At the Bottom of Topping the Bottom is Top. Part 1: The Secrets of Penetration and Enjoyment

Top, bottom, versatile, the gay porn world revolves around that holy trinity. I can never quite innocently refer to it without remembering what Michel Foucault had to say about the concepts of sexual ethics in antiquity. Still marked and indeed contaminated by the moralistic and psychological weight of ascribing a heterosexual or homosexual “soul” to each individual we are still amazed by the ease with which any man (rather, man) in ancient Greece and Rome could change between sex with men and sex with women, sometimes in different periods of his life, sometimes intermittedly. And no one would even have the idea, the very concept to wonder if this person is really “gay” or “straight”. This does, of course, not indicate that there were no moral rules connected to sexual activities. On the contrary. There was an intense and even desperate “care” about the question if one assumes an active or a passive role during the sexual act. For a man it was considered shameful and dishonouring to accept the passive, the “female” part. So as long as one could manage to stay the penetrator it was under certain precautions ok to fuck whatever gender.

Greek Vase, Jupiter courting Ganymed

Without going into further details about the pitfalls of the highly ritualized love for adolescent boys in ancient Greece – one can easily find it in Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” Vol. 3,

http://www.amazon.de/History-Sexuality-Care-Self-Penguin/dp/0140137351/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1247353193&sr=8-16

– I just want to refer to the amazing, or maybe misleading analogy to the “cares” and problematisations within contemporary gay pornography. Even though on the surface top and bottom are being treated as equally important roles, on a second layer there is a permanent discourse of power accompanying it. The bottoms are referred to as those who “take it”, like a punishment or a ritual of submission.
There seems to be a certain “care” around the masculine role, around the “honour” to be a top. The bottoms tend to be younger, smaller and slimmer. No surprise there. And on top of it – pun intended –there is an (unwritten?) rule that whoever wants to be in gay porn but does not own a big dick should better be ready to “take it”, no matter if this be his inclination or not.
In this sense gay porn in general seem to transport an old gender logic that does not really differ from a straight logic, but works on a more ritualised and abstract level, as it is in principle possible to change from bottom to top and vice versa if certain parameters are changing.
The game could be formalized as follows: the role of the bottom IS indeed less attractive, less “dignified”, in short: less masculine, BUT no one needs to stay a bottom forever and all the time. Unless his dick is too small. And even the most hunky tops can fall from the grace of topping when becoming too old or overexposed. Then they end up in a video announcing that such and such is “for the first time bottoming” – like Chad Hunt, the owner of a huge, semi soft baby arm of a dick he stuffed into young Brent Corrigan in “The Velvet Mafia”, who finally had to take it in the “Endgame” right before his retreat into a well deserved pension.
http://heroesnhunks.com/wordpress/2008/12/19/horsehung-chad-hunt-to-retire-after-bottoming/
On the pic Hunt really looks like he is desperately trying to give birth to, well, whatever

Lets cut for a moment to another completely different basic law of pornography that intervenes into this classical paradigm of penetration and makes gay porn a lot more complicated. For the demonstration of this other paradigm it is ironically best to switch to straight porn for a moment. Here the question is: why are women in straight porn by far more famous and better paid than men? Men in straight porn tend to be utterly anonymous and interchangeable, rarely attractive dummies, simple owners of the dick. There humble, sometimes idiotic part stands in glaring contrast to their display of dominance, there rude face fucking, calling her slut and pounding “the shit out of her” that is their usual routine. The very contradiction of dominant behaviour and insignificant identity is a perfect demonstration of two different paradigms at work in porn: the macho behaviour transporting the old logics of patriarchy and penetration as the ultimate power display is contradicted by the far more profound but also more hidden paradigm or porn as a display of excessive enjoyment. Watching porn means watching a subject who enjoys. And the ultimate in enjoyment in straight porn is embodied by the woman. That’s why she is by far more famous and better paid. The question now is of course: is enjoyment necessarily connected to femininity? Is the one who is being penetrated in principle the better or even the only subject of enjoyment? Or is enjoyment a more fleeting, a more subtle state that is in fact not really connected to penetration at all, that can indeed occur during penetration, but is rather prone to disappearance if the emphasis on penetration is becoming a little too crude and mechanical, and most of a little too connected to domination?
In that sense enjoyment and penetration can exist side by side, and even interpenetrating each other, but enjoyment gets stale whenever domination takes over.
I can always experience this, literally in my own flesh, when I notice how I get insanely aroused by the right kind of sighs and grunts and completely pissed off by idiotic phrases of male domination. And even though there are some female performers I find interesting, the female habit of permanent whimpering in porn just does not strike the right cord. The relation of this tension between enjoyment and penetration to the extreme nuisance of (almost any) background music I don’t even want to elaborate now. Fact is: I do not enjoy it.
I have to admit that the relation of a body orifice being penetrated and the expression of enjoyment is fascinating and puzzling to me. I am not sure if I am falling trap to an imprinted gender logic I otherwise reject, if as a porn consumer I simply enjoy the display of penetration, without ascribing the symbolic value of phallic domination to it. Do I as a consumer respond with a “primal female instinct” that I intellectually contradict as a “gender theorist”? It is not as simple as that. My responses are as complex and mixed as my analysis. And still, or therefore I enjoy them.


This image from “Jack the Zipper’s” “Squealer”, 2006 AVN award winner, is a good example for the whole messy complexity of straight porn. It is an extremely well done and well played orgy of female degradation. The uncanny background music, more like a deep breathing of the orgiastic space, deserves special praise A couple of women are kept hostage in a filthy, very “designed” farm barn by a couple of anonymous, faceless cowboy hooligans whose faces we never get to see. A situation of utter threat and violence in reality, but in porn it is not that simple. Even though those faceless dick owners brutally stuff the women’s throats till they puke the performance of the women, of the glorious Audrey Hollander most of all, is so intense and such an expressive display of enjoyment that yet again those faceless “masters” turn into dummies who just serve the bottom’s bottomless appetite.

Which brings me back to gay porn. Surely I can “identify” with the female part of enjoyment. But when watching a gay porn movie I enjoy, – and I do not really enjoy so many of them, – the game of identification and enjoyment becomes even more complex, a complexity I enjoy as well. A beautiful young male body being penetrated. What is my fascination for that? It is rich and paradoxical. I share his sensations of lust when his nerve endings are being titillated, his orifice is being stretched, his insides are being massaged. I am with him and his insides. On the other hand I am also with the other, I can well imagine how the hot, tight interior of another body would feel on a sensitive body part. I can share the dangerous desire to “violate” the beauty of another body, yet to compensate this violent urge with the will to be at the service of the other’s lust and enjoyment, by making any possible move of violation an act of care.

There has been a, in my mind completely misleading, even idiotic, feminist movement that would to a certain extent embrace the idea of pornography to the extent to which penetration is either avoided or at least marginalized. I totally disagree. What the aria is to the opera penetration is to porn. It is this one pathetic, monotonous, often failed, often cheesy “thing” everything revolves around. The fact that penetration is so vital to porn is a question of aesthetics and intensity. That’s why I compared it to an aria – thereby relying on Linda William’s already canonical comparison of porn to the musical (a thing that will be nice coming back to if I will manage to continue the Brent-and-Zac-story) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Williams_(United_States_film_critic) Or the pas de deux in ballet.
It is an easy and somehow cowardly move to leave it out, to produce operas of recitatives only, dances with soli only, and porn without fucking. If the problems of male domination, socially indeed very real problems, come into play, it is in the blunt and stupid display of male dominance that abuses penetration for its own purposes. What makes penetration the center of porn is not at all the fact that it is the obvious display of male domination but the paradox that the most exciting, most intense moment in a completely visual medium is something invisible. If there were a transparent body, or a camera showing us the insides of a vagina, a throat or a rectum, indeed a “cock perspective”, this would be the end of porn. It would just be an anatomical display, something hovering uncomfortably in between medicine and splatter movie. Visuals like that would simply leave the paradigm of porn as theatre of sexual enjoyment behind. Everything that is mad, arousing, intense about porn disappears in the opaque body of the penetrated and takes my desire with it, somehow on both sides of the channel.
Thus the law of porn is fulfilled: that the eyes make you feel a sensation you do not really feel. This strange transference of the senses is finally the reason why some people become addicted to porn and others do simply not respond to it.

In “Corpus” Jean Luc Nancy would claim that there is no penetration at all http://www.scribd.com/doc/9833074/Open-Wounds-Body-and-Image-in-JeanLuc-Nancy-and-Claire-Denis-by-Douglas-Morrey), there is only one skin touching the other, and sometimes the skin is simply turned inside out, just like the anatomical observation that the vagina is an inverted penis. Jacques Derrida calls this folding an invagination.
Mario Perniola, in his “Sex-Appeal of the Inorganic” ( on the other hand, talks of an interpenetration of a neutral sexuality of sensitive things that stays completely exterior, a penetration without touching.
http://books.google.com/books?id=52KBf6Oa5_YC&dq=perniola+sex-appeal&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=ubxbSs22ApaOnAPn1OjdCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

I somehow dig both theories, and the inability to decide is also providing a certain enjoyment.


The images in the beginning and end of this post are details of stills of two Brent Corrigan movies. In the very unlikely case of someone identifying the two movies, or even only one of them, I think about a reward. But of course it cannot be the signed copy of the freshman magazine I just won in Unzipped’s Haiku contest. http://blog.unzipped.net/brent-corrigan/