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University of Victoria

“Fuck Me Harder” and other things I wish I didn’t feel the urge to say:

An Reflection on the Pornification of my own Sexuality

Linaya Bertschi

V00871000

GNDR-329

Dr. Shumka

October 5th 2017

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I will be blunt, I am a confident person. I rarely feel uncomfortable talking in

class, I can stare at my body in a dressing room mirror and accept and love what I see

there, and I refuse to let slut-shaming affect my self-worth. I have worked hard to

unlearn a lot of the patriarchal qualifies of worth that I grew up absorbing, and up until

recently I assumed that carried over effortlessly into my sex life. Don’t get me wrong, I

have absorbed as much anti-porn and pro-porn rhetoric as any other Gender Studies

major out there, but until certain aspects of this class it hadn’t quite clicked in my mind

exactly how insidious the hypersexualization really was.

I personally wasn’t sure where I stood on the porn industry before this class. It is

no secret that many of the female workers are being coerced, assaulted, and injured and

that very few regulations are in place to ensure safe working conditions. There are porn

sites out there that host videos of underage pornography, filmed assaults, and revenge

porn, all of which are illegal and many of which are never able to be fully purged from

the internet. The book Anticlimax by Sheila Jeffreys discusses how seeing these violent

images of women as “available holes” (Jeffreys 2011) hasn’t been truly accounted for

when discussing the common discourse of sex and sexuality. She draws the connections

between violent pornography and abuse in stark, unequivocal terms that I hadn’t
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previously considered. Such as how the increased normalization of these violent

fantasies shows itself in the types of sexually based crimes that are committed.

And if men are being taught to take pleasure in enacting these violent scenarios it

also makes sense that women would internalize the images of receiving pleasure

through violence and feel obligated to find their own pleasure in experiencing the

violence. In the same way that the androcentric model remained the penultimate

explanation of ‘proper’ penetrative orgasms versus the ‘immature' clitoral orgasms

theorized by Freud (Maines, 1999) the sexual revolution has conflated the idea of sex-

positivity with a constantly ready, sexually submissive woman who is ‘cool’ with any

type of sexual activity.

However, there is a balance here that needs to be carefully walked, lest we

experience another debacle like the Barnard conference, and this is the line between

abuse and safe, sane, and consensual BDSM sex, and assault. Any type of sexual

fantasy, even the most vanilla, can become a basis for abuse and it is too easy to other

the kink community and call them ‘anti-feminist’ for experimenting with and

expressing power roles so explicitly (Rubin, 2011). There are many projects, such as

Erika Lust’s XConfessions, that are working to use pornography as “a tool to continue
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the sexual liberation of women” (B. 2014), by centring the fantasies and desires of

women in the films and ensuring all members involved in the production are treated

like humans, not holes. I believe that this sort of pornographic utopia is possible, but it

would require a massive overhaul of legislation as well as a broader acceptance of what

constitutes ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ sex. Including BDSM or other kinks and removing

anything that is not enthusiastically consensual.

It is because of this focus on feeling not showing that I found Dodson’s work so

important. It allows women to remove themselves from hypersexualization that comes

from this type of sexual attitude and places the focus on eroticism and self love. She

very clearly denounces the idea of faking orgasms to please a partner and places

pleasure at a position of power. Women should seek to get to know their bodies,

develop a connection with themselves, and advocate for their own pleasure. Although

Dodson emphasizes the importance of sensuality, she obviously understands how using

vibrators can enhance a sexual experience and I don’t see how that differs in concept

from other methods of sexual experimentation, such as certain BDSM scenarios or tools.

As I mentioned at the top of this paper, my confidence has always been an asset to me,

but it is time for me to relax the death grip I have maintained on my image as a sexually

confident woman and take time to listen to my self and focus on owning my own

pleasure.
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References
B. S. (2014). On Making Independent Porn For Women: And Interview With Erika Lust.
Retrieved October 01, 2017, from
http://feministing.com/2014/12/05/on-making-independent-porn-for-women-
an-interview-with-director-erika-lust/

Dodson, B., Williams, D., & Dodson, B. (1983). Selflove & Orgasm. New York: Betty
Dodson

Jeffreys, S. (2011). Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. North

Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex Press.

Maines, R., 1950, ACLS Humanities Ebook Collection, & American Council of Learned
Societies. (1999). The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the vibrator, and women's
sexual satisfaction. (Johns Hopkins Paperbacks ed.). Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins
University Press.

Rubin, G. (2011). Blood under the bridge: Reflections on. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, 17(1), 15-48.