PORNOGRAPHY IS A PERFORMANCE
Paul B. Preciado’s writing has been crucial in understanding pornography not simply as a representation of sex but as a technology producing bodies, desires and ways of seeing. Linda Williams, in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible , similarly examined pornography through its obsession with making bodily pleasure visible, turning sex into an image to be performed, displayed and verified.
Puma’s account introduces something often missing from those images: the labour behind them.
“People forget that we are actors and actresses, and that it is an act,” she says. “I can play being submissive. I can play being dominant.” It sounds obvious, but pornography is strangely resistant to the vocabulary of performance. Cinema can stage violence without anyone believing the actor was actually shot; theatre can produce grief without requiring genuine devastation. But when the performance involves sex, viewers tend to confuse representation with reality.
She describes the mechanics behind the fantasy as preparation, negotiation, physical limits, lighting, uncomfortable positions and conversations with co-performers about what will happen.
“It’s cold, my hip bone is hurting, but I look like it’s the best sex of my life.” The sentence reveals pornography’s machinery because it is normally invisible. The fantasy works because the labour disappears.
This is perhaps the first misconception she wants to challenge, the idea that the pornographic image is somehow more “real” than other forms of representation because it uses real bodies and real sexual acts. The body is performing. The camera is constructing. The performer is working.
THE PORN STAR IS SUPPOSED TO BE A VICTIM
There is another fantasy surrounding pornography, one less about sex than agency. The woman who performs sexualised images is rarely allowed to simply have chosen to do so. Her decision is immediately interpreted through exploitation, coercion, addiction, economic desperation or regret.
She has spent years encountering this assumption.
“People have trouble wrapping their heads around that this is something I can choose,” she says. Her position is not that pornography is automatically empowering, nor that everyone in the industry has the same experience. It is more basic, the possibility of choosing pornography cannot simply be dismissed.
“I get off on showing myself off on camera,” she says. “There are people looking at me, and then I know that thousands or millions will jerk off on this and enjoy this.”
There is no request for moral approval in the statement. What makes it uncomfortable is precisely its lack of apology. The cultural narrative surrounding women in pornography often seems to permit agency only if it eventually leads them away from pornography. The woman who regrets becomes a story. The woman who leaves becomes a warning. The woman who remains happy is somehow less interesting.
“I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I’m still happy. And I plan to continue. But that’s not what they want to hear.”
The happy porn star is culturally inconvenient because she refuses the role assigned to her.
