Difference Between Exploitation and Submission?

When I wrote the post about women liking gay porn, there was a topic I didn’t feel I could get into without making post twice as long. So here we are: Two posts!

One of the theories as to why women might prefer gay porn over straight porn is that gay porn feels less exploitative than straight, male/female porn. There are fairly rigid gender roles in most straight porn whereby females exist for the pleasure of males. Female bodies are the ones that are put on display; men are often edited out of the scene altogether (except for their cocks), and sex is usually something that is done to the females, not with them.

I’m very much overgeneralizing to make my point, so don’t even bother to come up with exceptions, I know there are many – but they’re still exceptions, not the rule.

So, the theory goes, if all of the participants in a scene are female, or if all of the participants are male, you don’t get the dynamics of women in relation to men. You could almost say that the sex is more “pure.” (If I have any gay readers maybe they really would say that.) The theory from the previous post is that women can feel free to just enjoy the sex in gay porn without having to deal with intergender issues. The fact that women seem to like male/male porn almost as much as they like female/female porn indicates that they’re not even interested in the genders of the people as much as they’re interested in how those people are pleasuring each other.

The point of this post, however – or at least one of the points – is that exploitation is not the same thing as submission. Women being exploited in porn is not the same as women in porn (or in real life) who are submissive. Based on the stats in the last post on what women are searching for and viewing on PornHub, it’s obvious that women as a group are quite fine with rough sex and BDSM in their porn, and I’ve talked with and read blogs from lots of women who enjoy rough sex and submission in their own sex lives. So submission and rough sex must be different from the exploitation we’ve been talking about; they must be two different things (even if there are overlaps).

And this is part of my theory as to why “female friendly” porn may not be attracting women in droves. Perhaps it’s conflating exploitation with submission; perhaps in the quest to make everyone equal in “female friendly” porn what they’ve done instead is take all of the lust out of it. We’ve all seen parodies on TV of people taking political correctness too far – men asking for permission to kiss women in exaggeratedly silly ways – and perhaps that’s what has happened to “female friendly” porn, albeit in a less Simpson-esque way? Has “female friendly” porn gone too far in avoiding exploitation and taken all of the “fucking” out of the sex, making it too clinical or lifeless? (“I would like permission to insert my erect penis into your beautiful vagina flower.” “You may insert it, sir.”) Is that why my friend told me that women who already enjoy porn would not enjoy “female friendly” porn?

And contrarily, is this what “female friendly” porn had to do to attract women who weren’t already attracted to porn? Was exploitation the biggest obstacle for them, and once that’s removed they feel politically free to enjoy it?

For my American readers: I don’t mean “politically” as in “Democrat vs. Republican.” For most of the world, “politics” is more broad than just which political party you support for government, it’s more a set of beliefs on how you believe the world should be run and how you believe people should interact. Voting for governments is just a part of that.

Will younger readers get this reference?

My point is that there are power dynamics involved in male/female porn that aren’t present in female/female or male/male porn, even when there is dominance and submission involved. There are ways of portraying dominance and submission which are not exploitative, just like there are ways of exploiting even when dominance/submission aren’t involved. I would also argue that removing gender from the equation is not the only way to do it; I think there must be ways for women to submit to men in porn without it being exploitative, and am sure there are scenes out there that pull it off. I just think the norm is that male/female dynamics in porn are exploitative.

Now, if my readers are with me up to this point – and they may not be, in which case they can probably ignore this last part – but if they are, I have a homework question for you: If we agree that exploitation and submission are not the same thing, and if we agree that it’s possible to portray submission in ways that aren’t exploitative – even women submitting to men, which is the type of male/female dynamic we’re concerned with when we talk about exploitation – then can we take things further? Is it possible to treat someone as a sex object in a way which isn’t exploitative?