Hi, it's this time of the year again - I am writing a two-partthree-part five-part essay on the problems that swarm around our definitions of pornography, and the way that latex fetishism exacerbates them. Obviously, then, I want to note that those essays will contain frank descriptions of sexually explicit content, including that of heavily fetishist kind. As such, reader's advisory is advised.
As always, if you are interested by my work, consider leaving a tip at ko-fi!
A Rubber Veil: Latex and the Problem of Porn
Part 1
What, exactly, is pornography?
This is a surprisingly tricky question—and one with very far reaching consequences. However, it is also one that is rarely posed as a problem that it is; for the most part, we tend to be satisfied with Justice Potter Stewart's quip suggesting that a definition of obscenity is superfluous because "[we] know it when [we] see it". And yet, it is important to remember that the quip was made during a very complicated legal case constituting an important step in the development of the contemporary legal doctrine that defines obscenity so narrowly that it effectively legalizes pornography in the United States.
Pornography, then, is a paradox: to call something "pornographic" is to suggest that its illicit and indecent nature is immediately obvious—but at the same time, precise bounds of what exactly makes pornography porn remain frustratingly vague. One needs not to look for a better example of that than the infamous ban on "feminine presenting nipples" on Tumblr, a zombified variation on the old trope seeing feminine embodiment and indecency as essentially coterminous. The joke, of course, is that this particular restriction could never really clamp down on porn in general, but rather some of its most easily recognizable features that could be excluded with the help of the machine-learned panopticon (in the process providing countless trans girls with the satisfaction of having their breasts validated by a digital policing system).
But really, this is a bit esoteric; after all, when we say porn, we tend to mean "explicit depictions of people fucking", usually visual, usually commercial, and usually made with the explicit intent to titillate. Again, however, this is not a definition, but rather a loose network of associations, each of which leads into a quagmire of its own. Titillate who? Commercial in what sense? And are people fucking really necessary?
Ask yourself: how do you see?
Again, those questions have serious ramifications. Consider, for example, Bondage Life, a porn studio committed to depicting "genuine enslavement" of one Rachel Greyhound. Much of the content they output does not really involve any fucking: one can pay to, for example, watch a 45 minute feed from an infra-red camera voyeuristically pointed at the bed in which Rachel Greyhound is spending her night in a metal chastity belt. Not only is there no "action" in it, but there is no action in general. I imagine that for someone not turned on by the image of a bound woman in bed, watching the video would be an experience akin to sitting through an experimental movie where the camera is held on a single frame for an hour and nothing happens. But, this is also porn, right? After all, one is unlikely to watch such a video if they are not into the idea of a bound woman sleeping on a bed—and even more importantly, they are unlikely to even know about it. To talk about pornography, especially niche pornography, is treacherous, because it is tantamount to an admission of interest. Why would anyone know about Bondage Life and recognize the name of Rachel Greyhound otherwise? Pornography is assumed to be consumed (and sought) for a singular purpose, and so to discuss it is always to discuss your own sex life; this, in most contextes, is frowned upon.
This, meanwhile, is art. And lasts 45 minutes.
Interestingly, if we follow this line of inquiry to its conclusion, we may quickly notice that we are approaching a sister problem to that of defining porn—defining art. Or maybe sister is not the best word? Common sense holds that the relationship between porn and art is adversarial: if something is one, then it cannot be another. By establishing your credentials as an artist one can escape from the accusation of being a pornographer, and conversely: to brand someone as a pornographer is to deny them the respect and protection that being an artist entails. Once more, this has serious consequences: the great anti-porn crusader of the US Senate, Jesse Helms, has used this logic to effectively restrict funding for sexually explicit art by helping institute the rule that the grants of the National Endowment for Art cannot be given to works that depict "sexual or excretory activities or organs". Incidentally his outrage started with the NEA supporting exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorn's work, depicting gay, sadomasochistic themes.
An example of Robert Mapplethorn's work.
However, this is incidental to the matter at hand. What interests me here is less the eternal question of the line between porn and art, but rather a question of institutions. To those unaware, the "institutional definition of art" is a notion that, to put it bluntly, art is what gets into an art gallery. If Rachel Greyhound's bound body was being displayed on the wall of a white cube gallery in downtown Berlin instead of a media player on the Bondage Life website, it would be art. If Ingers' Grand Odalisque was never displayed in the Louvre, and could only be viewed by going to a website with a .xxx extension that asks you if you are legally adult before you can enter, it would be porn.
This approach can then be extended by incorporating into it an analysis of circulation—and art gallery (or a porn site) is, after all, not a sacred, independent institution, but a node in a wide network of the art (or porn) market. One can, then, define both art and pornography by how it is displayed, and also how it is produced and then disseminated. Interestingly, it was dissemination that lay at the heart of the Miller v. California case which concluded the legal battles over obscenity in the US' Supreme Court. After all, because of the 1st Amendment, what was in contention in the United States has never really been whether one can produce pornography, but rather whether one can distribute it. Not for nothing one of the biggest anti-porn institutions of America has been the venerable United States Postal Service. If this sounds like a similar problem to the contemporary struggles over payment provides holding online distributions hostage when it comes to allowing porn onto their platforms, it is because it is essentially the same phenomenon. Pornography is as much about its market as it is about its content.
Yet, no matter how useful this is as a critical framework, it is singularly useless for the purpose of said vendors actually excluding pornography from their platforms. There is simply not enough manpower in the world to establish a team of crack censors that will scour the pages of, say, Tumblr, for any signs of sexually explicit content. Instead, clear—and algorithmically enforceable—rules need to be put in place. Hence: "feminine producing nipples". Or, really, Jesse Helms' charming phrase about excretory organs. Although technology changes, we really continue to exist in a problem space created by the fact that bespoke pornography identification services are not implementable at scale, and have never been.
The results of such policies tend to be interesting, to say the least. Some time ago, the internet was shocked by the revelation that F1NNSTER, a bona fide male-identified man who just happens to do some crossdressing and hormones on the side, got accused by Twitch's automated services of brandishing a female-presenting nipple, prompting much laughter, and quiet seething from a whole throng of desperate trans girls. But there is another case that interests me here, partially as an introduction to a wider problem with the notion of pornography, and that is of latex.
Is this body bare?
There is a surprising amount of scattered latex fetish material that survived the great porn purge on tumblr—and it makes sense. A breast squished by a catsuit is hardly feminine presenting, at least to a digital eye; a human one immediately gets what is going on. The joke, obviously, is that an image of a woman covered head to toe in clingy rubber can be described as hardly any less explicit than if this woman was naked; and yet, it also is completely safe for the Internet, by the strict definition instituted by automated censors.
The issue becomes even more glaring when we move from the depictions of entire rubber-enclosed bodies, and dive deeper into the fetishistic close-up of a kinky toy. Consider, for example, the following:
Here comes the money shot!
One of the earliest porn studies scholars, Lina Williams, has famously argued that the essence of porn lies in the "money shot", the close-up of an externally ejaculating penis. According to Williams, the money shot was the resolution (however imperfect) to the fundamental question of pornography: how to depict sexual pleasure visually. After all, arousal and erotic excitement is an internal state, and one that does not have unmistakable markers–-it can be faked way too easily. When we watch a sex scene during an artistic movie, we can be safe in knowing that it is no less fake than the sword-fight earlier; but the promise of a porn flick is that the sex in it is as real as it gets, and so is its accompanying climax. The money shot is the seal of authenticity.
Williams' perspective was heavily influenced by the golden age of Hollywood pornography, by that weird moment in time when porn flicks were major movie productions that could be seen in porn cinemas, before home video (and later internet) killed that entire business off. She was also heavily focused on a very mainstream, heterosexual pornography: the classics, one could say. Since the publication of her seminal (get it?) work Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, other scholars have pointed out that her definitions are just as incomplete as any previous attempt to consolidate the category of "porn" under a single sign. Which is not to disparage Williams' work; she has admitted herself that her perspective is, by necessity, incomplete.
Hardcore (in the colloquial, not technical sense) BDSM pornography provides one of the clearest examples of how Williams' analysis is both imperfect, and still applicable. There is much kinky porn where penetration, where it happens at all, is at best superfluous. Entire studios have made their brand on another kind of a money shot: that of a body in real pain, in real bondage, undergoing actual erotic torture. Here, the proof lies not in the ejaculating penis, but in the red welts left by the whip on the performer's exposed back.
Which brings us back to that gif. What it depicts is, too, a kind of a money shot. The studio that provided this material is Reflective Desire. It specializes in high polish (literally) latex porn, and the stress is on latex as a byword for a wider set of kinky fantasies. The gear—the catsuit, the mask, the boot—is significantly more important than acts of penetration. The insertion of a gag into a mouth is the equivalent of the white froth of a traditional climax, as it too guarantees that what will follow will include a performance that is seemingly true. Phalluses, fleshy or silicone, need not enter the camera's frame for a Reflective Desire's clip was effectively pornographic. In fact, no flesh at all needs to be bared. If the jocular term for a porn movie is "skin flick", then latex pornography offers a counter-proposal: you can made porn without skin at all. In fact, you can seemingly skip sex, and nonetheless succeed.
This, of course, is untrue. There is sex on the screen, and anyone can tell. And yet it is no sex at all. But this play of explicitness will have to wait until part 2 of this essay, when I will examine Bump & Grind featuring Miss Chill and Nim Pup.
Specialist fetish video pornography is fundamentally riven between two impulses.
On one hand, its objective is to sell the viewer on a particular fantasy. Few people seek niche porn to spectate quotidian sex between average-looking people. The genre inherently specializes, seeking to cater to individual desires—and to answer those desires, it must be able to provide a sense of it being recognized, if not fulfilled. Hence beautiful performers, hence athletic sex, hence all the strange and perverse combinations of appendages, orifices, and body fluids. More troubling, hence also the violent objectification of race, body type, of age and ability. It is unlikely for a porn performer who is, say, missing a limb, to make it in the business without making said disability their main draw: without literally offering it as a fantasy of "crip sex" for the consumption of others.
The thing about fantasy, however, is that it is also larger than life: this is why it is called a "fantasy". It exceeds availability, and usually possibility—which ends up at odds with the other basic objective of pornography, that is the desire to depict sex not just realistically, but literally. As I have established in the previous part, the point of a kinky porn flick is to directly capture the practice of BDSM as it is really happening, with real bodies, real orifices, and real appendages. This cannot help but to limit what fantasies can be depicted, and how far they can go. I do not mean here to imply only that bodies can stretch and bend only so far, though obviously this is a basic factor that needs to be accounted for (and, tragically, which sometimes is not: porn work is physical work, with all of its attendant dangers). Fantasy gets even more severely limited by reality when more extreme forms of sexuality enter the picture.
A famous example of that would be the moral panic around snuff movies in the 1970s: recordings that purportedly showed real sexual murder. While the popularity of snuff (in the media, if not among consumers) can tell us much about the way that sexuality and violence get discursively employed and entwined in Western culture, the fact of the matter is that the core of that frenzy—the idea that women are being literally killed in order to make porn—turned out to be literally untrue. Death in snuff movies was, ultimately, a faked orgasm.
Of course, I stress the literally here, because one could effectively argue—and in fact, many did—that it does not particularly matter if the murder on camera was staged or real. To quote the famous Robin Morgan's quip, porn was supposed to be the theory on which the practice of rape was based. For media critics—and especially for feminist ones—the very idea that one can get off on the image of sexual violence was disturbing enough, even if ultimately no corpses were produced while making the movie. After all, even if the director did not kill anyone, people raised on such films would go on to champion femicide anyway.
I am deeply uninterested in revisiting the porn debate here—I am noting this criticism mostly to note that it is one posed by a critic, not a consumer. While in the broad view of a patriarchal culture writ large it simply does not matter if Margarita Amuchástegui survived the making of Snuff, I can easily imagine a customer lured by the prospect of watching an actual sex-murder, and then bitterly disappointed it was merely another trick of the camera.
The example is extreme, but also illuminating. The same phenomenon, after all, recurs on a smaller scale whenever a porn production promises something forbidden or taboo (as it often does). The title may suggest that the heroine gets brutally gangbanged by savages, but the law required every performer to sign a consent form before shooting; performers in productions for enthusiasts of coprophagia tend to munch on cocoa, rather than caca. And 24/7 real-time bondage slaves are not.
This returns me to the example of Bondage Life, a site existing to sell the customer on a singular fantasy: that Rachel Greyhoud is an actual 24/7 real-time bondage slave. The way this is done is by obsessive recording and documentation: an endless feed of pictures and videos capturing the performer as she walks around the house, as she sleeps in a dog kennel, as she eats, or showers. But this multiplication can never be fully 24/7, and the gaps in the material stand out all the more for its quantity. Even if Greyhound lives in a 24/7 TPE situation (she may or may not, but it is vital for her business that she maintains she does), she cannot live 24/7 on set.
It would be overly simplistic, however, to assume that the porn's fantasy and porn's literalism are necessarily contradictory tendencies. It is true that they exist at odds with each other, but contrary to some critics, I do not believe that the result is inherent an impossibility of pornographic coherence. Rather, I want to suggest that pornography, to be effective, needs to balance those two tendencies—and it has, in fact, established a whole range of techniques meant to smooth their interaction.
Chief among them is, obviously, montage. The Kuleshov effect does not cease to apply when bare tits are on the screen. Reflective Desire's Charlotte in Red opens up with a series of shots of Goth Charlotte putting on a latex suit, piece by piece. Those shots depict many details that go into actually wearing rubber, including the need for lubrication and specific body movements that help to slide a skin-slick cover over one's flesh. However, they do not show the whole thing—putting on a catsuit is a tedious and unsexy process that is usually greatly assisted by the presence of others. But whatever helping hands Charlotte had are hidden between the cuts, helping reinforce the fantasy that recording tries to sell: that of a woman playing with herself, alone in her boudoir.
Note the bottle of lube left in the shot.
However jarring such cuts can be, they are nonetheless meant to be inconspicuous. They are supposed to turn the attention away from details which would disturb the fantasy, and in doing so render it more realistic. In fact, one gets a sense that their very status as a technique—a concept heavily associated with artifice—is put out of focus. Instead of trying to provide a filmic experience for the viewer, they try to make you forget that what you are watching is crafted for the purpose of being seen, not simply captured on camera.
An interesting counter-weight to this is established through the concept of "behind-the-scenes" features showcasing the work that went into establishing the scene, or a hardcore BDSM staple of having the performers confess at the end to the pleasure that brutal scene offered them. This, too, however works to remove seams: offering the supposedly kink-savvy viewer a chance to confirm that the scene was really a proper scene, and what was depicted was real, consensual kink performed by professionals. The stitch this covers is the suspicion that the performers—and the producers—are merely setting up a facade for the spectator, instead of creating something they too are into.
Beyond montage—beyond the craft of filmmaking—there are other ways that porn can help to resolve the tension I have outlined above. There are other techniques of narrative cinema which can be employed—and which were successfully used during the Golden Age of Hollywood pornography in the 1970s, where feature-length movies with elaborate narrative and staging relied on their status as films and as stories to found the fantasy. Often, this was at the expense of literalism: no one in the audience was likely to believe that Linda Lovelace really had her clitoris moved into her titular Deep Throat. The comic convention that such films utilized allowed sex to turn openly farcical, and the fanciful fantasy wrapped around the hard core of the money shot, rendering palatable, and sometimes almost respectable.
As far as I am aware, this approach has never held much sway in specialist productions. Linda Williams characterizes sadomasochist pornography as an emergent phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, one which blossoms alongside the development of video and its focus on immediate pleasure. Interestingly, the great kinky flicks of the Golden Age era tended to actually be even more slanted towards fantastical and ambiguous, utilizing the strangeness of bondage and sadomasochism to reinforce the otherworldliness of the fantasy. The Punishment of Anne is a movie steeped in the French New Wave cinematic tradition, while The Story of Joanna is a moody, gothic piece of aristocratic heartbreak. However, to my knowledge, such movies—Williams termed them as "aesthetic sadomasochism"—rarely get made anymore, and when they are, they are not marketed as pornography, as would be the case with works such as The Secretary or Duke of Burgundy. Specialist, fetish pornography instead evolved to be to the point, even if it is not necessarily quick.
Which brings to my point. A fifteen minute clip of a woman in latex pleasuring herself with a steel dildo (which is, more or less, what Charlotte in Red consists of) leaves little room for plot or set-up. It goes straight to the action, and if the fantasy is to be maintained in the face of camera's greedy eye focused on the gyrating body, it has to be done efficiently. The way that Reflective Desire accomplishes that—just as many other specialist porn studios do—is with shorthand. As it turns out, not a word needs to be written or said for the fantasy to manifest: it only needs to be evoked.
This is what I will analyze in detail when writing about Bump and Grind, but before then I want to give another example. In another essay I have written at length about the infamous porn studio Insex, and its influence on the world of hardcore BDSM pornography. Insex also happens to serve as a great case study in how to set up a fantasy using context only. Just look at the still from one of their productions:
Grime and violence.
Insex made "real" sadism and masochism its brand. But this reality extended beyond the fates of individual performers or acts they were put through on set. This reality was also its aesthetic. Insex produced itself as a vision of grime and violence, of rusted metal and stained concrete, of dirty bodies and elaborately crude implements of violence. It did not, therefore, had to bill itself on depicting, say, snuff, because death was implied in every frame. And though implication may not be reality, it is enough to give one a taste and an expectation of it.
This is what the tension between fantasy and literalism comes down to: a fantasy is not sustained by what is shown, but rather by what can be expected. After all, it dwells always in the future. A fantasy fulfilled loses the right to its name. In that sense, it can never be depicted: even if it is made real, it can only ever be different (for better or worse) than what lived in the imagination. But this phantasmal presence, visible only through the mind's eye, is also real. It attracts and pulls one to see, to watch, to wait for the manifestation that may never come. What Insex did, therefore, was to constantly imply: it used its aesthetic, and later its fame, to make the very physical acts depicted on screen constantly cast a longer shadow of acts that could be depicted. In essence, it ended up feeding on cultural motifs not to represent them, but rather to make them reinforce the idea that what is shown is more than it could ever possibly be.
There are more ways to achieve this effect than just with the brutish horror of Insex and its descendents, and there are more resources to fall back on when it comes to evoking a fantasy without calling it by its name. And this, again, is where I take a step back and decide to pause for now, performing this most erotic of gestures—that of deferral and anticipation—and announce that the analysis of Bump and Grind will have to wait for part three.
this extremely interesting essay had to be heavily edited after garg showed me the draft and i said something to the effect of "you've never watched vanilla cishet porn, have you" and she had to backtrack and add "IN SPECIALIST FETISH PORNOGRAPHY" at the start of every sentence so her analysis would still be accurate, this is why you pay your beta readers the big bucks
(i'm kidding, she doesn't pay me at all, not even in effortposts in my final fantasy quest like she said she would)
Frankly, I have gotten used to this. This sort of content, for better or worse, does not seem to attract all that much discussion on SV, unless I somehow manage to bait a controvery. For better or worse, however, I don't think people are invested enough into the aesthetics of pornography to call me out for being problematic, so the thread is going to be a bit dull.
I have read it and enjoyed the essay, but I don't really have much commentary, especially as latex stuff has never really been stuff I've been particularly drawn too, and so don't really have any comments to be made on that regard.
Not to pick on one bit in specific, but it's interesting that from an outside perspective the "I enjoyed this face-fuck so much!" scenes are seen as a creation of a realistic dynamic while from inside the industry it reads as the studio going "yeah we need to convince people that we're not underpaying or manipulating these young women into doing hardcore scenes they probably didn't fully consent to".
I don't feel the first post gave us a ton to respond to, since it was kind of just setting up classic problems in Aesthetics. I might be the wrong audience, though, since I'm pretty familiar with that discourse and firmly on the "porn is art" team. I've spent enough time on the internet that I'd fight anyone that dares imply some random PC-98 eroge isn't art. It's kind of where I suspect Garg is going- if latex content is about implying a larger fantasy that can't be directly shown, that's kind of like art!
I'm not familiar with latex or bdsm, though, so that history and insight is pretty interesting!
An interesting counter-weight to this is established through the concept of "behind-the-scenes" features showcasing the work that went into establishing the scene, or a hardcore BDSM staple of having the performers confess at the end to the pleasure that brutal scene offered them. This, too, however works to remove seams: offering the supposedly kink-savvy viewer a chance to confirm that the scene was really a proper scene, and what was depicted was real, consensual kink performed by professionals. The stitch this covers is the suspicion that the performers—and the producers—are merely setting up a facade for the spectator, instead of creating something they too are into.
I like this paragraph a lot! Anyone who believes these aren't just another layer of the fantasy being sold hasn't spent any time in the entertainment industry. When the social media team walks into the room, everybody starts acting very different. I have to imagine "behind the scenes" cameras are the same.
Not to pick on one bit in specific, but it's interesting that from an outside perspective the "I enjoyed this face-fuck so much!" scenes are seen as a creation of a realistic dynamic while from inside the industry it reads as the studio going "yeah we need to convince people that we're not underpaying or manipulating these young women into doing hardcore scenes they probably didn't fully consent to".
Both of those things complement and reinforce each other: since the dominant notion of "good" sexuality is that it is one where uneven power dynamics do not exist, showing the scene to be ethically produced is also a way to establish it as actually pleasant.
Is the technical sense here from hardcore and softcore porn as categories? Because it's not otherwise mentioned and that's the only thing that comes to mind as a layperson. But also as a layperson I had never considered those technical terms, though I suppose they technically (hehe) would be.
It would be overly simplistic, however, to assume that the porn's fantasy and porn's literalism are necessarily contradictory tendencies. It is true that they exist at odds with each other, but contrary to some critics, I do not believe that the result is inherent an impossibility of pornographic coherence. Rather, I want to suggest that pornography, to be effective, needs to balance those two tendencies—and it has, in fact, established a whole range of techniques meant to smooth their interaction.
This and the relevant preceding paragraphs were probably the most interesting section for me because this is a lens I could take and use to analyse other porn with. I feel like the balance talked about here is something more specific/niche, as I don't think all fetishes/communities/people necessarily need or want it to be real (in fact, personally I would say I want things to be clearly fake), but I think one can argue that there is always some sort of balance that has to be struck between fantasy and realism. Though perhaps that would be better compared to something like immersion in fiction than what is actually discussed in this essay, I am not sure. Regardless, I think it's an interesting viewing lens. Things like different balances different genres might be aiming for, the relationships between this balance and the medium the work is in, medium- or maybe even genre-specific techniques for adjusting the balance, stuff like that.
The Punishment of Anne is a movie steeped in the French New Wave cinematic tradition, while The Story of Joanna is a moody, gothic piece of aristocratic heartbreak. However, to my knowledge, such movies—Williams termed them as "aesthetic sadomasochism"—rarely get made anymore, and when they are, they are not marketed as pornography, as would be the case with works such as The Secretary or Duke of Burgundy. Specialist, fetish pornography instead evolved to be to the point, even if it is not necessarily quick.
I'm curious to know your thoughts on what the social phenomena is that has led to this in particular. I'm sure we've all seen the "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" motif repeated again and again, and there's almost certainly some of that tangled in here, but it strikes me as somewhat telling that what you might call "aesthetic pornography" really no longer exists aside from maybe some arthouse French films - I'm thinking of like, Blue is the Warmest Color, perhaps, but some might call that too tame to count.
Is it just the fact that the internet has allowed for greater market segmentation of media, to the point where there's not a lot of value in mainstream cinema even bothering? Is it that as the media market has expanded it has also culturally shrunk, so that there is no longer the space for separate sets of works to exist side by side, as opposed to being viewed as a single homogeneous whole?
Is the technical sense here from hardcore and softcore porn as categories? Because it's not otherwise mentioned and that's the only thing that comes to mind as a layperson. But also as a layperson I had never considered those technical terms, though I suppose they technically (hehe) would be.
Is it just the fact that the internet has allowed for greater market segmentation of media, to the point where there's not a lot of value in mainstream cinema even bothering? Is it that as the media market has expanded it has also culturally shrunk, so that there is no longer the space for separate sets of works to exist side by side, as opposed to being viewed as a single homogeneous whole?
Feature-length porn movies in the US fell victim to a number of processes that have preceded the Internet. They were killed by the rise of the home video first and foremost, and as a result the sharp decline in adult cinemas - which was exacerbated by anti-porn crusades of the 80s. Internet put the final nail in the coffin, but the point that the internet porn buisness became big, the golden age of Hollywood porn was long gone, killed by changing aesthetic tastes, modes of production, and anti-sex industry zoning ordinances.
F1NNSTER, a bona fide male-identified man who just happens to do some crossdressing and hormones on the side, got accused by Twitch's automated services of brandishing a female-presenting nipple,
Points of order: F1NN does not do hormones; he's on Finasteride and that's it. No estrogen, no Spiro. Second, he wasn't banned for, "brandishing a female-presenting nipple," he was banned for, and this might not be the exact language Twitch gave him, but it's as close as I remember, "excessive groping a of female presenting breast." He got banned for excessively adjusting his fake boobs while presenting femme.
I don't think the facts as they stand detract from your argument, I just wanted to correct the errors I saw.
One should always be wary not to read too much into etymologies; the original meanings of words can be as misleading as they are illuminating. Nonetheless, I think it is useful to observe that the term "pornography" comes to us having first meant "writings about prostitutes". This not only points at some among the favourite objects of the pornographic imagination, but also indicates a relationship between the spatial and the social that porn thrives on. A prostitute figures in the mass imagination as a publicly available woman who nonetheless plies her trade in private. She is, therefore, an open secret: everyone knows of her existence, but her actions are supposed to stay hidden from view. Pornography, then, offers an opportunity to violate this restriction. To look through its eye is to peer into a forbidden, private space. The pleasure of watching porn is, inherently, a voyeuristic one; by its very design it contains a thrill of being allowed to see what others would conceal.
This is one of the reasons why pornography thrives in closed, cordoned-off spaces. The nunnery, filled with cloistered women supposed to be cut off from the world of men, was a favoured setting in much of early modern pornography. The same logic produces endless amounts of porn set in brothels, boarding schools, prisons, dungeons, barracks, isolated chateaus, or sky-scraping penthouses. These are the spaces that are detached from the structures of the everyday, ones that Michel Foucault would call "heterotopias". But while they are an important resource of pornography, ultimately its most basic heterotopia is simply a bedroom in which there is sex. Porn is the ripping off the "do not disturb" tag from the door-handle, and sneaking a look in at an activity considered the pinnacle of privacy.
I stress this, because it is vital to remember that pornography, is ultimately, not just a particular genre or degree of explicitness, but also a way of seeing. Without the forbidding relationship of private spaces to the public gaze, there would be no room for it. And while not all porn productions lean heavily into this, many do. Again, I think that the example of Bondage Life's obsession with surveillance camera–style footage, and the way it draws attention to its own intrusiveness to sell the viewer on the fantasy of watching a real slave's controlled life. The case I am going to analyze more closely, however, is that of Reflective Desire's Bump and Grind, which is less obvious about the way it incites the pleasure of voyeurism—but which nonetheless relies on it on a fundamental level to maintain a fantasy without having to spell its name out.
As with many other Reflective Desire's productions, Bump and Grind is minimalist in its approach. It is a fifteen minute video in which two performers—Nim Pup and Miss Chill—mostly do what the title suggests: bump and grind against each other's latex-clad bodies. The character played by Nim is girlish and excitable, while Chill presents a more mature and domineering face. She literally towers over Nim, the difference in height further emphasized by the spike heels Chill wears, while her partner remains as bare-footed as latex socks allow. This is as far as their characterisation goes. What little dialogue they have—mostly words of erotic encouragement—is purposefully lost in the audio-mix which instead emphasizes the sound of latex, of its creaking and stretching as the two women rub their bodies into one another. In short, this porn without plot: but not without a narrative.
Nim Pup (left), Miss Chill (right).
To find it, we need to first look at the backdrop of the scene. Again, as is typical of Reflective Desire, the video is set in a brightly-lit, clean, and mostly empty space. Large, marble tiles, a faucet, and a bath in the edge of the frame suggest a washroom of some sort; a padded, leather bench gives it a bit of an opulent air. Together, those elements create an impression of a mansion's bathroom, spacious and tastefully luxurious in its minimalist decor. Of course, some details may not add up to that idea, but the point is not to scour the scene for hints of where it is really happening, but rather to focus on the mood it is trying to evoke. And that can be summed up in one word: carefree.
For most of its runtime, Bump and Grind is, by strict definition, soft-core, if even that. Most of the action is the two performers hugging and caressing each other, playing with their bodies, wide smiles adorning their faces as they do. Very little displayed on screen is, actually, in any way explicit. Even as they pet each other, they do not have to reach for the genitals, nor do they make an attempt to obviously tillitate. If anything, they seem to be entirely captivated with their respective bodies, and glad to be able to explore them and treasure them to the tune of latex.
Touch.
Unusually for fetishist pornography, there are no toys present on screen other than the latex suits themselves (and, arguably, the glasses that Nim wears, which aid her girlish persona). They would, I suspect, detract from the air of sensual, but innocent, fun; they would suggest something more serious than what the video is trying to offer as the fantasy at its core. Bump and Grind is evasive towards sex. Even when Nim grinds her crotch against Chill's thigh, the tribadistic display registers more playful than wanton. The women laugh at each other, as if playing a trick, as if engaging in nothing more but some girlish roughhousing.
A joke.
At no point in Bump and Grind is flesh bared. Although the play would provide fine fore-play, there is no moment when a zipper is opened and skin allowed to touch skin unmediated by rubber. Again, by technicality, the two performers stay entirely clothed throughout. And obviously, there is sex on the screen, but there also is not. Whatever the voyeur sees is tantalizingly close to explicit intercourse, but only approaches it as an asymptote that will never be fully reached.
This is why the moment late into the video when, following a sharp cut, we see Chill adjust the straps of a harness outfitted with neon-pink dildo, is so jarring. The ensuing brief oral scene, where Nim fellates the plastic phallus, comes across as almost perfunctory, as if the producers were afraid that without a moment of penetration the pornographic nature of their work would be missed. In fact, even on the level of montage, the final sequence stands out; while thus far, the camera work has been mostly unobtrusive and naturalistic, the dildo is introduced with an abrupt cut from a shot overlooking the two women embraced against a tiled wall to one where we look up at the harness already on. Both the imminent penetration and its tool are introduced without set-up, justified only by the logic of pornography, not the flow of the fantasy.
The obligatory phallus.
Yet, not even the introduction of penetration can fully disrupt the carefree mood. The dildo plays the role of yet another toy; laughs and excited twitches do not cease, nor are we thrust into a more carnal scene. At the end, both women embrace each other a few more times, and still looking solely at themselves, and not at the camera, turn to leave the room, stepping out of the washroom, out of the frame, and out of the video. In a minor failure of the film-making craft, the recording is cut before the doors fully close, instead of letting the camera linger over the now-emptied space. Still, the lapse is itself interesting in the light of how the visual language of porn seems to loathe such definitive conclusions, instead tending to fade to black over the action still going, as if sex was never allowed to stop.
The end.
So that is Bump and Grind, in all 15 minutes of its runtime. But, setting aside the pleasure of dryly recapping a porn shoot, where is the narrative I have promised? And why is it one that turns around latex?
As mentioned in the previous part, fetish pornography is often forced to rely on outside context and signifiers to help entrench its fantasy, and obviously, Bump and Grind is no different. The sources it reaches for, however—and I suspect it reaches for them unknowingly, replicating cultural stereotypes intuitively, rather than playing with them consciously—are highly specific and rather interesting. Of the many possible ones to identify, I would like here to focus on only two: that of the trope of a nymph scene, and that of the unserious nature of lesbian sex.
Bartolommeo di Giovanni, Woodcut made for a lost Quattrocento edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's Ninfale Fiesolano.
The myth of the nymph pool—and the cultural motif stemming from it—is one of female sexuality both unrestricted by mores and social convention, but also forbidden to men. A nymph is an erotic creature, one which plays nakedly in the water, and is a joy to all eyes that rest upon her. But as the fate of Actaeon reminds us, we are not supposed to look—and yet, look we do.
Nymphs bathing are a cultural staple when it comes to innocent, mythological erotica. There are countless representations of them in culture, from the classical era all the way to today. Like with pornography, those depictions play with the sign and sight of the forbidden; nymphs can be naked, playful, bathing because they are not being looked at (and to look at is, traditionally, a masculine action). They are, in essence, free. When the male gaze finds them, it ensnares them; it steals and spoils their freedom. It is, in effect, a violation. But, of course, this violation is heavily mediated. It is not a literal act of ravishment, or even contact of flesh—merely an illicit gaze, one elicited by the nature of the work that nymphs feature in.
Bump and Grind sets both Nim and Chill as nymphs. The association with water made by the washroom setting is clear, as is the fact that their profoundly sexual, and yet carefree play is shown as meant for themselves only, and not for the eye of the camera. The video demands a voyeuristic pleasure from the viewer in the same way that a Renaissance painting of nymphs bathing would. But while said painting would have the decorum of art and mythology to hide its sexual content in, a video by Reflective Desire cannot fall back onto that. At the same time, for nymph pool fantasy to work, it must hide the sheer sensuality somehow. It needs to attenuate it so that the softness and unexplicitness of the two women together can excite the senses in the way that a glimpse does, but a full look fails to. Hence, latex.
Reflective Desire's nymphs are not in the nude. They are fully clothed, and though their clothing leaves little to imagination, it nonetheless offers everything to it. Latex-clad bodies are idealized by the material surrounding it: a perfect and shiny layer that is both impregnable and ideally clean. It shows no blemishes, compacts the body into a more slender shape, and offers not a clear view of what the performer is "really" like under the clothing, but an impression of what the viewer would want her body to be. Latex catsuit is itself a fantasy, because it obscures everything while hiding nothing. Nim and Chill's bodies are as idealized in glossy black rubber as Renaissance nymphs on their frescoes.
It helps with that image that the sex they engage with is between women. It has long been a hurtful stereotype that sex without the presence of a bio-penis cannot be true sex at all; few people today and likely none on set of a Reflective Desire's production would ascribe to this view. But even if it is not acknowledged, the aura that Bump and Grind seeks to produce cannot help but to evoke it. A nymph is virginal, and yet carnal; she plays with her mates, but is still open to be despoiled by a hunter's eyes. In the video, this shows up in how playful rubbing and sex blend together, and depending on the way one wants to look at Nim and Chill it may well appear as nothing but an innocent game.
Lesbian pornography—or, rather, pornography featuring lesbian sex produced with a mainly masculine audience in mind—is often accused of perpetuating precisely this harmful stereotype of female homosexuality. If the sex on screen is both real and fake, it frees the potential viewer from suffering, basically, penis envy: he can rest happily aroused knowing that what he watches can never compare to what he can imagine himself providing to the nymphs, that is to the performers. But to stop here would be to suggest that this is what Bump and Grind fully leans into, and I think that is not the entire story.
Once again, latex is at the heart of the problem. I said before that all touch between Nim and Charlottle is mediated by rubber, and now is the time to unpack this statement. There are, I think, two ways to unpack what this means.
One is literal. Years ago, I heard a sex worker slash sex educator talk about dental dams; she laughed that when it comes to using them with her partner, it is like "licking a piece of candy through the wrapper". The joke, obviously, is that what such a form of consumption does is build up the appetite without ever fully eating. In this literal sense, latex mediates by preventing the touch from ever becoming complete. The metaphor of an asymptote, a line that can only be approached, but never crossed, comes to mind again. Literal latex in Bump and Grind ensures that sex is never fully consummated, and so can remain innocent in spite of its explicitness.
Even the actual scene of penetration does not carry the video beyond the line. Hot pink dildo on glossy black latex is obvious in its artifice. It is one of those toys that do not seek to imitate anatomy and find refuge in smooth, artistic curves that would look well on display in a fancy sex-shop. As such, one is not forced to reckon with its fellation as if it was the "real thing". It is a heavily mediated gesture easy to read as nothing but a more pornographic riff on the provocative eating of a banana or sucking on an icicle. Shrouded from skin by literal latex, it is fantastical, if not comical. To watch this mediated encounter can be greatly arousing, but the naughty innocence of both the performers, and the audience, remains safe behind a rubber veil.
But there is another way to look at this mediation, one which attempts to break free from the cisheteronormative assumptions about what "sex" really is. After all, an intercourse between a biopenis and an orifice is not the only way that people can feel like they have sex. There are so many other media through which it can be accomplished. A friend of mine recently had her back scoured with a flogger; it was sex for her. When another friend talks with his girlfriend living a continent away, and obeys her when she tells him to touch himself, it is sex for them too, not masturbation. That a touch is mediated does not mean it is not tangible. Quite the opposite. A body in latex is not desensitized to external stimuli; in fact, it may even become more vulnerable to them, as the thin rubber layer both transmits and subtly alters the touch, the temperature, the force of a spanking hand. Not for nothing one of the most famous magazines for rubber enthusiasts has been called Second Skin!
The paradox of a veil, after all, is that by hiding, obscuring, or distancing the senses from a particular stimulus, it makes said senses all the more keen. Seen from this perspective, Bump and Grind does not deploy latex to attenuate the explicitness of the scene, but rather to increase it askance and ratchet up the tension. A mediated gesture is also one that is done fully consciously; a person in a full-body latex may not be showing an inch of skin, but everyone looking at them knows they are putting themselves up for display, and hoping that the rubber membrane makes the looks all the more piercing. Nim's highly calculated play of an excited youth shaking merrily at the sight of a pink rubber dildo hints not at her innocence, but at her wantonness. The fact that nothing has to be said openly and nothing has to be done explicitly merely makes the suggestion stronger. The fantasy hits all the harder if the viewer is forced to think on what they cannot see, but can so easily imagine.
The thing is that those two perspectives, while seemingly contradictory, are both true. There is no essential meaning in latex, just as there is no essential meaning in sex in general. This then suggests that there is no single way of seeing that makes pornography, but rather a multiplicity of such ways, which are allowed to coexist no matter what we think of authorial intent or our own political convictions. Bump and Grind relies on old visual tropes and problematic ideas about female sexuality. Bump and Grind is a joyous depiction of kink liberated from the burden of having to play to the camera. Both of those interpretations are hidden behind the rubber veil, true and false at the same time, until we lift it and settle on what we see.
I wonder if this ambiguity was what motivated the producers to cut to plastic dick-sucking in the final minutes of the video. Perhaps this was meant to serve as a reassurance that the scene really is hardcore after all, that the viewer-customer is getting their money's worth instead of simply being teased by a pair of nymphs in latex. But if that was the intent, then it was not necessarily successful. Enough ambiguity remains the play between Nim and Chill that not even the seemingly explicit act of penetration can unequivocally tilt towards reading as carnal and wanton. It, too, can be incorporated into the fantasy of carefreeness that Bump and Grind are built upon. Although it is obviously a sex act, it also easily can feel like only play. In the end, if there is anything clear about it, it is that its meaning is to be found not in the act itself, but in the eye of the beholder.
This is the problem hidden within the phrase "I know it when I see it". Its it is far less obvious than Justice Potter Stewart intended. The question it raises is not "is this work obscene?", but rather "what do you see that makes it obscene?". And this is the problem of porn, a category we like to think transparent to our senses and desires, and yet one that slips through our fingers every time we think of defining it.
Bump and Grind thrives in this confusion. It is clearly pornography, and it is very difficult to mistake it for anything else. At the same time, however, its pornographic efficacy is achieved through putting in distance between the obviousness of explicitly bared flesh and the rubber-clad bodies playing on screen. Ultimately, what latex does is mediate: not just between flesh, and between various ways of understanding it, but also between the contradictory tendencies inherent in the logic of porn. And as in those cases, a mediation is not a resolution, but a structure allowing the weight of the fantasy to be carried by the performance's reality—and vice versa.
So, (latex) porn is in the eye of the beholder, and pornography is not an intrinsic quality of a specific piece of media, but rather a particular way of looking at media. So what? Those observations are, after all, hovering at the edge of the banal, as anyone who has ever put any serious thought to the idea of porn can probably attest. What matters, however, is where we go from here—what consequences those conclusions have?
To answer this question, I would like to first reformulate it somewhat. Instead of asking for consequences, it would be prudent to think about the stakes. What are the stakes of latex porn, and its ambiguous play with the idea of sex? What is at risk, and what is enabled, depending on what way we look at the thing hidden behind the rubber veil?
Consider the following hypothetical: it is a bright and sunny day, and families, lovers, and dog-walkers are out in force in the city park. And then, among them, there is some person, clad head-to-toe in freshly polished latex and ridiculous heels, likewise taking a walk. Is this person, with their gleaming, and obviously expensive getup, acting unethically, exposing themselves to bystander eyes like that?
At a glance, the answer may well be a shrug: it is their business, after all, what they are wearing. They are not baring any flesh, so the letter of law shields them from accusations of public indecency. Their outfit is risque, sure, but is it really meaningfully more risque than that of a gym-rat in a crop-top letting the world see his sculpted abs, or any other similar bold bodily display one can run into in a city park on a sunny summer day? This is the common sense response, assuming one comes from a sex-positive position.
Can you see the hitch?
What do you see?
Some time ago, I tossed a gif of a woman in a full-body catsuit shopping for eggs in a corner shop the way of my friend. Her response was a frustrated "I wish that people would stop doing that". The reason had nothing to do with questions of indecency, at least not directly. She argued, quite forcibly, that this sort of latex gear is inherently a "sex thing". If one wears it out in public, there are good odds they are getting off on being seen in rubber—and such exhibitionistic play obviously requires others to play the role of the voyeur. But the people in the shop, or in the park, are in no way in the position to consent to becoming involved in such a game. In essence, my friend argued, what happens is non-consensual. One should keep their kinks, and their catsuits, to appropriate venues, not flaunt them in public, and inflict them upon people who may not want to get involved in pervy pleasures.
There is a kind of moral forcefulness to this argument that makes it difficult to dismiss out of hand, especially since it is hard to argue that there is not an element of sex to wearing latex in public. Even if the person in the catsuit is not, personally, "into that like that", and is wearing rubber for entirely wholesome reasons, the status of such clothing in culture is such that they will be seen as sex things by others. The fact that that porn is in the ways of seeing means that even objects which are not pornographic by design can become, given the right cultural circumstances, seen as explicitly pornographic.
Ethical approach to sex demands that every action ought to be consensual, and the bounds of privacy and personal limits be respected. It is not hard to see, then, how one can arrive at the position that carrying oneself in such an ostensibly exhibitionistic way in public is ethically suspect. After all, the logic outlined above seems to suggest that there is the difference between showing up in a park in a catsuit, and being a flasher is one of degree, not kind. But acknowledging this line of reasoning has serious consequences, and it is where my friend's argument starts to fall apart.
Sex was the name of a fashion boutique started in the late 1970s by Vivienne Westwood with Maclom MacLaren's help; if you recognize those names, it is likely because you have some interest in the history of punk. If you don't, that's okay—they are incidental to the point at hand. And the point is that Sex was not a sex-shop, but rather one which attempted to sell sexually-associated clothes (rubber, spike heels, bondage pants) as fashion items. It had an immense and enduring influence on early punk and goth fashion; it also had a very famous clerk, who went by the name Jordan, and became something of an icon of punk fashion.
Jordan was famous for walking the talk; she did not just wear Sex clothes in the shop, but also in the public. Her memories of the time she worked in the shop are full of anecdotes like this one:
Article:
'After I got the job, I lost my flat in Drayton Place so I had to come back to Seaford to commute. And whatever I wore at work, I wore on the train and I didn't wear a coat. I had a lot of trouble but what did I expect? Sometimes I'd get on a train and all I had on was a stocking and suspenders and a rubber top, that was it. Some of the commuters used to go absolutely wild, and they loved it. Some of the men got rather hot under the collar, paper on the lap.'
Luckily, Jordan managed to evade getting into trouble for her sartorial choices; when a particularly irate commuter demanded that the train crew kick her out for indecency, she was instead offered a seat in the first class car. Still, it could not have been easy to endure this kind of harassment on the regular. Ultimately, Jordan justified her choices by framing them as a sort of a statement on the politics of fashion:
Article:
The clothes were really like works of art to me, to be cherished and taken care off. For instance, there were these incredible A-line skirts that I loved wearing the rubber suited the shape so well. It was a kind of legitimising of latex and not wearing it just because it was latex but it was a beautiful fashion item. And it wasn't only the latex stuff. Having said that I did once have a skirt that literally melted off me!
The wrinkle here, obviously, is that Jordan's sartorial manifestos were enabled by the same structural factors that make looking at porn looking at porn. You may recall how I have mentioned that pornography refers not just to a genre, but also to a particular placement in the relationships of production. Jordan had her security provided by the fact that she did not work in the sex industry. She worked in Sex, a boutique belonging to a renowned, if bohemian, fashion designer. She was gainfully, legally employed, white, young, and pretty. She had every advantage stacked onto her to let her make a point of wearing latex in public and not being considered a subject of pornography, which is to say a prostitute.
Oh, and Jordan was also obviously cis.
An image of security.
Let us go back even further into the past—all the way into the 1860s, to San Francisco slowly emerging from its time as a gold-rush boom town. It was a time for the reestablishment of good morals: the city had long had a reputation as a hotbed of vice, and this could not stand. Throughout the 1860s, the city council used its power to set ordinances pertaining to public order and public nuisances to regulate the streets and remove problem bodies from them. Those laws targeted beggars by forbidding displays of mutilated limbs; Chinese immigrants by banning carrying baskets on long poles or on the top of one's head, and, well, cross-dressers. In 1867, a law was implemented which made it illegal for a person "to appear in a public place . . . in a dress not belonging to his or her sex." As Claire Sears notes, it was primarily targeted at two social groups seen as particularly likely to engage in cross-dressing: the Chinese, and sex-workers. Its ultimate goal was to exclude such persons from the public, and hopefully, from the social more broadly.
Regulations against cross-dressing were not uncommon in the United States of that period; many of them endured well into the second half of the 20th century, only being removed from the books in the 1960s and 1970s. They represented an effort to make public morality and public decency codified into law, and thus enforceable—and almost without exception, they were used to target minorities. This is a recurring theme; one can point out how the anti-sodomy laws tended to not discriminate between homo- and heterosexual sodomy in the letter, and yet be enforced almost solely when it came to same-sex liaisons. But I digress.
What matters here is the subtle conflation at the heart of San Francisco's ordinance (and many like it). Under its logic, appearing in the clothes of the opposite sex in public was fundamentally an indecent act, because such behaviour could only be understood as a form of sexual soliciting. In essence, it equated expressions of cross-gender identification with both making sex in public, and being a sex worker. This, in turn, justified the suppression of public transness as a suppression of vice.
While such laws may be gone now, their afterlife is long and fruitful. In fact, their variants are currently undergoing a renaissance: anti-drag legislation being passed on the wave of political transphobia currently animating the American right are, in fact, their direct descendants. While they employ different frameworks and different logics, their ultimate goal is one and the same: establish a normative moral order in public in order to eliminate dissent from it not just from the public, but also from life in general.
Which, in a roundabout way, returns us to the question of a latex catsuit in a park, on a bright and sunny summer day.
Is such a display a sex act? As I have tried to argue in previous parts of this essay, it both is and is not; whether it is seen as such depends as much on the context and the way of seeing, than on the catsuit (and the intent of the wearer) itself. But this is not the real stake here. No, what counts is what sort of logic establishes what bodies, what fashions, and what expressions can be sexual in public, and which ought to be suppressed.
If wearing a catsuit to a shop exists on the same scale as public masturbation, so does a mini-skirt or a mesh top. Conservative fashion warriors know and acknowledge that, hence their calls for the return to properly modest and non-sexual fashion. Those calls are patently absurd, because modest and non-sexual fashion can just easily be fetishized as a latex catsuit. However, even though a white-collared black dress of an Edwardian wife is inherently no more and no less pornographic than a latex catsuit, the cultural context surrounding it renders it as a wholesome object (which, incidentally, can also be a kink in itself).
There is, obviously, a difference here; a tradwife is not assumed to intend for her dress to be a fetish object, while a latex-wearing street-walker hopes for such objectification. But to argue from intentionality is to, again, miss the point of whose intentions get to count as genuine. A tradwife's claim can be taken in good faith because she, like Jordan, is supported by networks of social privilege. A normatively beautiful woman in a head-to-toe rubber can, possibly, argue the same depending on exact circumstances, though her range of permissible possibilities is far more narrow. But a trans woman with a visible, rubber bulge? Here, even if she genuinely wanted nothing more than to try out some fancy rubber clothes, her appearance is going to be an incident of indecency. After all, indecency, like porn, is not the essence of a thing, but its framing.
An attempt to eliminate kink from the public is a doomed endavour if taken at its face value: fetishes can cling to entirely arbitrary categories of objects. Absence of latex, or mesh tops, will not free us from the pornographic gaze and its issues. But, as we should be well aware, such attempts are rarely made in good faith; their ultimate goal is not liberating people from unwanted sexual contact in the streets as much as precluding certain problem bodies from being able to take to the streets at all.
People in latex are hardly the most oppressed group in this context; in fact, they are such a marginal issue that they barely feature in the discussion about sex in public. But if the lesson of Bump and Grind is that pornography can be anything, and anything can be made into pornography if seen from the correct angle, then the actual conclusion is that modesty will not protect us. Those of us who wear problem bodies cannot defend themselves from the accusation of being publicly indecent by claiming innocence, for from the correct angle, our very appearance is already pornography. And, contrary to what we would like to think, this view is not wrong, only hostile. There is no escaping the eye that wants to see us as porn. What remains is to ask how to meet it, and survive.
This, however, is easier said than done. Crucially, there is no easy to chart way that takes us from the present situation to some hypothetical world where the pornographic gaze is no longer deployable as a tool of oppression. Sure, one can call to "normalize wearing latex", or "normalize being trans in public" (as different as those two things are), but the effectiveness of such actions is, at best, suspect. Suppose we all got up and got into catsuits, until the sigh of that tell-tale smooth, polished surface became as quotidian as a glimpse of cotton, but what would that really change? Mini-skirts used to be a bold statement once, and were seen as the end of decency, but if their normalisation managed to strike against patriarchal management of women's bodies, the damage was surface-level. Substitution of one object of repression for another cannot undo hierarchies of power by itself.
Furthermore, another wrinkle here—and one that starts to drive a serious wedge into the implicit equivalence between wearing latex in public, and being openly queer—is that it is precisely the potential for being seen pornographically that animates the pleasure of showing up in rubber in a park. My friend was not wrong insofar as she pointed out that such play wants to engage sexuality and its associations. If catsuits became suddenly normalized, the pleasure of wearing them would not go away entirely, but a certain illicit thrill that animates so much "indecent in public" fantasies would likely not survive fully intact. After all, what glamour would be left there if one could look at the polished black surface and not be threatened by seeing reflected in them a new kink they are developing? Could Bump and Grind remain arousing if not for the sexual writhing hidden behind the rubber veil?
Pornographic gaze is, at the end, a tool for sorting images and bodies between the licit and the illicit. Usually, it is employed for pleasure and arousal of viewing the latter, but it may just as well end up serving the purpose of protecting the former. After all, one of the first things that an anti-pornography activist ought to learn is how to recognize porn for what it really is. In any case, the act of sorting itself is likely impossible to disentangle from the act of watching porn; even the most vanilla porn flick ultimately requires the viewer to assume the position of a voyeur, and violate at least one social norm of sexual visibility. In other words, pornography cannot properly exist without the tension between the proper and improper, even though its existence also threatens both of those categories.
Latex is an edge case, where the question of "what porn is" and of the pornographic way of seeing becomes literalized in the ambiguous status of the rubber veil which always hides both sex and its absence. However, being an edge case does not make it an exception; rather, I choose to view it as an intensification of an energy that animates porn in general, and more importantly, that circulates through all attempts to deploy the category of "pornography" to castigate certain groups, bodies, practices, and expressions as perverse that goes beyond the pale. And yet, this castigation also can be a source of pleasure, however improper.
Ultimately, then, if I am arguing for something here it is not to be pro- or anti- latex porn, or porn in general. Both of those positions tend to reify pornography into a set of recognizable, bounded phenomena that can be named, separated from other spheres of culture, and then endorsed or repressed. Rather, by reading out from a single piece of latex erotica, I hope to demonstrate just how socially entangled the very idea of "porn" is; how much our judgment about it is never only about the work itself. By judgment I mean here both our erotic preference, or view of how well executed a particular bit of pornography is, as well as our stance on whether it is a politically good or bad object. Engaging with the politics of porn, therefore, must mean more than just being able to separate the wheat of proper erotica from the chaff of bad abusive visual material. Instead, we should seek to investigate the way that pornography works towards eliciting our sight, and also the way our sight learns to recognize pornography as porn. At the intersection of those two processes, we encounter a possibility to do the genre justice, or at least bring it to justice—not to the summary verdict of the court of public opinion, but to daily practices of living a good life even while trapped in the pornographic bind.
One should keep their kinks, and their catsuits, to appropriate venues, not flaunt them in public, and inflict them upon people who may not want to get involved in pervy pleasures.
Doing justice to latex pornography demands that we first identify the injustices that it suffers from—or, rather, is charged with. Fetish porn—and latex is a fetish par excellence—carries, at the best of times, significant stigma. In the court of common opinion, it is a fodder for perverts. Even if it is ultimately acceptable for it to exist, its consumption remains a shameful and antisocial activity. Most of the time, this shame works as something deeply internalized and naturalized: anyone posting "weird" porn clip to a Discord #nsfw channel is likely familiar with the experience of being ribbed for it. Such ridicule does not even have to contain hostility—merely friendly and amused comments from people who are "not into that" about how silly such content appears when viewed from the outside of the fetishist's gaze.
Undergirding this popular perception of fetish porn is a deeper unease that I have been alluding to throughout this series, and which has been most explicitly articulated within the feminist critiques of pornography. The two master terms of this critique are fetishism and objectification, and much of the feminist concern with them has since sunk into the common sense of our culture. As such, it is important to take a moment here to explain how we come by those terms, and what sort of feelings and anxieties are evoked with their deployment.
While the concept of "fetishism" dates back to late 19th century sexology, its feminist critiques owe much to Sigmund Freud and his interpretations. In classical, Freudian psychoanalysis, a fetish is, fundamentally, a substitution, emerging out of the failure to properly resolve the castration anxiety. For Freud, a boy that realizes that his mother lacks a phallus, but then fails to internalize the reality of sex difference (and thus progress up the normative arc of human psychic development) can then start finding and fixating on objects—be they gloves, furs, stocking, or latex—that can serve as a substitute for the lost feminine phallus and thus stave off the anxiety produced by its lack. To simplify it somewhat, this means that fetishism is a complex characterized by a keenly felt, but improperly handled sense of lack caused by the inability to cope with the reality of human difference.
As with so many other pieces of analysis by Freud, this is both frustratingly wrong in a direct sense, and highly useful as an analytic when taken not as a literal account of individual psychic processes, but rather a cultural pattern. It offers a handy way of explaining what sexual fetishes are: they are substitute sexual objects, which serve to displace sexual desire from its "proper" target, that is the opposite sex's genitals. This, in turn, is highly problematic because it can easily become an impediment in relationality: to fetishize something or someone is to treat them as a means towards sexual gratification, not an end in itself. It is not difficult to point towards the critical utility of such a framework: aside from feminism, it has been gainfully deployed in many fields, perhaps most famously in post-colonial critique which uses the theory to characterize the way that the West treats subaltern, colonial populations. It, after all, explains pretty well the short exchange a Black man I know had while on Tinder: messaged by a white woman, he was first asked about his race, and then whether his penis was above 10 inches in length. When he responded in negative—thus failing to be a desirable fetish object—the woman immediately terminated the conversation, unable to cope with him as a person, not a fantasy.
For feminism specifically, the idea that fetishism constitutes a socially problematic practice of substitution is highly useful. It cleanly dovetails with a key concept emerging out of feminist critiques of cultural representations of femininity: that of objectification.
Second wave feminism, where concerns with objectification first gained high visibility, was particularly concerned with how, under patriarchy, women are constantly being looked at not as full human beings, but rather as objects of masculine sexual desire. In this way, the recognition of their humanity and agency was commonly substituted for regarding them as the means through which men can gain fulfillment in their life. As Ann Cahil describes it:
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Much of feminist theory has been committed to the claim that the sexual objectification of women is harmful, degrading, and oppressive. To be viewed as a sex object is to be regarded as less than a full human person, to be debased and reduced to mere flesh. The male gaze – which is male primarily in its effect, not necessarily in its origin, in that women can also adopt it – defines and constrains women, assesses their beauty, and in doing so dehumanizes them.
Objectification, therefore, describes the result of cultural processes which refuse women dignity by degrading them to the status of mere objects existing for someone else's pleasure. The psychoanalytic notion of fetishism comes in handy here—not least for the reason that psychoanalysis was, and remains, a very important tool of feminist theory—as it provides a model, albeit extreme, example of how those processes operate.
Both rigorous second-wave approaches to objectification, and psychoanalytic explanations of fetishim may seem exotic, if not outright quaint today. However, as I have noted before, many concepts championed by them linger in the popular understanding of what fetish pornography is, and why it is significant and problematic. For the purpose of this essay, I'd like to single out two of them.
One: that a fetish is a substitute for some kind of an internal, psychic or spiritual lack. A very clear example of that can be seen in the many attempts to link transvestitism, understood as a sexual fetish, to some inadequacy in one's upbringing, such as disrupted gender roles in a household. Alternatively, it is likewise common to describe people engaging in severe sadomasochism as seemingly desensitized: their need for ever more elaborate sexual scenarios is a way for making up for how badly out of joint their sense of sexual pleasure is.
Two: that a fetish is a form of projection which leads to a disregard for the body that is attached to it. A fetishist is assumed to be attracted to a particular thing, behaviour, or an action, not to a person. This is substitution by the way of objectification: a fetishist replaces the (normative) desire for other people with a (perverse) desire for fetish objects. To return to the example of the white woman looking for Afro-American penises: it is intuitively obvious that her interest was merely in a certain fantasy enabled by the racial caricature of Black men living in her mind, rather than any sort of interest in a particular person. In essence, her fetish led her to see Black men as fetish objects, not independent human beings.
Combined, those two assumptions form the basis of a style of thinking that I'd like to term as the "logic of substitution": the intuitive and usually non-reflective association of fetishism with the act of replacing "genuine" human intimacy, eroticism, and desire with more artificial, unnatural and anti-relational objects and phenomena.
It is not hard at all to apply this logic to extreme fetish pornography, especially to one featuring latex. As a material, latex has a tendency to both depersonalize and idealize the body wearing it. It compresses it into shape, and its smooth, polished surface allows no blemish nor individuating characteristic. While it would be a stretch to say that all bodies in latex look the same, once a full-face mask is applied they certainly become difficult to tell apart.
Who do you see?
In fact, there are certain online genres of pornography (whether written or visual) that downright rely on this interchangeability. For example, drone kink lives and breathes the idea that people fully enclosed in latex can be reduced to serialized drones that are impossible to tell apart from each other. There is a potent, normative undercurrent to this. I owe to my partner the observation that disabled and non-skinny people are almost completely absent from drone kink media. As a fetish genre, it is also one that implicitly reinforces exclusionary and sexist ideas about what bodies get to be treated as sex objects. It is not hard for me to imagine how this could serve as a springboard for an argument seeking to show how sexual fetishization seeks to overwrite actual human diversity and reduce it to an assimilable fantasy.
Even setting aside the extremity of drone kink, the aesthetic of latex is one inextricably bound with the notion of an idealized and deracialized human body. The sheer cleanliness and absence of clutter on the sets of Reflexive Desire shoots is not accidental. Certainly, it stands out when compared to the gritty and grimy evocation of violence performed by Insex, or Bondage Life's practiced attempts at depicting a lived-in 24/7 power exchange environment. An obsession with tidiness, and the removal of foreign bodies, underpins the fantasy that Reflexive Desire sells.
An universalized fetish body.
If we follow this grim logic to the end, it seems to inexorably end in a condemnation. It suggests, forcefully, that the rubber veil is ultimately a fetishistic substitution of flesh so profound that it can deal away even with the act of sex itself. A sterile dildo attached to a rubber skin without openings is a wholesale displacement of the reality beneath with a non-threatening, idealized, and increasingly non-descript body.
This is the kind of analysis that emerged from the radical feminist, anti-porn movement—one of the most important champions of the notion of fetish as a violent substitution. The fetishistic act of objectification is at the heart of this critique, and while there are many ways to argue against it, I am not here to revisit the trenches of that old sex war. Instead, it is my hope to draw the attention of the point of view that this logic of substitution assumes, when one tries to analyze porn from its vantage: it is a way of looking that privileges the spectator above the performer.
One of the constant features of the discourse on pornography is a tendency to ignore the lived realities of making it, especially if they cannot be mined for shocking stories of abuse and exploitation. This is a part of a broader trend where sex workers are denied voice in their own matters, often owing to the paternalistic assumption that one can only ever do sex work when forced into it by external circumstances, or when suffering from insanity. While this is rarely put in terms that stark today, we continue to assume that a sex worker is someone without a choice, or without a clue. I am not referring here solely to militant SWERFs, but to a far more broadly ingrained idea that treats "sex" in "sex work" as fundamentally different from "sex" in "sex life". On set, one is fucked for money; outside, one fucks for love.
The paradox here is that this is the inversion of the problem that the term "sex work" itself was meant to address. While it is commonly thought to originate as an attempt to depathologize the profession and remove the awful associations carried by words such as a "prostitute", this is far from true. In fact, sex work as a category emerged out of an attempt to find a language for criticizing the sex industry without lapsing into the moralistic terminology of anti-prostitution crusaders. The idea was that by stressing the fact that sex work is a form of labour, it can be then subjected to the same critiques of structural inequalities and injustices that pervade work and the labour market in general. In other words, sex work as a term is supposed to suggest to us that the problem of prostitution is not in the first order a problem of sexual exploitation, but rather a subset of a broader issue of exploitation of workers.
Flipped around, this seems to imply that just as problems of sex work are problems of work writ large, so are they problems of sex in general. This, however, goes against one of the most common analytical moves that happen when sex work is being discussed. Namely, a boundary is instituted between private sex as a non-commodified expression of affection, and public sex as a good set out for sale.
This artificial distinction likewise operates along the lines of the logic of substitution. Commercial sex is commonly assumed to be an imperfect, if not outright morally deficient, ersatz of genuine sexual connection: a man goes whoring because he is thought to be unable to find non-commercial partners, or feels the need to replace a lack left by his wife. In fact, the moment money (or other forms of compensation, such as expensive gifts) enters a sexual relationship, it risks tainting it with its association with sex work. Sex for money is imagined as inherently less worthy than sex for love, and the two possibilities as mutually exclusive.
This does not only affect the consumers of sex trade, but also the producers. The very fact that a porn video is a piece of work being sold makes it difficult to imagine the relationship depicted on screen as anything but professional. Porn is a substitute of real sex for people who buy it, and a falsification of it for people who perform in it. Sex is only real if it is done out of emotional intimacy between two partners at equal standing. Otherwise, there is work, or abuse. Under the logic of substitution, there is no coexistence for intimacy and labour, or for love and monetary exchanges.
Under this binaristic logic, there are certain questions which become impossible to ask. For example, it does not matter what the relationship between Nim Pup and Miss Chill is Bump and Grind, because any and all sexual acts they perform on screen are supposed to be performed for the spectator only. Public sex is sex for the public, not for those who have it. And while I am far from dismissing such concerns out of hand, neither should we allow them to totalize our understanding of sex on screen, and maybe sex in general.
Here, I want to return briefly to the case of Insex. While it is inarguable that for some performers employed by the studio, the experience was exploitative and abusive, others, years later, still think fondly back to their performances. Interestingly, some choose to not even frame their performances as a matter of sex, but rather as a form of extreme sport that faced them with the limitations of their body, and allowed them to endure them. Under a binaristic logic of substitution, however, such sentiment becomes hard to articulate. It becomes easier—as many SWERFs do—to claim that such narratives are outright false, and those performers simply lie or fail to realize the enormity of harm they suffered. And even if one is not against sex work per se, it is not hard to bristle at the notion that the abusive conditions of Insex might have produced experiences that were not uniformly negative.
This, and I need to stress it, is not an attempt to defend a producer who was exploitative both in terms of sex, and in terms of labour. However, this exploitation does not have to be the entire picture, and the entire story; we do not have to acknowledge it as the only thing that can be said of the studio and people who went through it. Both hurt and pleasure may be true at the same time—and depending on one's point of view, they may even end up being the same thing.
And so, let us come back to Reflective Desire for the last time. The thing is, no matter how interchangeable the body in latex may seem to be, ultimately there is an individual body behind the rubber veil. For one reason or another, it found itself in the position of a performer—but concealed. The problem with sex, especially kinky sex, is that it is highly intimate. It happens between people. And there is no pornographic gaze strong enough to penetrate through the veil that hides relations from view. The images that we see on screen are doctored to give an impression of a particular set of relations (say, a sub and a dom, a girl next door and her dorky neighbour, a rubber slave and his master), but those impressions do not fully substitute for the relations of both labour and affect which join those who perform.
Once more, latex puts this in sharp relief: it literally hides the body from sight and lays over it a layer onto which a fantasy can be projected. But the layer does not ever fully replace the flesh beneath. A full-body latex catsuit rendering one into an universalized fetish body is not only an allegory of fetishism as the displacement of someone else's subjectivity. Just as easily, it can be read as a case study in how the truth of someone else's desire is always opaque to a spectator. The rubber veil does not only arouse the imagination of the onlooker; it may just as well hide the smile—or the scowl—of the one wearing it.
I started this series of essays with an attempt to explain how videos such as Bump and Grind use the aesthetics of latex to both depict sex explicitly, and to render it safe and harmless. I sought to show that there is no contradiction between those two tendencies that emerge out of the paradoxical needs of visual pornography. This, in turn, allowed for a broader reflection on the limits of what porn can show, and how those displays are always beholden to the spectator's eye. And here, at the end, I turn towards the problem with the logic of substitution: a splinter in that eye, or perhaps a blinker that lets us see one way, but not any other. The question emerges: how do we look differently? What alternatives exist to the logic of substitution?
A hint can be found in Płock. For those unaware, it is a small and rather provincial city. It is also the home of @latex_coach, a fashion TikToker who specializes, as her name suggests, in latex. Despite living far away from the queer glitz of grand metropoles of Warsaw or Poznań, she seems at ease parading through Płock in full-body latex, and making this her entire brand. As she explains, it is an exercise in bravery, and an encouragement for others to get over their shame and learn to appreciate latex as a fabric that can be worn not only to an erotic club.
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Unfortunately, Latex is mainly associated with erotica, bdsm, porn, kink, fetish. The upshot is that many people don't wear Latex because they're afraid of what other people will say. And here the complexity of the human psyche shows, because for each person Latex is something different.
This statement is taken from her official web-page, on which she advertises her services as, well, a latex fashion coach. Every other sentence, she stresses that she does "not make any nudity or sexual content". Her goal, it seems, is to save latex from its associations with sex, and herself from being thought of as a sex worker.
I would hardly blame anyone for calling bullshit that taking a walk with a cameraman in two through a city park while wearing a catsuit and 20cm platform heels is supposed to be wholesome and non-sexual. But also look at that knitted cap, at that sensible (if fashionable) jacket—certainly not the sort of items one would expect on an illicit Instagram thirst-trap. So what is it? Is @latex_coach honest with us, or is she quietly getting off her performances while maintaining a professional face?
The logic of substitution hinges on strict exclusion. A person suffering from fetishistic objectification is no longer a person, but an object, and one can never be both. It is an either/or perspective. This is why it is imperative under it to try to lift the rubber veil and ascertain, once and for all, what exactly is hidden behind it. The question of whether it is sex or not, intimacy or labour, wholesome or perverse, has dramatically high stakes, because once a singular answer is found, its opposite becomes impossible. Substitution of personhood, or fetishization of a body, can only ever be an act of violence under this schema. After all, when one desires a fetish object, they are failing to see the bearer of the object as a human being. And if one exposes themselves to be seen as a fetish object, then there is no escaping this objectifying gaze. The way that the spectator sees you is the way that you are, or rather that you cease to be.
Wu Tsang said it best.
The logic of substitution renders @latex_coach's claim that she is trundling through Płock in full body latex and maintaining without making "nudity and sexual content" absurd. The spectator's gaze can—and will—see her body as a sex object, and this look will overwrite the body's desire. For the same reason, a sex worker can never work sex without being immediately alienated from the fruit of her labour by the objectifying power of a monetary exchange. In this either/or world, one can be a performer or a lover, but never both.
But what if, instead of conceding to the mutual exclusion of possibilities—to the binaristic demand to entertain one possibility only, and its ensuing privileging of the overpowering violence of objectification—we make an attempt to look not for the truth of a fetishized body, but rather its possibilities?
The logic of substitution is a logic of scarcity. But there are ways of looking at the fetish which, instead, promise abundance. In order to do so, however, we must first cut off the part of the theory that anchors it the most to the notion of objectification's irreversible damage: that which starts with lack.
Let us attempt to locate the gaze that fetish performance elicits as originating not in a place of personal lack, but rather personal want. However subtle this shift may appear, it dovetails with Amanda Fernbach's opinion that "decadent fetishism can involve the refusal of the 'natural' and the disavowal of social lack, as a new identity is fantasized into being through a set of identifications that are at odds with the dominant culture's ideals."
@latex_coach's lack of identification with being a sex performer is, clearly, at such odds. It is very difficult to look at her outfit and her actions without seeing something horny in that. But she does not care. She shines her catsuit and goes on a walk. We watch, and maybe get off. Whether we do, however, does not threaten her ability to both walk the walk, and keep wearing the decidedly mundane knitted cap on.
When those two ways of looking at her (and her looking at herself) intersect, they need not to come into conflict. They can, instead, multiply. It is a logic of addition, not substitution. She is doing sex, and she is not. Both statements are true, and they do not exclude each other. This is what matters about the rubber veil: the barrier through which we can never see through, but only imagine (and desire) the full abundance of meaning hidden behind it. For as long as we do not drive ourselves to violence attempt to tear it down, it remains to remind us that those meanings are there, and remain frustratingly, but enticeably open.
This sounds—I hope, at least—nice. But what to make out of it in practice? How to turn a principle into an alternate way of seeing and relating to material that would otherwise turn us off, or, worse yet, turn us towards a violent gaze? This, after all, is the leading question of this entire series of essays, that recurring "what do you see?" asked of images offered to us by pornographers peddling fantasies as reality.
The problem with answering it lies in the very act of finding an answer that can provide a sure and stable footing for interpretation. As I have mentioned, pornography is characterized by a drive towards a stark form of literalism: the idea that the video represents some putative truth of the sex depicted on screen. This approach, and its attendant way of seeing, demands of the viewer the expectation that their gaze too will be able to penetrate the image and take into possession the reality of the act depicted within. Pleasure, in this perspective, is an ultimately limited kind of mimesis: the visual medium substitutes for a physical presence, and the spectator derives their enjoyment vicariously. Conversely, this very same expectation that the pornographic way of seeing must seek the truth behind the image, animates the kind of critique which returns, time after time, to the claim that porn is the theory of which rape is the practice.
But that answer, and even searching for it, needs not to be a necessary feature of looking at porn, or even at sexually suggestive imagery more broadly. While it is difficult to argue against the intimate involvement with the search for truth, and the desire for possession, which is the dark side of the adage that "knowledge is power", this need for mastery can be bracketed. The logic of abundance, I am proposing, requires just that: attempting to treat the images before our eyes as opaque, instead of transparent. This, perhaps, is the call to allow them to be treated as art, which is dogmatically mandated to be open for interpretation. After all, my attempt in this essay has been to interpret a piece of latex porn, instead of explaining it. The use of interpretation here is that it can never be final, and it says as much about the viewer as it says about the object of their sight.
Importantly, this is not a call to automatically assign fetish pornography merit; rather, the practice that I am suggesting is one of unlearning the tendency to understand it as obvious. This applies whether we are talking about the veracity of the images—and so our ability to tell what is really happening—but no less importantly also when thinking about the sort of affective work that went into its creation, the social and economic conditions of its emergence and distribution, and all the other factors that go into considering a work of art an object of critique. Critique, it needs to be added, which is a generative practice, one that seeks to add to the work it criticizes, instead of serving as a way to warn others away from it and its lot.
Ultimately, the logic of substitution requires a belief in our unshakable ability to know it when we see it; the logic of abundance is the undoing of that knowledge. I chose latex as the material through which to view it because of its ambiguity—its ability to stand both for the fetish as the violent objectification of a body, and for a barrier imposed before our senses. This, perhaps, is as good of a place as any to conclude the series: by returning to an earlier meaning of that word, fetish, meaning a part of the made world that is imbued with a power both tangible and ineffable, and as such always exceeding our belief that we know what it is. It is for the want of knowing that we may remain wanting.
I'm not really into pluralism. I'm more of a nihilist. That there are many ways to see things just says to me there's no good way to see things.
Reminds me of political lesbianism. If you see heterosexuality as pornographic then homosexuality seems pornographic as well. And chastity seems extremely pornographic as well.
You should really talk more about disability stuff and neurodivergence stuff. Psychiatry is a huge part of the stigma around kink. A lot of anti porn arguments boil down to the performers or the consumers are mentally unwell. I would actually argue that kink in many ways is a disability.
Latex has obvious sensory aspects to it. For people with autism or sensory issues the tight hug machineness of latex can be soothing. Latex is also shiny and pins the eye, an attribute appreciated by people with ADHD or executive dysfunctions.
Drone kink and hypnosis are soothing for people with racing minds. Masochism is useful for people with chronic pain. Emotional masochism is appealing for people with emotional numbness.
So kink can be appealing to people with issues. But more than that people with fetishes (not mere paraphilias) require assistive technology in order to get off. In other words fetishists are disabled in the ability to get off and require the use of assistive technology. I would more broadly describe kink as physical and emotional intimacy and distancing disabilities. I would describe disability as the set of assistive technology and skills that a person uses to navigate a world not made for them.
Anyhow latex is clearly a tool for regulating physical and emotional intimacy and distance. Latex both distances and sensualises which can be extremely appealing and useful for developmentally delayed people who have extreme difficulties getting close to others. Physical intimacy is not limited to sex and some people do not like hugs or do not like their skin.
I am not sure if viewing fetish as a disability aid really helps with making the designation of fetish clearer. Kind of rambling.
I've always found the person/object dichotomy incredibly stupid. I am an object, everyone I've ever spoken to is an object, we are all objects. Being an object is a prerequisite to being a person, not an impediment to it.
The section about the dildo in Bump and Grind reminds me of reading about an incident with a smoking video (a decade and more ago).
They submitted it (for this is Great Britain we speak of, where cinema films are classified and video recordings are censored) to the BBFC.
It was given something like a 12 rating (possibly even softer than that).
Vexed by the BBFC's refusal to acknowledge the material as erotic, they spliced in a minute of gratuitous vanilla cishet material, irrelevant to the people who would buy the video in the first place, and resubmitted it so that it could be given the credibilizing imprimatur of a BBFC R18 certificate.
An essay both thought out and well written. Unfortunately I have absolutely zero empirical knowledge of the subject matter, so I can't think of anything to critique. I'll take your word for it then.
