One thing that has troubled me about this discussion is that my own limited consumption of hetero-oriented porn doesn't so neatly support the depictions above. I remember in grad school, for example, being very into the glossy no-plot porn of Andrew Blake. Essentially these were just strings of pretty sex scenes and as I recall the men and women took each other. True the sex was pretty standardized, and true in some scenes a woman was clearly being dominated (in a very light BDSM kind of way, though, so there would be some context). But my impression was not so much "man as taker" and "woman as taken" as it was "wow, this is sort of unimaginative in terms of sequencing: oral, oral, vaginal penetration, etc." Taking/taken seems to imply more than who is penetrating whom. It seems to imply something about sexual agency, and the women in the Blake films were depicted to have a fair amount of that.

I think also of Candida Royale's work, which I watched a certain amount of during my Andrew Blake phase. That too seemed to present women as possessing sexual agency even if not always presenting a wide array of sexual imagination. But lets face it, many people don't want really imaginative sex. Some just want to reliably get off.

Tristan Taormino's Chemistry films, also very hetero-oriented, also come to mind. Again, perhaps not the most mainstream of hetero porn, but it is certainly hetero porn. (If you're interested you can read our interview with Tristan Taormino about her third installment in the Chemistry series here. It was a great conversation.)

So when we talk about hetero-oriented porn, what set of material are we really talking about? And when we talk about takers and taken are we talking about penetration or are we talking about depiction of agency or are we talking about some combination of those things or about something else altogether?

I'd agree that the range of depictions of men in hetero-oriented porn is pretty narrow, but again my own viewing is too limited to say much here. I can recall in the handful of videos I've seen scenes where the man is "overtaken" by two women who initiate the sex, but it doesn't take long before he is being responsible for fucking them both in some way or another. I guess my bigger concern about the depiction of men in straight porn is that it makes sex look like a lot of work and not really a lot of fun.

Does porn made for gay men show a wide variety of masculinities or does it tend to reproduce a narrow set of roles albeit perhaps different ones than make up the tropes of straight porn? I can't say, having not made time to watch.

By the way, and only tangentially related: How many of you look at the IFeelMyself.com videos? How do they change the discussion of porn? Are there corresponding sites showing men getting themselves off?

It strikes me that it would be interesting, in the way there are book club discussions, to choose a porn film for people to watch and discuss. Discussion could center on depictions of men and women, on imagination and sex, on production qualities (pet peeve: bad lighting), plot, characterization, you name it, how successful was it as porn (e.g, did it get you aroused). Anyone want to try it?

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth