Watching Contrapoints’s Tangent on The Male Gaze

Eliciting Unexpected Fond Memories

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I’m in the middle of watching Contrapoints’ “Tangent” video on the male gaze, which is a topic I‘ve been reading about for nearly 30 years. I first encountered it while I was preparing to enter the academic feminist fray around, at the time, pornography, a discourse now re-centered on sex work. At that time the central topic was MacDworkinism, which is, to oversimplify it, a form of so-called radical feminism based on the concept that under patriarchy male sexuality is inherently violent. In the 1980s and 1990s Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were fighting to pass anti-pornography laws on the basis that pornography itself is violence against women. As someone who had experienced actual physical violence, some of which was intended to kill me, I prefer the word “violence” to be used with a little less nuance – but I understood what they meant. I did not, however, think that it was necessary to pass a law that would inevitably be abused, if it was enforced at all, against sex workers, primarily women, to prevent a lot of things, such as rape, that were already illegal and already of slight interest to police. Looking back I can see there was a lot of white feminism going on on both the anti- and pro-pornography sides, and a lot of refusal to acknowledge the large body of people of every gender who weren’t comfortable on either side of this debate. But at the time I was heavily invested on what was called the pro-porn side, or, if you’re a MacDworkinite, the pimp lobby. 

I published an essay related to the male gaze in 1999 in a book that emerged from the World Conference on Pornography titled Porn 101 . I just looked it up on Amazon and it is ranked #699 on the subject of pornography, which means there are at least 698 other books about pornography. I probably own about 100 of them, not to mention that I own a fair amount of actual pornography in contrast to literature ABOUT pornography.

The title of my article was “Topping from Below: Does Female Dominant Pornography Endorse the Rape of Women?” My thesis was that it didn’t. Of course I don’t really think it’s that simple, but as a dominatrix I have a perspective on male sexuality that might vary from “the norm” (hi, norm!). Also, as a stripper who worked in clubs that weren’t chic, where most of the men came in solo, I have some experiences of male kink that inform that perspective. Furthermore, as a woman who worked in the hetero sex industry before the World Wide Web, and decades before social media, I have a very deep sense of men’s secrets and private fantasies.

My sense of the male gaze isn’t related to any formal research, but I’ve listened to a lot of men talk about fantasies they don’t want anyone else to know. Some of them shared them with sex workers because they didn’t respect us and didn’t care what we thought of them. Some of them shared their secrets with us and treasured us as repositories of their intimate confidences. Some of them felt special because of their inclinations, some felt shame, some were matter-of-fact, and some were angry about it. But none of them were sharing this stuff with their work buddies. In all the years I’ve worked as a dominatrix, I only ever met one set of men who came in to see dominatrices together as adventurers, and although they were game to try things, they weren’t actually very kinky.

Some of them were powerful men who need to release the stress of that power. Some of them were men who felt power because they paid us to enact their fantasies. Some of them were sort of extreme athletes of the psyche who wanted to see if they could survive doing things like licking boots, being humiliated verbally, or being peed on. 

The ones who intrigued me most, however, were the ones who were interested in some form of what was called, in marketing, “forced feminization.” For some, the implication was that they were SO VERY HETERO that only a beautiful woman could drive them to do something so taboo as suck cock – I often suspected these men were repressed bisexuals, but it’s not for me to ultimately say. Some fantasies of forced fem could involve anything from fucking them with a strap-on to dressing them up like whores and forcing them to suck cock for me. Sometimes they would request that I would bring along a trans woman; sometimes a man, some of whom were gay for pay and some of whom were straight for pay.

I often had to struggle with my sense that misogyny was bad when one of my all-time favorite clients, who I’ll call Lucy, after being dressed up in exaggerated versions of female clothing, would scream, “Fuck me like I’m your little whore!” with his cock waving wildly in excitement.

I don’t really have an answer for what all this means, but I can tell you that these experiences and my enjoyment of them, sometimes merely amused but often sexual, made me think differently about the concept of the male gaze than a lot of what I had read. There is of course a sort of ourbouous of conceptual patriarchy that would define all these contortions, as well as my enjoyment of them, as proof rather than as refutation of the idea that patriarchy is so absolute we can’t have sex without it. For me, it felt like a revelation – that men were struggling with their roles as much as women were. It felt as though the simple idea that the male lens is controlling the entire world, that it’s inescapable, that society’s definition of how men conditioned by patriarchy see the world, was barely an interesting concept. People’s reactions to gender standards were far too complex. They were, of course, always aware of them, but they weren’t always indoctrinated. And when the indoctrination didn’t take, they were endlessly inventive, in ways I often found enchanting and erotic.

I am often sexually stimulated by visuals. Some of those visuals are heteronormative, but some of them aren’t. The idea that the ones that aren’t are simply inverted versions of the ones that are is both reductive (in part because the concept of “male” is reductive) and circular (“everything is patriarchal because everything is patriarchal”). It just doesn’t leave women with any kind of sexuality at all.

I understand that most of the men were topping from below in the sense that they were telling me their fantasies to guide the sessions. I tend to think of the “dominant” in a session as the active one, rather than as the one in power, and the “submissive” as the one to whom things are being done – and of course even this is too simplistic. I am privileged that I was in situations where I could tailor my marketing and my resources to the kind of clientele I liked. I did like them, very much, and still have relationships with some of them after decades. However, so many of them were eager to let go of the idea of control – especially with me, since after I got to know them I stopped allowing safe words – and that tells me something, although I’m not sure what.

I still think about Lucy, who, in spite of the intensity of our decade-long relationship, eventually stopped seeing me when I became less frequently available. I think of Lucy as “she,” even though she retained her male status the entire time I knew her, coming in in her suits. She was one of the most respectful and passionate of my “sissies.” I sometimes wonder how she would have thought about her gender in the era of social media, and I wonder how she thinks about it now that social media has opened so many doors for people. She struggled with her male identity, and talked about it often, wishing she could be with me and be dressed in her sissy clothes all the time. What would she say if I could ask her about her identity now? Would she think of this in any of the ways I think of it? Does she remember me? Where does someone like her fit into modern discourse about gender and sexuality? I cannot think of her as having either a female or a male gaze. 

As for Contrapoints’ video essay, for me it raised a lot of old questions rather than a reaction to Natalie’s opinions. Maybe after I finish it I’ll have more thoughts, but for now it’s enough that I’ve had the fun of remembering some of my favorite clients.

Image: The ever-problematic Slick Joe Wolf by Tex Avery