Sexual compulsion is not a strange theme for von Trier. It was there in Antichrist (2009) as a way to alleviate anguish, but the genre in Nymph()maniac’s narrative resembles more the 18th Century novels – from Sade to Marivaux – with a single story line, a narrator and a semi-passive interlocutor, where the focus is on sex and in the monotony in the repetition of experiences. Curiously, the sexual compulsion that eases emptiness in Antichrist does not echo in Nymph()maniac: Joe has no anguish, even though she tries to forge it inside a guilt that does not exist. Especially in Volume 2, Joe looks for limits which would bring her the guilt she believes she should feel as a result of her behavior, but not as a compulsion or a vice. Aesthetically speaking, Trier created a panoramic view of the pornographic film industry in its last 30 years, being more visual in Volume 2 than in the first one, and focusing on the dichotomy love vs. sex (which is ultimately the base of any discussion on pornography).

Seligman has as primary role to unveil to the audience (as well as to Joe) that she does not feel truly guilty or tormented by her compulsion. Opposite to Haneke’s piano teacher, Joe is unable to feel embarrassed by her behavior and tries, pathetically, to fabricate a distress that is not truly felt – something immediately pointed out by Seligman, the “blessed man”, coauthor in Joe’s story, and who refuses to be shocked or to judge the woman’s sexual postures. His analogies of fishing techniques, Fibonacci numbers and other things are, at least, curious, and mirrors Joe’s narrative structure by proving to be the marks which will guide her story.

By exposing sex in such banal manner, without a hint of embarrassment and narrating it as matter-of-factly as he does, Trier transforms sex into that what Joe questions: her doubts, her anxieties, herself. The sexual objetification is removed from her, who is then at the same time subjectified and subjectifier. In her extreme search for whatever she is looking for, sex plays a secondary role, obliterated by her (more) mundane problems and modern anxieties. Her issues, however, have little to do with sex and more to do with the eternal compulsion for breaking limits. Just one more limit. Just one more broken limit. Even in her childhood, sex is turned into a playful act void of guilt. Her virginity is lost in a mechanical, mathematical intercourse with Jerôme.

To be pornography the sex has to be meaningless, and even the meaningless sex in Nymph()maniac is full of significance. As spectators we search for the interpretation of scenes trying to make sense of what we are watching. Trier lays the answer before we can blink: it is a film about the art of narrative and the manipulation of reason by two characters who are so detached from judgment they can weigh in even their own flaws – or lack of them – in unison polyphony.

After Melancolia (2011), Trier said he was embarrassed for having directed a film which was too pretty. Nymph()maniac is ugly. Joe says she hates sentimentality because it is not real. Trier has made a false terror (Antichrist), a false sci-fi (Melancolia) and now has created a false porn that drags hordes to the movies looking for sex and leaves questioning themselves. It does not get more real than that.

But what makes sexual tourism so bad, and why are Brazilians so adamant in advocating that their women are not prostitutes?  To which extent is the limit of representability (Zizek, 1989) of the Brazilian female exuding nothing but sexuality, and who is to blame for this? Why does the country refuse to be recognized as a market example of sexual trade, and how does it impact its true economy?

Sex as commodity bothers humanity since the capitalistic criminalization of sex (Foucault, 1976).  In an economical transaction where the object is the service and the labor at the same time, and in which seller and commodity are one, nothing is left for the latent exploitation of the economic value of the transaction and/or object.  It is important to remember that sex as a mode of production leaves no traces of ownership: what is traded is the service, not the possession of the body – which eliminates the basics of capitalist models of exchange and profit. Brazilian female sexuality as something possible to be purchased may not be perceived as similar to the several other ongoing marketing transactions that happen around the country on a daily basis – with foreigners or locals similarly – but in nothing differs, technically speaking, from other business negotiations.   But sex is to be performed for procreation only, within the sanctified realms of marriage. Once it can be traded for money, it threatens not only the institution of marriage but also the entire economical system which is based on the triad producer – object – seller.

The fact that prostitution blurs the realms of market and intimacy still determines the impossible end of obscenity proposed by Rembar in 1969: it remains embedded with pre-capitalistic notions of ownership, lineage and heteronormative monogamy as a means of control and propagation of capitalist ideas.  This agenda is hidden under false assumptions that prostitution equals slavery, trafficking, and violence against women – this way totally eliminating any possibility of recognition of sex workers as agents and in control of their own economic operations.  By equating prostitution to the sexual exploitation of women, we are denied the concept that it is a viable commercial avenue to women who – and some may find this surprising – choose to embark in this endeavor instead of being coached or forced into it.

The stereotypicalization of Brazilian female sexuality as a commodity should not offend the country since it is, without a doubt, a potential means for economic improvement.  If removed from the obscurity and stripped from the label of obscenity, it might even guarantee better and safer working conditions to all sex workers in the country. If only we let it.

Dear boy,

I read the letter your mother sent you regarding porn, and I am using the fact she made it public to write to you just to give you a broader perspective on the porn industry. I don’t know how old you are, but I’ll assume you have left the single digit but has not yet reached your 20s – or, in other words, you are around the same age I was when I watched porn for the first time. And I want to start by telling you that it is A-okay to watch porn. I have been watching it for almost 30 years and I turned out as a responsible, sane, intelligent and productive member of society.

I am a porn scholar. This means I study porn. It is like writing book reports, but instead of reading books I watch porn. And, because of my profession, I have come in contact with a lot of the porn industry. I have even visited a couple of porn sets myself, while the movies were being shot. Some of my best friends are porn stars, just like some others teach English as a foreign language. I met my husband in this environment, and even though none of us has ever performed we are equally personally and professionally interested in pornography, and this is just another characteristic of our relationship. (By the way, there is no indicative that men who watch a lot of porn have trouble enjoying sex with real women. Most men watch porn. Some women do. And yet people are still out there really enjoying sex, so that idea is kind of strange, don’t you think?)

But back to porn: it is okay to watch it, but just like everything else in life, there is good porn and bad porn out there. Most people think porn is degrading to women, forces women into doing things they would not normally want to do, raises the bar into impossible-to-meet expectations, and that porn is not real sex. Some porn out there might be all this, for sure. Just like not all marriages are for love, some work relationships board slavery and not everything is the way it is supposed to be. But there is some porn out there which strongly refutes all these harmful things, so I want to go over your mother’s list to make sure you get some facts straight.

1. Porn can be real sex, just like Mc Donald’s can be real food. You just have to know how to reach for the good ingredients: lay off the Big Macs and have a salad once in a while, and there will be no bad-side effect in your body. But don’t watch ONLY porn (and don’t eat ONLY junk food).

2. Do not compare yourself to the man you see in porn, just like I should not compare myself to magazine models. I believe you have already been exposed to the discussion of how unrealistic media portrays people: porn is just like any other movie. I will never look like Angelina Jolie, no matter how hard I try. Just like your penis might not ever be as big as Manuel Ferrara’s. It is okay. That does not make me less beautiful, just like it does not make you less of a man for having a normal-sized dick.

3. That also applies to your partner. Maybe she WILL look like Stoya. Maybe she won’t. I know for a fact Stoya has never had a boob job, and a friend of mine who is a porn star commented that the only operated vaginas she has ever seen are from transgendered women. The idea that some porn stars have their coochies done to look prettier is silly: pussies come in all forms and shapes and sizes and colors, and I am yet to meet a porn star who has had it done by a doctor to look a certain way.

4. Not all women in porn are faking it. In fact, most of my friends say they do orgasm during scenes. Ironically, I have more non-porn friends who fake orgasms than porn-friends who do, but this is a long discussion I will save for an academic article later. Just keep in mind some women do get off when performing in front of a camera. They might exaggerate the reactions so it can be captured by camera, which is the same as Jennifer Lawrence sobbing uncontrollably when her sister got picked for the Hunger Games, but making a spectacle of it does not mean she was not truly sad inside, does it? The point is, you don’t want your partner to fake her orgasm, just like you should never fake your own pleasure.

5. Oh, and there is no such thing as getting paid more money if a scene is “violent” or “degrading”. Everything is pre-discussed and agreed on, and I have seen many times two performers discussing what they like and do not like before the camera starts rolling, just to make sure everyone is comfortable and enjoying their job. Because getting paid to have sex on camera is a job like any other. That does not mean those women who are there don’t want to be there. As some of them say, it is actually the best way to explore their own sexuality, because it all happens in a controlled environment, with people watching over them (pun intended).

6. Nothing ever created will be an indicative of mainstream female taste in sex because there is no such thing as “mainstream female”. Women are all different, and they like different things, and want different things. Some like to have the guy come on their faces; some don’t. Some like the light on; others prefer the lights off. Some like sex in the morning, some in the evening, some in the middle of the night. Some women like it rough, some like to be spanked, have their hair pulled, and it is all quite normal. There is no such thing as “what women want” in sex because all human beings feel sex in a very personal manner and want their own thing (which is fine, and actually makes sex less mechanical).

7. While on the subject, contrary to what people believe, porn stars do not get paid double for anal scenes. There is a surplus charge, yes, but just because anal scenes require preparation, like dieting and enemas and stuff… but it is not because anal is worse than vaginal sex. It is just more complex to film it, so there is a bonus on how much they get paid for it.

8. Porn used to be made by men and for men, but things have changed. There is a long list of female porn directors and producers who are now making excellent porn for both men and women, because some women also like porn. Funnily enough porn is taking a turn and more and more women are producing and directing it each passing day, so the idea it is a man-made product directed at men only is totally last year!

I LOVED the fact your momma included a video from Cindy Gallop in the end of her letter to you, because I have personally met Cindy and she is one of the greatest porn advocates I have ever met. We think a lot alike: porn can be extremely positive if done right, and thank God it has been done really right by some companies. Not all of them are nice, I have to confess. But you just have to know how to look for the right type, just like I am sure you don’t play just any computer game that comes your way.

PS: As I was writing this letter, I wondered: do you have a sister? Because if you do, I’d like you to share this letter with her. She needs to know it is okay for a girl to explore her sexuality, and that nothing that she does is ever, EVER bad – as long as she feels like doing it. I am worried now that she will grow up thinking that some of the things she feels and wants are wrong just because they are portrayed in porn movies. Have her drop me a line: I need to talk to that girl about porn, maybe more than I needed to talk to you.

(a response to this letter)

In times of literary pseudo-erotic nonsense, when the concepts of bondage, SM and discipline are being sold to be lightly consumed as the newest sexual fad, one could be easily tempted into believing that the romantic essence of a BDSM relationship equals the profundity of a popcorn and soda movie. For the majority of the literature being commercially produced on this topic, this might indeed be the case. But just like real jazz will only be found away from the market-driven popular semi-lit bar lounges, good erotica produced under the slant of BDSM must have true, honest, and heartfelt origins. This is how Mich Masoch’s “Lina & Nate Series” can be perceived: as the black resistance organic foundations of jazz, only in written smut style.

Writing erotica is not an easy task.  Catering to different styles and sexual preferences must transcend the writer’s own expectations and reach for an audience who might not fully comprehend the universe which is being unveiled throughout the pages. When the eroticism gravitates around BDSM issues, the relationship between a reader’s own erotic elements and those present on the text proves to be even more complex, since BDSM is a very personal experience, something that exists exclusively between specific partners and that suffers alterations as relationships develop.

The four short stories in Lina’s Submission: Four Complete Quick & Dirty BDSM Short Stories – Lina & Nate Series 1-4 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EK8LCQ4) disclose the intimacy of a 10-year-married couple and their gradual entrance into the BDSM universe. It would be simple for a writer to resort to extensive descriptions of bondage acts, apparel, toys and physical reactions.  Masoch, however, is able to intertwine very graphic sexual descriptions – that leads the reader into a heavy-breath trance – and psychoanalytical first person narratives that elucidate the journey Lina is making towards an understanding of this new façade of hers.  This way, Masoch is able to work through an elicitation of intimate feelings of mutual trust, hope, vulnerability, strength of purpose, desire, and love even from a reader who, at first, is not part of the relationship she narrates, nor shares personal identification with the BDSM environment.

This is not, however, a book for beginners, or for people who expect to find a romanticized and unreal sexualized relationship. To fully perceive the complexities of Lina and Nate’s relationship one must be ready and open to an infinite number of colors – not only shades, and not only fifty.

This pornscholar left her computer – and her country – and immersed herself into pornography (this time in 3D and real time and within a hand’s reach). The result of this adventure will be slowly and gradually unveiled in these pages. 

To start, here is a first-timer eye-witness account of the Adult Video Network Award and Expo, which took place in Las Vegas in January. It was originally published at AIP Daily but with different photographs.

Enjoy!

Breakfast can be caramel vodka and Bloody Mary shots, and you run into stars who want to eat your pussy for business and photographers who want to see your breasts and they say that out loud, and perverts are everywhere and we love it, and the fan line is huge but when we sit for coffee we talk about diets and make up and power struggle, and we never eat but we sit at Mr. Lucky’s and watch people and ourselves, and that is what you do in Vegas, you sit down and you watch yourself while all those lights kind of blind you a bit. I sit back and observe the people I study, already thinking about this article, and in my mind I can classify them into categories, but suddenly they are talking about five hundred dollars dresses and alcohol and paleo and psychology, and I loose myself into my ridiculous classification and decide just to watch.

During the day the exp floor becomes packed with people, and press is all around covering every single move, but not many people pay attention to the seconds between flashes, when faces are tired of smiling and drop for a second, while the frenzy of fans waiting 25 minutes in line for an eight seconds interaction pays for the trip. I watch, and wonder how many stories fit inside those eight seconds, and how ego boosting all that can be if you are a performer. For the studios, the never-ending line of consumers make it all worth their while: this is how they measure how much they are making, regardless of numbers. The hoard of porn fans – old, young, men, women, singles, couples – flocking around a booth makes you stop and wonder who is signing. If you are lucky, Skin Diamond is on display that hour, and for 25 minutes of your time you can talk to her for eight seconds and walk away with an autographed photo. Trust me, it is worth the wait.

You walk between the two rooms which host the expo, and in the hallway you meet Stoya and Dani Daniels, and they are happy to see you even though they don’t know your name. But you are a fan, and the reason why they are there, and they are nice and kind. You step away from them feeling special because you just spoke to the most popular girls in school and they like you, they really do like you! You are one of them right there, at this second, and all the intimacy you have shared while watching their videos translate into this milimetric encounters. You go for a bite and the table next to you has Arabelle Raphael and Kimberly Kane sharing a sandwich, while in a bedroom somewhere, with dimmer lights and less fantasy, two performers are debating Foucault.

Vegas smells of cigarettes and people. Lights are never off. You sit across the table from strangers you know, and suddenly you are stranger than they are. Everyone seems to be high on lights and expectations, like the air is made of these tiny particles of energy. It is easy to want to be illegal here. It is easy to be anyone. And in this intersection between on and off cameras, when asked what you do, you answer “I eat pussy for money”. I write about porn. I do porn. I am porn. Because in Vegas, under all those lights, you are nothing. Until you meet a girl with no make-up and heavy eyes, you are nothing. And after that, every time she catches you looking at her, you become utterly aware that you are nobody under those lights, although your tattoos and your scars prove different. But in Vegas, under all that spectacle and all that make up, your body does not mean much – unless you are a performer. For them, vanity is a requirement to grasp the dynamics of this business and be able to play. Vanity and emotional bond with each other, which is manifested outside the screen in semi-romantic relationships based on mutual understanding and support. You might love them. You might even be loved back. But that kind of friendship you can only experience if, one day, you might perform together.

Male performers get less attention because there are less female fans – and I did miss a gayer crowd around, to tell you the truth. But while you shake hands with Xander Corvus your knees melt, and you understand why he is so good on camera. But you just spoke to Manuel Ferrara and lent three dollars to Dane Cross, so by the time you run into Mick Blue you are not sure who you are anymore, and you just stand there and watch him in silence for the entire night. Do not worry: later you will gather the courage to walk to Woolf Hudson and get a delicious hug and a compliment that will keep you high on self-esteem for the rest of the week.

Nights host people around both Circle bars, and if you sit quietly you can eavesdrop into discourse, identity, boy/girl or girl/girl, and the perfect dick size, and an eventual shout announces someone just made some serious money in the casino. Porn stars talk to each other and make a spectacle of it, forging sexual attractiveness and intensity before the eyes of fans. Mostly men. This is their own private time with their favorite performer, and the level of hope and expectation is unbearable. Eventually, one will come up to a girl and say something to get her attention, but she is already focused on someone else who just entered the circle. This time, it is all about them: not the fans. Fans are allowed to participate only by watching, and the roles are once again back to the familiar place we are used to. Life is back to normalcy. You stand and you watch while the girls make out, sipping on your drink and wondering what it tastes like to be part of the gang. All around you are fans who are sharing that exact same moment in the exact same way, and unless someone pulls you aside to tell you this is real life you can swear you are watching a film.

Until some guy decides to take up the leading role and insists on finding out what your limits are. In his mind, you cannot get mad, though. “It is a porn convention, what did you expect?” The threat of the question echoes in your mind for hours after that, and you debate the social and sexual implications of the porn industry to the level of exhaustion when deep down all you want to say is “I am scared”. But you hold your head up because you are among your peers and they are there for you, and the casino has cameras and security guards all over the place, and that creep cannot get his hands on you – but you do think of other women and how maybe they are not as ironically protected by this same stigma which haunts you, and you fear for them. And that makes you mad, and you wipe your tears and say “The benefit of the doubt is not something someone should have over my body”. Later, you will find your shoes hidden under the blankets and look gorgeous again.

Then the day after it is the awards and the hotel takes longer to wake up and the booths are slowly attracting people as the performers take their places behind the tables with their minds on the prize later at night. Afternoon comes and suddenly Vegas is a desert while hair and makeup is being done. The frantic clicks of flashes is what wakes you up while the red carpet is happening, and for a second you are sure that the aim is you, because nothing escape lenses in that space. Performers and directors and studios all say hello to each other, and it is like an office’s Christmas party, only that it happens in a very, very public manner, and you are socializing with coworkers that you only see once a year, although you do business over the phone the entire time. When the awards actually begin, businesses tend to take a faster pace because the weekend is coming to an end and everybody is talking in hushed, loud voices, sometimes even muffling the winner’s acceptance speech. Later, however, you will see them around the hotel and congratulate them on their award while they are getting a milk shake. You exchange phone numbers and talk about hanging in Los Angeles. The weekend is over.

Of course there are secret parties and millionaire dinners and sex happening everywhere, but unless you step back you cannot see them. In Vegas, you cannot see much because you are inside of it. It was a struggle. It was learning. And I will be back next year, for sure.

The introduction to Nica Noelle’s gay studio debut could not have been more pertinent. Set in 1930s Britain, His mother’s lover (Rock Candy Films, 2012) approaches taboo subjects revolving around fatherly figures and their impact on a young man’s identity and sexuality.
The plot presents young Robert (Chase Austin) and his desire for men under an array of authoritative figures: an older student, the school’s headmaster, his own brother, his absent father. The movie opens with a classroom scene in an all-boy school, and Robert being observed – and observing – an older student (Travis Irons) who, within moments, brushes past Robert on his way outside. Preceded by a somewhat labyrinthic chase between the two boys on school’s grounds, the first sex scene in a storage room is silent and clean, with beautiful lighting and setting, and the cinematography makes it so cocks are veiled by school uniforms eventually, adding a perk to any school boy fantasies the viewer might have. The boys are caught by the school’s headmaster (Ian Whitcomb) who, although stern, seems sympathetic and understanding of Robert’s misdemeanor, actually spoon feeding Robert with a heat of the moment, judgment impaired youth, crime of passion alibi – maybe because of Robert’s resemblance to his deceased father, who was one of the headmaster’s favorite students. Excluding expulsion, Robert’s punishment is set at a 4-week suspension for truancy and a flogging – something which clearly delights the headmaster and appears to be more a warning for secrecy than punishment for a wrong act.

Robert is the perfect student, his mother’s rock, never in trouble. The mysterious counterpart to Robert is his brother, Jeremy (Xander Corvus), a painter who drowns on alcohol and surrounds himself with nothing but his work. The darkness that belongs to Jeremy is in direct contrast with Robert’s openness and forwardness, sketching his father as somewhat an amalgam of both or, in other words, as fluctuating between Jeremy’s darkness and Robert’s innocence. Whether his father’s death had been suicide – as Jeremy believes – or as the result of an accident does not seem to disturb Robert; he conscientiously chooses one side of the story and does not seem disturbed when Jeremy contradicts his version with a reminder that he (Jeremy) had been the person who found their father dead.

Robert is sent home on suspension and meets his mother’s fiancé, Daniel (Boston Miles) – to whom he will instantly be attracted. Daniel has come into the family’s life as a rescuer for a lost mother, who “never dreamed that anyone would love (her) again”. He stands as balance point between the family and Jeremy, constantly excusing the young man’s behavior and attempts to be the rudder in a family shattered by the loss of the patriarch under suspicious circumstances. To escape the notion that the father should be exclusively the carrier of the law, Lacan always claimed that a father as a legislator or pure authority with no desire usually has devastating effects on the subject (ŽERJAV: 2010, 214). Desire, here, will manifest in Daniel primarily as a care taker and only after in a sexual manner towards Robert, thus protecting him from authoritative fatherly impositions. This is pivotal for the change in Daniel’s positioning which Robert will promote later.

The similarities between Robert and Daniel are pointed out by the mother, who unintentionally generates space for association and transference by both Robert and Daniel. While the first clearly sees his soon-to-be-stepfather as a prerogative to a fatherly figure – one which is closer to him than his own taller, stockier, “a bit more manly” father was – Daniel is able to reconstruct his fantasies with the Russian prince by transmuting Robert into an Alexei he is able to keep as a secret, care for and save, therefore restoring his own fatherly function. While we have no access to how the process unravels for Daniel, Robert’s dream – in which he witnesses a professor and a younger student having sex in the bathroom and, later, transmuting into himself and Daniel – makes explicit the associations between authoritative function, power, sexuality and transference he is delineating in order to establish Daniel’s position in his own psyche. The camera work in this sequence, it is worth mentioning, makes for a Robert who grows from boy to man, with angles which project him bigger and taller – while positioned as observer – towards the end of the scene.

Freud’s Oedipal archetype of the father as the holder of the (metaphorical) phallus – which would state order and the dissociation necessary for the identification into the binary male vs. female dichotomy – is here replaced by the Lacanian concept of Nom du Père, and his tripartition into a real, a symbolic, and an imaginary father. It is in this paternal metaphor that the key to Robert’s mind can be found. The Name-of-the-Father as the signifier that replaces an initial maternal one in the symbolic could never take place within Robert because his father had never been named – and here I mean both metaphorically and literally – turning Robert into an enigma which can only be solved by the Name-of-the-Father as constrictive signal posts to his proper identification as a grown man.

It is not by chance that Robert’s father’s name is only mentioned in the movie to establish the mother’s psychological state (“God, I’m so lucky to have you. When Clarence died I thought I’d be a widow for the rest of my life; I never dreamed that anyone would love me” – my emphasis). This lack of the father is the basis on which Robert’s story is going to be told. It is not by chance, either, that Robert himself has to refute the need for a father in order to reach/be reached by Daniel: “I am a grown man myself” – a reminder that the paternal metaphor can only be read retroactively, therefore proving itself worthless had it placed Daniel as a symbolic father figure. This will unravel into the first sex scene in which Robert does not wear a school uniform, which means he is no longer a boy.

Robert is not in conflict with his sexuality: Robert is in conflict with himself or, rather, struggling to find identification outside of himself. It is only when he is able to map out his own identity after dismissing a fatherly figure that his conflict is solved. Ironically, the same act that frees Robert eliminates the need for Jeremy’s existence, as he stands no longer as a nemesis/mirror to his brother.

As is it common to all Noelle’s productions, there is obvious thought put on light, setting, costume and editing. His mother’s lover delivers a solid, well-constructed plot, presented by fairly good performers and fluid, artistically-built sex scenes. The key elements to Noelle’s repertoire (a more emotional seduction, long foreplay, intense kissing) are all present in this new line, and generates as a result what might be called a more romantic approach to gay male pornography without, however, feminizing it. The movie brings as treats an unforgettable headmaster played by Ian Whitcomb – who also composed the soundtrack, a delight in itself – and Magdalene St. Michaels, in a delicious performance embedded in 1930s candor and sheer sweetness.

A bene placito can also be used in musical conducting: it allows for a more relaxed, freer mode of playing, something which would lead an orchestra into appreciating the sounds it is generating. Noelle herself is basking in the results of her work. As she is entitled to.

Last month I noticed how much I talk about pornography when a friend complained about the monochromatic tone of my conversations: “Not everything is about sex”, she said.

And she was right. Not everything is about sex. But everything is about porn.

Sex as power, as a space for dominance and social interaction, as an economic trading mode, does not exist in the love making format; it comes raw, violent, basal, instinctive, anonymous, and primary as a biological need. It takes places not in the Victorian bedroom we still reproduce in our bourgeois households, but out on the streets, where it can be noticed and acknowledged, accepted or repudiated. From the latest Nic Minaj video to Cronenberg’s (failed) attempt to portray female hysteria, through the endless flirt between Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy: it is all about PORN, not about sex.

Sex is what happens when nobody is looking: porn is its embodied version into something that exists to be noticed, this way positioning participants in a given social economic loci by subjecting them to classification by observance. Sex is to be whispered about, barely noticed, while porn is this over-sized  grotesque body singing loud from TV screens in the broadcasting of cooking shows, soccer games, dance theater: it is all in the body, the human form, the assemble of limbs and muscles and skin, and it is all about pleasuring the taste buds, the eyes, the ears. Pornography is not about sex: sex is about pornography.

The private history of the subject has long become focus of the academic world, inasmuch as it is the primary configuration, the archetype of every process of come-to-being. The limits between the public and private, which appear to be the founding structure of our society, is being now constantly questioned by the use of social media and the internet: no longer I am able to “be” without “being seen”. And, aware of that, one can choose which facade to display: never, or quite rarely, there is a window that allows a peek into their fondness for pornography. While that eroticism is moderately accepted, pornography is dealt with as if deriving from twisted, darkened sexualities which are to be hidden – all this while the world wide web, the same frame which in current society locates the self, continuously bombards users with pornography in its most varied forms.

And while I was thinking about this, it dawned on me that the porn industry might be the most inclusive, most open, and most accepting of all industries, since it allows all sort of minorities to establish in a niche created specifically for them. While that some may argue that there is a ranking system, a price tag which differs to the products of each niche – as in this performer versus that performer, or this category over that one – it is society and consumers, not the porn industry, who ranks them. By allowing all forms of fetish to be equally represented, for example, pornography would be able to bridge private and public on a non-judgmental way, wasn’t it for its consumers denying its consumption. The irony is amusing.

It is in the tension between what is done (inside) and what is spoken (outside) that a solution for the demystification of porn lies. As Michel de Certeau poses, “Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narativising. Stirring up or restoring this narativising is thus also among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name.” Let ‘s make it named: porn.

The controversy surrounding Elegant Angel’s release Dare (2012) seems to center around Dani Daniels’ crossing towards boy/girl pornography. The film has raised debates which cover areas such as the “degrading aspect” of boy/girl porn and the veracity embedded in filmed porn, to the significance of performers’ sexual orientation. Undoubtedly, Dare is a groundbreaking project but for reasons yet not mentioned in fan forums or Twitter, where Daniels herself is receiving a lot of negative criticism – some even address to her own person and private life, eliminating the boundaries of fiction and reality.

Dani Daniels is not the first performer in history to broaden her field of action. Many performers have initiated in girl/girl porn and, later, made their way into boy/girl features for whatever reasons. The pressure from the industry to prevent performers from positioning themselves into segmented niches has financial motives; nonetheless, limits are constantly being tested, and the step further presents itself as the innovative glitch studios are after to keep sales from dropping – and to test boundaries in a postmodern world which delineates itself without limits. It is not by chance, therefore, that Elegant Angel latest marketing campaign announces a sequence of firsts: Dani Daniels’ first boy/girl scene, Lily Carter’s first DP and DAP, Asa Akira’s first gangbang. However, although Dare innovates by portraying Daniels in boy/girl scenes, its biggest value lies on the discourse it presents in terms of female agency inside the pornographic industry.

In the opening interview, Daniels states “I found my way into porn myself” (my emphasis). Daniels’ entire discourse emphasizes the importance she places on her own agency inside the industry,

I knew what I was getting into, I knew what I was going to do. I had this formula: ‘I’m only going to do girl/girl, I’m only going to do this, I’m going to do this’, and now I am like ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do anymore.’

Me, as a person, I’ve always been into one man and many women, that’s just me, that’s the real Dani.

When talking about what is different between doing boy/girl and girl/girl scenes,

‘I’m used to waking up and, like, oh, I’m going to fuck her today, and I’m gonna’, like, it was me, like, ‘I’m going to fuck’, and today’s like ‘I’m getting fucked’.

Daniels is aware of the different social roles perpetrated by sexual gendering. She is conscious that, in traditional porn, females are only allowed true agency when paired with another female, and are expected to take on a more submissive role when working with a male performer. However, even in that position, Daniels refuses to let go of her agency; instead, she is the one who walks into scenes, and ALL the utterances that form the corpus of the sexual oral interaction position Daniels as the primary and central character in the act: she verbally demands rather than offers pleasure and sexual gratification, the only exception made in her scene with Sinn Sage, whom she allows to partake subjectivity – ironically, after an intro that parodies boy/girl interaction, with Daniels dressed up in a suit and smoking a (phallic) cigar while Sinn Sage dances for her. “Rub your pussy on me”, Daniels says, this way equaling Sage to herself.

Daniels herself states the premises in which this film is based:

What does it mean to be a pornstar in 2012?

(…) There is no pornstars anymore. It’s about … something else. With pornstars I just think, I think of like… ‘Yeah, that pornstar sucked my dick last night’, it’s so like not about the girl, the girl becomes a sexual item. Where I feel like porn nowadays is about the girl. It’s about watching a girl get off, like, fuck a guy getting off, yeah, he comes at the end… on her face… okay… It’s about watching the girl, it’s about watching the girl come while it’s happening. Which, I am not a porn watcher, but I can guess, 80s, 90s porn is not like that. I can guess that girls didn’t even cum, girls just sat there like oh, oh, oh, you know, that’s a scene, then he cums on her face and it’s like, yeah… Now it’s like fucking finger my ass, make me squirt, make me scream, make me convulse, and then you can come, when I am done with you, you can come. You’re mine now, you are my object, I am not your sexual object, you are my sexual object.

As a result – or as indicative – of Dare’s new approach to female agency and subjectivity, it is important to point out that none of the scenes end the traditional way, that it, with the male ejaculation. Instead, after facials, the focus returns to Daniels, and in all sexual interactions throughout the feature she is the one who orgasms last.

Dani Daniels subjectifies women in porn, centering it on female pleasure and objectifying the male. Here lies the core of discomfort for so many viewers: the switching of the conventional paradigm – a phenomenon we have been watching designing itself inside contemporary pornographic productions – had never before been so explicitly posed in front of a camera. And it is by making official a discourse which has been put into silent practice and that, when put into words, questions traditions and stirs the boat on another direction that Dare parts waters. Waters many will not dare to sail. Luckily for us, Dani Daniels will be sailing in front.

Then he hid himself in the fire that purifies them.
- Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVI 148

One can never approach a wasteland with enough caution. The barren and uninteresting panorama is designed to confuse you: it is in the remote maze of a cement jungle that Graham Travis delivers what I assure you to be perhaps the greatest masterpiece of contemporary (adult) cinema. One more exquisite Elegant Angel production, Wasteland revolves around the reunion of Anna and Jacky, old school friends who meet in a Los Angeles which is as deserted as their native Tucson. The movie opens with the following poem:

                         I see a creature, fierce and unrestrained
                         A hazardous raging fire, and yet I reach out towards her flame
                         The darkness from her depths, guiding me into her soul
                         Drawing me into her wasteland… into her world.

Don’t be fooled: it is Anna, and not Jacky, the poem is about. She is the raging fire, the dark one, the wasteland. Her only chance of salvation – to her mind – is through Jacky: aware that, once her grandmother dies, she will no longer have connections with the world, she does not fear what may come of her. What she fears, in reality, is herself: her loneliness, her silence, her depth. Although Anna is completely aware that Jacky does not function as a mirrored representation of herself – she states it in the very beginning, when she says “I met Jacky in high school. We weren’t likely friends. She was popular, outgoing… but unsettled. I was awkward, shy, withdrawn. We were both different. We weren’t like anyone else.” (my emphasis) – she holds on to the fantasy that Jacky is the one person who might prevent her from total isolation and, therefore, a confrontation with her own self.

Lily LaBeau creates an aseptic Jacky who hoovers above sentiments and states that “sometimes I think that there is something wrong with me. Do you ever get that feeling? Like I am not a girl, I’m not a boy, but I am some weird species that is not built like everyone else”. By exempting herself from gender and even from human form, Jacky makes it clear that she is unable to connect with anything – unless when in contact with a parallel sexuality that works as a provocation to sensations and emotions. From the very beginning of the film, the distance she keeps from Anna reflects her knowledge that, deep down, they are so different that they are never going to be able to connect. “She is crazy, this one,” she says at the bar. “You know what they say: it is always the quiet ones.” And although she is the one who seems to be the quiet type, Jacky constantly verbalizes what is actually happening (like when she defines Anna’s promise to always be her friend by defining “always” as “boring, and lonely, and painful, and scary, ‘always’ is just unrealistic”; which is how Anna sees her own future), in contrast to an Anna who reveals things in spurts, but predominantly talks about herself.

Unlike Jacky, however, Anna is not in need of external provocation to feel; on the contrary, she is so constantly tortured by things she does not want to remember that she chooses to focus on specific feelings through life – like her love for Jacky, or the unfamiliar normality of Lee’s house. At the same time, however, she knows Jacky does not belong to her, and she constantly reminds herself of that by choosing to revive in her memory the specific moment in which she realized it; when Jacky has sex with Eric on the night of the campfire, the significance of that moment for Anna lies on her comprehension that Jacky is not able to connect with anyone but on a sexual level, as well as her own inability to do so (“I wouldn’t do the things you would do. I wouldn’t take them on my mouth. Or let them fuck me like a dog”), this way establishing the pivotal difference which separates both women, on her mind. So when she arrives in California she is sure of which path she will take – having spent years romanticizing an adolescence friendship that had left her to deal with her old emptiness when Jacky moved away

“When you left, at first, it was not what I expected. I was so lost. I drank like crazy and listened to songs that reminded me of you. This is embarrassing. I guess I didn’t know what it would be like to lose my best friend. But that empty feeling is normal. You get used to it. The distance grows.” (my emphasis)

Anna departs to Los Angeles despite the imminent death of her grandmother in order to reestablish a non-existing relationship she had been feeding for five years, this way avoiding being disconnected from the world. It is not by chance, therefore, that on her first moments with Jacky, Anna deliberately constructs a revised version of the campfire night, and chooses to watch as Jacky has sex with a man in a bathroom stall. Perhaps in an attempt to breach the distance between them, as a foreshadowing of what is about to come, Jacky invites Anna to partake in her own sexual enterprises by asking Anna to join her and the man in the back alley; however, by transferring sexual completion to Anna’s figure, Jacky is disembodied from her normal role, and the realization that Anna does not configure sex the same way she does hits her before it dawns on Anna or on the viewer, for that matter. Therefore, because she is aware that Anna’s visit is not going to become something permanent, and that Anna is not and will never be like her (despite Anna’s later plea “I want to be like you”), Jacky is able to go through the night without raising expectations and even flashes back in time, becoming a teenager who can play Go Fish and have tequila shots with her bestie: sex for Jacky takes on a calm, tranquil aspect here because it does not represent the provoking kind of sex she seeks in order to feel, but old sensations of friendship and comfort. And that is how she is able to refute Anna’s pledge to be her friend forever, and why she was able to move on after moving from Tucson and missing Anna for “a few weeks” before it “became trivial”.

It is worth noting that all significant moments between the two characters happen around water. From the adolescence lake, to their reunion five years later by the ocean – where both seem tentative and playful facing the water – to the swimming pool scene: those moments are emblematic of female sexuality, and are iconic of the relationship that exists between both women. The counterpart is the fire that burned down Anna’s house and killed her parents; the cigarettes that are lit in the specific moments Jacky is portrayed separated and distant from Anna’s reality; the campfire on the night she sees Jacky and Eric together; the flame-red light at the club when Anna goes through what seems to be an initiation process before she can meet Jacky in the last room. In moments where Anna is confronted with her own fears, the presence of fire undermines that of water, obliterating her sexuality by iron branding her psyche.

Jacky’s wasteland is kept under control although over populated with a myriad of stimuli and several layers of sounds, from dissonant classic music to voices speaking a foreign language; Anna’s, on the other hand, seems placid and silent like the morning after, but poses as a burden heavier to be carried. Unable to make it in Jacky’s world – because it is as foreign to her as the voices that come from the men in the club – Anna returns to the “black hole” of Tucson as empty as she expects her future to be. Her return to Arizona can also be seen as her ultimate redemption: “Then (s)he hid himself in the fire that purifies them.” By returning she is actually walking towards herself, stripped from the (romantic) fantasies towards Jacky she had spent so long harboring. Lily Carter delivers a performance that is impossible to be put into words: she is able to express in her eyes the process in which Anna slowly becomes deprived of life, or gaining conscience that she must ultimately confront herself.

As a writer, Travis is able to implement a variety of foreshadowing elements without destroying the viewer’s hopes – whichever those may be. The impeccable work and careful direction made it possible to extract from LaBeau and Carter deep, genuine performances without forcing them to lose themselves into characters that might differ dramatically from their own personas. Visually the film is potent and impervious, with a cinematography that is heavy and dense even when under white, bright linen. The soundtrack complements the story perfectly, and it should be released as OST.

To conclude, Graham Travis did it again. Wasteland is bound to repeat the same success of Portrait of a Call Girl, but this time with even more maturity and complexity. It will be interesting to see Travis’ next step: topping Wasteland will reveal itself to be a difficult task.

                                     ‘‘Now punish me!’ she said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck.  ‘Whip me, crush me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry out’. (p. 374)

The quotation above does not belong to any of the three Fifty Shades volumes. Although it has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and stirred debates on the intensity of the sex scenes it depicts, the Fifty Shade Trilogy is being wrongly marketed as “pornography”. Don’t be fooled. There is very little pornography in there.

Disguised under a misused BDSM tag, the Fifty Shades trilogy is nothing but a repetition of the same Victorian romantic paradigms, perpetrated by the Harlequin novels: an unreachable, dark, tense hero who gets rescued by the innocent and true love of a naïve young woman. Damaged Christian Grey is constructed as the combination of a traumatic childhood and sexual abuse suffered at the age of fifteen: his origins are mysterious and dark, locked away behind very little verbal communication with the outside world, his sexual preferences a result of being molested by one of his adoptive mother’s best friend – portrayed as a sexual predator MILF – who still haunts his present days. He is hard, distant, constantly disturbed by his inability to process his feelings, which he then transmutes into successive aseptic relationships with his submissives, none of which has ever slept in his bed. His contractual terms involve providing for and maintaining the perfect mental and physical health of his subjects, void of emotional recognition, and although having been adopted by a cereal-commercial kind of family he keeps them at bay from his own private life, resorting to actually connecting to other human beings exclusively inside his Red Room of Pain, which is kept constantly locked. The heroine, Anastasia Steele, is built under all precincts of romantic female protagonists: she is pure in intention, a virgin, innocent, a literature undergraduate who fails to understand that the main message in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles is exactly what she is running towards: Victorian notions of female purity being questioned by the crude analysis and frank look at the sexual hypocrisy of (English) society, and the acknowledgment that the infantilization of women may be even more dangerous than female oppression.

Trapped in the middle ground between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hardy struggled with Victorian ideologies, tradition and innovation. EL James fails to construct a romantic novel because there is no more tradition to fight. In an attempt to recover some ground to establish the battle which would justify or promulgate the romantic aspect of her novel, she turns to the BDSM taboo in a very misleading way, admonishing it from the start: “I’m fully aware this is a dark path I’m leading you down, Anastasia.” (FSOG, 74). What serves as an attraction and explanation to the commercial success of the book does not follow through until the end: loved by Anastasia, Grey subdues to “vanilla sex” in exchange for her presence in his life. The sex scenes depicted in all three novels border Victorian language: James exhaustively insists on the same metaphors for body parts, leaving out what would be considered harsher vocabulary in detriment of a more “romantic” one. “The second and third volumes of the trilogy which, having moved on from the nuts and bolts of dominant-submissive sex, are basically shopping lists”. (WILLIAMS, 08/15/2012) And it is precisely in this dichotomy between what the book promises and what is actually delivered that lays what might be considered the only significant aspect of this market trend: the fact that all the BDSM is eradicated from the novel’s pages almost instantaneously, being replaced by long, repetitive narrative of more conventional sex which, nonetheless, is always practiced under the safe norms and regulations, with Grey producing condoms from his back pocket even if he is not wearing pants.

To be a true romantic novel, what should evolve around the character of Anastasia, mirroring the centrality of the romantic female protagonist is, in James’ book, a failed attempt to focus on the character of Christian Grey. Still, what Millet dubs temperament, or “the formation of human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’” (MILLET, 1968: p. 26) is so strong within James’ writing that her characters are caricatural, and what should be “based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates; aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity, ignorance, docility, “virtue” and ineffectuality in the female”. (MILLET, Ibid) is translated into BDSM terminology by an author who, clearly, feared it too much to really dig into this world even if only through her writing.

Although I agree with Hussein’s concept that “reading a text is not an objective process upon which all readers agree. Each reader has certain tendencies and an ideology which s/he imposes on the text itself, rejecting the old approach of text/reader or author/reader hierarchy.” (HUSSEIN, 2004), it is impossible to regard the Fifty Shades trilogy as contemporary pornography or “female-targeted erotica packaged for the mainstream reader” (FORBES, 3/19/2012). Whether by concentrating on the development of literature written by women (gynocriticism) or by reinterpreting various works written by men (feminist critique), feminist literary criticism contests the eternal opposition of biological and aesthetic creativity. James’ does not write the way she does because she is a woman; in 2011, she writes the way she does DESPITE being one. Ignoring Showalter’s classification of women authored literature under the Feminine, the Feminist and the Female stages (SHOWALTER, 1979), James dives back into the past and goes way beyond Hardy’s or even Bronte’s Romanticism, landing flat on a time where language had no significance other than the accurate description, some light years before literature was invented.

It is appalling nonetheless that James’ novels are being regarded as erotica literature. In an Australian newspaper, a journalist wrote that “There is an absence of good erotic writing in serious literature and a puritanical disdain for literary descriptions of sex.” (SIMMONDS, 16/3/2012) I wonder, then, where we should place the works of writers such as Anaïs Nin, Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, Erica Jong, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer – to name a few. Fifty Shades is being regarded as inaugurating a new found craving for all things ‘naughty in print’ when, in reality, quality literature has been doing it for years, and Harlequin books are not fooling us around, promising BDSM and delivering sparse and condescending use of a few sex toys labeled under poor metaphors for Webber’s herrschaft: “One has to ask if writing about power is always more erotic than writing about penetration.” (MOORE, 7/4/2012)

I refuse to be condescending with James’ work by the use of arguments such as some I have read, that the Fifty Shades trilogy has rekindled marriages and incentive women to explore never-before visited aspects of their sexuality: Sacher-Masoch, Bataille, Catherine Millet and so many others would have done a much better job; even Thomas Hardy, with all the Victorian pressure around him, was able to depict sexuality in a much more palpable way than EL James. “I shall not cry out”, Tess says. Those are Hardy’s words that introduced you to this article. Tess’ eyes are “neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all these shades together, and a hundred others” (chapter 14). After all, real literature takes more than 50 shades to be good. Luckily for them, “the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing”.