The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film

Abstract

Porn can be both progressive and reactionary, oppressive and liberating and it is naive simply to welcome or denounce its representations. Debates in Britain have tended to pivot on the oppressive nature of power without often recognizing the possibility of women's pleasure. Heterosexual analyses of porn have rarely applied their theories, often rooted in a binary male-female, subject-object discourse, to same-sex erotic representations. Socialist-feminist men have seen other men's need to watch porn as a social lack: 'A narcissistic substitute for really effective and socially interactive power-sharing' (Bloom, in Day and Bloom, 1988: 21). Many radical feminists have strived to protect us from its corrupting force: 'It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our oppression that it can be from images and fantasies of that very oppression that we draw what we have been encouraged to see as empowering and liberating, i.e., sexual pleasure' (Jeffreys in Chester and Dickey, 1988: 139). Just as it has been taboo for women to express an interest in sex and sexual satisfaction, so feminism has prescribed further taboos declaring 'politically correct' ways of having sex and seeking arousal. To watch, never mind admit to enjoying porn, is equal to treacherous collusion with the most sinister component of hetero-patriarchy. As porn is visible and explicit it could be seen as an easier target to focus the fight against sexism and male violence. However, antiporn campaigners have often conflated sexually explicit images with violence against women, rather than see porn as a socially constructed part of a much