ABSTRACT
The places, traditions and icons of sport play a significant role in male pornography. Indeed pornography is one of several media genres that turn their gaze on sport alongside newspapers, television, Hollywood film and prose fiction. Pornography in general is far from a minor part of the entertainment industry. The New York Times estimates that in the USA alone it is a 10–14 billion dollar industry, which even at the lower estimate makes it a bigger business than professional football, basketball and baseball put together. In fact people spend more on pornography in America in a year than they do on cinema tickets, and more than they spend on all the performing arts combined. 1 While quantitatively sport plays a small role in the pornography industry, it does nevertheless play an important one in that genre of pornography which represents men only. Indeed the contexts of sport are frequently referenced in a range of pornographic media, including video, magazines, the Internet and prose fiction. In this type of pornography the spaces of sport, such as locker rooms and playing fields, the equipment of sport, such as uniforms, jock straps, weight training equipment and baseball bats, as well as the traditions of sport, such as initiation ceremonies and victory parties, establish the erotic context for the sexual activities that take place in the sports setting. This genre is often called gay male pornography, which suggests that it is produced by and for gay men. But a considered analysis of this material suggests that the producers and consumers of such pornography are not necessarily only gay men. It is better to avoid limiting these representations to sexual identity politics and consider them more simply as representations of men and that these representations can be read from a wide range of sexual sensibilities – and identity positions. It is worth noting that pornography that represents women very seldom features sport places, traditions and icons. Why this is the case will be considered later in this chapter.
