Pornography, according to feminist theorist Jane Caputi, is “a worldview, a way of thinking and acting that sexualizes and genders domination and submission, from the bedroom to the war room, making domination masculine (even when a woman plays that role) and submission feminine (even when a man plays that role), and making both the essence of sex.” Professor Caputi may as well have been describing heterosexuality generally. As a political system, a system of governance, heterosexuality is as absolute as any monarchy, as dictatorial as any dictatorship, as fearsome as any terrorist regime; it is a system built upon the act of heterosexual sex, itself often explicitly violent, always implicitly so, constituted by aggressive intrusion, and constitutive of the philosophy of objectification through dominance and submission made sexual – experienced as sex – which is the ruling ethos of the world heterosexed. This philosophy of heterosexuality constitutive of and predicated on gender makes sexuality gendered, masculine over feminine (male over female in the heterosexual model), and gender – inequality – sexy.

The point of convergence of these two definitions in the analytic of gay pornography, specifically, reveals the paradox of “gay pornography”: In gay pornography we see what heterosexuality is. A Gay liberationist critique of gay pornography claims the realization of this reality as its ground. From its perspective, that which is usually defended as liberation looks a lot like mimicry, cut from the same cloth as the argument for equality through assimilation, or for marriage, as such, as the vehicle for social acceptance. Gay pornography is predicated on the “truth,” accepted as a priori good, that the heterosexual means of relation, always sexual by straight people’s practice of objectification as sex, and objectivity as the mirror of this understanding of sexual relation, is the path to self-actualization. The Gay Self is replaced by this self, understood as the totality of Gay identity. In other words, to be Gay is to be sex, where sex is a practice of inequality.