Is the rectum still a grave? Anal sex, pornography and transgression Stephen Maddison Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, anti-hero of Irvine Welsh’s novels Trainspotting and Porno, tells us that anal sex is “essential these days” and nowhere more so than in pornography, where “fit young birds always get it up the arse” and where “any young lassie serious about being a … star” must “take it up the shitter” (Welsh: 2002, 17778). According to Rotten.com (n.d) “today, all-anal videos and DVDs dominate the market, constituting at least half the releases consistently ranked among the bestselling adult films charted by Adult Video News”. Lauren Langman (2004) has suggested that this preponderance of anal sex constitutes part of a larger “grotesque degradation” of women in hardcore (Langman, 2004: 201), and elsewhere I have noted that the output of companies like Extreme Associates and Evil Angel, once considered extreme, now defines the norm for the kinds of mainstream porn charted by Adult Video News (Maddison 2009b). The newly emergent porn studies, typified by Linda Williams’s iconic collection (2004), may reflect the position of porn in popular culture, by taking its legitimacy for granted, but in attempting to avoid the deadlocks of the feminist porn wars, some of this work avoids not only urgent political questions, but some of the most interesting ones as well. Indeed, as Susanna Paasonen (2010) has recently suggested, accounts of the increasing extremity and misogyny of porn run the risk of making generalisations, displacing a more nuanced and complex account of the kinds of meanings porn makes. In this chapter I want to consider the significance of anal sex in mainstream heterosexual porn to questions of gender, selfhood and pleasure. In this analysis I aim to unpack the ubiquity and dominance of anal sex by considering it in the context of historical formulations of sexuality, politics and the body that have emerged from gay liberation, queer politics and feminism. Eve Sedgwick has suggested that for 1 women to be anally penetrated is to be used “as a man”, and that “there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means. Means anything” (Sedgwick 1994: 204, emphasis in original). She goes on to question the impossibility of meaningfully articulating the anus as a site of “women’s active desire” (205). If Sedgwick is right, then this would indicate that all those gaping assholes in porn cannot articulate women’s desire. Should we then suggest that they articulate men’s desire? But desire for what? One key aim here is to discover whether radical gay accounts of anal sex that have proposed its transgressive potential can help us to find ways of both understanding the current fixation with anal, and ways of transgressively reinterpreting it. In an age of pornification, of increasing explicitness, and of apparently increasing sexual choices, it is especially noteworthy that the anus, potentially the most gender-neutral of genital zones, should be as assiduously gendered as it is in heterosexual porn. What does it mean that one of the primary articulations of heterosexuality in porn is women getting fucked in the ass? Catherine Walby offers the notion of “erotic destruction” as a way of conceiving the “ecstatic confusions wrought upon the everyday sense of self by sexual pleasure” (1995: 266). Destruction here conjures both the “tender violence” and the “terrors” of sexual practice that bring about a “momentary annihilation or suspension of…self” (266). Waldby picks up the idea of destruction from the words of Jeanette Winterson’s lesbian protagonist in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Jess says “I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me…I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer, and never be destroyed” (Winterson 1985, quoted in Waldby 1995: 266). Waldby considers ways in which we might understand heterosexual eroticism as a more mutual enterprise, and foregrounds the transgressive potential of anally penetrating men as a way of destroying the phallic imago and empowering a phallic woman (272). One of the key elements of Waldby’s argument is her 2 suggestion that the erotic potential of the male anus is intensified by the strength of the phallic taboo against it; that the enormity of the transgression and the cost of its destructive potential is what makes eroticism of the male anus so compelling. But Waldby points out that this intensification of erotic potential in men’s anuses usually involves a violent repression, where this potential is channelled “back into the penis” and into “violence against…those who…experience such pleasure themselves”. Thus, repression of the erotic potential of the anus can lead to both an intensification of the erotic “destruction” of women, and of homophobic anxiety and violence (273). Current trends in mainstream hardcore would seem to uphold elements of Waldby’s thesis. Enrico Biasin and Federico Zecca (2009) have recently noted what they describe as a “new” hyperbolic mode of Williams’s famous characterization of hardcore porn as a “frenzy of the visible” (1990). This mode is characterised by fetishistic practices that were once synonymous with gonzo genres, but which can now be found across most porn styles.i Primary amongst these practices is the kind of “extreme anal” that has cemented the reputations of porn auteur/performers like John Stagliano, Rocco Siffredi and Max Hardcore, that foregrounds doublepenetration, ass-to-mouth, cum swapping, anal gaping and violent ass fucking. Pornography has made anal sex a primary articulation of heterosexuality. And with the exception of a small sub-genre of pegging films that specialise in women fucking men with strap-ons, all of the anal intercourse in (heterosexual) mainstream hardcore consists of men fucking women in the ass. If the anus means anything, as Freud, Silverman and Sedgwick remind us, it means “an erotogenic zone which is undecidable with respect to gender” (Sedgwick 1994: 97). That it means, in the mainstream porn of Elegant Angel, Vivid Entertainment, Wicked Pictures, and others, very specifically the receptivity of women’s anuses and the non-receptivity of men’s, points to the density with which gender is circumscribed in this kind of porn, and in turn to the density of the anus itself as a site of contestation and anxiety. In other 3 words, the non-receptivity of men’s anuses makes meaning, as does the receptivity of women’s anuses; this asymmetry is especially striking given that, physiologically speaking at least, being anally penetrated is likely to be more pleasurable for men because of the location of the prostate gland. The dominance of anal was something noted by Martin Amis in his now infamous article on the porn industry, ‘A Rough Trade’, published in 2001. Amis interviews John Stagliano and asks him, “How do you account for the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex [in the industry]?” Amis’s account of Stagliano’s answer bears quoting in detail: After a minimal shrug and a minimal pause Stagliano said, “Pussies are bullshit.” Now John was being obedient to the dictionary definition of “bullshit” which is nonsense intended to deceive. With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated - well, here you have some chick chirruping away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jack-knifed over his flying fist) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit? With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly puts it, “Her personality comes out.” He goes on: “You want guys who can fuck really good and make the girls look more . . . virile.” Virile of course, means manly; but once again Stagliano is using the King’s English. You want the girls to show you “their testosterone”. (Amis 2001) Here the “undecidable” nature of the anus becomes foregrounded. The pussy, the genital organ associated with women, is “bullshit”, not only “nonsense” but defined by deception (in Amis’s words). Is the manifestation of pleasure in vaginal intercourse “real” or does it deceive the “genuinely discerning viewer”? How can that viewer, 4 experiencing an affective frenzy, trust the veracity of her response in his? (That he’s jack-knifed over his flying fist may render the question moot.) The answer to the indeterminacy and deceptiveness of the pussy is the anus. Why? Amis, representing Stagliano, suggests it’s because being anally penetrated solicits a more “guttural” and “animal” response from the woman performer. But how is more guttural and animal more authentic, and to whom? Williams has famously argued that porn is driven by the fantasy of capturing the “truth” of female sexual pleasure (“indiscreet jewels”), but that its frenzied gaze upon the female body is a “narcissistic evasion of the feminine ‘other’ deflected back to the masculine self” (Williams 1990: 267). Stagliano’s suggestion of anally penetrated women demonstrating more virility and testosterone, points to an obvious substitution, as we may suggest Amis substitutes Stagliano for himself. The anus is more authentic than the vagina, for Stagliano, Amis and the men they assume to be watching porn, because men have one too. Thus what is apparently a preoccupation with female authenticity becomes a narcissistic substitution of the anus, the indeterminately gendered orifice/receptacle. Here the idea of the affective response to being penetrated is a fantasy belonging to men. It is worth emphasising that the response desired by Stagliano (and by Amis) isn’t necessarily one of pleasure: “guttural” and “animal” are as likely to be affective responses to pain and discomfort. Amis notes that Stagliano defines these authentic responses as signs of female virility, not male virility (as we might expect). This transference typifies the “undecidability” of the anus: anal sex may offer an affirmation of phallic agency through the solicitation of a “guttural” response, but the preoccupation itself points to an identification with being penetrated. Langman suggests that “the symbolism of male masochism is blatant” in “painful anal” in porn (2004: 207). It is the vicissitude of the anus that enables such compelling male identification with it: men can be anally penetrated too. The logic organising this hierarchy of authenticity and pleasure depends upon the absence of a female 5 enunciative position. By definition, any response articulated by women performers is “deception” and neither Stagliano nor Amis consults women either making porn or watching it for their perspective. Indeed, this logic of men’s pleasure in women getting ass-fucked rather depends on a notion of “woman” alienated from rational articulation, agency and desire. That women are (anally penetrated) means that men aren’t “destroyed”. Amis, a distastefully prurient spectator, notes that Stagliano “again and again…wistfully and reverently” conjures the name of Rocco Siffredi, “the bigdorked Italian, and porno’s premier buttbanger or assbuster (to use the dialect of this tribe)” (Amis 2001). Amis here substitutes Stagliano’s homosocial desire of Rocco for his own, as he earlier substituted Stagliano’s anal desire for his own. Such a substitution guards against the kind of transgression Waldby describes as “destruction” (1996: 267). She suggests that: “If the point of the phallic imago is to guard against confusion between the imaginary anatomies of masculine and feminine, and to shore up masculine power, then anal eroticism threatens to explode this ideological body…anal erotics in the male body amount to…a taking of pleasure in being destroyed rather than being the destroyer” (1995: 272). In films like Torri, Tara and Bobbi Love Rocco (2010, dir. Siffredi) and Rocco’s Back (2009, dir. Siffredi) the sex scenes demonstrate an affective intensity and performative endurance that turns women into the “meat” repository for the demonstration of performances by male “plant” machinery (Willeman 2004: 21). Vaso-active drugs have banished the limp penis from hardcore pornography and installed new standards of male and female performance and physiology (Hartley 2006; Marshall 2002; Marshall & Katz 2002) giving rise to what Mark Davis refers to as the “Viagra cyborg” (2009) and what I have theorised as the biopolitics of the penis (Maddison 2009a). This discipline of performance and prowess overlaps with the emergence of anal sex as a dominant articulation of heterosexuality in porn. For Langman, “grotesque degradation”, which includes the current mode of anal sex 6 under discussion here, is a product of cyberporn and works to compensate men for the privations of neoliberalism (2004: 212). Porn may offer the compensatory spectacle of “the cum guzzling slut painfully split open by a giant cock in her ass” (Langman 2004: 213) but in doing so it also installs a disciplinary injunction that is unrealistic to say the least. Alongside the injunction to hypermasculinity, porn also offers ubiquitous and “undecidable” anal sex, promising masochistic “destruction”. In this context, it is not difficult to interpret Rocco”s excessive and ecstatic demonstrations of phallic endurance as a violent repression of male anal eroticism, especially when such excess is channelled “back into the penis” and into the sadistic ass-fucking of female performers from whom he constantly solicits attestations of their pleasure. In this rationality, pussies are “bullshit” because fucking a pussy doesn’t effect as convincing a repression of male anal eroticism as does fucking a woman in the ass. Yet the problem with repression, as any good Freudian knows, is that it is by definition, leaky, inconsistent and insecure. Eve Sedgwick identifies “to use a woman as a man” as a popular euphemism for heterosexual anal sex, and I shall return to the instability of the “pussies are bullshit” rationality shortly. But what is at stake here? Is this simply a matter of unrecognised sexual desires? Of men liberating their frigid arseholes and enjoying it? Of re-stating the overwhelmingly patriarchal context of the hardcore industry? For Mario Mieli, an Italian gay liberationist writing in 1977, repression of anal eroticism is not merely an important way of securing a phallic masculine subjectivity, but of reproducing bourgeois capitalism. To be fucked is to be “ruined” both in materialist and gender terms (Mieli 1977: 140). Drawing on both Freud and Marx, by way of Fereneczi, Mieli suggests that the repression of polymorphous infantile scatological pleasure works to sublimate anal pleasure in the accumulation of money (142). He argues that “if you know what tremendous enjoyment is to be had from anal intercourse, then you necessarily become different from the “normal” run of people with a frigid arse” (Mieli 7 1977: 139). For Mieli, repression of Eros and economic repression are entwined, and find their most profound expression in the repression of anality, and its sublimation in capital accumulation. Mieli understood heterosexual male fear of being fucked as the cause of their “blind phallic egoism”, itself an obstacle to the attainment of true “reciprocity” and intersubjectivity (140). So, whilst anal eroticism is transgressive in its liberation of Eros, its effect in desublimating the anal character’s neurotic accumulation of capital potentially effects a much wider social transformation. If “capital liberalises desire while channelling it into a consumerist outlet” (129), anal sex holds the promise of anti-capitalist selfhood. Capitalist ideology depends upon the psychic repression of polymorphous desires and their expression in forms that reinforce social alienation, competition and the hysterical accumulation of money. For Mieli, the liberation of anal eroticism promises a mutuality of sexual experience that will not only prevent men from fucking women “badly” and foster greater identification with women, but will underpin a wider revolutionary transformation of the ways capitalism represses sexual energies, and institutionalises exploitation. Mieli’s work is characterised by a deliciously radical campery that delights in flagrancy, queening-up both Freud and Marx alike. His work serves as a high water mark for the optimism characteristic of gay liberation, a perspective that explicitly linked sexual transgression and desublimation to wider social and political transformation. Ten years later, at the height of the Northern hemisphere’s AIDS epidemic, Simon Watney offered a very different analysis of the political meanings of anal sex. If Mieli offers the gay man’s anus as the model for a widespread radicalisation of erotic potential (“my arse is open to everyone…” 1977: 145) Watney notes how AIDS discourse reinscribed gay men’s bodies in terms of disease and contagion born of precisely the kinds of excesses and permeability Mieli prescribes. In a reactionary backlash against the political gains of gay liberation and its erotic libertarianism, in the AIDS discourse of the mid 1980s gay sex and the gay anus 8 become unsafe, in Sedgwick’s words “fragile and fatal” (Sedgwick 1994: 210 n21). Watney argues that “the male rectum is the most thoroughly policed part of the male anatomy” and this suggests that “a particular effort is needed to redirect the libido away from deeply repressed memories of anal erotic pleasure in infancy, at a time when our primary awareness of our bodies is erotogenic. AIDS offers a new sign for the symbolic machinery of repression, making the rectum a grave.” (126) Watney offers a thorough analysis of the ways in which public discourse of homosexuality in the mid and late 1980s in both the US and Britain reinvested the totems of gay liberation radicalism – promiscuity, sexual flexibility, exploration, making the private public – in a moralising agenda that threatened to turn back the advances that had been made by lesbians and gays in the previous decade. Where once anal eroticism promised symbolic dissolution and transgressive “destruction” of the (bourgeois, phallic) self, homophobic panic literalised the fear of death alluded to in these possibilities. Taking up the question of the rectum a year after Watney”s book was published, Leo Bersani (1988) offered his own analysis of AIDS discourse, noting the mainstream media’s concern with innocent and guilty victims. Gay men are the guilty victims of these discourses, which highlight gay promiscuity as insatiable and unstoppable. Bersani links right-wing rhetoric about AIDS with Victorian accounts of prostitution and notes that in both, “women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction” (211) and suggests that: “phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women” (217, emphasis in original). In a critique of Foucault’s coyness about the gay life-style, the liberal pluralism of Weeks, Rubin and Watney, and the determinism of Dworkin and 9 MacKinnon, Bersani seeks to recover the radicalism of sex, and in particular the radicalism of what Waldby might describe as “destructive” sex. He famously conjures “the infinitely…seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (212) in a way that prefigures Waldby’s anally permeable heterosexual male and reminds us, again, that “the moral taboo on ‘passive’ anal sex in ancient Athens is primarily formulated as a kind of hygienics of social power. To be penetrated is to abdicate power” (212, emphasis in original). But I would suggest that Bersani’s analysis goes much further than Waldby’s. The anal eroticism Waldby imagines offers the appealing fantasy of a dominant masculinity transgressed by the potential penetratability of the phallic man. Such a fantasy is possible because men have an anus, and the possibility of its getting fucked always haunts phallic ideology, according to Waldby, a possibility that must be continually repressed along both masculine/feminine and heterosexual/homosexual lines (273). What is less explicit, and probably less transgressive, about the fantasy of anal eroticism Waldby (and Mieli) enunciate is the extent to which it anticipates and desires an (un-transgressed) phallic subjectivity in the first place. As Bersani says: “If, as Weeks puts it, gay men “gnaw at the roots of a male heterosexual identity” it is not because of the parodistic distance that they take from that identity, but rather because, from within their nearly mad identification with it, they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violated” (209, emphasis in original). In the context of early forms of Queer culture and politics – S&M, drag, butch-femme – Bersani reminds us that if we are to come to terms with the politics of sex, where “parody is an erotic turn-off” (208) and “sexual desire for men can’t be merely a kind of culturally neutral attraction to a Platonic idea of the male body” (208) we must come to terms with our identification with, and our desire for, the “brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity” (208). As phallic ideology always already anticipates and represses the desire for 10 passivity it projects on to others, so the transgressive eroticism of men’s anuses always already desires the phallic subjectivity it seeks to “destroy”. There’s a risk of tautology in Bersani’s argument, but he concludes by suggesting that “if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared – differently – by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential of death.” (222) This is of course where Mieli’s politics are heading – not merely a more erotically and socially satisfactory arrangement of existing institutions (like heterosexuality) but a radical transformation of the structures underpinning those erotic and social arrangements. Do such formations of eroticism, subjectivity and psychic desublimation still offer the same kinds of transgressive potential that they did for Waldby in 1995 and Bersani in 1988? I want to pursue this question in the context of mainstream heterosexual hardcore pornography because it is, quite literally, awash with anal sex. One problem with the work of Mieli, Bersani and Waldby is the relative lack of materiality in their analysis. This is one reason why I’ve referred to their conceptions of anal eroticism in men as a fantasy. There are very few places where we can adjudicate sexual practice, and whilst all three writers offer astute and politically shrewd analyses that address underlying structural questions that pose urgent problems to a variety of radical politics, the figure on which those analyses turn, the heterosexual man “destroyed” by anal eroticism, is strikingly elusive. In the very last sentence of her chapter, Waldby suggests that “what theoretical feminism needs now is a strap-on” (275). But who is actually wearing it? And where are the men feminism is going to use it on? It is here that I want to return to the proposition that the abundance of anal sex in porn represents a repression of male anal eroticism. I’ve suggested that the phallic subjectivity Waldby wants to transgress by way of anal eroticism already presupposes desire for that phallic subjectivity. Given that the current vernacular of 11 mainstream hardcore foregrounds “plant” performances on “meat” repositories (Willeman 2004), and upholds a biopolitics of the penis which disciplines erotic competence in women and men (Maddison 2009a), we might expect porn to successfully repress desire for its “plant” to be anally “destroyed”; indeed we would assume that porn fails to manifest a heterosexual male anus at all. What use would it have for one? And yet this is not what we find in the films of Stagliano and Amis’s homosocial object of desire. Rocco Siffredi is probably the most famous man currently working in the industry. He has starred in over 1,300 films, having made romantic adventures and comedies in the style of the Vivid Studio, as well as in his more familiar gonzo style with John Stagliano at Evil Angel Video, and eventually for his own company Rocco Siffredi Produzioni (Siffredi n.d.). Rocco’s films are characterised by the kinds of extreme anal I’ve already discussed, along with irrumatio, slapping, spitting and other kinds of mild sadism. But they are also haunted by the spectacle of Rocco’s anus. A characteristic of the pile-driver sexual position allegedly invented by Max Hardcore, and a staple of Rocco’s performative repertoire, in which the female performer lies on her back projecting her rump vertically with the man entering her from a semi-standing position above, is that it exposes the ass of the male performer, as his buttocks part with each thrust. A similar, and more concentrated, effect occurs in popular double penetration positions. In order to project his penis forward enough to penetrate, unencumbered by his own thighs, or those of the other man, the male performer on the top, the second to penetrate the female performer, usually has to spread his own legs outside everyone else’s. This has the effect of parting his buttocks and exposing his ass; as there are limited angles by which to shoot double penetration and capture the genital action, the camera is usually placed just behind his buttocks, potentially exacerbating the effect. In general, the photography and direction of hardcore seeks to ameliorate these effects, often by using extreme close- 12 ups to limit collateral display of the male anus. Rocco’s films, in which he usually stars and directs, frequently offer a different approach. In Rocco’s Bitch Party (2010, dir. Siffredi) Rocco pile-drives Bobbi Starr and Sindee Jennings in the sunshine by a pool. The camera lingers on Bobbi’s gaping asshole as Rocco repeatedly withdraws and reinserts his penis. With each thrust the shaded groove between Rocco’s buttocks contrasts with Bobbi’s gaping ass, and we catch glimpses of his wrinkled pucker. Here the striking visual equivalence between his ass and hers seems anything but a repression of his anal eroticism. At one point, he withdraws his penis and offers Bobbi his ass. She leans forward to rim him as he choke-fucks Sindee. He encourages her, “Oh, you know I love this, eh? Oh yeah, lick my ass, baby. More, more. I want to feel your tongue.” Lifting his balls, to push his penis into Sindee’s mouth, he reveals his anus, penetrated by Bobbi’s tongue. Toward the conclusion of the scene, pile-driving Sindee’s ass, his buttocks parted and pushed at the camera, Rocco again shows the camera his anus. It doesn’t gape like Sindee’s, but it refuses to be un-signified; not only present, but sexualised, Rocco’s asshole displays itself to us. The first scene of Rocco’s Back (2009, dir. Siffredi) narratively plays out Rocco’s return to performing, as Tarra White and Aliz attempt to coax Rocco out of retirement; inevitably they succeed in this endeavour, and in the course of the genital action Rocco asphyxiates Tarra with his ass as she rims him. Do such scenes deliver opportunities for the kind of “destruction” Waldby is looking for? These are performances that foreground the technocratically superior “big dork”, relentless and ever-hard, its phallicism a function of filming and production techniques, towering over the faces and rumps of female co-stars. Let’s not forget that what Waldby is interested in isn’t anal eroticism for its own sake, but rather its potential to transgress the logic of phallic eroticism and provide greater mutuality in heterosexuality. In this context, and read diegetically, Rocco’s explorations of his 13 anal eroticism seem to offer few opportunities to reimagine a more mutual form of erotic destruction. His female co-stars could hardly be said to occupy a phallic destructive sexual role; in terms of the progress of the genital play, they are subjugated by Rocco’s ass, rather than subjugating it. But extra-diegetically Rocco’s ass may offer both female and male spectators more transgressive possibilities. Waldby’s interest in anal sex is essentially liberal, for very good political and strategic reasons. For her the anus allows women the opportunity to turn the tables on men, but glosses both the desire for phallic forms of masculinity in the first place (as I’ve already suggested) and the pleasure of female (and male) subordination, a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self…beyond the fantasies of bodily power and subordination” (Bersani 1988: 217). In films like Rocco’s Bitch Party, Rocco’s ass isn’t a fully repressed anus, an absent or un-signified anus, but is instead a hungry anus. Rocco’s ass cannot satisfy its hunger (at least on screen; we can only speculate about its private activities) because it is circumscribed by the rationalities of homosocial ideology and fear of the erotic destruction Waldby might (theoretically, at least) subject it to. And above all, its hunger remains unsatisfied because it is a site of capital accumulation: Rocco is a brand, an auteur, a “bigdorked Italian”, practically a generic classification all his own, and certainly the centre of a very profitable entertainment corporation. Rocco’s rectum cannot be a grave “in which the masculine ideal…is buried” (Bersani 1988: 222). But as with any complex formation, the density of meanings that accrue to the kinds of anal eroticism Rocco offers, produce effects that cannot be entirely contained by the reinscriptive force of the brand identity. Can we offer a transgressive structure for watching Rocco’s porn? Stagliano’s pronouncement that “pussies are bullshit” and his “wistful reverence” for Rocco, in Martin Amis’s words, suggests that if Rocco’s ass is hungry then there is a relational context for that hunger to be expressed. Both men, known for their fixation with anal sex, take women “as a man”, simultaneously repressing 14 their homosexual desires and reaffirming their homosocial romance. In this context, the hunger Rocco’s ass articulates in his films is sublimated, in accord with his anal character, in capital accumulation; Rocco is head of his own studio, Rocco and Stagliano have been business partners and retain financial interest in their mutual back catalogue. Rocco returns to performing in order to overcome the sexual frustration of working in porn behind the camera, but also because “the business is so low” and because he’s spent “four million” building a new studio in Budapest and in doing so, he reaffirms his phallic imago (Miller 2010). But this imago, demonstrating as it does such hunger (“Oh, you know I love this, eh? Oh yeah, lick my ass, baby. More, more. I want to feel your tongue”), such potential for anal eroticism, cannot but solicit “destructive” desires from diverse spectatorial positions. We may readily anticipate such transgressive desire in heterosexual women and gay men who watch Rocco’s films; as Bersani puts it, “from within a nearly mad identification with [male heterosexual identity]…they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violated” (Bersani 209). But we must also identify a destructive desire in heterosexual male spectators, who, like Stagliano (and Amis) long not only to “spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction” (Bersani 211) but themselves desire to destroy the “big-dorked Italian” who stands not only as ideal archetype for the phallic imago, but as its bio-technical disciplinary standard (Maddison 2009a). Why has there been such an intensification of anality in contemporary porn? John Stagliano pioneered techniques that came to define the gonzo genre with his first Buttman films in the late 1980s; by 1994 the Adult Video News annual awards had introduced a new category for best gonzo. Initially Stagliano’s Buttman films foregrounded an ass fetish, rather than a preoccupation with anal sex; it was one of Stagliano’s associates, Adam Glasser, with his alter-ego Seymore Butts, who cemented gonzo’s tradition of “buttbanging” and “assbusting”.ii With trends towards 15 the pornification of culture and the increasing diversification of hardcore production and distribution, it is easy to understand the dominance of gonzo in the current era of digital porn. Gonzo can be cheaply produced, with a seamless digital workflow from filming to publication and retail. And the camera-as-spectator in the scene reflects the increasingly intimate relationship porn spectators have with smaller screens and browsing-as-viewing modes of consumption. In this context, how can we expect male and female heterosexuality, and the complementary and mutually reinforcing sets of homosocial structures that discipline that heterosexuality, to remain constant and unchanging? If male homosociality secures the interests of men through the exchange of women and the repression of the homoeroticism that haunts men’s bonds with one another (Sedgwick 1985, Maddison 2000) and female homsociality “helps heterosexual women to further men’s interests” by being “one of the girls” whilst instating a lesbophobic boundary to police female gender identification (Storr 2003: 49-53), what are the effects on such structures of the kinds of anal sexuality and the wider commodity innovation in genital acts that is driven by the economic power of gonzo? Or to put it another way does Rocco’s hungry ass promise a liberation of the frigid male arse (Mieli) a destruction of the phallic imago (Waldby) and the death of the masculine ideal (Bersani)? Sexual tastes and the sexual ideologies that police gender, are increasingly driven by the needs of capital. Male homosociality depends upon the violent repression of the proximity of homoeroticism that upholds a phobic injunction against homosexuality. For some time now, we have seen this homophobic injunction become unsettled by trends towards an increasing consumerist exploitation of masculinity that have effectively gayed it up (exemplified in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the “metrosexualisation” of heterosexual men). Concomitantly, in a “post-gay” moment we are witnessing both the disappearance and the assimilation of gay identities (Sinfield 1998, Bech 1997).As neoliberal consumer culture has 16 embraced homosexuality for its profit potential, emboldening queers of all hues, those queers have become literally less marginal than they once were. Thus assimilated, and generally lacking a trans-generational culture with which to reinvigorate and inspire the less experienced, queers have become less politically meaningful than they were, to the point of “disappearing” in Bech’s words. Queerness, and all it stands for, is less troubling than it once was. An economically significant effect of this is the so-called “metrosexualisation” of heterosexual men, who have become subjects of the consumer culture just as upper-class women did in the early twentieth century and middle-class women did in the post-war period. Male narcissism, fashion and grooming are no longer signs of queerness, but of successful heterosexuality; gay men have thus not only disappeared politically and culturally, but aesthetically and stylistically as well. Have other aspects of homosexuality gained similar levels of familiarity and become less threatening? Do men still fear being penetrated as they did? In the Northern hemisphere we occupy, discursively at least, a post-AIDS moment. So what’s left to fear in being fucked up the ass? We don’t fear queers (as we did); we don’t fear AIDS and STIs (as we should). Is there still an injunction against anal sex? Rocco licences a post-gay preoccupation with anal sex, but a kind of anality that rigorously upholds a phallicism secured by economic and patriarchal interests. For Mieli, writing in the first years of gay liberation, anal intercourse was the aspect of homosexuality most feared by heterosexual men (1977: 139). Have the intervening years made anal “destruction” a less terrible threat to homosocial subjectivity? Rocco’s hungry ass announces itself, outrageously, and in flagrant transgression of male homosocial ideology, through a partial desublimation of that ideology’s injunction against the possibility of male penetration. Thus brought forth, the hungry ass becomes part of the representational economy of Rocco’s oeuvre, soliciting destructive desires from fans and spectators of the kind of liberal transgression Waldby formulates. But this partial desublimation of Rocco’s hungry ass is effected through commodity forms of the digital-porn complex, thus re17 securing a “repression of sexual energy by capital” (Mieli 1977). Rocco’s ass represents an inversion of Mieli’s desublimated anus. Where Mieli’s erotically liberated anus also promised a liberation from repressive capital accumulation, Rocco’s hungry ass is hungry for money. As such it represents a characteristic manifestation of neoliberal sexuality, where potentially transgressive desires, pleasures and practices become detached from collective engagement and instead come to stand as guarantees of individual, atomised subjectivity. Thus Mieli’s investment in liberating heterosexual men’s anuses for erotic and political transformation becomes, in Rocco’s ass, capital accumulation and hypermasculine performativity. And worse, this “phallic imago”, in Waldby’s terms, is a property not of individual, alienated men but of what we might call the porn-pharma complex, that is leased to men through an ongoing series of monthly subscriptions to porn sites, and underwritten by the guarantee of vaso-active drugs that secure the plausibility of the “Viagra cyborg”. So much for Rocco’s hungry ass. But why is women getting butt-fucked a dominant mode of heterosexuality in porn? As I’ve suggested, in Rocco’s performative style we can see how fucking women anally disavows anal desire in men. The prevailing structure of porn in the style of Siffredi, Stagliano and their ilk is homosocial; masochistic desire for, and violent disavowal of, anal penetration and anal pleasure, is a primary way in which porn organises negotiations with women. As we’ve seen in discourses of anality (“pussies are bullshit”) and in the distribution of affective responses in porn (“guttural”, “virile”), women represent both the opportunity for demonstrating phallic prowess, and the possibility of failing to demonstrate that prowess. This latter possibility remains critical to the functioning of the porn-pharma complex, which constitutes hypermasculinity and capitalises on the anxiety endemic to it. The rectum is thus, in part, intelligible as the death of a certain kind of phallic subjectivity, but not in the terms Bersani imagines. As phallic confidence dies, there 18 is the promise of its resurrection. The rectum symbolises masculine anxiety; what is resurrected through it is as unpalatable as faeces: resurrection is conditional upon consent to the ongoing extraction of profit potential. Big-dorked Italians and the guarantee of pharmacological on-demand hypermasculinity promise individual male supremacy and concomitant female subordination, but manifest what Nikolas Rose has called “government at a distance” (1996: 59). References Amis, Martin (2001) ‘A Rough Trade’, Guardian, 17th March. Bech, Henning (1997) When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bersani, Leo (1988) ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Douglas Crimp (ed.) AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Biasin, Enrico & Zecca, Federico (2009) ‘Contemporary Audiovisual Pornography: Branding Strategy and Gonzo Film Style’ Cinema&Cie: International Film Studies Journal, 9, 12, 133-50. Davis, Mark (2009), Sex, Technology and Public Health, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartley, Heather (2006), ‘The “Pinking” of Viagra Culture: Drug Industry Efforts to Create and Repackage Sex Drugs for Women’, Sexualities 9 (3): 363-378. Langman, Lauren (2004), ‘Grotesque Degradation: Globalization, Carnivalization, and Cyberporn’ in Dennis D. Waskul (ed.) net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography and the Internet, New York: Peter Lang. Maddison, Stephen (2009a) ‘”The Second Sexual Revolution”: Big Pharma, Porn and 19 the Biopolitical Penis, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 22, Fall, 3554. Maddison, Stephen (2009b) ‘”Choke on it, bitch!”: Porn Studies, Extreme Gonzo and the Mainstreaming of Hardcore’ in Feona Attwood (ed.) Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western Culture, London & New York: IB Tauris. Maddison, Stephen (2000) Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture, London: Macmillan. Marshall, Barbara L & Katz, Stephen (2002) ‘Forever Functional: Sexual Fitness and the Ageing Male Body’ Body and Society, 8 (4): 43-70. Marshall, Barbara L (2002), ‘”Hard Science”: Gendered Constructions of Sexual Dysfunction in the “Viagra Age”’, Sexualities, 5(2): 131-158. Mieli, Mario (1977) Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, London: Gay Men’s Press. Miller, Dan (2010) ‘Rocco Siffredi Reveals Reasons for Return in Exclusive Interview’, Adult Video News, http://business.avn.com/articles/Rocco-SiffrediReveals-Reasons-for-Return-In-Exclusive-Interview-384795.html, accessed 28/9/10. Paasonen, Susanna (2010) ‘Repetition and Hyperbole: The Gendered Choreographies of Heteroporn’ in Karen Boyle (ed.) Everyday Pornography, London & New York: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas, 1996, ‘Governing “advanced” liberal democracies’ in Barry et al (eds.) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government. London: UCL Press. Rotten.com (n.d) http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/pornographers/max-hardcore/, 20 accessed 28/9/10. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1994) Tendencies, London: Routledge. Siffredi, Rocco (n.d.) http://www.roccosiffrediblog.com/, accessed 20/9/10. Sinfield, Alan (1998) Gay and After, London: Serpent’s Tail. Storr, Merl (2003) Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers, Oxford & New York: Berg. Waldby, Catherine (1995) ‘Destruction: Boundary Erotics and Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body’ in Elizabeth Grosz & Elspeth Probyn (eds.) Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, London & New York: Routledge. Watney, Simon (1987) Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media 2nd Edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Welsh, Irvine (2002) Porno, London: Jonathan Cape. Willeman, Paul (2004) ‘For a Pornoscape’, in Pamela Church Gibson (ed.) More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, London: BFI. Williams, Linda (1990) Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, London: Pandora. Williams, Linda (2004) (ed.) Porn Studies, Durham & London: Duke University Press. 21 Abstract: In 1977 the Italian Marxist gay liberationist, Mario Mieli, suggested that “if you know what tremendous enjoyment is to be had form anal intercourse, then you necessarily become different from the “normal” run of people with a frigid arse.” (Mieli, 1977, p.139) Mieli, interpreting Freud and Marx, suggested that anal eroticism was transgressive not only for its liberation of Eros, but also for its desublimation of the anal character”s neurotic accumulation of capital. Anal sex held the promise of anticapitalist selfhood. Ten years later, in the midst of the North”s AIDS epidemic, Simon Watney suggested that the disease had offered new modes of repression that had made the “rectum a grave”. Taking up this idea a year later, in his iconoclastic essay, “Is the rectum a grave?” Leo Bersani offered an account of human sexuality that turned contemporary debates on their head. Bersani identified a redemptive, pastoral liberalism at the heart of both the radical feminism of Dworkin and MacKinnon, and the pro-SM feminism of Rubin and Califia. Bersani argued that calls for sexual pluralism made by women and gay men alike disingenuously overlooked the intolerable desirability of passivity. Conjuring “the infinitely…seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” Bersani concluded that: “if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal…is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential of death.” Here anal sex represents a shattering transgression not only of selfhood, but of murderous misogynous homophobia. At the end of the first decade of the new millennium does anal sex still have the transgressive potential it had for Mieli and Bersani? What has happened to anal sex in the last twenty-five years? This chapter will consider the politics of anal sex in hardcore pornography in the digital age. In porn, as Irvine Welsh has noted, anal sex is now the dominant articulation of heterosexual desire. Lauren Langman desribes extreme anal as a “grotesque degradation” of women that offers men compensations for the privations of capitalism and the advances of feminism. Yet even the once “frigid arse” of the heterosexual man is now deflowered as a matter of course, with a growing number of porn films featuring rimming and pegging (men getting fucked by women wearing strap-on dildos). At the same time, the post-AIDS consensus about the use of condoms in gay porn has substantially broken down, and both gay and straight films routinely fetishise sperm transmission, gaping orifices and postKinseyian cycles of penetration. Why has anal sex become so omnipresent? In these contexts is it possible to restore its transgressive potential? And if the rectum is still a grave, what forms of mortality does it broker? As well as considering Mieli, Bersani, and Freud, this chapter will draw on the work of Guy Hocquenghem and Henning Bech, as well as contemporary theories of neoliberalism. Biography Stephen Maddison is Principal Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He is the author of Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture (Macmillan & St. Martin”s Press, 2000), and has published work on the cultural politics of sexuality in a number of journals and edited collections. He has published essays on pornography in New Formations and in two new collections, Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Culture (IB Tauris) and Online Pornography (Peter Lang), and is working on a monograph entitled The Myth of Porn. He co-runs the website www.opengender.org.uk. 22 i Gonzo porn, as distinguished from “feature” or narrative porn, aims to put the viewer into the scene, and often uses handheld camera shots, or a first person perspective on the action, which tends to be edited less. Gonzo films tend to have lower production values, and less “gloss” than traditional features, although gonzo is itself now a diverse category. ii See P. Weasels, “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Gonzo”, http://www.gamelink.com/news.jhtml?news_id=news_nt_101_gonzo, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stagliano, both accessed 28/9/10. 23