Is the sexual practice in which two men penetrate a woman anally and vaginally at the same time -- a "DP," or double penetration in the vernacular of the pornography industry -- inherently sexist?
When I first got into academic life, I couldn't have predicted some of the questions that would come my way. But after nearly two decades of writing and speaking about the contemporary pornography industry, not much surprises me.
This question was posed to me recently by a man who had read an essay of mine in which I had argued that men's ability to achieve sexual pleasure by masturbating as they watch DP scenes in pornographic movies was an example of a failure of empathy.
Is a DP inherently degrading and therefore sexist, as my essay implied? After corresponding a bit with the man, I realized I had never addressed the question directly in print. He pressed for a simple yes-or-no answer, but it seems more useful to walk through a careful response to the question. So, let's start with ...
Observation #1: The only people who have ever asked me that question are men. I'm not suggesting that no woman has ever considered the question. But it is the case that in my 18 years of working on this issue, it has been a question raised exclusively by men.
From there, let's move to other important observations and assumptions on which my conclusion will be based.
Assumption #1: There in considerable individual variation in the human species, yet there are also patterns in human behavior. That is, we cannot ever predict what any specific individual will feel, think, or do, but we often can find patterns in human emotions, cognition, and action. That leads to ...
Assumption #2: There are women who in their personal lives find sexual pleasure and/or emotional fulfillment in DPs, which I call an assumption because ...
Observation #2: In my 48 years, I have never met a woman outside the pornography industry who has acknowledged participating in a DP or having a desire to do so. It's possible that I have met an unrepresentative group of women, or that some of those women have participated or harbor such desires but remain silent about it. But neither of those possibilities square with my experience, which includes traveling widely for many years to talk in a variety of settings about these issues.
Observation #3: When I ask women whether they think a DP is degrading and sexist, all have answered yes or refused to answer, suggesting the question is meant to be a diversion from a focus on men's behavior. I do not claim this is a scientific sample from which generalizations can be made. Again, it could be that I have spoken to an idiosyncratic group of women, but I think there's a pattern here.
Observation #4: I have never met a man outside the pornography industry who has acknowledged participating in a DP, though some have told me they would like to. Given men's typical celebration of their sexual feats, there's no reason to think men are hiding their participation in DPs. These observations lead me to ...
Assumption #3: Outside of pornography, very few heterosexuals are participating in DPs. There is no systematic data on this, because surveys of sexual behavior don't ask specifically about DPs. But the most reasonable assumption is that DPs, while common in pornography, are relatively rare outside of the industry and are not part of the routine sexual practices of the vast majority of people.
Assumption #4: Heterosexual men who watch pornographic movies featuring DPs -- whether or not they have a desire to participate in DPs in their lives -- know that the vast majority of women would not find sexual pleasure or emotional fulfillment in a DP and do not desire to participate. Male pornography consumers have told me they think that the women being DPed in pornography like it, and some say that women outside pornography might like it if they tried it. But I'm relatively confident that most men don't think most women really want to be DPed.
Based on those observations and assumptions, I reach a conclusion that seems uncontroversial to me:
Conclusion #1: The key to the sexual attraction of DPs for men is the knowledge that women don't want it. The men who watch DPs in pornography know that the vast majority of women outside pornography do not seek out that sex act, and this knowledge is at the center of the sexual charge. The attraction of a DP in pornography for heterosexual men is not just that it's a social taboo -- a sexual practice considered by many to be inappropriate or immoral -- but that men know women don't want it.
So, is a DP inherently degrading and sexist? In the minds of the men who want to watch them, I think the answer is yes. That is, men understand and experience it as a degrading and sexist practice. That's why it's sexually exciting, precisely because of men's assumption that women don't want it -- because it's degrading, something that has to be forced on women who don't want it.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
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