Abstract
Heteronormal histories have been shaped by a recurring set of debates about what kinds of explicit sexual expression and representation are publicly allowed, structured by a form of line-drawing that sanctions certain forms of public heterosexual practice in popular culture and representation. While depictions of heterosexual activity in popular cultural representations are tolerated within certain parameters, and while such parameters around what is possible and acceptable have shifted over time in Anglophone discourses of sexuality, overtly pornographic depictions are consistently cast as a non-normative, deviant form of heterosexual expression.
Over the past decade, the emergence of ‘pornified’ culture prompts us to ask new kinds of questions about heterosexual practice, pointing to some interesting transgressive potentials. What happens when a historically non-normative form of public sexual expression attains a measure of social acceptability? Does this challenge the historical signifiers of good heterosex? To explore these questions, this article draws on a study with young people aged 12–16 in South Australian schools who have some interesting things to say about the ‘explicit’ in public. They describe an alteration to the historical relegation of explicit porn sex to secret private spaces, and articulate how pornified culture works as moments for curious exploration: a fun, fleshy spectacle. However, in making this claim, I (and they) walk a careful line. The extent to which heterosexual porn can be a matter of ‘fun’ and experimentation is simultaneously moderated by historically persistent signifiers of classed and gendered respectability. While the repertoire for open acknowledgment of certain forms of play and pleasure may be opening up (perhaps disrupting existing orthodoxies of heteronormativity in some key ways), heteronormal conventions simultaneously constrain these possibilities.
Introduction
Heteronormal histories have been shaped by a recurring set of debates about what kinds of explicit sexual expression and representation are publicly allowable. Heteronormativity is structured by a form of line-drawing that sanctions certain forms of public heterosexual practice in popular culture and representation, judged against the perversity of non-normative heterosexualities and other marginalised identities (Berlant and Warner, 1998). As Gayle Rubin argues in her classic essay ‘Thinking sex’ (1984), socially sanctioned ‘charmed sex’ – monogamous, reproductive, and heterosexual – works through establishing a distinction from ‘scary’, public, explicit, pornographic sex. While depictions of heterosexual activity in popular cultural representations are tolerated within certain parameters, and while such parameters around what is possible and acceptable have shifted over time in Anglophone discourses of sexuality, overtly pornographic depictions are consistently cast as a non-normative, deviant form of heterosexual expression.
Debates about public representations and explicitness inevitably attach themselves to ‘pornography’. What constitutes pornography remains subject to conjecture, and is not my specific concern in the article. Rather, for the purposes of this essay I invoke the more general term pornification to refer to a relatively wide range of highly (hetero-)sexualised visual representational practices and products across popular culture, encompassing more or less explicit representations of bodies and sexuality in advertising, music videos and mainstream entertainments. More recently, this trend has signalled a shift in what ‘porn’ and its associations mean. Over the past decade, academic and popular discourses have traced the emergence of an increasingly ‘pornified’ and sexualised culture. In the popular and media cultures of the consumerist West, sexualised representations are increasingly pornographic in aesthetic and style, enjoying a public visibility and accessibility not previously witnessed (Attwood, 2006, 2009, 2010; Duits and van Zoonen, 2006; Hardy, 2008; McNair, 1996, 2009, 2013; Mulholland, 2013; Paasonen et al., 2007; Paul, 2005; Poyner, 2006; Smith, 2010). Porn products, aesthetics and enjoyment are no longer, necessarily, a shameful secret to be hidden at any cost.
This trend prompts us to ask new kinds of questions about heterosexual practice, pointing to some interesting transgressive potentials. What happens when a historically non-normative form of public sexual expression attains a measure of social acceptability? Does this alter the nature of public heterosexual practice, which casts non-hidden porn as ‘scary’, ‘bad’ and disrespectable? Does this widen the repertoire of possibilities for heterosexual expression, historically restrained by discourses of respectability that closely monitor what extent of explicitness is permitted to be discussed or viewed in public? Does this, in short, challenge the historical signifiers of good heterosex? As Beasley, Brook and Holmes (2012) argue, it is possible to look to transgressive moments in heterosexual practice in ways that counter the view of heterosexuality as static and monolithic, and in ways that constitute a deviation from the dominant and normative. Heterosexual practice, they argue, can be transgressive within the terrain of the dominant, pointing to ‘the importance of recognising the pleasurable, exciting and non-normative possibilities of heterosexuality which signal possibilities for social innovations and change’ (Beasley et al., 2012: 8). Is such a moment of transgression operating here?
To explore these questions, this article draws on a study with young people aged 12–16 in South Australian schools who have some interesting things to say about the ‘explicit’ in public. The voices of young people in studies such as this are important because young people in the Anglophone West are the primary consumers of a globalised set of pornified popular and media cultures, and as such are positioned at the cutting edge of revisions to sexual expression, self-presentation, and new forms of body politics (Halberstam, 2012). Given that an increasingly pornified culture has been identified in a number of international locations, participants in this Australian study are situated within – and are perhaps contributing to – an interesting global phenomenon (Egan, 2013; McKee et al., 2008). While empirical studies with young people are rare in research about sex, studies are beginning to emerge which note some interesting generational changes in people’s responses to the depiction or representation of explicit heterosexuality (Buckingham and Bragg, 2004; Jackson and Vares, 2011; Mulholland, 2013; Ringose, 2011), and these offer potentially subversive readings of the relationship between porn, heterosexual expression, and public spaces.
The young people in this study present such a reading, describing an alteration to the historical relegation of explicit porn sex to secret private spaces. In and through their narratives, they argue that pornified culture works as moments for curious exploration: a fun, fleshy spectacle. This shift points to some interesting transformative potentials in the role and effects of pornified representations and heterosexual practice. However, in making this claim, I (and they) walk a careful line. The extent to which heterosexual porn can be a matter of ‘fun’ and experimentation is simultaneously moderated by historically persistent signifiers of classed and gendered respectability. In short, while the repertoire for open acknowledgment of certain forms of play and pleasure may be opening up (perhaps disrupting existing orthodoxies of heteronormativity in some key ways), heteronormal conventions simultaneously constrain these possibilities.
Beyond the bedroom
Feminist theorists, queer scholars and sexualities’ studies have long established the ways in which heteronormativity works to privilege certain sexual acts and practices over others (Benhabib, 1987; Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1990 [1976]; Ingraham, 1996; Sedwick, 1990; Warner, 1999). In the Anglophone West, ‘both images and verbal language have represented the couplehood of man and woman, and the (modern) family formation of hetero parents and children, not only as ideals but outright moral imperatives’ (Rossi, 2011: 9). As Berlant and Warner (1998) suggest, heteronormativity occupies a position at the invisible centre, marking out the normative from the deviant/perverse ‘in an ever-shifting continuum of more or less serious deviation, with a constant battle over ‘where to draw the line’ (Warner, 1999: 27). In making this argument, Berlant and Warner set up an important distinction between heterosexuality and heteronormativity: while sexual practices between men and women are diverse and varied, and may not follow heteronormative scripts in uniform ways, heteronormativity is that which establishes them as the ideal, makes them seem coherent, the invisible norm against which all other identities are judged (Berlant and Warner, 1998; Ingraham, 1996).
The interplay between what is normative and allowable in private as opposed to public space lies at the heart of heteronormative boundary projects. Berlant and Warner tease out this dynamic in their seminal essay, ‘Sex in public’ (1998). Here they make the case that in the modern West, intimacy and sex are linked to ‘private’ spaces in heteronormal frameworks, and this serves to crystalise the normalcy of good, coupled sex. Rubin makes a similar case in ‘Thinking sex’ (1984), arguing that heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, and privately enacted behaviours are historically normalised as ‘good sex’, while excessively explicit, in-public expressions – even as utterances – are pathologised. In theorising the connection between good sex and privacy, such arguments do not overlook the ways in which certain heterosexual practices and expressions enjoy a normative, and socially sanctioned public visibility. Certain representations of heterosexual sexual activity are normatively centred and thus operate as invisible and un-noted (such as kissing in advertisements, sex scenes on television shows and in movies), and do enjoy a normative and more tolerated public visibility not historically granted to homosexual and other non-normative heterosexual expression (Bell, 1995; Califia, 2000; Hayes and Carpenter, 2012; Johnson and Dalton, 2012).
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Indeed, as Eve Sedgwick (1990) observes, private life is, in a sense, lived in a very public way, ‘as a kind of open secret’ (During, 1993: 354). However, public expressions and representations of heterosex are only sanctioned where they reflect and reinforce the ‘goodness’ of heteronormal intimacies, which form the building blocks of broader social, cultural and economic relations. As Berlant and Warner put it: the normativity of heterosexual culture links intimacy only to the institutions of personal life, making them the privileged intuitions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development … by making sex seem irrelevant or merely personal, heteronormative conventions of intimacy block the building of non-normative or explicit public sexual cultures. (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 553)
This article hinges on one such instance of non-normative public sexual culture: the almost ubiquitous ‘porn’ readily available to young people. Despite the sanctioning of heterosex, when it becomes too graphic, fleshy, immediate – too pornographic – such representations tip over to become non-normative and deviant. As I have argued elsewhere, in modern western discourses of sexuality, pornographic representations of sex work as a signifier for perversity (Mulholland, 2013). Historically persistent arguments about what degree of ‘explicitness’ is publicly allowable rest on definitions of what is pornographic, and such contestations over what constitutes the pornographic underpin the careful line-drawing of heteronormativity and public/private sex (Kendrick, 1996 [1987]; McKee et al., 2008). In the following section I look to various historical moments, or ‘porn histories’, to help explain how, and in what ways, porn has been positioned as non-normative.
Discourses of class and respectability
Important feminist historical research elucidates the connection between respectability, ‘restraint’ and normative sex in modern discourses of sexuality. Beverley Skeggs (1997) and others argue that notions of respectability constituted the central mechanism through which the concept of class emerged in post-industrial Europe, notions that were central to constructions of the ‘good’ and the normative. Bourgeois sexualities were morally sanctified as restrained, civilised and self-controlled (Strathern, 1992), set against the sexualities of the ‘massified’ working classes and ‘raced others’ from the colonies who were deemed pathological, deviant and potentially dangerous. A licentious, open, ‘out of control’ sexuality was antithetical to that of the bourgeoisie: ‘sexuality, regarded as one of the most immoral forces, was relegated to the inner core of marriage and sexual play became the ultimate antithesis of rational work’ (Davidoff and Hall, 1987: 27). The control of women’s sexuality was crucial to this knowledge/power arrangement, whereby the behaviour and control exercised by women was considered paramount for protecting family structure, bourgeois consolidation and civilised nationhood (Davidoff and Hall, 1987; Skeggs, 1997).
Porn histories
The construction of respectable civilised bourgeois sexuality – the normative yardstick against which all other sexualities came to be judged – was tightly connected to newly emerging discourses concerning ‘pornography’. Several important historical works – Walter Kendrick’s Secret Museum (1996 [1987]) and Lyn Hunt’s The Invention of Pornography (1996) – reveal how the emergence of pornography as a distinct category in the 18th century worked to buttress notions of ‘good heterosex’ as respectable, restrained, civilised and thoroughly private. In contrast to the degree of social visibility enjoyed by ‘obscenity’ in pre-modern arrangements wherein evil existed ‘cheek by jowl with the good’ (Kendrick, 1996 [1987]: 69), Kendrick traces some interesting historical moments through which pornography started to function as ‘secret’ and ‘private’. The discovery of the explicit frescos of Pompeii deeply troubled cataloguers of artefacts, which were consequently labelled pornographic, and locked away in the Secret Museum in Naples. At about the same time, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) published its first definition of pornography: indeed, Kendrick reveals that the 1864 definition was the ‘licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of Pompeii’ (Kendrick, 1996 [1987]: 13). These examples were representative of a more general trend whereby cataloguers, bibliographers and curators began to categorise certain materials as ‘pornographic’. As pornography, such material was subject to regulatory sanctions such as being deemed illegal, withdrawn from view, or censored for public consumption. All this supports Kipnis’s argument that ‘the precondition for pornography is a civilising process’ (Kipnis, 1999: 168). The relationship between access to pornographic material and a person’s character and personhood became paramount. As one of a number of ‘others’ to ‘good’ sex, the pornographic was banished to the private. The perceived danger of pornography was thus premised, among other concerns, on its potential to disturb the goodness of respectable heteronormative sex. 2
Porn and cultural anxiety
Social fears about the corrupting power of pornographic images have continued to circulate as a series of sex panics in the Anglophone West (Rubin, 1984). Countless incidents over the past two decades evidence this, and at the risk of oversimplifying their diversity, it is fair to say that such panics serve to entrench pornography as non-normative. In Sexual Anarchy (1992) Elaine Showalter reflects on the crises that emerged around the fin de siècle, arguing that the emergence of feminism, homosexuality (as a named practice) and new forms of sexual expression precipitated cultural fears about the regression and denigration of normative boundaries. The ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s also illustrate the controversy of pornography, during which feminist debates about pornography raged over questions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex and polarised conceptions of sex as ‘pleasure’ or ‘danger’. Against the Dworkin/Mckinnon position which thoroughly incriminates pornography in (all) women’s exploitation (Dworkin, 1989; Dworkin and McKinnon, 1988) a feminist counter-position argued that representations of explicit sex were not inherently dangerous and could work as a form of play and pleasure (Church-Gibson and Gibson, 1993; Ellis, 1986; Snitow et al., 1983; Vance, 1984). These and other controversies indicate that while boundaries around pornography shift and change, they are nonetheless expressive of the cultural anxieties surrounding the meaning, uses and effects of porn.
Porn goes mainstream?
The ‘pornification’ and sexualisation of contemporary culture described earlier presents a challenge to the relationship between respectability, pornography, and how heterosex is allowed to be represented. A growing body of academic work suggests that something new might be happening with regard to porn and popular culture (Attwood, 2006, 2009, 2010; Duits and van Zoonen, 2006; Hardy, 2008; McNair, 1996, 2009, 2013; Mulholland, 2013; Paasonen et al., 2007; Paul, 2005; Poyner, 2006; Smith, 2010). Collectively, such work claims that pornographic styles, motifs and aesthetics have achieved a mainstream, public visibility not previously witnessed. Instances range from ‘sexed up’ music videos, sexualised child stars, Playboy-branded products in teen marketing, the mainstream popularity of pole-dancing classes, sexting, and ease of access to porn on the internet (Mulholland, 2013; Smith, 2010). As noted in an Australian study exploring global trends around porn mainstreaming: Pornography not only stirs our bodies, it stirs our ethical and political selves. Pornography draws out our beliefs about gender and sexuality, race and class, power and self-hood. Pornography is about much more than just sex. Whatever you think of pornography, whether you consume it or abhor it, or both, it is now a highly visible part of our world and one we all need to discuss and deal with. (McKee et al., 2008)
On the one hand this trend represents a new form of sex panic, captured in adult-centric fears about the porno-saturation of young people’s worlds (Attwood and Smith, 2011a, 2011b; Egan and Hawkes, 2012). On the other hand, it may herald an interesting moment in which heterosexual pornography has become normalised and socially acceptable. Does this trend signal something new in terms of ‘good’ heternomative sex and porn? Does a mainstreamed porn aesthetic subvert the historically reified connection between respectability, privacy and sex that casts pornography as perverse and non-normative? Does this amount to a moment of transgressive heterosexual practice?
These questions were explored in a recent study I undertook with young people in three South Australian high schools, elucidating what young people had to say about the apparent normalisation and ready accessibility of porn, broadly conceived. 3 The project was based in three public, state-funded secondary schools. 4 In each school I worked with classes from Years 8 and 9 (whose students are aged 12–13) and Years 10 and 11 (students aged 14–16) for three one-hour, whole-class sessions. In each session I introduced a number of ‘pornified’ products and/or debates. The first activity asked students to respond to the Bratz Baby doll, an ‘infant’ version of the older Bratz doll criticised for its pornified appearance. The second activity required them to participate in a debate based on the statement: Young people’s access to the internet should be controlled to prevent access to inappropriate content. The third activity presented them with a series of jeans advertisements – ranging from highly sexualised, pornified representations, to more staid, less explicit images. Taking the place of the teacher (who stayed as observer in the class), each class was run as an open-ended, activity-based discussion.
Porn: Fun, fleshy spectacle?
Within the school context – a highly public and institutional space – the commonplace location of porn in young people’s cultural milieu was clear. Across all of the activities, the students seemed plainly comfortable in speaking about pornified and explicit sex in ways that signalled a shift in its position as perverse, deviant, or shameful. It is important to note at the outset that when these young people referred to pornified products – and porn itself – they invariably (and implicitly) assumed this was heterosexual in nature. Girls and boys alike talked openly about, for example, tits, kink, dildos, strip clubs, and various porn sites. In the second activity, when asked to debate whether young people’s access to the internet should be controlled to prevent access to inappropriate content, the conversation invariably turned to pornography. In and through these discussions, young people conveyed an ease in conversing about porn, across gender lines. As a note of qualification, not all students talked as freely, some did not mention or evoke porn at all, and those who did talk about the sexually explicit or the pornographic did so in the different ways. I am sure some students were more familiar with sexually explicit and pornographic images than others, and there were gendered and classed differences, which I tease out in more detail in other work (Mulholland, 2013). However, what was tangible despite these different engagements was their relative familiarity with the sexually explicit. In a general sense, the students were well versed in how to access porn, ready to make jokes about it, and confident to talk about its content.
The extent to which porn and the pornified aesthetic were presented to me as a familiar, routine, habitual aspect of life was most palpable in discussions about adult-centric panics. When asked to respond to community concerns about porn, the response was almost unilateral: ‘Porn is just normal now’ (Boy, Year 11, School 1), ‘Coz it’s really easy to get to the porn sites and that, it’s so easy to see all that stuff, so no one really cares anymore’ (Girl, Year 10, School 2), and ‘Our age now, its normal, like, you know’ (Girl, Year 10, School 2). When I encouraged them to explore further what they meant by ‘normal’ and ‘no big deal’, the following conversation was representative across all classes and age levels: Me: Is porn just completely normal now? Girl 1: A lot of people have photos of girls on their phones and everything, and videos. Me: That was not normal when I was young! Would people agree that porn is much more normal? Boy 1: It’s much more tolerated. Boy 2: Depends on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to someone from your generation [i.e. 30-something], it’s … creepy. Me: Yeah, but your generation, people don’t think it’s as big a deal? Girl 1: Yeah, no, people don’t. Like if they tell you they watch porn, it’s like … Me: I find that fascinating. This is a better question. How many people think that porn is not a big deal? Class: Almost all hands go up, bar one. Me: Why isn’t it a big deal? Girl 1: Coz everyone does it. Boy 3: Coz of the internet, coz you can access it. Girl 1: Coz it’s free. Girl 2: You can like Bluetooth it to each other during school and stuff. Me: Is that normal? Like people do it? Like when I was young it was more under the bed, like you know that old idea that it was all under the bed, but now it’s much more available? Girl 3: Like our age now, it’s normal like, you know.
(Year 10, School 3)
Overturning its historical association with the perverse and aberrant, what young people in this study tell us is that porn is very much part of their cultural worlds. Across these accounts (which were representative of conversations about pornography in all activities) the repertoire of porn included the fleshy explicitness of heteroporn and heteroporn aesthetics in popular culture. This familiarity suggests that porn has attained a degree of acceptability. As argued earlier, certain forms of heterosex have long enjoyed a popular public visibility, and in these young people’s accounts, even explicit porn is similarly permissible.
Fun, curiosity and exploration
This shift points to a potentially subversive practice by young people with regards to their interpretation of public hetero-porn. Rather than signifying the perverse and deviant, porn-like representations of heterosex in popular culture – along with pornography itself – were understood as opportunities for exploration, freedom, fun and entertainment. In the debate activity, focused on whether the internet should be censored, young people across the board drew on notions of freedom, exploration, curiosity and ‘knowing what’s out there’ in their negotiations of pornified culture: ‘Cos its part of growing up’ (Boy, Year 8, School 3), ‘We need to know about these things’ (Boy, Year 8, School 3), ‘Cos young people are curious’ (Boy, Year 9, School 2). A similar study by Buckingham and Bragg (2004) also notes the ‘practices of freedom’ which constitute young people’s negotiations of sexual imagery. A more recent study confirms this, reflecting on the ways in which young people express a desire to ‘make their own decisions, to develop their individuality, and express themselves’ (Bragg et al., 2011: 284).
The young people I worked with also referred to the fun, humorous aspects of porn and pornified culture. While elsewhere I present a more complex reading of what this humour means (Mulholland, 2013), this does signal another potentially subversive reading of ‘pornified’ or pornographic texts. When porn was referred to in peer-to-peer discussions or in various whole class activities, the general tone was laugh-out-loud (LOL). Following a discussion about ‘anything goes nowadays’, one group’s explanation was representative of negotiations of porn and humour: Boy 2: I think a lot of people use it for humour. Girl 1: It’s just hilarious. Girl 2: It is quite funny. Girl 3: I watch porn a lot. Girl 1: We’re not getting off on it, we just think it’s hilarious.
(Year 11, School 1)
In addition to freedom, exploration and humour, young people spoke about pornography and pornified culture as forms of entertainment. In classroom discussions, porn and pornified culture were referred to as one form of entertainment among many, as one element in a package of entertainments available in cyber and technologised spaces. As the literature on young people and cyber culture notes, many young people spend a great deal of their time online, and in places in which self-display and self-construction occur. They also use technologised media to facilitate instant communication, social networking, swapping, chatting and constructing cultures particular to their identities and interests (Attwood, 2010; boyd, 2008; boyd and Ellison, 2007; Waskul, 2004; Weber and Mitchell, 2008). As the young people in my study point out, these entertainments are often linked up, or characterised by endless crossovers. As one student observed ‘Girl: Like if you go to youtube or myspace, there’s just porn all over it, like adverts for it’ (Year 10, School 2). McKee (2012: 549) addresses the mainstreaming and revisioning of porn entertainments, arguing that there is analytical traction in locating porn as ‘part of the cultural realm of entertainment’. Attwood also articulates and maps out the emerging forms and genres in online porn environments, in which ‘changes in technology do introduce new ways of doing things, and new environments in which to do them (Attwood, 2010: 8).
The young people in this study speak to this new way of doing things, especially through the ways they grant it a normative acceptability. As argued earlier, normative public discussions and representations of heterosex are framed by bourgeois constructions of ‘good’ sex as restrained, decent, civil, and controlled. The young people in this study subvert this tradition to some extent through their insistence that fleshy, explicit, and open representations of heterosex offer playful, humorous, curious moments of exploration. This allows for engagements with pornified heterosex that run counter to histories of non-explicit, monogamous, reproductive sex as the ‘good’. Brian McNair endorses this idea in his various works (2002, 2009, 2013), arguing that ‘striptease’ culture enables a democratisation of desire, and new forms of public displays of intimacy.
Good girls go gaga?
Another subversive possibility emerging from a normative acceptance of heterosexual porn by young people are new forms of gendered display and body politics. Post-feminist literature has long argued that contemporary representational environments are allowing newfound freedoms, agency and empowerment, especially for girls. While notions of freedom and empowerment are limited (as will be explored later), especially in terms of how agency and freedom are available to particular classed and raced bodies (Egan, 2013; Renold and Ringose, 2011), the post-feminist turn does signal a shift in public heterosexual practice, as was clearly expressed by many of the girls in my study, albeit to different degrees and in different ways. In activity 3, when asked to choose their favourite from a selection of advertisements for jeans, the girls seemed very comfortable in making sexual assessments, apparent through statements such as ‘the guys are hot’. Across all of the activities, girls also seemed comfortable in talking openly about porn. This suggests a shift whereby for girls, respectability can mean an active, overt sexuality. Indeed, as noted in post-feminist literature, sexual agency has become something of a cultural imperative (Gill, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; McRobbie, 2009).
Judith Halberstam’s recent analysis in Gaga Feminism (2012) provides a useful means for thinking through the subversive reading offered by young people in this study. Halberstam argues that contemporary ‘gaga’ forms of sexual expression allow for ‘innovative deployments of femininity … characterised by their excess, their ecstatic loss of control, and a maverick sense of bodily identity’ (2012: xiii). Granting porn a new-found acceptability may be associated with a body politics in which pleasure and fun are allowable, and may represent an example of ‘heteroflexibility’. In addition, this new body politics recognises the transformative politics of loss of control and excess, especially for girls. While in the next section I argue this potential for liberation is recuperated by heteronormative conventions, the idea that one can embrace porn culture and ‘gaga’ are subversive challenges to ‘respectable’, restrained bourgeois representations of heterosex.
Public heteroporn: Walking a fine line
I return now to my intention to walk a careful line. While the young people in this study may grant porn a normative status in public life, such a status is nonetheless constrained by historically familiar heteronormative conventions around respectability and restraint. This highlights the contradictory nature of young people’s narratives. On the one hand, the repertoire for fleshy explicitness is expanded, providing new possibilities for sexual display, play, pleasure, and exploration. On the other hand, such opportunities are constrained by heteronormal histories. The explicit might be ‘out to play’ more openly, but this does not mean that anything goes. Explicitly pornified representations of sex are coded with classed and gendered historical conventions, in several important ways.
Respectability, behaviour, and ‘going too far’
While young people routinise the visibility of porn, they simultaneously employ notions of respectability to make clear judgements about what is acceptable or not. In the very first session, which asked students to describe the Bratz Babyz doll, the term ‘slut’ was often used. When asked to explain what this term meant, the conversation turned to a distinction between ‘slut’ as opposed to ‘hot’. ‘Slut’ was articulated using terms such as: fake; too much make-up; overly enticing/in your face; attention seeking; over the top/too much; try hard; ‘hooker style/hooker you don’t pay for’; dressing as if ‘trying to pull someone’; revealing clothing; no standards; trashy; and dirty. When asked to further articulate what ‘slut’ meant, the following conversation was representative: Girl 1: A lot of times if you see someone and call them a slut, they’re generally trashy. They just look dirty. They look like somebody that would walk across the street and you’d be like ok right you know that’s someone who’s from Elizabeth
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or something. Like you can smell smoke, and crack on them, and they haven’t brushed their teeth. It’s just dirty. Me: Would people agree with that? Most: Yep. Me: Does slutty verge on trashy? What is trashy? … like could you look slutty in Burnside? All: Yes! Girl 2: There are people that look slutty that don’t even do that much. Me: They’re trying to look trashy? Girl 2: They’re just perfect. They have this ideal image in their head that they have to have perfect clear skin, amazing gorgeous eyes, bleached pathetic dead hair. Girl 1: Yes, but to achieve this they put on six layers of make-up and straighten their hair till it falls out of their head.
(Year 11, School 1)
These terms and sets of conversations are clear expressions of how porn operates along class lines, as noted in a range of scholarship (Arthurs, 2003, 2004; Attwood, 2007; Egan, 2013; Ringose, 2010, 2011; Skeggs, 2005). As Egan argues, discourses of sexualisation and the supposed dangers of porn are rooted in fears about particular girls: namely, those who are white, heterosexual and middle class (2013).
In contrast, other sessions and activities saw students claim that ‘explicit’, raunchy representations could be nonetheless respectable. ‘Hot’, as compared to ‘slutty’, was associated with the following terms and phrases: good looking; how you present yourself; being yourself; ‘normal’; original; more natural; talented; longer lasting relationships; more mature; dresses responsibly; has a job, professional; not as try-hard; respect. They were at pains to stress that what matters are not explicit or fleshy sexualised expressions. As stated by one boy, (aged 15, Year 10) ‘both categories might dress the same, but the behaviour matters’. This is reiterated by another girl (aged 15, Year 10) ‘just say hypothetically you get two girls next to each other wearing exactly the same thing to a party, it really comes down to how you conduct yourself’. When I asked the students to explain why certain celebrities could be viewed as respectable ‘while not wearing very much’, the following comments were revealing: Girl 1: Zooey Deschanel – she’s the most beautiful girl in the world! Girl 2: She’s beautiful and doesn’t look trashy. Girl 3: Angelina Jolie … she’s really talented. Boy 1:You get to see personality before she does the raunchy stuff. Boy 2: She does lots of charity work … I just think there’s a lot you can respect about her. Me: So it’s not just raunch in itself? Girl 4: It’s about being raunchy in the right places. Me: Raunchy in the right places? Boy 3: In the right situation.
Later
Girl 3: Beyoncé’s definitely hot. Me: But it’s pretty raunchy stuff isn’t it? Girl 3: Yeah, she’s done all that dancing but I would never call her a slut. Girl 4: I think she’s really confident. Boy: She’s married too. Girl 2: It doesn’t seem that sexual as well. Me: Why does it seem not sexual? Girl 2: It’s not like she’s popping her boobs out. Boy 2: It’s like ‘I don’t want to be on you’.
All laugh
Me: I get it! So slutty is like I want to be on you and I’m raunchy, whereas hot is like I’m raunchy but I’m not in your face. All: Yeah, yeah! Boy 4: Yep that’s perfect. That is the definition. Slutty people are throwing themselves at you. Girl 4: It’s the difference between burlesque and stripping. Boy 4: Whereas hot people are there … but they’re not everywhere.
(Year 11, School 1)
Another fascinating set of reflections elucidated how some celebrities can be ‘publicly explicit’, but maintain an aura of respectability if they exercise control, restraint and ‘know when to retreat’: Girl 1: Pink is tough. You don’t want to call her a slut, you’d get your ass kicked! Girl 2: She’s a strong character. Girl 3: She’s independent, she doesn’t follow the extreme slutty stuff, she tries and stays to herself. You don’t really see her much in the paparazzi compared to others. All: Yeah. Me: So it’s like she’s not doing it just for the sake of being sexy. Girl 3: Like she loves what she does. Girl 4: All the stars that while they are famous … all the stars that go back to their private life, live their lives, don’t get in the tabloids … so we don’t think you’re like this, you’re like this … there’s a movie premiere, I’m going … we think omg what were you thinking! … or there’s this hot party, I’m going, I’m so going … The more appearances you make, the more people judge you, the more you get classified … But when you retreat back to your life, into your own thing, no one can question.
Later
Girl 4: Beyoncé, JLo, They all know when to retreat. They know how to put on the sex appeal in videos and stuff, but because they know when to retreat back to their lives nothing ever becomes of it … It’s very professional, the way they handle the whole famous business.
The bordering of respectable raunch from the trashy and slutty is thus a clear indication of how public porno heterosex continues to function as non-normative and perverse if such instances ‘go too far’. Notions of ‘going too far’, ‘over-the-top’ and ‘not knowing your limits’ employ historically familiar classed and gender indicators, indicators which, as argued earlier, shape and define the heteronormative. This represents a continuation of historically familiar markers of bourgeois, civilised, restrained sexuality, set against the unrestrained, licentious, uncivilised sexuality of classed others. For this reason, it is possible to argue that while porn may be out to play, heteronormal conventions simultaneously regulate and manage what is possible and permissable.
Girls do slut
What was also clear through all of the activities was the focus on girls as signifiers of the hot or slutty. Boys were never mentioned in discussions about what marked out the ‘slutty’ from the ‘hot/respectable’. Indeed, when I asked the classes why male celebrities were absent from their discussion, and if boys can be ‘slutty’, the following excerpt was indicative of the kinds of discussions across the board: Me: One interesting thing about your lists. There are no men on them. Girl 1: Oh yeah!! Me: Why is it? Can men be slutty? Girl 1: Yes! Boy 1: Men can like pick up girls and things like that. Like Hit and Run,
6
or something. But not slutty. Me: Why not? Boy 1: Cause. (shakes head) I don’t know actually. Me: We’re just not used to calling them slutty, are we? Even though they are doing the same thing. Girl 1: Guys get away with things, easily, like more than girls. Boy 2: Yeah! Girl 1: Like if a girl does something slutty, we are like against them. Then when guys do it, we think it’s like normal. Me: Why does anyone else think there are no men on the list? Boy 1: Cause we just don’t hear much about men being slutty … nup (shakes head).
(Year 9, School 2)
The ways in which girls are asked to walk a line on this – a line which can easily mark them as ‘trashy’ – works to continue gendered heteronormative logics whereby femininity and respectability are intimately (and dangerously) connected. As I have argued elsewhere (Mulholland, 2013), raunch and explicit sex per se are not in question, nor are they necessarily in opposition to the respectable. However, the focus on respectable behaviour – or respectable forms of porn – points to a set of contradictions similar to those identified in Kalish and Kimmel’s study of sexual practices on US college campuses: Hooking up is both a step forward for women who seek to expand their erotic repertoire and explore facets of heterosexual desire. At the same time, as a new normative sexual experience … it structures the very erotic exploration into definable and normative constructs, constraining the very impulses it enables. (Kalish and Kimmel, 2011: 138)
As Skeggs (1997: 2) similarly argues, ‘respectability contains judgments of class, race, gender and sexuality and different groups have differential access to the mechanisms for generating, resisting and displaying respectability’. As such the ways in which respectability are evoked are highly significant for which bodies and identities in the new terrain of porn come to embody the good: Sexualisation is far from being a singular or homogenous process … different people are ‘sexualised’ in different ways … and does not operate outside of the process of gendering, racialisation and classing, and works within a visual economy that remains profoundly ageist and heteronormative. (Gill, 2009: 139)
Conclusion
The ways in which the young people in this study articulate their relationship to porn goes some way to challenging heteronormal histories that construct ‘good’ sex as restrained, civilised and controlled. Openly expressing an interest in pornified heterosex thus offers the potential to disentangle good sex from such a history, especially for girls. It is a tantalising moment in which we can glimpse what might be possible. Perhaps there are possibilities for new expressions of (hetero)sexuality that can be ‘loud in a world of silent collaborators … crazy in a room full of nice and normal people … unpredictable in a world of highly structured systems of meaning’ (Halberstam, 2012: 141). However, the ways in which young people in my study understood and engaged with porn can be seen as another form of heteronormative border work: the power of the heteronorm continues to regulate what is allowed. In regard to rethinking heterosexual practice and expression, the ways in which young people normalise porn both opens up and closes down transgressive possibilities.