Like a good hair tug during sex, pornography is about control. It can be pleasurable or painful, but ultimately someone does the pulling and someone is pulled. It's easy to get lost in feminist theory about pornography, and the best way to avoid doing that is to drop the theory and look at what's in front of you. There are bodies, maybe two, maybe four. There is someone thrusting -- perhaps male, perhaps female -- and someone being thrusted into. There's someone holding a camera. There's someone directing the scene.
A child of four could tell you that we, as humans, don't exist in a vacuum. There are multiple steps to every process and with each step, decisions that must be made. Say I draw a picture of you. You're my model, I tell you to sit on the couch and hold an apple in your mouth. You do it. I draw you how I see you and not as you really are. I dash off my drawing, throw on a frame, and sell it for $500 at the hipster art gallery down the street. A transaction has occurred, but one of us was paid with money and the other with something less tangible. Fame, idolization, muse, celebrity: I offer you these things in return for taking your image from you and doing what I want with it.
Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adéle) is a French film from director Abdellatif Kechiche about a young woman's search for companionship, sexual fulfillment, and position in the world. Adéle, 15 at the beginning of the film, meets Emma, an art student. They meet, have lots of sex and ultimately break up. Here, the controversy -- the talk -- has revolved mostly around those sex scenes, described by some as painfully long, and also nature of two women involved in those sex scenes. Back to the apple drawing -- who are the women, how are they shot in the film, and who is it exactly that's shooting them?
The women, the actual actresses behind the women, aren't lesbians in real life. In a Daily Beast interview with those women that borders on disturbing, the two say the film's shooting was unprofessional and left them not wanting to work with the director again. According to Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel the film is based on, the extended sex scenes between the women struck her as inauthentic and made her feel "ill at ease." Kechiche, the director, is a straight man.
The desire to please men creeps up in unexpected ways. I remember in college, I got in the habit of announcing that I had no problem with Playboy and Hustler magazines. The articles, the articles! I'd yell out to eager boys at parties, while not as sure girls crouched in corners, sneering, shaking heads.
I thought that my being okay with the sexuality of those magazines was a way of owning it, a way to take control of my own emerging sexuality. Why fear Playboy, why not say yes?
Looking back at those situations, there was a sexual grey area that I didn't allow myself to explore in front of 20-year-old college men. I fed into what they wanted, knowing it was what they wanted. I didn't see it, and even worse, I shunned the women who were brave enough to vocalize what they didn't like about Playboy. I would have snidely beat them down, psychoanalyzed them, made them feel less smart or brave for taking that route. I was malicious without knowing why.
Being paid for image will always have a level of prostitution attached to it. So anyone, male or female, takes a risk when they agree to let go of that image. But in a world where women have a history of getting the shit stick, we're more sensitive to it when women let that image go. We protect women because they're more typically the ones being penetrated, rather than doing the penetration. The same goes for film.
I disagree with the New York Time's critic Manohla Dargis' claim that "we need more women on screen, naked and not, hungry and not, to get this conversation really started."
In 2013, women made up just five percent of directors in Hollywood.
It's the women holding the cameras -- pulling the hair -- that are oh so absent from that dialogue.