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'Anal' Sex
Something to be said about this phenomenon.
As a heterosexual male, I find the 'Anal phenomenon' to be somewhat unique, or maybe even definitive, to porn.
Because anal sex found a life of its own in porn. Its own rhymes and reasons.
For those of us who have tried anal sex with a woman (dick, not fingers), we know it's not exactly the quotidian joy that porn makes it out to be:
It is messy, very high maintenance, painfully insisting on its own rhythm (which is much less flexible - than vaginal - to accept my rhythm...). It can't really be spontaneous, and, if it is, well, it's best to not have any sense of smell. Whatever touches your dick now gets compromised, needs to be put under surveillance and/or quarantine like a plague carrier (exuding nastiness and/or transferring bacteria to whatever it touches). It is also rare to find a woman who would want or ask for it, and genuinely enjoy it (in my limited experience, those who did had a dark story behind it, some restriction or other that forced them to anal as the only viable sex option - usually religious/traditional reasons).So when I first saw anal in porn, I didn't like it one bit. Couldn't relate, even though I only watched scenes - which are most mainstream scenes - where the actress had maintained her anus thoroughly before, giving it the "all clear."
But then, the more I watched porn, the more I began to like watching the anal scenes.
Why?
It's not erosion.
A woman pegging a man will never be something I enjoy watching, and I have been exposed to it quite a bit in today's porn safari. Nor the too-gay-for-me double-vaginal penetrations. Nor dickgirls or shemales or whatever is appropriate to call a person with a woman's figure sporting a man's penis. Nor even mainstream positions I personally don't like in real life. None of these ever "caught on."
Then what is it?
Well, here's the theory of this heterosexual porn addict:
Porn needs to sell; and not a finite product, but an infinite fantasy as a product.
And fantasies are tricky when incarnated as 'product.'
To have a fantasy survive and continue to yield - pleasure, which the porn industry learned to convert to revenue (porn is the master Capitalist) - one needs to fulfil this fantasy. But to do this in a way that keeps it from falling apart; to somehow keep it both fulfilled and absent, like your sexual partner imagining you are her ex just beforegasm (a base/basic example; the women I knew told me of far more creative ones).
Porn manages to do just that - something our imagination used to do (or at least used to do more often). And for me, as a heterosexual male, the fantasy consists in the beautiful girl getting fucked on the screen is being fucked not by me, but by the idea of me.
It's the idea of me that continues for so long, that doesn't need to cuddle or to touch beyond the base arousal functions, that has a dick that doesn't look like mine, etc. And the actress-image? She has no demands from my dick (to stay hard, to go slower or faster, to be bigger or smaller etc.) and this gives it, and me, all the privilege and none of the burden of actually performing. This burden falls on the male performer (*salute*). Long live the idea of me fucking.
Porn is the quintessential experience of the "voluntarily celibate."
But because it isn't my imagination anymore, but a produced image, porn has this constraint: that I, as its consumer, still need to see what the idea of my dick does. Since it is just an idea, but still one that demands incarnation in/as the fantasy-product, I need to be convinced of its effects.
Hence all the porn classics: the lighting, the close-ups, the "money shot" on her face or the visible "creampie" in her pussy, the actress' moaning and/or screaming (preferably both)...
But, with time - it's here that "erosion" plays its part - these effects start to lose their credibility. Too many scenes with too many similar dicks entering too many similar vaginas, in too-familiar positions with too-familiar moans by too-familiar actresses (porn has a high turnover of actresses for this reason, but after a while you begin to notice facial and bodily patterns, and the actresses start blending into one another).
The idea of "my dick" is compromised; I begin to suspect it doesn't matter anymore.
That it is all routine.
The thing about anal is not that it breaks this routine.
The gloss of the scene and its automated familiarities create a need for meaning: my dick wants to feel like it matters again. But how do you matter to an image?
Yes, there's 'Point Of View', and 'Reality' and 'Virtual Reality' porn, but they fall victim to the same gloss as well, eventually, the same rote and rot. "I" need something more. It all looks too fake, too easy, too streamlined - "I" may as well not be there, not even as "idea". I need to matter. Somehow.
When something virtual needs to matter - here lie the difference between "Black lives" and Blue lives" - someone's gotta get hurt.And so, what if I could find a way to make sure I matter? What if my "idea" could fuck the actress in a way I know she would mind? That I could connect my idea to her real-time responses beyond a professional/fantastic façade, one that she can simply wear, like a uniform (an apt name), and then take off when the scene is done?
A way that I know would im-press her?
I think the porn charm of anal is that it sells the incarnation of the fantasy by attacking the woman behind the fantasy-image, as if something new in her becomes part of the product. Like a Cronenbergian "new flesh."
It is similar to the "plastic fantastic Bimbo" fetish, where you know the actress did something drastic to her body to accommodate your fantasy requirements.
The same goes for what they call the "gape," incarnating almost a literal de-finition of my ideational, present-absent dick.
When it comes to anal, I know that, if the image moans, the actress moans; that its real, even at the price of the knowledge that these are probably moans of discomfort and/or pain. She might not care for it, but she minds it. And it heightens my porn-arousal.
That is where habituation, where the erosion, sets in. It is an ethical erosion. It tickles my misogynistic bone(r).
(Yes, BDSM operates on a similar logic, and is not as popular or mainstream as anal, but anal has the advantage of needing no apparatuses or script, being a kind of pure "torture-fucking" to my "pornosexual libido.")
But at the price of normalizing this need of the actress's pain.
It is the porn industry that is responsible for this, by "professionalizing" the process -- the (admittedly underrated) knowledge that comes from their experiments of what sells more and less, who like what and how much will they pay for it etc. -- along with flooding the medium with innumerable nameless girls (the brands they carry are not names).
All of this begins to come between the idea of me and the "pornstar" I want this idea to fuck, to matter to.
It's not so much about authenticity, but selling the illusion that 'I' matter regardless of any props or knowledge. Granted, the extreme of this logic is a snuff film, or real torture, but that risks marking the image with indelible scars (or worse, destroying it), which would ruin the experience of the "stardom."
But the linking in the logic is no doubt there. I'm sure that, on some level, all anal actresses - which is almost all boy-girl actresses today - realize(d) this.
Anal in porn gives you the "best" of both worlds (same logic, by the way, with "deep-throats"). She can maintain her star aura, keep her pristine looks, and yet be marked by the pain that "I", as a viewer, know for a fact that she suffers. If she really suffers, if she can't not suffer, then I am assured to matter.
Porn anal trained me to get-off on the actress' pain, as a substitute to her pleasure/attractiveness.
But it is "the industry" - an apt name that captures its issues of mass-production - that pushes me more and more to demand this assurance. Because industry is as industry does: its power is not variety, but efficiency and continuity.
This does not take away my ethical implication in this empathetic corruption, just like junkies can't lay the blame of their own corruption solely at the feet of their drug-dealers.
But they can rat them (and their drugs) out.
Post Scrotum
The new "Onlyfans" phenomenon shows how far this variety can go without having to anal as often. It is not for nothing that some say OnlyFans "killed porn"; they mean it is deadly to the industry.
Of course, it won't be long before the "snuff logic" will seek its relief with OnlyFans models. Which is dangerous.
I would advise them to keep their anonymity as high as possible - there's no industry to take the heat anymore. The "snuff logic" is still there, and, in the absence of the industry as a medium, it gets closer to the actress behind the brand.
<Image in the collage taken from by André Koehne for WikiCommons>
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