The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (53 page)

Obviously, the barrage of hate has upset me, but the positive feedback made me realize that I do not make pornography simply for people to get off. I do educational work, too. I challenge people to examine how our society defines gender on the basis of genitals alone. I change the way they look at what it means to be a man. I promote the idea that having a vagina is powerful, no matter who it is attached to. I inspire many trans men who have vaginas to feel safe to explore and enjoy sex. I show the public that guys like us exist and that we are sexy and sexual. My latest
projects are educational and include interviews with different trans men about their sex changes, and how their sexuality has transformed along with their gender and their bodies. I want to provide trans men with a voice—and for more of us to speak loudly and be heard.

When men do adult work they are considered “studs.” There is no reason that it should be any different when women do the same work. This double standard of sex work is appalling. I have chosen this line of work not because (as the stereotype about women with vaginas goes) I am abused, coerced, or incapable of doing something else. I make porn because I am passionate about educating about sex and gender. The message of being
empowered
through sex work is a very important one.

To use the word “vagina” in my life now makes me feel like Superman. I see that other trans men are starting to feel the same way. We no longer have to feel like that word makes us weaker, but that we can own and use it to feel and express our personal power. I believe that making my films has helped to open doors for people (no matter their gender) who have always felt some sort of shame about their bodies, or dissociation from them. That’s my kind of feminism: taking control of our bodies, naming them on our terms, and being unafraid of using our power, especially sexually. Taking back the word “vagina,” using it as a symbol of power, and showing it on film has changed my life. In turn, by being so open and public about that, I have also changed the world.

Bound by Expectation: The Racialized Sexuality of Porn Star Keni Styles

CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU

Celine Parreñas Shimizu
works as a filmmaker and film scholar and is professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book,
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American on Screen and Scene
won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2009, and her second book is
Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies.
Recently, her first feature film,
Birthright: Mothering Across Difference,
won the Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival. She teaches popular culture, social theories of power and inequality, race and sexuality, and film and performance theory and production. She is currently at work on her new film,
Stoop Labor.
For more, see
www.celineshimizu.com
.

I
n the now classic 1989 essay “Looking For My Penis,” Richard Fung identifies the predominance of Asian men performing as bottoms in gay porn.
¹
While critic/filmmaker Hoang Tan Nguyen’s work critiques the rendering of the bottom as undesirable, as if lacking power,
²
Richard Fung’s work captures a critique that I call “straitjacket sexuality” which I define in my recent book as constrained definitions of sex that privilege norms and limit our understanding of the diversities of sexuality. That is, when Fung critiques the lack of a wide range of representations for Asian men in western pornography, his point shows us how such a limited scope acts like a chokehold on the sexual possibilities available to Asian men not only in pornographic imagery, but on the horizon of representations we can further imagine. Aggravating the problem of limited Asian male representations in pornography, antipornography scholars like Melissa Farley present the representations of racialized subjects as the ultimate manifestation of pornography’s victimizing power.
³
Supposedly, the kind of sex scenes featuring people of color in pornography damages and destroys subjects already assaulted by racial inequality
in scenes of everyday life. Unlike Farley’s logics that simply declare the racism of pornography as matter-of-fact, Fung’s writing and video work describe how pornography and explicit representations can illuminate ongoing struggles around racialized sexualities. His work
Steam Clean
(1990) educates and humanizes, especially in times like the 1980s and 90s, the AIDS crisis. And in
Orientations
(1986) and
Chinese Characters
(1990) the method of multiple perspectives is crucial in representing a wide range of identities under the categories of queer and Asian. He makes sure to represent a number of characters so that each presents a network of identities who define themselves from multiple angles. His method ensures how specific members of Asian American gay, lesbian, transgender, or queer communities disseminate the diversity of their desires, practices, and identities. Using open-ended questions, Fung’s subjects not only speak for themselves in describing their sexual experiences, but understand and theorize their particular actions and their significance for themselves and in relation to others.

Pornography, like other media technologies, can be deployed by people of color to represent themselves as sexual subjects—who can own their desires and learn something about themselves. Rather than defining sexual representations as manifestations of racism, filmmakers of color like Fung do so within a framework of subjects-in-struggle, who engage sexuality as a process while making their own images. That is, they use media in an attempt to understand their sexualities within and against imposed definitions and established ideas about their racial identities. To use Michel Foucault’s words, “how people actually conceive themselves and their sexual behavior” is what we see carefully set up and drawn out in methods that don’t already assume the meanings of racialized sexuality.
⁴

Taking Richard Fung’s approach—the power of talking through one’s representations to make sense of one’s struggles with sexuality and race, I evaluate the impact of Keni Styles, widely regarded as the first Asian heterosexual male performer in the US pornography industry. He has received more than a dozen award nominations (including Male Performer of the Year in 2011 by AVN and the Urban X Awards) and won Best Male Newcomer at the UK Adult Film Awards in 2006 and Male Acting Performance of the Year at the XBIZ Awards in 2011, which illustrates not only Keni Styles’s popularity, but his ability to cross geographic borders. Fascinating about Keni Styles is a Thai and British masculinity or an Asian masculinity that is forged within multiple western contexts, including the United States where he works. I keep this in mind as I look
at how racialized sexuality is configured in his own narrative and how his racialized sexuality is conveyed in feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino’s
Rough Sex #3: Adrianna’s Dangerous Mind
(2011), in a group sex scene nominated for an Adult Video News award.

As the first Asian heterosexual porn star in western pornography, Keni Styles may embody the missing penis, whose search was called for by Richard Fung. After establishing himself in the US porn industry, Styles embarked upon a business of helping other men through an instructional video: his self-representation arrives not in the form of directing his own narrative pornographic work but as a how-to pornographic video called
Superman Stamina
(2011). The product purports to help alleviate men’s problems with premature ejaculation by making available the philosophies and sexual practices of porn stars. With an approach that presumably addresses both the mind and body, Styles promises to provide an education that will change lives through better sex. In close readings of the marketing of the product, I note that he uses his racial background and experiences, in terms of his racialization by others, as linked to premature ejaculation. In effect, his sexual problems are racial problems. Considering his position as the first Asian male heterosexual porn star, what does it mean for one who is a member of a group usually seen as lacking in sexual power, especially in the movies, to offer a solution to the problem of lack? In the process, does he offer an alternative masculinity to the one that judges Asian American men as inadequate? I am especially intrigued at the possibility of his showing us not only how to find your penis but what new discourses of masculinity he generates, if any. I then compare his how-to pornographic video to the feminist porn work of Tristan Taormino. Bringing together these two works will help me assess the significance of Keni Styles whose pornographies teaches us about the potentialities of telling stories about race and sex today.

A Male Version of “Me Love You Long Time!”?: Marketing Keni Styles in
Superman Stamina

On
thesuperstamina.com
, Keni Styles’s
Superman Stamina
video offers for sale a video that shares the secrets of male porn stars to solve the often shameful and frustrating problems with premature ejaculation. In identifying the need for his product, Styles presents a definition of manhood that centers on women’s pleasure and that clearly relies on a range of techniques for sexually pleasing a woman successfully. In a four-part
system, he outlines the need for penetration to ensure a woman’s orgasm. He argues that “oral [sex] is not enough” and prescribes penetrative sex as the “biologically programmed” solution. In prioritizing the penis itself as essential to a woman’s pleasure in the sexual exchange, he asserts that the woman needs a man [that is, a penis] inside of her. Styles argues that the woman does not just love but actually “needs” orgasms. This need is motivated by a reproductive charge. When reaching orgasm, she releases a chemical that supposedly “allows for her to identify a good mate.” So when more is released, she is “more likely to think of you as the one; while not enough time means the brain is not flooded with the chemical long enough to register.” The male challenge, then, according to Keni Styles, is to penetrate the woman “long enough” in a “firm and steady” manner so that she forges an attachment. In effect, Styles produces this structure of pleasure that follows pornography’s problem of how to make female pleasure as visible as male pleasure. But beyond this pursuit of showing female pleasure, Styles ultimately defines the significance of sexual success as male prowess.

In the premise of the video, a definition of manhood emerges that says men must demonstrate ability and skill, even expertise, so as to please women. And this demonstration of a unique male dexterity produces male power. The point of learning these techniques benefits men and renders women as derivative in the male context of prowess. Thus, to use the penis proficiently and even well, can mean access to the phallus—where women are begging men for sex and moreover, as the video suggests, will forego the social rituals of receiving gifts and being taken out to dinner, just to experience the pleasures of male penetration.

In marketing
Superman Stamina,
Styles narrates how he was born of a Thai woman, a sex worker. He then grew up in an orphanage in London as the “only Asian male,” where he was “made fun of and pushed around by others.” They taunted his “eyes, skin, and penis size—though they did not see it.” This teasing shaped his self-regard, for “he came to recognize [that] Asian men are not stallions in bed.” The naming by others led to the experience of premature ejaculation as an adult. There was “not much I could do—I came, not [by way of] penetration, but in my pants.” In his intimate relations with others, the “hotter the girl” the easier he “lost it.” This inability to perform sexually shaped his social relations with women; when he became nervous about sex he would simply “stop flirting.” Here, his intimacy issues lead to a kind of social stunting when he cannot sexually interact with women.

Recognizing the problem as bodily in nature, Styles built up his athleticism through boxing so as “to get confidence [and] work out anxiety
. . . [and become] a champion”; he looked “tough” but “inside held a secret.” He was a “bad ass in the ring” while in bed it was “another story.” Despite his strong body, he was “dumped on (sic) for someone else” when his “good oral sex [skills] of G-spot tongue twirls” were cataloged as dissatisfying to his partner. Pills did not help either, as it simply made him a “two-pump chump” who’s quick to rise and quick to fall. He did gain the appearance of strength and thus fulfilled a definition of maleness in terms of his body, but his body failed in the face of the other, especially in sexual intimacy. Lost, he joined the British Army and somehow and quite unexpectedly found a solution to his sexual problems there.