ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between pornography, fantasy and reality for pornography consumers. Drawing on two in-depth studies looking at men's engagements with sexualisation (Garner, 2016) and women's relationships to pornography (Vera-Gray, 2020), it argues that when you centre the accounts of pornography consumers, a symbiotic intersection of porn, reality and fantasy emerges, orienting around the recognition of violence against women as an inseparable part of all three.
This acknowledgement gives rise to a sense of conflict between users’ pleasure and their principles, reminiscent of the relationship between the personal and the political grounding in radical and Black feminist theory. The conflict plays out in gendered ways. For women, it arises in a recognition of the shared situation of “woman”, drawing connections between their own gendered position and that of the women they see in porn, something which makes it difficult to wholly separate the personal (fantasy) from the political (reality) in the way needed to experience uncomplicated pleasure from porn. For men, their conflict is twofold, both personal and political. In the latter, men are required to reconcile a “tacit knowledge” that porn is implicated in violence against women by distancing themselves from it, and in the former conflict derives from their lived experience that distinctions between “porn sex” and “real sex” are, for them, blurry.
Fantasy/reality distinctions emerge as tenuous and porous discursive strategies to reconcile users’ conflicts. We thus argue that what is needed is an expansion of the space available to explore overlaps, ambiguities and tensions in pornography consumption and a challenge to the public story of porn as just a fantasy.
