King Kong Theory

Morning, everyone,

I just wanted to share with you an excerpt from a text by an important French feminist author, Virginie Despentes. When I read it last year, I felt like I finally understood something very profound about my own unhealthy relationship between porn and real sexuality. It raises issues that are deliberately provocative, but which I find very real. I'd like to know what you think about it, and if it resonates with you as much as it does with me. Enjoy your reading!

PS : sorry for the translation, I did it myself

"What struck me in their company (pornstars) was not that the men treated them like trash, nor that they dominated the situation. On the contrary, I have never seen men so impressed. If, as they so loudly assert, nothing is more beautiful for a woman than to make men dream, why do they persist in pitying the porn stars? Why does the social body insist on making victims of them, when they have everything to be the most accomplished women in terms of seduction? What taboo is being transgressed here that is worth this feverish mobilization?

The answer, after watching a few hundred pornographic films, seems simple to me: in the films, the porn star has a male sexuality. To be more precise: she behaves exactly like a homosexual in the back-room. As staged in the movies, she wants sex, with anyone, she wants it through every hole and they enjoy it every time. Like a man if he had a woman's body.

If we watch a heterosexual porn movie, it's always the female body that is valued, shown, relied on to produce effect. We don't ask the male pornstar to perform the same performance, we ask him to get hard, to get excited, to show the sperm. The work is done by the woman. The viewer of the film X identifies with her above all, more than with the male protagonist. Just as one spontaneously identifies with what is highlighted in any film. Porn is also the way men imagine what they would do if they were women, as they would try to satisfy other men, to be good bitches, cock eating creatures. We often talk about the frustration of reality, compared to the pornographic staging, that reality where men have to fuck women who actually don't look like them, or not often. It is interesting to note in this respect that the "real" women who overcumulate the signs of femininity, those who repeat twelve times in conversations that they feel "so much like women", and who participate in a sexuality that is compatible with men's sexuality, are often the most virile. The frustration of reality is the mourning that men have to make, if they want to enter heterosexuality, of the idea of fucking with men who would have external attributes of women."