On the question of squirting/female ejaculation that has been doing the rounds since some research was published last week saying that it’s just pissing: these scientists are of course the same idiotic positivist lot who spend their lives trying to argue that there’s no such thing as a g-spot either. But ultimately their argument amounts to the claim that because pleasure happens not to be reducible to a question of pure physiology it must be false or not really exist. Over a hundred years after psychoanalysis first showed that the question of pleasure had to be located not just anatomically but in that fractured difficult place where history or society meets nature, these scientists, having apparently thrown away all social considerations, are surprised when they can’t find pleasure either and announce their thus concealed social insight that female pleasure must all be a lie. The various articles (such as that in the Guardian) that have argued this week that these attempts are ultimately motivated by a science that will, for sexist reasons, always demean female sexual pleasure are for the most part entirely correct. But perhaps this question also needs complicating: we should be asking questions about why there is a craze for squirting in the most mainstream and commercial pornography. Perhaps what is interesting here is that for a long time mainstream commercial pornography, when it has been developed and marketed to a heterosexual male audience, has also demeaned female genital pleasure. The crazes for pornographic images of feminine orality and anality expose perhaps a general underlying interest in female sexual regression (or masculine heterosexual paedophilia), while the penis takes centre stage. As is well known the “money shot”, the ultimate pornographic image of male pleasure aimed at a male heterosexual audience is of a penis; but I suspect also that this is something more specific to pornography (and the interactions of porn and other sexual interactions are socially complex.) What does it mean for pornography to try to capture pleasure in an image? And how does it fail? Why is female genital pleasure so often of little interest to mainstream porn? Is it the image of pleasure or the failure of capturing an image of pleasure that is pornographically arousing? One question we should be asking is what are the similarities between the scientists failure to locate pleasure physiologically and the struggle (or resignation) of mainstream pornographers to capture female genital pleasure in an image. What is interesting about the question of squirting is that it probably has led to a new market in pornography that centres on female genital pleasure: but we have to ask if this is really about women’s pleasure or if something else is going on.
(BTW I imagine I might be attacked for saying that feminine anality and orality is regressive – this is not straightforwardly meant here as a value-laden claim, however much the language is tainted with a history of that, and I would like to at the very least voice some discomfort with the some claims of psychoanalysis that take heterosexual coitus to be a telos.)