The Face in Beautiful Agony Laura Shaw Shannon Bell Th
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MA MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER Representing Orgasms and Pleasure in Pornography: The Face in Beautiful Agony Laura Shaw h Shannon Bell The Major Research Paper is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture Ryerson University-York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada May 4,2011. Shaw 1 Introduction: A woman's head appears as she lies down, directly below the camera, filling the frame with her face and shoulders. She stares into the lens as she adjusts herself, and we hear the sound of her unbuckling and unzipping her pants. We see her shoulders and upper body tense up as she begins to touch herself-but her movements are beyond the frame. As she brings herself to climax over the course of the next three minutes, we watch her move back and forth, open and close her eyes, make soft moaning sounds, and peer into the camera lens occasionally. We are given a glimpse only of her face and shoulders. Her orgasm is brief and the only evidence that we are given is in her face: she contracts, furrows her brows, and jerks back and forth, gasping. When she is finished, she gets up and leaves us with a view of her pillow. The video is sparse: there is no dialogue, no music, and no partner-there is also no nudity. The amateur pornographic website Beautiful Agony contains over 2000 videos of orgasms, all showing pleasure only from the neck up. Anonymous contributors are encouraged to send video files of their faces as they masturbate, and are paid two hundred dollars (American) for each video submitted, plus one month's free subscription. Beautiful Agony is one of many amateur pornographic websites with an emphasis on eroticism and pleasure rather than hardcore images; straddling the line between art, project and pornography, the website is titillating despite not showing graphic images. Online pornography has allowed fot a democratization of pornographic materials: through the DIY nature of the Internet, anyone can produce and upload images and videos to share, trade or post online. With the advent of the Internet and the decreasing Shaw 2 cost of electronics and webcams, pornography has moved away from the cinema and into the private bedrooms of most pornography consumers. Not only has the Internet replaced magazine and film pornography, but it has created specific subgenres that utilize the interactive nature of the Internet specifically--chatting, posting to message boards and webcam porn are popular in part because they allow the viewer to interact with others and feel part of a community. Online amateur pornography is one such niche-it is relatively inexpensive to produce, and it appears to be more "authentic" than mainstream professional pornography because it features people who do not have the appearance that we associate with professional "porn stars." Most online amateur pornography features men and women who are "billed as your neighbour, your boss, your sister-in-law" (Patterson 111). In this way, consumers are led to believe that they are witnessing pleasure between real people, rather than actors onscreen or professionals. Online pornography also allows for extremely specific niches to emerge and thrive through online community building-the ability to communicate with others who share one's interests helps particular kinks and pleasures to thrive. Beautiful Agony is one such particular pornographic website, which meshes art and eroticism together with the interactivity of an online community to create an atmosphere that moves beyond mainstream pornography. In this paper, I will investigate the potential for finding a counter-aesthetics within pornography. First, I will briefly describe a history of ignorance surrounding female pleasure within medicine and science. I will argue that female bodies have been subjugated, regulated and repressed in mainstream Western society, and that this subjugation has created a sense of unknoweability within many women about their bodies Shaw 3 and more specifically, their orgasms.' I will then discuss the relationship between bodies and screens, showing how interactivity and a sense of domesticity within online pornography operate to create an intimacy between the viewer and the bodies that he or she is engaging with. I will explain what is at stake when we try to find a "truth" within the bodies onscreen, drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of the scientia sexualis and Linda Williams' "frenzy of the visible." I will then move to a description of eroticism and "moral pornography,,,2 and the ways that pornography can be productive in creating SUbjectivity, rather than objectifying bodies. I will focus on the sense of "authenticity" created through the domesticity and interactivity on the Beautiful Agony website. By "authenticity," I mean appearing to be accurate in representation, and genuine in appearance. Amanda Bakehorn notes that authenticity has been studied in a variety of fields, including the existential search for an "authentic self' and as an ideal "set against the homogenizing, alienating forces of modem society" (55). She argues that originality and authenticity are important in the modem world, as people are "inundated with the fake" and are searching avidly for the genuine. Authentic pleasure is tied to truth; the quest for authentic or "real" pleasure is a goal for many pornographers. Finally, I will describe Beautiful Agony as creating an I While I argue that mainstream culture has repressed female desire through shame and ignorance, there have been changes to this regime, particularly from the 1980s on. In her chapter "The Female Phallus," Shannon Bell notes the history of female ejaculation, arguing that a paradigm shift about representations of female sexuality began in the 1980s, creating a new~iscourse surrounding female pleasure, including the coining of the term the "G-spot" and an emerging public lesbian queer culture (Bell, 2010). 2 Angela Carter defines the "moral pomographer" as an artist who would utilize pomographic material to demystify the flesh, thus allowing for a realization of "the real relations of man and his kind" (I9). Shaw 4 environment that moves beyond traditional amateur pornography; I will argue that in eroticizing faces rather than bodies, Beautiful Agony invites the viewer to identify with the subjects onscreen in new and interesting ways: rather than passively enjoying the bodies onscreen or experiencing pleasure from them, the viewer actively identifies with the Other, thus understanding him or herself through this Other onscreen. A critical study of pornography must take into account the fact that pornography is mostly ignored within current academic debates due to its seemingly lowbrow status and an assumption that it in its vulgarity, it is more akin to pop culture than literary texts or cinema. Linda Williams points to the importance of studying pornography in her preface to the 1999 edition of her seminal work Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible", noting that since her initial text was published in 1989, academia is opening up to the study of pornography. Despite this change, however, discussing surrounding porn all too frequently focus on "pro" and "anti" pornography arguments, which as Peter Lehman argues in his Introduction to Pornography: Film and Culture, do not contribute to critical and analytical study. In this way, academic discourse surrounding pornography has historically focused upon censorship or repression-the "pornography wars" of the 1980s saw feminists arguing that pornography is tantamount to rape, essentializing both male and female pleasure as active and passive, respectively. In her "Introduction" to Sex Exposed, Lynn Segal notes: "Two oddly contradictory arguments began to take the lead in feminist debates from the mid to late 1970s. The first ... was to deny that rape was sexually motivated, and analyse it purely in terms of violence, as the timeless and global method by which men had sought and managed to keep women subordinate ... The second ... was to analyse all of male sexuality in terms of Shaw 5 a continuum of violence: to proclaim ... that the basic elements of rape are involved in all heterosexual relationships" (3). Pornography was thus vilified as a cause of men's violence towards women. Conversely, anti-censorship feminists criticized the conservative anti-pornography movement for its bias against sexuality and the illogic of their causal arguments. In Pornography and the Law, Dany Lacombe notes that anti censorship feminists argued that a simplistic understanding of pornography as causing violence against women does not properly explore the social relations between men and women, or explore the mechanisms by which "desires, fantasies and sexual identities emerge" (57). These feminists used semiotics to understand the signifiers of sexuality and separate "pornography" from other sexist representations within media and other mainstream images in order to demonstrate that pornography itself is not the cause of oppression, but sexism is deeply rooted within culture. These debates are largely past, and feminist theory has moved on; postmodernity has problematized the essential categories onto which many of these arguments rely, and feminist theory has undergone disciplinary changes, with universities moving from Women's Studies to Queer or Gender Studies. What is at stake in discussing pornography in a seemingly post-feminist theoretical context? What is there to discuss? Despite these apparent contradictions and problems, it is vital to read, study and consider pornography as existing on the borders of our society and rendering our desires visible. Pornography shows us both what we want to see, and what we do not want to see. In showing extremes of the body and intimacy, pornography demonstrates the private made explicitly public; Laura Kipnis argues that pornography "holds us in the thrall of its transgression," offering up a "detailed blueprint of a culture's anxieties, investments, contradictions" Shaw 6 (120). Because of these interesting contestations, feminist and critical theory must continue to look at pornography as a site of power, struggle and sexuality.