Reader Marie posted the following question about spanking porn in a comment, but since it was unrelated to the post, I thought I’d pull it up and give it its own post. Fair warning, it reads like one of the standard stereotypical feminist slams on porn generally, with the word “spanking” inserted. So I don’t know if Marie is a spanking aficionado or a regular reader of this blog — it’s possible this was just a drive-by attempt at consciousness raising. Without further ado:
This isn’t in relation to your latest post: it’s a rather large question I’d love to see ad dressed by the spanking community at large. WHY is it that almost all spanking porn requires women to shave their pubic hair? As a teacher who addresses feminist issues, I’m thrown by the presence of an insidious culture of fake female body types that our young men are growing up with: fake body types are their normalized erotic texts. Why is this acceptable? Why are females in spanking porn always depicted without pubic hair? This is just one more example of the commodification of female bodies in a way so retrograde of our embracing our own erotic fantasies and engaging with the normalization of them.
We are creating a new generation of men raised on internet porn who cannot encounter women with the normal bodily accoutraments nature gave us because of the tastes of the current crop of producers of pornography. Why must we perpetuate the notion that genital hair is so unacceptable as to be invisible in spanking porn?
I’ll start by dismissing the absolutes.
Question: “Why are females in spanking porn always depicted without pubic hair?”
Answer: They are not always so depicted. In evidence, I offer three exhibits, one of which was still visible on the front page of Spanking Blog when Marie posted her comment:
Marie’s comment is a dense bundle of intermingled questions, assertions, and assumptions, and I’ve got problems with many of the assumptions and assertions in particular. So I’m going to respond, in my own opinionated fashion, point by point.
Question: “WHY is it that almost all spanking porn requires women to shave their pubic hair?”
Answer: There’s an agency assertion here that I dispute. Having dismissed the “always” claim, I don’t have a problem agreeing that shaved pubic areas are predominant in spanking porn. However, I find the phrase “spanking porn requires” to be a very strange one. So far as I am aware, there isn’t a spanking porn standards body. Nor is porn an active agent. Spanking porn is a product in a market, and as everyone knows, requirements in markets are consumer requirements. If there’s a requirement here, it’s in the nature of a market preference by spanking porn consumers.
Statement: “As a teacher who addresses feminist issues, I’m thrown by the presence of an insidious culture of fake female body types that our young men are growing up with: fake body types are their normalized erotic texts.”
My reactions:
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Insidious culture? What’s “insidious” about it? Insidious means “Working or spreading harmfully in a subtle or stealthy manner.” Shaved pussies are anything but subtle or stealthy, no?
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How is a shaved pussy a “fake female body type”? With respect, Marie, who the hell are you to tell my girlfriend that she’s got a “fake female body type”? She shaves regularly and with extreme prejudice — her body hairs quail and tremble when they see her coming. She read your comment and recoiled in horror. Body hair? Her exact quote was “Ew, do not want! DO NOT WANT!” (She even plucks her eyebrows, which completely baffles me, but whatever – it’s her body, her hair, not my problem. From my perspective, shaving is just a girl thing, like the seven bottles of lotion without which it is apparently impossible for a woman to have clean skin.)
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As for being “normalized erotic texts”, porn is fuel for the world of fantasy. In just the same way that a novel describes fictional situations, porn often describes and depicts women who are different in some way from the women, if any, actually available to the porn consumer. That’s part of what porn is for.
Question: “Why is this acceptable?”
Answer: Why not? The crusader for porn that’s more representational of female body types would surely bear the burden of establishing a problem with the use of fantastic images in porn. To me, that seems like a huge and insurmountable burden, given porn’s deliberate role as a fuel for fantasies.
Statement: “This is just one more example of the commodification of female bodies in a way so retrograde of our embracing our own erotic fantasies and engaging with the normalization of them.”
Reaction: This is too jargony for me to parse. I think I’d disagree with what’s being said if it were stated in plain English, though. It appears to have buried within it a laughable claim that some erotic fantasies are more appropriate than others. But I may be missing the point.
Statement: “We are creating a new generation of men raised on internet porn who cannot encounter women with the normal bodily accoutraments nature gave us because of the tastes of the current crop of producers of pornography.”
Reaction: Oh really? This strikes me as an unsupported claim plus a bit of false nature-worshiping plus another marginally-related bit of backwards economics.
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First of all, it’s a giant logical leap from the probably true “consumers of porn are used to, and tend to enjoy, photographs without much body hair showing” to “such consumers cannot encounter women” who have body hair. That strikes me as unlikely; but, in any case, it would need to be established by more than bald assertion. {drumroll}
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Second, I am detecting an unexamined exaltation of the natural. Humans are the monkeys who tinker. We change our environments, our diets, our physical landscapes, our pets, our crops, our sexual practices, and yes, our bodies, radically and massively, all the time, to suit ourselves. That’s natural, for us, because it’s our nature. Some of these changes have unfortunate secondary effects, but we have to engage those on their own merits and demerits. Just because “nature gave us” a thing is no reason to proscribe or critique the universal tendency to tinker with it.
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Lastly, “because of the tastes of the current crop of producers of pornography” is breathtakingly backwards economics. Do we assume that people buy SUVs by the flatcar load “because of the tastes of” the automakers in Detroit and Japan? No, those automakers produce SUVs because of the tastes of the people who buy cars. People who disapprove of SUVs, like those who disapprove of shaved pussies, like to claim that the producers are cramming the product down our throats. But they make what people buy. Can they shape and influence consumer preferences? Sure. Or, at least, they can try. But all the actual power is at the point of spend.
Question: “Why must we perpetuate the notion that genital hair is so unacceptable as to be invisible in spanking porn?”
Answer: I don’t think that notion has been established.
OK, enough with the point by point. This isn’t, really, about spanking porn at all. This is a standard porn critique with the word “spanking” plugged in at a few key points. Now I’m going to share my own opinions on pubic hair in porn — porn generally, since I don’t see much difference between spanking porn and mainstream porn on this subject.
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It’s true there isn’t a lot of pubic hair in visual porn. I think this is primarily a photographic / cinematographic issue with a side issue of porn economics. Porn is divided into soft core and hard core. Soft core doesn’t show genitals, and the models get paid less. You want to show genitals, you pay the models more. If you pay them more, you want to show what you paid for. Pubic hair is obscuring. Why would you pay to show something, and then leave it covered up? Answer: You wouldn’t, unless you were making fetish porn for people who specifically are aroused by the hair. Mainstream porn has lots of stuff aimed at body hair fetishists. Spanking porn tends not to, I suspect because targeting two fetishes at once is economically tricky.
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The visible / covered issue with pubic hair may extend to the personal preferences of porn models, also. Some of the division between women who shave and women who don’t can be explained by how comfortable they are with concealing or not concealing their own genitals. Porn models are a self-selected group who are, obviously, more comfortable with exposure than folks who choose not to appear in porn. Perhaps, as a class, they are more likely to have shaved before seeking out work in porn? It would be interesting to hear from porn producers here. How many of your models are shaved when you start working with them, versus how many shaved at your request?
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Shaving is a body modification choice. I shave my face because I don’t like all that stuff in front of my nose and around my mouth. I don’t shave my pubes because, frankly, it would be a hassle, I don’t feel a need, and nobody’s ever suggested they’d like it. Women make similar choices. Some shave, some don’t. Why? I’m sure it’s highly individual and highly personal. I don’t need to know. But I am an absolutist about individual choice. I know that early in the history of American feminism some women said “I’m not doing this for myself — I’m going to stop.” And they did, and that’s great. But then some of them said, in effect, “all women should stop shaving, none of them are doing it for themselves.” And that, in my view, was wrong. Complaints about shaved porn models have been a constant drumbeat from then to now. My mother used to say things like “real women aren’t shaved, only Barbie Dolls and porn stars are shaved.” That’s a hideously unjust attempt to constrain the real choices of real women, including — in this case — one I love. So, needless to say, I am against that sort of judgmental claptrap.
I’d be interested to hear the perspective of actual spanking models like Adele Haze, Niki Flynn, and Pandora Blake. Ladies?
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