Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography

JEFFREY ESCOFFIER writes on the history of sexuality, pornography, and LGBTQ issues. He is a research associate at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
 

Introduction
       
In June 2017, New York Magazine published an article about Pornhub, an Internet website that is the largest distributor of porn in the world. The author argued that Pornhub was “the Kinsey Report of our time,” and that it “may have done more to expand the sexual dreamscape than Helen Gurley Brown, Masters and Johnson or Sigmund Freud.” Such a claim implies that video pornography on the Internet is not only hugely popular form of entertainment, but also a body of knowledge about sex that is both a form of sex education as well as a self-help guide. 

Erotic visual representations have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years—from cave paintings, to Greek vase paintings and murals in Pompey, up until World War II pin-ups, Frances Bacon’s paintings and Hustler magazine. Up until the invention of photography, visual representations of sexuality were more fully mediated by fantasy and the human imagination. Photography introduced a realism certified by a degree of ‘automatism,’ based upon the chemical relationship between light and the film medium. And hardcore moving-image photography enabled the recording and presentation of live sexual encounters narratively organized by fantasy scenarios and accompanied with visible demonstrations of “real sex”—that is “reality effects” such as erections, penetration, and ejaculations. The enhanced power of pornographic movies was due to its ability to blend fantasy and the ‘realism’ of the photographic medium. Yet hardcore pornographic film media also produce misrepresentations of sex that demonstrate the indeterminacy of pornographic media. The indeterminacy reveals a gap between pornography as photographic representation of sex and the human experience of sex. The photographic representation of sex only captures the visible record of the physical activity of a sexual encounter; it isn’t able to capture heart rates, feelings, or psychological self-representations. The indeterminacy of the representation of sex in pornographic movies raises many challenging questions about the medium. In her book, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” Linda Williams’ explores the generic and rhetorical conditions that underlie the photographic and filmic representability of sex. She has shown that the medium’s implicit ‘principle of maximum visibility’ fails to provide an adequate representation of the female sexual experience—it is organized primarily around the visible display of male penetration, erections, and orgasms but is unable to visibly represent female climactic sexual pleasure.

Pornographic motion pictures exhibit other forms of indeterminacy. Gay pornographic movies also generate misrepresentations. They fail to consolidate and reinforce gay male sexual identity. The significant presence of “gay-for pay” performers (heterosexual men) in gay pornography underscores the fundamental indeterminacy of video pornography. It situates homosexual desire within the masculine regime of desire irrespective of heterosexual or gay identities. Thus, the widespread employment of straight performers—estimates vary from 40 to 60 percent— in gay pornography intensifies the contradiction between homosexual desire as an expression of gay male identity and homosexual desire without identity which confers legitimacy on homosexual behavior independent of gay identity.
The emergence of trans porn as a major genre reveals another form of indeterminacy. Trans porn challenges the stability of male heterosexual identity. In the porn industry, bisexual porn, in which some of the male participants have sex with women, is usually classified as a gay genre due to the presence of men having sex with one another; while trans porn is considered to be a “straight” genre because the sex is between women and men, even though the women may have penises and sometimes penetrate their male partners. Trans porn unsettles received ideas of the relation between gender and heterosexual sex and its representation in pornographic films and challenges straight male identity and the ways in which male heterosexuality is or is not a sexual orientation analogous to gay male identity. 

The “sexual identity” of heterosexual males (and gay males as well) is unrepresentable in pornographic movies. Based on pornographic films, it is possible to argue that male heterosexuality is not strictly an “identity” but a default category that encompasses a huge wide range of sexual behavior that not only includes sex with trans women, but also vaginal sex with trans men, strap-on videos in which heterosexual men get fucked by women, various kinds of bondage and discipline as well as many other combinations, in which the “procreative model” of heterosexuality (the missionary position—male on top, female underneath) is only one script among many. Basically, it could be argued on the basis of its indeterminacy that male heterosexuality is an incoherent category. 

The transition from soft-core pornography to hardcore produced a dramatic break in the production of erotic cinema – both in how sex was portrayed on film and in the way the production of pornography was organized, who performed in it, and what other kinds of activities were associated with it. The defining characteristic of hardcore is ‘insertion’ – oral, vaginal or anal. It required new performance conventions and new cinematic production requirements. In the production of soft-core cinema many standard cinematic conventions of genre, performance and narrative held sway; virtually everything changed in hardcore production. The feature length softcore movies often resembled Hollywood features with the addition of some female nudity. The production of hardcore movies to some extent required the performance of “real sexual acts” that involved male erections, actual penetration, and ejaculation. The status of who performed in softcore versus hardcore pornography changed. In softcore, performers were actors, in hardcore they were sex workers. 

How is pornography a body of knowledge? Michel Foucault, in the History of Sexuality: An Introduction, argues that there have been two ways of organizing knowledge about sex. In ancient and Eastern civilizations knowledge about sex was codified as an ars erotica, based on practical experience to be passed on down to the uninitiated. In Western Europe, a scientia sexualis emerged during the late nineteenth century, first as sexology and later by psychoanalysis, which has grown into the academic fields of gender and sexuality studies. But it has become obvious that moving-image pornography, combining as it does the photographic recording of live sexual conduct (and their scripts) with the innovative explorations of sexual perversity, constitutes an enormous archive of sexual fantasies. The knowledge accumulated in pornography is not a systematic body of knowledge, but, is instead, an enormous catalogue of loosely organized sexual fantasies and sexual scripts—like a cookbook in which every recipe must be tested, every pornographic scene is a test for feasibility of a particular perverse fantasy. Does it work? Is it doable? 

Thus the essays brought together in this volume are, to a large degree, about sex and what can be learned about it from pornographic representations. They explore two different aspects of pornography—both derived, in part, from the “ontological status of the photographic image.” As Andre Bazin argued, the production of an image “by automatic means” (as opposed to media depending primarily on the human imagination and artistic skills) “has radically affected our psychology of the image.” The photographic medium’s “realism” (or illusion of) and its role in the creation of sexual fantasies in pornographic movies has conferred tremendous power on the medium. One group of essays explores how moving-image photography captures the sexual behavior and eroticism of different historical periods and preserves it. Siegfried Kracauer, like Bazin emphasized how photographic media capture what is literally in front of the camera—"things often taken for granted or not normally noticed.” And how it can reveal to the viewer from another historical period, differences in behavior or in cultural assumptions from the historical period in which the film was made. The second group of essays is focused on the production of pornography and the employment of “reality effects” – i.e. from, at one extreme, male erections, penetrations, and orgasms to the way that photographic media capture how light reflects off of skin, the delicate angles of necks, buttocks and legs and so on. In that group of essays, I focus on the way the production process creates the necessary conditions for performers to enact credible sexual encounters on film.

Pornographic cinema emerged almost simultaneously with motion pictures themselves. Motion pictures were invented by Thomas Edison sometime around 1889. Les Culs d’Or (“Golden Asses”), probably the oldest hardcore movie known to exist, was made in France in 1908. The earliest extant American hardcore film is A Free Ride (also known as The Grass Sandwich) made sometime between 1919 and the mid-twenties (going by the model of the automobile used in it). The movie starts out with two women walking, somewhat wobbly, on a country road. A man driving by in a sedan convertible stops and offers them a ride. Giggling they accept his offer. When they enter the car, he immediately grabs their breasts and plays around a little, and then excuses himself to go off and pee. They hop out of the car and follow to watch him take out his penis and watch him urinating. They all go back to the car, but the women decide that they have to pee. In turn, he watches them and begins to play with his penis through his pants. Next he and one of women go off into the bushes and start fucking. Soon the other woman joins them. All the characters are elaborately dressed (in the period’s fashion), so the sex is somewhat obscured. One short segment shows one of the women performing oral sex on the man, but his penis is barely visible throughout the film. There is clearly penetration but no emphasis on either his erection or orgasm.

A Free Ride illustrates both aspects of the film medium’s capacity to represent sex: (a) the historical differences between the sex shown in that period with the sex seen in today’s pornography and (b) its reality effects in that period (the man’s penis urinating and his obvious penetration of the women). The historical comparison is obvious—1920s vs. the present—but neither period’s pornography should be taken as literally accurate portrayals of sex in each period, the differences none the less capture historically different aspects of sex and attitudes towards it. 

Sexual Scripts and the Production of Pornography
Human sexuality, whether it’s a biological process or affected by the limitations of the human body, is shaped by social and historical forces. The narrative and behavioral requirements of sexual conduct are organized by sexual scripts. Communities and other social groups offer some sort of ‘education’ or ‘training’ relevant to sexual conduct that reflects their values, dispositions and expectations. The end product is a bundle of embodied social constructs of gender, race, and class that are then reproduced through an individual’s values, preferences, and actions. This bundle consolidates different types of knowledge and dispositions such as: (a) repertoires of interactional skills, social protocols, and etiquette; (b) cultural narratives around families, learning, work and crafts, aging, and reproduction; (c) practical awareness of constraints, institutional boundaries, relations of dominance and submission; (d) a repertoire of reasons, norms and rules that govern everyday life; and (e ) skills that involve strategic thinking or creative action. Sexual scripts draw on these embodied forms of knowledge and normative behavior. Sexual arousal and the performance of sexual acts depend upon the meanings and cues of the social and cultural context—and they are incorporated into sexual scripts and help to make a sexual encounter into a relatively coherent performance.

Communities also pass on a small repertoire of sexual scripts that were constructed by earlier generations. These sexual scripts constitute a relatively stable genre of sexual scripts—most often organized around procreative sex. Sexual scripts are for the most part dialogues – between two or more participants, as well as fantasy partners. Individuals do not always literally follow a pre-existing scripts, but they to co-author them. Yet despite the dialogical and improvisational character of scripts, social milieus (whether of communities, subcultures or ethnicities, etc.) typically generate ‘genres’ of sexual scripts consisting of a repertoire of scripts. Within each grouping there is a certain degree of heterogeneity of sexual scripts which typically include short sequences of interactional dialogue, narrative frameworks, proverbs, and practical advice about consequences (such as commitment, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.). 
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify broad relatively simple genres of sexual scripts that group the heterogeneous scripts created by individuals or specific social groups that reflect personal fantasies, subcultural norms and institutional contexts. 

The scripts used in pornographic movies can also be organized into genres. They are basically fetish categories that draw on the spectator’s “fetishized” expectations and establish ground rules for both producers and performers. Generic forms determine the narrative devices and the mis-en-scene that govern the sexual action. Over the course of more than fifty years, the pornographic film industry has developed a huge variety of sexual scripts and genres. New genres and new market niches emerged to cater to specialty interests – gay, BDSM, transsexual, MILF (“Mothers I’d Love to Fuck”) and sexual fetishes of all kinds. New porn genres emerge or undergo changes due to historical shifts in attitudes towards certain types of sexualities. Nevertheless, sexual scripts are often quite flexible and plastic – as they must adapt to the interpersonal relations as determined by the participants’ emotional or expressive needs, individual fantasies, economic status, or ethnic and racial characteristics. While each genre may be relatively stable, but they may vary over time and reflect a period’s cultural values and historical context to some degree, i.e. Freud’s Vienna, Victorian London, 1970’s New York City or San Fernando Valley in 1990. The scripts are not necessarily compulsory – though deviance from community, institutional or religious norms may generate significant degrees of anxiety, guilt and stigma. 

The Pornographic Production Process
The making of pornographic films invokes ‘sexual scripts’ in two distinctly different ways. On the one hand, there is the literal ‘script’ or narrative action of the film itself. On the other hand, there are the sexual scripts of the participants: the director, various performers and other participants in the process such as the script writer, the film editor, lighting person, and even the marketing people. However, sexual scripts in pornographic movies operate on many different levels. To some degree, directors, editors and performers were guided by their own daydreams, fantasies and personal scripts. And there is also the fantasy script of the person who watches the video. The scripts in most porn movies or videos are more like story boards, which may specify the setting (bedroom, gym, or outdoors) or costumes (lingerie, jock strap). They are fictitious aspect of scenarios of sexual fantasies. However, there are important non-fiction elements in pornographic movies – erections (even Viagra requires sexual attraction/stimulation) and orgasms. Thus, for the performers in a pornographic video production, sexual scripts (a la Gagnon and Simon) exist as a practical necessity in order to produce credible sexual performances. 

The production process of pornography creates the social conditions that enable performers to engage in credible sexual performances. The producers supply (1) the social and physical space where these sexual activities can take place; they provide (2) actors who expect to engage in sexual activities with one another; and they develop (3) narratives of sexual activities that invoke culturally available sexual scripts that elicit and activate the sexual activities to be performed. Porn movie production organizes the space (both physical and social) were sex will take place. It is a social space dense with sexual cues. But the making of pornography necessarily requires drawing on the culture’s generic sexual scenarios – the sex/gender scripts; racial, class and ethnic stereotypes; the dynamics of domination and submission; and the reversals and transgressions of these codes. These culturally significant symbolic codes help to mobilize the actor’s private desires and fantasy life in the service of the video’s sexual narrative. The production process is also highly organized commercial space that supplies sex partners, symbolic resources and other erotic stimulants, and a video production technology that can produce coherent and credible sexual narratives and images. 

Performing in cinematic pornography is a form of sex work and like all sex work requires the performance of sex acts according to the direction of the paying party. While porn actors, like other sex workers, may exclude certain activities from their repertoire, their sexual behavior is governed by the demands and constraints of the video production process. The repertoire of a performer’s sex acts is very much a part of the actor’s porn persona and depends upon the sexual scripts that exist in the culture-at-large, his or her own sexual fantasies as well as those they can imagine in their everyday lives. 

The making of a porn video requires not only the performance of real sexual acts but also the simulation of a coherent sexual “narrative.” Real sex acts are usually performed, but the video representation of them is more coherent than the actual sexual activity recorded. The shooting of any sexual scene is made up of an apparently simple sex act photographed from several different perspectives. The performed act is interrupted many times to arrange shooting angles, lighting, and to allow the male actors to “get wood” and regain their erections. For example, the camera man may crawl under actors fucking doggie-style, then shoots them from above to show penetration, then from behind to catch yet another penetration shot of the hard penis going in and out. Then the “money shots” (shots of the male actors ejaculating) have to be choreographed often at the end of many hours of filming. The male actors may need help of various kinds to help them to have orgasms: porno magazines, porn videos on monitors, one of their co-actors to bite their nipples or kiss them on order to help them “get off.” Thus a 15-20 minutes sexual scene may take six or seven hours to film. The short scene that the video viewer sees has been edited and patched together, a soundtrack added, from the footage shot over six or more hours.

The video’s director choreographs the sexual combinations and the action, working from a script that is more like a storyboard or a “treatment,” than a script in the conventional sense. In most videos, casting the performers and teaming them up, planning their sequence of sex acts and coaching them in their performances is the director’s main job. Porn scripts frequently elaborate on or incorporate the culturally available sexual scenarios. The director fashions the sex scene by deploying material drawn from “cultural scenarios” (men dominate the object of desire, are active, etc., men are sexual, but not emotional), from everyday interpersonal social dynamics, as well as relying on the actors’ “intrapsychic” or personal identity scripts. The director shapes the video’s script by exploiting and integrating these cultural resources.

Finding the Script: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge
While sexual excitement is a matter of a person’s physiological state and relies to some degree on the stimulation of erogenous zones, fantasy plays a central role in producing sexual excitement. Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller postulated, in his book Sexual Excitement: The Dynamics of Erotic Life that frustrations, injuries and conflicts during infancy over gender identity were encoded as perverse fantasies. Stoller, like Freud, believed that the dividing line between what might be ‘normal’ and what might be ‘perverse’ was difficult to identify. The perverse mechanisms that generated sexual excitement did not seem restricted to people who were clinically perverse. Stoller believed that ‘perversions’ or ‘perverse fantasies’ were part of the human condition – that, in fact, we are all ‘perverts.’ His research on sexual excitement, and on pornography, followed from his belief that ‘perversion is a fantasy put into action.” Pornography packaged these perverse fantasies and distributed them to the public. 

Stoller conceptualized that the infantile traumas that triggered sexual excitement were encoded as data (the perverse fantasies, the scripts, and the traumatic memories) resembling microdots—an early twentieth-century technological form of information storage:
Everyone knows of the microdots of sexual excitement: a genteel clean woman in a quiet marriage of low erotic intensity is stabbed with excitement at the look and smell of a physically disreputable man of clearly lower class; a twelve-year-old boy puts on his sister’s clothes, never before having cross-dressed, and has an instantaneous spontaneous orgasm, his first; a forty-year-old woman, well-experienced in sexual activity, is with a new man, who without warning gives her a slap on the buttocks, causing her to experience, simultaneously rage, humiliation, and fierce genital excitement; a man looks at a woman with a certain hairstyle and becomes nauseated; a philosopher (male or female) looks at an erect penis and starts to write a political tract; a woman looks across a room at an unknown man and decides she will marry him. The number of examples is endless.[1]

While erotic representations—stories, visual art, or movies—have portrayed some combination of both (a) objects of desire and (b) narratives of sexual action, Laplanche, Pontalis and Stoller have argued that narratives are essential to the generation of sexual excitement.[2]  Stoller believed that people used pornography to search for that bundle of ‘original erotic scripts’ created by the traumas of infancy, struggles about gender identity, sexual frustration, and the perverse fantasies that begin to emerge as we approach puberty. Many of these scenarios are lost during childhood and cannot easily be ‘found’ again. While the original script may not be immediately accessible, potentially it can be psycho-dynamically reconstituted by the development of ‘fantasmic’ scenarios through substitution and displacement. Thus, pornography serves as a kind of vernacular epistemology of sexuality—the object of knowledge for the spectators of pornography is “the script” that provokes sexual excitement.[3]

The essays brought together in this book were written over a period of twenty years and most of them deal with pornographic films made for the gay male audience, although much of what they have to say about gay porn films is equally relevant to other kinds of video pornography. Several discuss the role of heterosexual men as performers in gay and trans porn. And one deals with the labor process of the straight adult film industry and the industry’s compensation practices where female performers are generally paid more per scene than male performers. 

The essays in Part I explore the historical context and significance of pornographic films for both heterosexual men (Chapter 1) and gay men (Chapter 2). But two essays also show how pornographic films can be seen as historical documents (Chapter 3 and 4) and what they can tell us about gay male sexuality in the 1970s. Chapter 1 focuses on the potential impact of pornographic movies being shown in porn theaters during the 1970s. The availability of hardcore pornographic movies shown in porn theaters (the standard venue for exhibiting porn in that period) made many heterosexual men aware of other men’s penises during heterosexual encounters—most men’s fantasies about heterosexual sex probably did not include other men’s penises. The availability of heterosexual porn movies, both in general and in public theaters, potentially helped to reconfigure the heterosexual male’s sexual imaginary. In Chapter 2 I review the emergence of gay pornographic films as a significant factor in gay men’s lives as well as a sector of the adult film industry. The transition from beefcake to hardcore was extremely important for gay men. The primary focus of beefcake publications had been on men as objects of desire, but hardcore films offered images, roles and ‘scripts’ that could serve as models for ‘active sex’ rather the ‘worship’ of ideal bodies. Thus, with the advent of gay hardcore movies, gay audiences were able to see gay men as active agents of homosexual desire. 

Chapter 3 is focused on a group of porn filmmakers in New York City, whom I have called “homo-realists” and who used cinema verité techniques to show porn in locations around the city where public sex of some kind was taking place. In Chapter 4 I discuss the work of two of those filmmakers—Jack Deveau and Joe Gage—who made porn that explored the some of the social aspects gay male life at the time. Jack Deveau was one of the first filmmakers in the 1970s to make gay films with hardcore sex scenes. In particular, he explored the impact of promiscuity—this was before the discovery of AIDS—on gay men’s romantic relationships, on their neighbors and friends and on their work loves. Joe Gage made a trilogy of films, widely considered to be masterpieces— Kansas City Trucking Co. (1976), El Paso Wrecking Corp., (1978) and L.A. Tool and Die (1979). Made in the same cinema verité style, these follow a number of men traveling across the across the country and engaging in various sexual adventures, mostly gay, some straight. None of these men think of themselves as gay, yet sex with other men is very important to them. 

The essays in Part II are centered on the production process of porn films—scripts, porn genres, performers and their careers. A central focus is on the role that sexual scripts play in the making of pornographic films—drawing on John Gagnon and William Simon’s work about the social aspects of sexual behavior which bring together (a) everyday patterns of interaction, (b) society’s cultural scenarios (norms, gender roles, power dynamics, etc.) and (c) the individual’s erotic fantasies. Sexual scripts are necessary to produce credible pornographic scenes. Chapter 5 examines the way sexual scripts and film scripts interact in the production of video pornography. Chapter 6 focuses on the heterosexual men who are performers in gay porn movies (known as gay-for-pay) and how they utilize sexual scripts to successfully work in gay pornography. Chapter 7 looks at the straight side of the porn business to explore how the labor process of pornographic production is affected by the differences in compensation between women and men—women, on average earning two or three times the amount that male performers earn per scene. Chapter 8 focuses on the typically short working life that performers’ experience working in the gay porn film industry during the 1980s and 90s and its relationship to other sex work opportunities as strippers (dancers) and escorts (prostitutes). Chapter 9 looks again at the heterosexual men who perform in trans porn and routinely engage in sex with trans women with penises and are frequently anally penetrated by the trans women.

Sexual scripts are necessary at every stage of production and are the reason that people watch porn. There is a constant dialectic between the “realism” of photographic pornography and the indeterminacies of the medium—female pleasure and sexual identities of men (gay or straight) are unrepresentable. But the scripts, the fantasmic scenarios, in porn movies are what attract their audience to search for the one that works for them. Though moving-image pornography has its limits, its indeterminacies, the scripts are the pornography’s objects of knowledge. 
 

Introduction
Part I: Pornography and the History of Sexuality
Chapter One - Pornography, Perversity and Sexual Revolution
Chapter Two - Beefcake to Hardcore: Gay Pornography and Sexual Revolution
Chapter Three - Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of Sexuality
Chapter Four - Porn's Historical Unconscious: Sex, Identity and Everyday Life in the Films of Jack Deveau and Joe Gage
Part II: Producing Sex: Sexual Scripts, Work and the Making of Pornography
Chapter Five - Scripting the Sex: Fantasy, Narrative and Sexual Scripts in Pornographic Films
Chapter Six - Gay-for-Pay: Straight Men and the Making of Gay Pornography
Chapter Seven - The Wages for Wood: Do Female Performers in the Adult Film Industry Earn More than Male Performers
Chapter Eight - Porn Star/Stripper/Escort: Economic and Sexual Dynamics in a Sex Work Career
Chapter Nine - Trans Porn, Heterosexuality and Sexual Identity
Epilogue: From the Secret Museum to the Digital Archives: Constructing the Sexual Imaginary
Acknowledgements
About the Author