“We are both going to enroll in the John Robert Powers Charm School where they will not only instruct you on makeup and clothes which you are coming along very well with now, but also in the art of conversation and development of your feminine personality. Most women who attend these courses are weak in this area also, and if we are to be in mixed groups again such as the barbecue, I want you to be at ease, and this should do it."
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the stories in which the sadomasochism is intense, placed even more in the foreground than is the cross-dressing. In this form, the story is so slam-bang instantaneous that it is often represented simply by photographs without text. These show a “woman” tied up in ropes and chains in uncomfortable positions, in fact a man in woman’s clothes; but what excites in this pornography is not just the male in women’s clothes but the fact that “she” is chained. With pornography becoming specific enough for each type of man, there is less need to buy the pornography of the past that was acceptable but not ideal.
I have the impression (there are too few cases for sureness) that those who, in their childhood, were treated less cruelly by a woman (or women) prefer a happier pornography in which frank humiliation or even open physical sadism is not a part of the overt story.
However, these varying pornographies have in common the evocation of danger (humiliation, anxiety, fear, frustration) surmounted. In this sense, all pornography probably contains the psychodynamics of perversions. There is, I allege, no nonperverse pornography, that is, sexually exciting matter in which hostility is not employed as a goal. Most pornography is aimed at heterosexual men, however, and since there are so many customers and since there is so much of this minor-league pornography, such literature is “normal” in the statistical sense of being congenial to many men. Thus, for most men in our society pornography consists of pictures of nude women and of heterosexual intercourse. That these forms are common does not mean that they do not arise as solutions to conflict, distress, frustration, and anger. If they were “normal” in the sense of being a universal, biological expression of unconflicted pleasure-seeking, then nudity would be sexually fetishistic in all societies (which it is not), not just in those like ours where it is made tantalizing by frustration.
Pornography spares one the anxieties of having to make it with another person; the people on the printed page know their place and do as directed.
Although popular, pornography may nonetheless not be simply (though it may, especially in adolescence, be partly) a substitute because of lack of proper sexual objects. It exists because it fills voyeuristic, sadomasochistic needs that in some people cannot be satisfied no matter how many willing sexual partners are available. Although genital orgasm is the final common pathway for pleasure and for relief from the drivenness of perverse need, perversions often use acts performed on objects or parts of the body that simply cannot be fully relieved by orgasm (cf. 152, p. 316). Nongenital organs—for example, eyes, skin, anus—and affects other than love—for example, rage, anxiety, depression—can, we know, be erotized, but the tension cannot easily be released, as it can in the genitals. This gives, I think, an intensity, a compulsiveness—a hopelessness—to perversion. Analytic theory, which connects perversion to neurosis and psychosomatic disorders, has long since suggested that if erotic tension builds up in an organ that cannot adequately reach discharge, chronic cellular change occurs.
If in pornography sexual activities are somehow portrayed in which there is always a victim, who is the victim in pictures and descriptions of heterosexual intercourse? Who is the victim and what is the sexual activity in a photograph of a nude?
While much of the excitement in the pornography of heterosexuality may come simply from identification with the depicted participants who are displaying their agility (and who do not suffer anxiety or genital failure as might the viewer), it is also likely that piquancy is added by the primal-scene fantasy of a child getting away with something when he watches what he should not and perhaps a sense of superiority from being an audience and so not exposed to risk. The victims then are the “grownups,” whose lack of omnipotence is proved since they do not know they are being observed.
Very popular are descriptions of a woman who starts out cool, superior, sophisticated, and uninterested but is swept by the precisely described activities of the man into a state of lust with monumental loss of control. One easily sees therein a power struggle disguised as sexuality: the dangerous woman who is reduced to a victim and the boy who, by means of the pornography, for a moment, in the illusion of power, becomes a man (106).
I have said that an essential dynamic in pornography is hostility. Perhaps the most important difference between more perverse and less perverse (“normal”) pornography, as between perversion and "normality,” is the degree of hostility (hatred and revenge fantasies) bound or released in the sexual activity. One can raise the possibly controversial question whether in humans (especially males) powerful sexual excitement can ever exist without brutality also being present (minimal, repressed, distorted by reaction formation, attenuated, or overt in the most pathological cases). This may be comparable to asking whether a piece of humor can exist without hostility (25). In humor the hostility is not simply tacked on but is a sine qua non (though not the only one). Is it possible that in nonperverse sexual excitement, unconscious hostility also is essential and not simply anaclitic?
Can anyone provide examples of behavior in sexual excitement in which, in human males at least, disguised hostility in fantasy is not a part of potency? We are already familiar with a similar situation in which hostility surmounted is essential for normal functions, for we know that normal development demands that infants be increasingly frustrated in order to permit the separation that will result in the ego functions and identity necessary for coping with the external world. This process, using frustration as an essential tool, creates a reservoir of unconscious hatred, coping with which helps determine successful or maladaptive personality development. Mastery, that most gratifying experience, often comes about through restitution for passively suffered frustration by creating fantasies, character structures, or modes of activity that in their most primitive form are brutal, but that, filtered through a process of sublimation, may end up far removed from the original hatred.
If hostility could be totally lifted out of sexual excitement there would be no perversions, but how much loving sexuality would be possible? The differences between each of the perversions, and between the different perversions and more common sexual behavior, may lie with the specific differences in frustrations and gratifications (often determined by society but applied by parents, especially mother) experienced in infancy and childhood.
A few words may be in order regarding the puzzling fact that attempting to sell pornography to women would lead one to starvation. Why? In the asking itself, not just in an answer, there is information. The question is like “the age-old mystery”—to put it in its ripest form— What Is Woman? Only men worry over the mystery of women; women do not, because they are not mystified. This does not necessarily mean that they comprehend the dynamics of their own sexuality but simply that because they experience it, it does not strike them as mysterious. If women wished, they could ask about the mystery of men’s sexuality, which may not be so clear as some would have us think. We may take it for granted that we understand male sexuality because most of the work on it has been done by males who, experiencing it, need not be so curious and mystified.
In regard to the question why women do not respond to pornography as intensely as men, perhaps the question is wrong. Men tend to equate pornography in general with what is pornography for them in particular, but, for instance, precise depiction of sexual intercourse, although exciting, is less compelling for women. You can sell a steady flow of pictures of nude men to very few women for erotic purposes, but that does not mean women do not have their own pornography—they do. Because their childhood experiences in our society are different, women need some aspects of their pornography to be different from men’s. By now it is known that women are full of their own private sexual fantasies and are stirred by pornography (see, for example, 36, 69).* Men, judging the pornography of women, make the same mistake as when judging the pornography of anyone dynamically different; not stirred themselves, they cannot sense that the material might arouse others. Reading the romantic, masochistic stories that in recent years have been the surface that excites women, men might think it trash, since it seems so unsexual. It can appear ad libitum, not recognized—much less legislated —as obscene.