THIS ARTICLE IS ACTUALLY SFW IN THAT THERE IS NO NAKED PENIS. THERE ARE NAKED DUDES, AND IT IS ABOUT PORN, SO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I don’t watch a lot of video porn, since I tend to get more bang for my buck with the written word, but when I do, Gay for Pay can be a nice vanilla appetizer before I get down to the real stuff.
If you’re not familiar, the premise of Gay for Pay porn is that young straight men will agree to do gay stuff, which is against their very nature, for the promise of cold hard cash. Usually, this is part of the narrative, from agreement to payment, sometimes with the money being thrown on their cummey backs for extra effect.
The videos really set up that these are st8 studs willing to get gay assfucked and cummed all over for them sweet sweet dollars.
Over the years, I’ve wondered why the insistence on straightness, and all I’ve been able to come up with is that these videos are a gay male power fantasies where the straight stud is the one who is denigrated and other-ed for his (in the context of this virtual room) minority sexual identity. Especially because the denigration factor is frequently high.
Later on in the video Michael wraps his thighs around Freaky J’s head and cums directly onto his face, but instead of the cum shot being the end, as in most traditional porn, the camera follows J into the bathroom and records him while he washes the cum off his face and tells the cameraman that it was unexpected.
In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be pornos that punish straight bros for thinking it might be fun and profitable to get fucked by a gay dude they met on Craig’s List. A lot of people have a lot to say about how that perfect world should happen. Not the least of which are my feminist sisters in the dick police who seem to have more in common with the extreme Christian right than with any actual feminists I know.
But if our porn is problematic, that’s got nothing to do with the porn and everything to do with our problems. We frequently work out real-life tensions in the sphere of erotic fantasy. There’s no denying there’s cultural tension between gay and straight men that we have yet to resolve. And that’s putting it lightly. Gay men are still subject to physical attack for being gay in this country. It’s understandable how someone might want to blow off a little steam by watching Freaky J get his face cummed on.
Not being a gay man, whether or not the men are straight is less of a factor for me. It’s more important that they’re doing something that makes them physically and emotionally uncomfortable in exchange for money, which is my own particular interest. One I have a feeling a lot of people might find even more problematic than the gay for pay issue.
Which, of course, is kind of the rule of human sexuality. A thousand separate people can adopt the same sexual practice or habit for a thousand different reasons. I like to think about it like Newtonian physics and quantum physics. Newtonian physics is what we already know about sociology and psychology, we’ve got a pretty solid framework that we’ve used to make some amazing advancements in the field of human behavior. But when we get down to the human sexuality level, all that goes more than a little bit haywire. We tried to applying macro morality to personal sexuality, and all it got us was about a hundred generations of people who were deeply ashamed of their own bodies and appetites.
Would I ever hit someone I loved? Bite them? Restrain them? Let them do anything like that to me? Of course not.
During sex? Oh hell yes. (Provided there’s consent.)
In order to be happy in my body and my use of it, I had to decide that the moral dilemmas of race, class, and gender are not allowed in my presence when I’m fucking.
When I’m getting spanked and fucked, I don’t think “Oh yes, this is one of the weird sex things I do in order to re-contextualize childhood abuse in a safe way so as to manage my lifelong PTSD.” I’m thinking “Spank me, fuck me!” Which, in my opinion, is exactly how it should be.