Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Thinking About Pornography 1

Male dom­i­nance instructs men that our bod­ies are tools. By turn­ing male orgasm into the “cum shot,” het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy reflects and per­pet­u­ates this image of the male body. Yet it does not have to be that way. Erec­tion, for exam­ple, the grad­ual hard­en­ing of a man’s penis – in the hand or mouth or inside or against or at the sight, sound or smell of the body of his lover, or in his own hand – is the phys­i­cal corol­lary of, a con­crete metaphor for, that man’s capac­ity for trust, some­thing Sharon Olds explores in her poem “The Con­nois­seuse of Slugs:”

When I was a con­nois­seuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bod­ies,
translu­cent strangers glis­ten­ing along the
stones, slowly, their gelati­nous bod­ies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to noth­ing if they were sprin­kled with salt,
but I was not inter­ested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug for­got I was there
and sent its anten­nae up out of its
head, the glim­mer­ing umber horns
ris­ing like tele­scopes, until finally the
sen­si­tive knobs would pop out the
ends, del­i­cate and inti­mate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with plea­sure to see that quiet
mys­tery reen­acted, the slow
ele­gant being com­ing out of hid­ing and
gleam­ing in the dark air, eager and so
trust­ing you could weep.
“”

That trust as a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for sex, as that with­out which sex becomes exploita­tion by def­i­n­i­tion, is what is miss­ing from the male per­for­mances in movies like Inside Christy Canyon.

I want a main­stream het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy in which this male trust is eroti­cized, in which the places we have not been, I have not been touched, the places it is in the inter­est of male dom­i­nance to keep hid­den, are lifted into the light and brought into knowl­edge. I want a het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy in which the sen­sa­tions of the penis are not lim­ited by the in and out and up and down that leads to ejac­u­la­tion; in which our avail­abil­ity, my avail­abil­ity to the eyes and hands and mouths of my lover(s) teaches me what it means to be known and desired entirely, only and wholly for myself; in which the touch of sex – because at the level of the body touch is all sex is – cre­ates a space where the embod­ied life of one human being opens to the embod­ied life of another; in which what is made from that open­ing is under­stood to be what the love in mak­ing love is all about.