Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Abstract

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.

Keywords::

• pornography
• orgasm
• emotion work
• embodiment

Notes

^1. I do not mean to suggest here that ejaculation is necessarily experienced as equivalent to orgasm for men, rather than ejaculation is culturally coded as the definitive signifier of male sexual pleasure regardless of whether it is experienced as such by individual men.

^2. Female ejaculation does not seem to have the same authority as a signifier of female sexual pleasure and remains a marginal type of representation – for example, Paasonen (2006) found that only 6% of all ‘money shots’ in a sample of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites represented female ejaculation.

^3. It could be argued that by focusing solely on orgasm that this paper perpetuates the orgasmic imperative and the elision of orgasm with sexual pleasure. However, I treat orgasm not solely as an embodied event, but as a set of social and sexual practices and discourses which is worthy of academic attention.

^4. Hochschild used the term emotional labour to refer to this kind of work in a commercial setting, and emotion work to refer to similar processes in private, non-commercial settings. However, the terms are often used interchangeably.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Frith

Hannah Frith is a psychologist at the University of Brighton. Her research interests focus on the interrelationships between embodiment and identity. She is currently writing a book on Orgasmic Bodies: The Orgasm in Contemporary Western Culture to be published by Palgrave in 2014.