Palimpsest

Possibly one of the most intriguing articles I have read this year. Ostensibly, it is all about a lesbian who enjoys seducing nominally straight women but the real meat lies in the ways in which it plays with our assumptions about both gender and sexuality. In fact, the article’s sexual politics are so densely layered that the article serves as a kind of therapeutic touchstone for the reader’s attitudes about gender and sex.  How do you view female sexuality? Is human sexuality a series of categories or a spectrum? How central is sexuality to your concept of identity? The article challenges all of these ideas and prompts dozens of outraged comments in the process.  A superb piece of intellectual provocation:

Twenty years later, I still flirt with these straight-but-not-so-straight women. Only now I know the limitations of such insanities. The trick to surviving the chase is not to take yourself, or the interaction, too seriously. I always choose an opening line that borders on the absurd. “I like the way you make that pink push-up bra look intellectual” – and if she is the kind of sexually ambiguous woman that likes this kind of attention, she will laugh. And if you listen well, you can tell if she is likely to play or nay. It is not because she laughs that indicates her willingness, but how she laughs. It has to be a sort of curious amusement that comes from her eyes and travels to her mouth. Never mention that her skin is beautiful or that her legs go on for ever. Remember, she navigates that sort of cheese from straight men all day long.

The reason the directors and producers hiring them are mostly men is because the audience for porn as you have admitted is – overwhelmingly – men. And so it follows that the men who become porn actors are not chosen because it’s thought they will appeal to women (though this may be the ‘no-homo’ rationalisation that goes through some men’s heads).  They’re chosen because – in addition to being able to maintain a large erection for hours in front of a camera and crew, something which most mortal men can’t manage – they appeal to men. Most men like and admire big arms. Big abs. And big dicks. Men are so low-class.

If porn is all about the women, then why do all male porn actors have such massive cocks?