Sex “Journalism” Bingo
Is there a bingo card we can pull out and play along with, when reading bad mainstream sex journalism? If not, somebody needs to make one. And my first suggested square would be “journalist marvels that people at sexual event look normal / don’t seem all skeevy and perverted”.
I was reminded (not for the first time!) of the need for such a bingo card while reading this article in Salon by an author who attended (with enormous disdain) an Ultimate Surrender naked girl-wrestling performance. (Thanks to Bondage Blog for including the link in today’s bondage links roundup.) The piece includes this magnificent exemplar of the “Gosh, I expected perverts!” genre:
“Not to sound like a prude but: These are clean, attractive, normal-looking people!”
Well, duh! What did you expect, stinky unwashed men in raincoats and clutching bottles of Boones Farm Watermelon Malt Liquor Product?
Sadly the rest of the article was not any better. It’s a limp word salad of discomfort, confusion, and utter lack of recognition that the event — not to the author’s taste — might be fetish gold for its intended audience. Shorter Salon author: “I went to this sex wresting thing, almost by accident, and it was totally weird and it made me uncomfortable.” Even one paragraph of contextual reporting might have helped rescue the article; some words from an enthusiastic fan, a sentence talking about how the Ultimate Surrender fights are marketed as softcore pay-per-view events on satellite TV, something! But no, it’s just “Ugh, what is this? I don’t even…”
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I attended an Ultimate Surrender taping in 2008. I had a very different experience than Tracy Clark Flory. Instead of men in trench coats, I ran into several friends I knew from the kink event circuit.
Natural? Unfeminine? Wha? The performers I saw were Adrianna Nicole, Dia Zerva, Jade Marxxx and Annie Cruz, all quite lithe and attractive. I went and dug up the photos I took: http://bit.ly/e...S1Aef. If I fault Kink.com for anything, it’s that the women are uniformly slim, compared to the women of queer porn.
Watching hot bodies wrestle in a live action was pretty hot. Watching the photographer and videographer follow the wrestlers and the referee and try to get good shots was the surreal part. It may not be my flavor of fun, but it was well produced. It’s certainly popular enough that 3 years later, they still stage live tapings.
Damn. She got invited to the Armory by Steven Elliott, and she *still* wasn’t happy? Talk about pearls before swine!
One thing I did find interesting, tho, was her emphasis on how “natural” and “unfeminine” the women looked. (We’ll save the grumbling about gender expectations for later.) There has been a trend in porn towards more natural-looking girls, but over here in pervert-land I haven’t heard many people describe the girls on Kink.com as “natural”. Maybe it varies by site?
Molly, from what I’ve seen Ultimate Surrender uses a mix of the regular stable of Kink.com models (mostly the more athletic ones, not so much the ones with thirty pounds of enhancements) and some lithe little athletic hard-body gym-rat types. In any case, I’m suspicious of the word “natural” and don’t necessarily think that body modification by workout is any more “natural” than body modification by plastic surgery.
Viviane, you’ve put your finger on exactly what bothered me about this article. You were able to appreciate the show you went to even though it wasn’t precisely “your flavor of fun” — but this article was written by somebody who just seemed bewildered by it all, and didn’t seem even to comprehend that it was somebody’s flavor of fun.
I read the article, maybe too charitably, as an honest report of the writer’s reactions. She definitely didn’t get the appeal, but I don’t think cluelessness needs to imply hostility. When she writes, “Weirdly, it all looks closer to ‘real’ sex than any staged and carefully edited porno scene,” it looks like the beginning of understanding.
And my impression was that “natural bodies” here was used to mean “not like mainstream porn bodies,” which is maybe a sloppy definition but mostly harmless.
We all seem to have a piece of the puzzle, but I think Bacchus nailed it: Americans are uncomfortable with sex, don’t have the skills, experience or cultural encouragement to accommodate difference, and are pretty secure in the idea that anyone or anything different than them is “pervy.” The article did give us a personal reaction,but not in a context that gave it any journalistic value. It was a striking measure of our culture that a San Francisco-based progressive publication, and a Bay Area writer gave us something so flabby.
While I’m being a concern troll anyway (and really, I’m sorry about that), I’ll just add that “unfeminine” was applied to the combat, not the combatants, and “natural” referred specifically to one performer’s breasts.
So my issue here is that it seems counterproductive to take a writer to task for realizing that her preconceptions about sex are wrong. She admits to coming into the show expecting something gross, scary, or whatever, but then finds herself enthralled by the performance (“on the edge of my seat, my body tense”) and able to relate to the performers. It would be great if everyone writing about sex were comfortable and knowledgeable about it, but failing that I’ll take willing to learn.
I completely hear you on the tone of the review, but I’m not at all surprised at it. Salon, or more precisely, its readership, is kinda polarized on sexual topics that don’t fall within a fairly narrow range. Being a liberal leftish kinda publication, Salon has a large “sex positive” readership, Susie Bright fans and such, who are generally open to non-mainstream sexuality, who would probably “get” Ultimate Surrender even if they weren’t into women wrestling as a fetish.
But being a liberal leftish kinda publication Salon also has a large publication of SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys) and the particular brand of feminists I call “prudo-feminists” because they’re deeply suspicious of all depictions of sex that are not exquisitely balanced in terms of sexual egalitarianism, which of course means they are deeply suspicious of all depictions of sex, period, hence, prudes.
These people would find the poor exploited women of Ultimate Surrender to be victims of patriarchal male blah-blah-blah and I’m sure they’d see the wrestling as violence against women being carried on by female proxies, the ultimate expression of masculine aggression against women, as both the winner and losers are victims of the patriarchy.
To give you some idea how smug and self-involved the people who hold these ideas are, check out these comments on the love god, lizard king blog, in response to some over-the-top humorous drawing by comics artist Greg Horn. Some of the comments are reasonable, but some of the comments have elevated the smug self-righteousness to ludicrous levels.
Walking a fine line between these two groups, Salon articles dealing with non-egalitarian or commercial sex topics tend to be distant and to make a show of TRYING to be fair and reasonable, but somehow finding the whole topic they are dealing with ickey. Which is exactly what the author did. They’ve been doing it for decades. Helps them maintain their mainstream cred, too.