Transgender porn is the absolute objectification of women

Readers from Fetlife: While I absolutely respect your right to discuss my writing, I'm also very curious what you're saying about it. As no one has seen fit to leave a comment, I find it all the more interesting. Please leave a note and let me know what you're saying about this post? Thanks. (I don't care if it's good or bad. I'd just like to know. :-) )

Carolyn Ann

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[As I think about this, I keep thinking of things to add to this post. As a result, it's going to change. I'm not going to start a small "series" of posts about the subject; one is quite enough!]

Yesterday, in one of those rambling "I don't know what to do with myself right now" posts I do so well (?), I mentioned that transgender porn is basically gay porn; and it has all the appeal of that. For its aficionados, great. For others? What a turn-off, even to the point of being repulsive. Anyway, I noted that for all the pretensions about femininity, such things are anything but feminine. It's all very degrading imagery, to be honest. The "heroine" considers himself - it's difficult to apply a feminine pronoun to someone with a penis sticking out half way across the room - as much a sexual object as the other participant or participants.

So I was quite startled to see a headline "The Lesbian Hugh Hefner", by Itay Hod, in The Daily Beast. He describes Jincey Lumpkin, a lawyer-turned-porn entrepreneur, and how she's become a sort of (er) lesbian High Hefner. She has a different take on feminine, well, lesbian, pornography: less of the objectification and more about style, fantasy and femininity.

She also runs a lesbian social network, Digiromp, that the Village Voice noted was "The new social network for gay, bi, and trans ladies is anything but subtle―it's got dirty stories, kinky videos from lesbians across the world, and the tagline "Where all the hot girls come." Boys, not only can't you touch, you can't look either. Men get turned away at the door." On top of the all that is happening, I am - the article was written in 2008... :-)

So yet again a gender difference is highlighted: the penis-wielding "gurls" of transgender/gay porn versus the more stylized stuff lesbians actually buy. (Believe me: those penii are wielded liked swords. Not a pretty sight; quite repulsive, actually. It was actually quite difficult to check the facts in this post!)

I doubt the transgendered porn will change; as far as I can tell there's no particular need for it to change. The audience and participants clearly have figured out what they want; they even tout for partners on Flickr. (Which struck me as quite dangerous, but whatever. Their life. As long as they don't infect others with AIDS or STD's, what do I care? [One of the things that struck me about the TG porn I saw was the complete absence of condoms. In this day and age, it's not just your life you're dealing with. Such reckless disregard for others isn't unexpected; it is dismaying, however.]) I was actively reminded of an old, passing, argument sometime in the mid-90's about gay porn and the casual gay sex "trade". Keith Haring, the artist, argued quite vociferously that anonymous bath-house sex was an essential part of the gay (New York) scene. I've read other accounts, even last year about a bathhouse in Philadelphia, that seem to support Mr Haring's claim. The idea is that "your" sexual gratification is all that actually matters. Your "partner" could be a machine, and is, to all intents and purposes. (It's a wonder I didn't see any rubber dolls and transgendered porn-"stars"! I probably wasn't looking hard enough...) The feeling looks mutual, which doesn't make it legitimate! Considering how masculine the transgender porn is, I'd say it's absolutely in line with Mr Haring's argument, and it also supports feminist arguments about how pornography objectifies the person. In the case of transgender porn, it seems the participants want to be sexual objects.

Here we have some guy, dick swinging in the wind, presenting himself as some sort of feminine ideal, photographing himself giving blow jobs to all and sundry. The implication being that women are easy, slabs of meat, sexual objects that would act the same given half a chance. Sexual conquest is more important than the partner, it seems. But you have to retain your lingerie and high heels while engaged in sex. Fantasy is a large part of transgender porn; bondage is, too. I couldn't look at the bondage stuff, but the one or two thumbnails I saw in someone's "Favorites" pile seemed to indicate that being a feminized sexual object, intent upon some sort of "feminizing" ritualistic humiliation, was the goal! I also noticed a large amount of pedophiliac "young boys being turned into girls" cartooning; the cartoons I looked at were highly sexual and, if photographed, would be child porn. If you don't consider any of that to not be objectifying women, I'd like to know what you think is! The whole affect, with the lingerie, stockings, high heels and so on, is also a strange, twisted and quite evil parody of women. In the end, transgender porn objectifies women in a way that regular pornography couldn't even hope to achieve.

And people wonder why Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel are so vociferously and vehemently anti-transgender?

Carolyn Ann