On LGBT Porn

OK, the title is perhaps misleading. I'm specifically discussing the impact of pornography on LGBT perceptions and mainstream culture. You see, porn is like going to the toilet: only scientists or weird people discuss it, yet we all do it. I guarantee everyone reading this has at least a passing knowledge of it. (Also, I assure you this article is perfectly safe for work.)

Over the past few years, we've seen a huge rise in portrayals of homosexual/bisexual women in film, television, and even gaming. Carol is expected to be nominated for Oscars, E4's Banana was perhaps more successful than it's big brother Cucumber on Channel 4, and Life Is Strange currently has a huge social media following. And this is adding onto the legacy of lesbian love-stories in fiction that extends back to before it was even legal. Outside of erotica, there was a huge LGBT underground art scene in the 80's. It's typical that the worst decade for gay rights in the UK since the 60's produced some of the best work. But now, over 30 years later, it's finally breaking through.

This is great. Lesbian fiction is no longer shunned, and is in fact becoming accepted by a mainstream audience. People of all backgrounds and sexuality are watching/playing these stories of lesbian romance. Yes, there's a small group of people who are freaking out. Don't worry: they'll be dead one day.

But the whole reason why I'm writing this post is because apparently, in the UK, 'lesbian' is one of the most common search terms for porn-sites - meaning it's perhaps the most highly demanded type of porn. So are lesbians only liked because they're still slim, conventionally attractive women who engage in sexual acts? Are straight audiences only accepting of such fiction because they see it as erotic?

....mostly, yeah. Whilst in recent years films, television, and games have been more open to male homosexual romance; it's not as prevalent and certainly isn't as mainstream. Even when we do see such films as Pride and *grimace* Stonewall, it's more specifically about LGBT rights rather than relationships - even though it's who we fall in love with that defines us. Granted, I despite being comfortably gay enjoy lesbian romances. But porn isn't strictly romance, and straight men for some reason have this thing for lesbian's. That, or they're running away brandishing The Bible.

If you'd forgive me for stating the obvious: lesbian's are women. This means they have to endure both sexism and homophobia in everyday life. They're victims of 'The Male Gaze,' a topic you should probably Google if you want to know more about, because it's an extremely complex yet popular academic idea frequently applied to feminist discourse.

In short, 'The Male Gaze' is the idea first coined by Laura Mulvey that all media is displayed through the perspective of a heterosexual male. The audience is assumed to be a straight man and thus what they see/read/play is tailored as such. Women are often sexualised whilst men are seen as either underwhelming or a power-fantasy. You want to be this man so you can get this woman. Lesbian fiction often still employs the gaze, as such works are more prone to displaying scenes of intimate contact than gay fiction. Compare the sex in Blue Is The Warmest Colour, which is highly romanticized, to Kill Your Darlings - which is a painfully true example of what gay sex is actually like.

Obviously porn is the worst offender, because it knows what you're in for. In some ways there's a refreshing honesty to it. We know you're not here for the story of the plumber and the woman who can't pay. You're here for sex, and we're gonna get right to it.

The question of how the porn industry treats its performers and how liberated/exploited the performers feel is not one for me to discuss; because I know nothing of the issue. But I know that the performer exists in porn to be an object of desire for the viewer. In heterosexual and lesbian porn, it's the most literal version of 'The Male Gaze.' The woman is not a human being with hopes and dreams and feelings and a childhood and history and knowledge. She's an object, and to be an acceptable object she must be slim, white, and with a 'good' face. Anyone who doesn't fit this is shunned by a mainstream audience. They're erased from our minds for the crime of not being born with symmetrical cheekbones.

But gay men experience this also. The 2015 TV show Cucumber was centred around a 50 year old gay man, and concerned his struggle of being erased by the typical image of 16-24 year old white, skinny, groomed, boyish men - or 'twinks' as they're known in the gay community. The majority of gay pornography is either Topman models, or Olympic body-builders. It turns out that more and more straight women are watching gay porn; for exactly the same reasons as to why heterosexual men watch lesbian porn.

I've always believed that the reason why pornography is '18+' isn't necessarily because it's the work of Beelzebub, but because in theory by the time we get to 18 we usually already know what sex actually looks like; and by extension what people look like. We don't expect women to be double-D or men to be 8". Women aren't automatically slender and toned; men aren't by default muscular and groomed. Women don't constantly demand sex, nor are they coy strawmen only pleased by shallowness. Men aren't by default entitled to sex, nor are they bestial hump-gods. (Heh. 'Bestial Hump-Gods' should be the name of a band.)

Of course, having witnessed sexual harassment countless times, I know that for many people 18 is still far too young. (Incidentally - how is it that you can join the army at 16? Why can you be trained for murder yet still not be allowed to log onto RedTube?) In practice this whole theory breaks down because the majority of people discover porn before they discover love; so they believe that sex is inherently linked to it.

Going through the 'LGBT' tag in 'Getty Images' was both hilarious and sad...

It's particularly bad for gay men because it's more than likely they're still in the closet by 16. After denying their sexuality for so many years, they find porn and realize that it's OK to be gay....provided you have a six-pack and no body-hair. With a huge amount of shame, I'll admit that I first learnt about gay sex via porn - because who else was going to teach me? The closest my school came was an embarrassed side-mention that gay men need to wear condoms too. I wanted to stand up and say: "Why? What are we supposed to do with them? Have a rubber sword-fight?!"

This isn't even exclusive to LGBT pupils. Our sex-education is so awful that many teenagers are forced to turn to porn for a sufficient visual aid. I only received a frank talk about contraception when I was 15. Again: in theory this should be sufficient, but in reality 15 was waaay too late. Even though I went to an all-boys school, many of my fellow students had 'girlfriends.' I use quotations because these relationships lasted a few months at the most - but, as they happily bragged, sexual acts still occurred during this short time. I suppose they could've been lying, yet sex was still on the brain during a teenage romance. Even back then I was thinking: "You could at least do something nice first! Go to a movie, look round a stately home, play some Scrabble - make this more than just a sexual experiment." (I was such a boring kid.)

I recently signed a GOV.uk petition to make sex-education LGBT-exclusive. GOV.uk is an official government website where you can start a petition, and if it gets 10,000 signatures then the government will respond to it. If it gets 100,000 signatures then it must be debated in parliament. The petition got enough signatures to warrant a response, and so a few months later I got an email from a 'government representative' (some poor civil servant) saying that the 2002 sex-education act already covered everything.

Not to be confrontational, but BULLSHIT!

I was a secondary school student from 2005 to 2010, and again; there was only an awkwardly muttered one-sentence bleat about contraception. Homosexuality wasn't discussed in any class in the entire curriculum. We didn't even get one of those infuriating groups of failed drama students who tell you all about drugs and gangs and crime and all that stuff. From what I could tell working in a secondary school last summer, this is still very much the case. There was only a very brief mention of LGBT issues during a PSHCE lesson on prejudice; and it was just "RACISM, SEXISM, oh and homophobia I guess". Each of these types of xenophobia deserve their own lesson, particularly since whilst monitoring the schools PC network I came across a girl who wanted to kill herself because she was the victim of homophobic bullying. Even in one week that was supposed to celebrate 'core values' or 'student rights' or something like that, there was a huge display-board saying: "DIVERSITY...is a thing that exists apparently."

This 2012 Stonewall survey says it all. It's nice to see that the government has taken these results by the UK's biggest LGBT charity and used it for toilet paper. Even LGBT people are shockingly under-educated about their own rights. So few know just how many countries they're illegal in, which is why you keep hearing stories of couples being arrested whilst on holiday in Dubai or Morocco. The whole 'chemsex' moral panic can be entirely blamed on the Ministry of Education failing us, as these people were all raised on pornography rather than their teachers.

And we need inclusive sex-education more for straight people than the LGBT population it keeps ignoring - because, since the school syllabus hasn't changed since 2002 (before even civil partnerships were legal), straight people are also learning about homosexuality through porn. Just as women are regarded as sex-objects, lesbians become a fetish. They'll never be seen as human, with just as much diversity in personality and appearance as men. For bisexual women it's even worse, as they are simultaneously seen as an object and a fetish. They're seen as datable entities who may also 'perform' with other women - all taken from ideas seen exclusively in pornography.

And this is starting to seep into the mainstream. Lesbian romances mostly concern young, conventionally attractive white models. They're depicted as an angelic, pure couple who have transcended into a state beyond love. They ooze sex from every pore in their body. Films such as A Room In Rome may as well just be porn. Compare this to such films as I Love You Philip Morris which tend to be far less romanticised whilst displaying homosexual male relationships.

Gay stereotypes still exist, but gay men have much less pressure put upon them than gay women. Lesbian's must look like any other fashion model, and must be absolutely gorgeous without being too masculine. In fact, we're all supposed to 'look straight' if we want to be accepted by society. Isn't this just as bad as being in the closet? "OK, you can sit at our table - but none of that gay stuff. It's icky."

I'm not even getting started on transgender visibility. The reason why many think Miss Jenner is "the grinch who stole the trans movement" is because she enforces the expectation that you can only be trans if you have tons of expensive plastic surgery. Again: you have to look like a fashion model to be accepted. You have to completely hide who you are. In this day and age, you can say who you are, but you must still conform.

All of this is linked back to porn: which brings not just LGBT representation but the representation of people down to the lowest, harshest level. It's the most basic, primal fantasy. Why are porn-stars so ridiculed by society when they're standard setters? All our expectations for how we should look seem to come from porn. And with it comes expectations of sex, of sexuality, and of gender roles.

It's all about expectation, but expectations are almost never reality. The solution to this problem isn't to limit pornography, either in distribution or production. The solution is to tell the kids before they find porn - because they will eventually find it. Tell them about sex, both straight and gay. Tell them about STDs. Tell them that sexuality is an entire spectrum that you don't have to conform to. Tell them about sexism. Tell them about transgender issues. Tell them about consent. Tell them about sexual abuse. Just tell them!

None of these things corrupt, because none of these things lead to hatred or violence. Since when has education killed someone? Did that girl I mentioned want to kill herself because her friends knew too much? No! Her friends didn't know enough! If they knew that sexuality was in fact fluid and gender roles are merely social constructs then they wouldn't drive their friend to the point of absolute depression.

Porn doesn't corrupt either. Porn just doesn't tell truth, and it's not supposed to. It's not the cause for societies failure: it's the escapism everyone seeks as a result of it. We're the stupid ones for taking it seriously...