(Additional: This article was written before I found the essay on pornographic tagging, namely 'Deep Tags' by Antoine Mazières, Mathieu Trachman, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Baptiste Coulmont & Christophe Prieur - which will go on to inform further thoughts in this area. Another retrospectively relevant article is 'Microporn in the Digital Media Age' by Joseph Brennan, which examines the consumption of out-of-context clips from longer works.)
The risk of having any work that explicitly displays the human form being re-appropriated by viewers for more salacious ends is, of course, ever-present, as Linda Neade reminds us, quoting Lucy Lippard:
“A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult.” (Lippard, ‘Pains & Pleasures’, From the Center: 125). Nead herself adds: “Women who used their bodies in performance art could easily be reappropriated for the purposes of male sexual arousal” (Nead, ‘The Female Nude’, Routledge, 1992, p.67). Nowhere is this made clearer than on the public porn site which employed me in 2020, www.Xhamster.com, where uploaded clips of nude performance art, mainstream cinema and television works, ballet, and even grand opera may be found buried under a plethora of tags which reduce all these works to their barest (pun intended) essentials – the idea that any naked (or partially so) female body is fair game.
Whilst seeking to counter viewer expectations of what this genre of work ought to depict, a browse through the tags applied to images and videos on any porn site can and will reveal that almost anything can or will be somebody's fetish – and will be enthusiastically shared with others of the same mind. The fascination with these fine details and the need to collect them is not reserved purely for material intended only to titillate. Spend five minutes browsing films intended for adults (as distinct from 'adult films') listed on movie review site www.imdb.com and study the tags which users apply to films for relevant, or interesting, content. To take one example1, the 2010 remake of the 1970s exploitation feature 'I Spit on Your Grave' – a film which portrays a vicious gang-rape, followed by the victim's equally brutal revenge – users have provided, among many others (200+ in fact), the following helpful index of salient features:
“female nudity”, “sexual humiliation”, “arms tied overhead”, “sodomy”, “forced to strip”, “public sex”, “outdoor sex”, “woman stripped from waist down”, “video voyeurism”, “clothes torn off”, “panty sniffing”, “shotgun sodomy”, “public nudity”, “gun in anus”, “female star appears nude” and “nipples visible through clothing”2,
almost all of which (barring the obvious violent tags) are themselves categories and tags on any standard porn website, rather than aspects of a mainstream Hollywood feature that went on to spawn two further sequels to date. To take a very different example on imdb, 'Schindler's List', we find the tags: 'female nudity', both 'male' and 'female' in 'full frontal nudity' and 'pubic hair', and 'bare breasts' – somewhat more detail, I feel, than is necessary in warning viewers to the presence of potentially adult material (where 'strong', moderate' or 'mild' classifications of sex, violence, nudity etc. generally suffices on DVD and Blu-Ray sleeves), as if the grim true-life theme was not more troubling. In a final example, the 1993 Robert Altman comedy/drama 'Short Cuts', the top of the list of 'most relevant' tags are almost exclusively pertaining to female nudity and sex:
Out of the top 38 “most relevant” tags for that film (accessed 9/10/21) – see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108122/keywords?ref_=tt_stry_kw – 30 of them refer specifically to fetishistic or sexual elements, many of which tags, again, are also very commonplace on pornographic media. My point is that when works of non-pornographic intent such as this (though possibly still informed by the dominant patriarchal gaze defined by Mulvey) can be regarded by some users in a pornographic context and appropriated as such, the rhizomatic nature and structure of the male gaze and its pornographizing function is made evident: 3 out of 4 visitors to the imdb.com page for 'Short Cuts' deemed the tag 'no panties' to be relevant to a film of 150 minutes running time, chronicling the daily lives of multiple characters and stories. An alien visitor to our world, attempting to analyse such data, would be inclined to draw the conclusions that 'real' pornography was non-existent in human society and could only be 'sneaked in' to otherwise serious, mainstream works. Or put another way: those few seconds of clips which can be viewed in that manner, have already cropped up on pornographic video websites, alongside mainstream action as well as installation works by Vanessa Beecroft tagged as ‘public female nudity’, and have probably motivated the viewers of those clips to pass on their enthusiasm via the imdb.com tagging system.
The conclusions we can draw from these examples is that as anything can be fetishized, so too can any material, even with innocent intention, be sexualized, and sought out as such – what I refer to now as the ‘pornographizing gaze’. While this may perhaps not be news, the extent of its pervasiveness may be surprising. Where this is relevant to my current line of questioning, is in the ability for a user’s gaze to ‘pornographize’ or acquire the form of another, for purely sexual purposes, whether or not that is the intention of the individual, or media, under scrutiny. I have never actually (yet) thrown a drink in anyone’s face for up-front asking me in a nightclub what kind of genitalia I have under my dress (finding fear of a rapidly escalating situation to be the greater part of valour), but in the world of porn all things are permitted (within legal and website limitations) and all bodies potentially desirable. Desirability cannot be measured or quantified: let’s recall the pre-internet pornographic niches of ‘older’, ‘larger’, ‘pregnant’, ‘Asian’, ‘black’, ‘cross-dressed’, ‘obese’, ‘midget’ etc. subjects which go back decades and were catered to in material which was often classified as ‘obscene’ in the US and the UK due – I can only suspect – entirely to its associations with the grotesque and therefore its place outwith the accepted hetero-normative body ideal. That online pornography is now helping to flatten those distinctions cannot be denied, even if still within something of a fetishistic framing – at least the performers and models can no longer feel so marginalised as having their bodies stamped as ‘obscenities’ by government hands, and those who sell the publications which paid them, prosecuted. The problems exist, as I have found out myself, when those persons who own those ‘alternative’ bodies expect to be treated as persons, outside of any fetishistic, pornographizing system of sexual classification – and by virtue of simply being what they are, are conflated with objects of desire and titillation in other contexts. If a movie depicting a gang-rape and revenge on the perpetrators can entice viewers seeking hints of bondage, public humiliation and aggressive sexual activity, then it is no wonder why people in public places find themselves continually cornered and expected to play the roles which have been, in the minds of the gazers, thrust upon them. I understand this involves a paradigm shift in male-centric thinking, and along with my previous post’s suggestion that people quit judging others by arbitrary physical or facial features, I am asking far too much of the majority of the world’s population who think and act in these ways. But we must find somewhere to start.
1Chosen precisely because of its troubling subject matter, sexual violence (though nowhere as intense or graphic as the 1979 original 'video nasty') and contemporary attitude to such issues.
2Not all the violent content tagged thus is, of course, directed against the central female character, as her revenge on the male rapists is eye-watering, and other tags do refer to this – but the implication remains that users, irrespective of their motives, gender, sexuality or expectations, seemingly seek out, or wish to share, such very specific details of filmic content, and that a large number of these focus on prurient minutiae.
