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this body not your own, unlike your own, squirting this stuff all over,
sliming
you . . .
Borden:
Do you think also that that's why men have accused
women
of being dirty for so long and have had this horror of menstruation and women's body fluids, have called them dirty cunts? Do you think that that's a reaction against women's revulsion about semen?
MacDonald:
I don't know. I suppose it's true that women are made to feel dirty about menstruation. It seems obvious enough in the compulsive neuroticism promoted by ads for tampons and sanitary napkins. But when I was growing upI don't know what it's like growing up nowI didn't know
anything
about menstruation. And when I did find out about it, I never thought it was a
dirty
processin the sense that semen was a dirty substanceit was blood: scary, but not dirty.
Borden:
What's so interesting is the transformation of those feared fluidsin filminto fetishization. Every conventional porno movie I can think of has those slow-motion cum shots, beautiful arcing shots with symphonic sound behind themat the finale. It never happens
like that
. This all relates to other forms of fetishizationgolden showers, brown showers, the extremes, the desire for the most vulgar, hated substances.
MacDonald:
The
fantasy
is to have these substances accepted, adored.
Borden:
You know, in those sex fantasy phone calls you can charge to your credit card, the idea of men coming is treated in that way. The women transform semen into something very desirable, something very wonderful, to be waited for, to be coaxed out of men with a lot of adjectives as if they can't wait for it. There's a whole fantasy vocabulary for the penis, based on how men (clients) want their penises to be perceived.
I would say definitely that the reason the phallus has been so mythologized and symbolized as this mighty, powerful, steellike organ is that for the most part it's
not
like that. I mean if it
is,
it's for very short periods of time. Most of the time it's this vulnerable, very retiring organ that's easily hurt. In most rape cases men literally don't get it up. Violence happens
instead of
sex. Rape is about the inability to have an erection in any kind of framework of control.
Obviously, all of this evaporates in a case where two people are madly in love with each other. Then all these things become the most wonderful things in the world for a period of time.
MacDonald:
After I got a VCR, I rented
The Devil in Miss Jones
[1972],
Deep Throat
[1972], and
Behind the Green Door
[1972]. I was planning to write an analysis of those films (or so I said to myself!) that explored my suspicion that the experiences many men have watching them are more complex than we usually think, that the nature of the gaze