainly those are learned—but more complicated representations and enactments of desire and power.

This isn’t an exercise in converting them to any particular kind of sex practice; it is however, about broadening their ideas about sex practices and desires so that when clients come in who are often socialized to feel shame about their desires, their therapists won’t further shame them. We need to learn to be present with our clients’ experiences and desires, and to be curious about them without leading to the activation of our own fears or uncertainties.

My students and I then talk about what kinds of pornography they should be watching. In my class, questions about “what kind” of pornography aren’t code for kinds of sexual practices. It is an explicit conversation about my belief in feminist pornography and what that means. We talk about the importance of performers’ self-authorization; porn stars who actively and politically claim the role and title of porn star as a stand against sex-shaming, normative cultural expectations; performers who identify as exhibitionists and perform sometimes with partners of their own choosing, with the bodily limits that they have articulated for themselves; and films in which we can trust that the role of consent was central, including films that include behind-the-scenes interviews with performers explaining not only their willingness to perform, but often their own sense of excitement at setting up their own scenes, and sometimes even the negotiation of limits between partners before those scenes.

Additionally, I want my students to learn to talk in public about sex, to develop comfort with asking questions. Even though there is a lot of porn available online, including grassroots, feminist porn, teaching in San Francisco means I can send students on field trips to Good Vibrations and other sex-toy stores to peruse the rows of pornography available for rent or purchase, and to ask questions of the staff. My classroom
is often a site of cultural contact for students who come from communities where there was no easy access to information about sex and sex practices, and who stare wide eyed at my assignments. Many students who live in the Bay Area moved there because of the area’s reputation as a mecca for sexual outsiders. And very often, my students have ties to the porn and sex industries. As some students make classroom confessions about their favorite porn stars, other students tentatively disclose their experiences with sex work, stripping, producing or acting in porn, or working in other parts of the sex industry.

Good pornography, like good sex education, is useful as a therapeutic tool not because it sets out to convince my clients and students that they want to do everything—or anything—they see, but because it helps to build somatic and visual vocabularies from which to make empowered choices.

As we talk in class about pornography, the externalization of desire, and porn as sex education, the question inevitably comes to this: How do we actually make use of porn in therapy as a therapeutic tool with clients? There is always at least one student who has been taught by a professor, or by conservative feminist politics, to believe—not unlike my first supervisor—that pornography, especially when working with survivors of sexual trauma, leads to enactments of abuse. I want to be able to categorically deny this. But I can’t quite.

On the occasions I have seen porn lead to traumatic reenactments, it has been the result of people trying to enact scenes they’ve watched when they have no prior experience with that particular kind of sex play. I want to help clients take away from porn that they’ve watched, and which has aroused desire, an articulation of the feelings that they want to explore and the ability to then negotiate scenes based on their own experience and boundaries that allow for those explorations.

Most porn isn’t subtle. It relies on big visual emotion and physicality. I tell my students that it is our job as therapists to work with clients and help them begin to recognize their own internal cues and their ability to maintain connection to their emotional and bodily experience without dissociating. This means working with clients to build their awareness of sensations that aren’t visible in performance when watching porn—sensations in their hands and feet, connection to their breath and the beating of their heart, and connection to the body and experience of their sexual partner(s).

I make it clear to my students and clients that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with playing with big exertion and physicality. But the kinds of exertions and exuberant physicality that might look great on
screen shouldn’t be valorized over more subtle forms of play and exploration, especially when working with survivors of sexualized violence. The therapeutic goal isn’t about any particular kind of sexuality or sexual expression, it’s about building the capacity to stay present with one’s own experience.