Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Spirit'. My vote was for the Offspring’s “No Feelings”, but it was eventually decided that we would all dress up in ‘schoolgirl’ outfits (as distinct from our actual uniforms) and attempt to recreate Britney Spears’ “Baby, One More Time”.
     
    Those at a delicate stage of adolescence were provided with toilet-roll pneumatic breasts; we drew fake freckles on top of our real ones with biro and, when the day came, lip-synched along to the lyrics imploring a vague male cipher to perform unspecified acts of casual sexual violence. The crowd went wild. We hadn’t been good; we hadn’t even ballsed it up so concertedly badly that we deserved points for sheer shambolic brilliance. It was a whining, mal-coordinated pageant of teenage sexual mimicry made worse by the presence of three perky stage-school girls blowing bubblegum at the front row and flashing their knickers. Like Britney, who at the time had yet to commit the transgression of finishing puberty, we were a bizarre drag act riffing on a plasticized version of adult sexuality. We got the biggest cheer of the evening.
     
    We were disqualified.
     
    What our act expressed too vividly for the parent-judges to countenance was our innocent anxiety to involve ourselves in culture of mandatory sexual performance. We had learnt from an early age that our bodily desires were the lesser part of our sexual development: far more important, for young people, is the creation and maintenance of erotic capital.
     
    Adolescent sexuality, as understood and marketed by older generations, has become a ritualised act of erotic drag: a grim, unsmiling duty of knowing looks, coquettish pouting and occasional listless fucking to be undertaken by any young person wishing to advance themselves socially – or economically. Young people are not merely in the thrall of a culture of porn and advertising that seeks to sexualise us; we have always been more than simply a target market. What many of us understand quite profoundly is that sexual performance and self-objectification are forms of work: duties that must be undertaken and perfected if we are to advance ourselves.
     
    Pornography is a part of this language of erotic duty, and any discussion of the ‘pornification’ of contemporary youth culture must be understood in this context. The porn industry is worth some $14bn in America alone, and the explosion of online pornographic material freely available to young consumers provides a chorus for the consumer masquerade of paranoid, ritualised, repetitive heterosexuality. Feminist academic Dr Nina Power explains that “the early origins of cinematographic pornography tell a very different story about the representation of sex… one that is filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummelling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that don’t always function and purr like a well-oiled machine.” 4
     
    Power is right: when faces can be seen at all, nobody in modern pornography looks like they’re having much fun.
     
    The ubiquity of this blandly violent interpretation of pornography can be extremely bewildering for young people. Steeped in the shaming propaganda of our elders and bereft, for the most part, of any alternative educational or cultural models of sexuality, many of us begin our carnal adventures by attempting to reproduce the motifs of porn.
     
    Young men as well as young women are undermined by this grinding, relentless erotic model. I know at least one young man who, during his first sexual experience with a woman, was horrified to discover that he had not been expected to pull out and ejaculate on his partner’s face. He had understood from watching pornography that the experience was what all women wanted.
     
    The formal rules of late capitalist pornography are the fulcrum of modern sexual affectlessness: an endless parade of disembodied cocks going into holes, a joyless, piston-pumping assembly line of industrial sexuality that seeks constantly to monetise new limits of ‘hardcore’, to milk more cum, to stretch sphincters wider and open orifices to double, triple, quadruple loads of faceless genital meat. Naomi Wolf described in 1991 how pornographic signs had come to “people the sexual interior of men and women with violence, placing an elegantly abused iron maiden into the heart of everyone’s darkness, and blasting the fertile ground of children’s imaginations with visions so caustic as to render them