When I was a fresh undergraduate student of literature, slowly coming of age with feminist consciousness, terms like patriarchal socialisation, heteronormativity, male gaze, and internalised misogyny flooded my vocabulary. So, when I read Atwood’s oft-quoted lines from The Robber Bride (1993), “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman”, I agreed with her. I understood that the beauty standards I followed since childhood were not really a product of my self-expression, but the product of a ‘male gaze’. I also understood that this male gaze is perhaps most potently displayed in porn, where women are the powerless, passive subjects of men’s powerful, active desires. During classes of feminist theory, professors would announce, “to watch porn is to subscribe to the oppression of women”, and I chimed in. But deep down, I was ashamed. Not only did I actively watch porn, I liked it.

To make matters worse, I liked not just any porn but a retinue of ‘problematic’ categories found in the porn-world: humiliation, subordination, gangbang, you name it. This contradiction in my desires as someone well-versed in feminist politics left me deeply troubled. I felt disconnected, and often do, to physical, sexual intimacies and connections. In simplistic feminist theory, my desires are a product of patriarchal socialisation that eroticises my subordination and dehumanisation. The fact that I derive sexual gratification from my own supposed oppression makes me the perfect Atwoodian voyeur. But can this voyeurism actually be feminist praxis?

Feminism has had a complicated relationship with porn. The porn wars or the sex wars of the 70s divided many into anti-porn and pro-porn feminist camps, the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality being a high point of these debates. While anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin decried porn as the ultimate weapon of women’s subordination and called for its annihilation, other feminists like Carole Vance and Gayle Rubin treated it as ‘work’, where feminist interventions focused on bettering ‘work’ conditions, not banning it. But while there has been much debate around ‘doing’ porn, not enough has been talked about ‘consuming’ porn.

The primary consumer of porn has been seen as the heterosexual man for whom porn is nothing short of pedagogy – it trains the cis-heterosexual man how to perform masculinity in bed, it teaches him that women like it ‘rough’, and it legitimises penetrative sex as the only sex that counts. Not that porn’s character has not evolved; there is also feminist porn with directors like Erika Lust, who make porn that challenges the hegemonic idea of which bodies are pleasurable and whose pleasure matters. But porn like this is expensive, inaccessible, and pales in comparison to free porn, which is uploaded every day at the speed of lightning. And women are watching this. In 2019, out of the 42 billion visitors to Pornhub, 32% were women. That’s 13 billion women –13 billion who were watching it to get off. As was I.

This statistic helped me understand that I wasn’t the only one among the supposed ‘oppressed’ lot to be watching porn. Not only this; a quick google search told me that it wasn’t just me who had “rape fantasies”, but countless other women too. When I finally turned to my friends to talk about the messiness of these fantasies and my repulsion/desire toward them, many admitted they felt the same way. Were we all, then, victims of sexual politics, or was there merit in our subversive desires?

The discomfort of feminists with porn is its assumed role in desensitising its viewers to extreme violence against women. The crusade against porn has led to research studies that try to find the correlation between porn and violence against women. While it is true that heightened exposure to porn desensitises viewers, can the opposite be true as well? When Samuel R. Delany, a stalwart scholar within queer science fiction and theory, writes about his porn-watching experience in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he notes “with such extensive exposure, certainly, I and the rest of the regular audience were desensitised to certain aspects of the films. But by the same token I suspect I was highly sensitised to certain others.” It is this sensitisation along with desire’s role in creating it that merits greater exploration.

For as long as I can remember, watching porn was the only way I could orgasm. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering the fact that I am a millennial, and my generation is quite truly the first generation to be raised on internet pornography. For us to know of a time when a screen did not mediate our sexual experiences is impossible. It is then inevitable that our psyches are also products of porn − what we desire is already decided for us. For me, watching Bollywood as I grew up also shaped these desires; the ubiquity of the coy, shy, submissive heroine, whose ‘no’ meant ‘yes’, while highly problematic, can be highly prescriptive of our desires too. In fact, there’s a whole range of porn in this category: consensual non-consent, or CNC, and practitioners of CNC are an ever-growing community of sex-positive advocates in queer subcultures of kink and BDSM.

Sexual practices like consensual non-consent complicates linear understandings of desire and its interplay. It urges us to reimagine the semantics of being the passive and dominant subjects. As Seresin notes, “a hard dick doesn’t necessarily equate to aggression; being a woman does not equal getting fucked; there is power to be found in what seems like passivity; domination can look a lot like surrender”. 

In a world where the conversation had moved ahead tremendously regarding notions of acceptable and unacceptable desires, watching porn did not seem like the worst thing. In fact, it didn’t seem like a bad thing at all. Funnily enough, porn played a massive role in helping me articulate my queerness (I am pansexual) and my even queerer desires. It helped me realise that the camera turns me on; whether it is I who does the peeping or others who do it, and that is valid.       

There needs to be a deeper exploration of violence and desire’s relationship within feminist debates on porn. We need to uncouple normative notions of abuse when we think of porn. Choking, spanking, and fisting might fall under basic definitions of violence but the playground of desire complicates these yearnings. Powerlessness can be erotic. The moment we start thinking in that direction, it shifts the conversation from danger to pleasure, risk to play, and violation to titillation, manifesting desire’s ever-amorphous nature. Is it time, then, to move beyond guilt and shame and find joy instead in our subversive desires? Is it time that feminist theory makes space for the contradictions between desire and its politics? 

I once had a dream where I was half naked. I stood looking in front of my mirror, deeply aroused. Atwood’s “You are your own voyeur” couldn’t get any truer than at that moment. So, what if I am my own voyeur? I manipulate this image to my advantage; I feel the pleasure of the exhibitionist and the voyeur; I hold power and powerlessness in the pursuit of desire. Shouldn’t we all, if we want to?

This article was originally published in the October-November 2022: Connections and Sexuality issue of In Plainspeak.

Cover Image: Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash