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Weddings and pornography: Thecultural performance of sexElizabeth Bell aa Associate Professor of Communication , University ofSouth Florida ,Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

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Text and Performance Quarterly

19 (1999): 173-195

TEXT AND PERFORMANCE

QUARTERLYFormerly Literature in Performance, Founded 1980

VOLUME 19 JULY 1999 NUMBER 3

Weddings and Pornography:The Cultural Performance of Sex

Elizabeth BellWeddings and pornography are cultural performances. This essay analyzes these performances, not

as cultural opposites, but as mirror doubles, complementary and necessary to each other to solidifysocial organization through control of sex. Their complementarity emerges from the nexus of church,public performance, and state as both weddings and pornography make, fake, and break culturalinsiders and outsiders, norms for sexual and social behavior, and frames of belief and play. This essaythen examines the term "performance" as utilized by various camps in the pornography debates as ameans to condemn, embrace, or erase sex in the material practices and discourses of pornography.Ultimately, sex is the sine qua non of both weddings and pornography, and its performance, whethersocially sanctioned or culturally condemned, creates and maintains order through control of sex.Against this necessary backdrop of control, performance is always imbued with transformativepossibilities, for it both maintains the cultural status quo and contains the potential for change.

Keywords: performance, sex, weddings, pornography

The world, in truth, is a wedding.(Erving Goffman, Presentation ofSelfiñ)

We generally disdain the idea of public nudity, prostitution, and sex shows because we disdain makingone's sexual relations public, showing them off. But every marriage is a public sexual relationship,legally sanctioned...

(Sallie Tisdale, Talk Dirty toMe25$)

Every Sunday evening for several years, my children and I tuned in to ABC'sAmerica's Funniest Home Videos. Now in reruns, the television show continues to

delight my kids with videos of animals who seem to sing, dance, and engage inall-too-human interactions aided by Bob Saget's ubiquitous voice-overs. My favoritevideo clips, however, are weddings. Here voice-overs are typically absent: the ritualparticipants with their coded costumes and stations need no additional explanation.The presence of the video camera and its operator shows an untroubled faith in thereproduction of eventhood.

Elizabeth Bell is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. She wishes to thankKim Golombisky, C. David Frankel, and John Giancola for their helpful responses to earlier drafts of this essay.

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The wedding as performance, however, is wonderfully and constantly undone onAmerica's Funniest Home Videos: grooms faint; fathers-of-the-bride lose their pants;six-tiered cakes collapse; and brides skate over slippery dance floors with yards andyards of crinoline over their heads. Despite the entertainment value of theseepisodes for me, none of these accidents undo the efficacy of the rite.1 Theparticipants in these ceremonies, I assume, are still "married." If a breach hasoccurred, then it is not in Victor Turner's sense of the rupture of the social fabric ofsociety, but rather, in Erving Goffman's sense of performance as a consensual reality:an "impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing thatcan be shattered by very minor mishaps" (56).

Like the bride slipping across the dance floor, the term "performance" also slidesacross a continuum of meanings on AFHVwedding clips: performance is at once"real" and "faked," at once ancient ritual and contemporary entertainment, framedas event by the video camera and then reframed for prime-time television audiences.Herbert Blau maintains, "as we think, then, about the future of performance, thequestions are simultaneously technological and metaphysical" (256). These techno-logical and metaphysical questions are evident not only in the accidental "mishaps"captured in videos of weddings, but also in pornography, the shadow side of thewedding's performance of relationship.

On a much less frequent basis and never accompanied by my children, I indulgein the viewing of pornographic videotapes. This is an admission, I realize, that placesme at precarious odds with the strange coalition of anti-pornography feminists andthe Christian right, as well as in the middle of "a continuing debate amongintellectuals and legislators about the political nature of the popularity of sexuallyexplicit representations, a debate whose twists and turns have been constitutive ofthe ideological fabric of our recent cultural history" (Ross 223). This admission notonly makes me politically "incorrect," but, as a researcher, "morally suspect"(Plummer 4).2 Brian McNair, perhaps, says this best: "Writing about sex is not onlydifficult, it is dangerous, in a way that few other subjects are" (viii).3

Sex in pornographic videotapes is also a performance that is at once "real" and"faked," at once ancient rite and contemporary entertainment, framed as event byvideo cameras and then reframed for consuming audiences. And, pornography, too,raises questions of technology and metaphysics. For lisa Palac, "technology may bethis generation's key to taking control of our sexual identities . . . high technologyputs the means of production back in everyone's hands. We no longer have todepend on someone else's mass-produced idea of eroticism; we can create our own"(162). Indeed, "amateur" pornography is a lucrative and burgeoning market.According to a recent U.S. News and World Report cover story on the pornographyindustry, home-made hard core videos are a direct result of the popularity andaffordability of the home-video camera: " . . . die camcorders advertised as a meansof recording weddings, graduations, and a child's first steps were soon used to recordsex" (Schlosser 48).

Weddings and pornography are mirror doubles of the cultural performance ofsex. As cultural performances of sex, weddings and pornography are socially andpolitically organized to create insiders and outsiders, norms for appropriate sexualbehavior, and frames that fluctuate between play and belief, all in the service of theculture. As cultural performances of sex, both weddings and pornography depend on

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the efficacious enactment of conventions and scripts, performance consciousness ofthe performers, deliberate manipulation of time and space, and the imposition offrames of belief and play. As cultural performances of sex, they both hold consentand sexual intercourse as their sine qua non. As mirror doubles-not mirror opposites-they are complementary and mutually dependent. Weddings and pornography holdsimilar constructions of culture, performance, and sex for their existence; that is, ifthere were no socially sanctioned coupling through weddings, there would be nosocially demonized coupling through pornography.

This construction of weddings and pornography as complementary culturalperformances shifts the emphasis from "sex" as the operative term in the pornogra-phy debates to "performance." In the rhetoric of pornography debates, variouscamps utilize "performance" to describe and to evaluate the content, performers,audiences, and representational discourse and materiality of pornography. Depend-ing on their divergent political agendas, these camps conveniently condemn,embrace, erase, or displace the term "performance" to describe the sex in pornogra-phy. When the bride says "I do" and the porn actor climaxes on the breasts of hisvideo sex partner, these cultural performances create sex that is alternately valorizedor demonized, but always warranting control.

Weddings and Pornography as Cultural Performances

Cultural performances-for example, sporting events, Mardi Gras, and politicalprotests-have been described by performance theorists as wide-scale events usuallyinvolving large numbers of participants and observers. Their duration and staging isfluid, but usually longer than the typical Western stage play, as the lines betweentime and space are blurred (Schechner, Performance Theory 251-88; Bauman, "Perfor-mance"). As both public and ceremonial, "display and exhibition" are operativeintentions of the performers, and "the bodies of the performers are their instru-ments" (Stern and Henderson 26-7). Most importantly, cultural performances are"at the service of the culture, and the ceremony is designed principally to reinforcecultural values and to solidify social organization or stimulate political action, ratherthan principally to please and entertain" (Stern and Henderson 27).

Weddings easily adhere to this definition of cultural performance-as ceremony, asdisplay, as site of cultural values: "Although there is no such thing as 'the typicalAmerican wedding'—as many styles of weddings exist as the styles of citizens giventhem—every single one possesses the same ritualistic ingredients, the same replay ofancient custom and primeval symbolism, the same predictable plot and standardplayers. A wedding is, after all, a wedding" (Seligson 4). But pornography, too, is acultural performance-as ceremony, as display, as site of cultural values. All cultureshave expressions deemed pornographic, "but not every culture distinguishes theerotic from the pornographic, nor is pornography defined in the same way in everyinstance" (Findlen 53). Sallie Tisdale maintains that "the sexual material of a culturereflects that culture's concerns," and she continues to detail differences:

In America, the adolescent rut—eternal erection and ready orgasm. In England, book afterbook about spanking, sex across class lines, and a detailed interest in underwear; inGermany, leather-clad blondes whipping swarthy men; in Italy, an interest in feminizedmen; in Japan, a preoccupation with icons of innocence (schoolgirls, nurses, brides), soiledinnocence (widows), and maternal nurturing. In Japanese pornography active female

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pleasure is considered a turnoff. I've never seen an American film that didn't feature it.(138)

As mirror doubles, weddings and pornography solidify social organization throughtheir constructions of sex.4 While weddings traditionally represent, enact, andperform social order and pornography traditionally represents, enacts, and performssocial chaos, neither would exist without its discursive and material complement;and both emerge from a cultural center that, precariously, holds.

This essay positions both weddings and pornography at a tripartite cultural center,anchoring their complementary genesis at a nexus of the sacred, public perfor-mance, and the state.5 More simply, both weddings and pornography are made ai theintersection of the church and the state through public performance. While churchand state's interests will be examined in detail later in this essay, public performanceframes, as well as centers, both weddings and pornography. The efficacious perfor-mance of intent and consent in the performative utterance "I do" punctuates andconstitutes the wedding ceremony, followed by the performance of sexual inter-course to consummate the union. I think it no accident that J. L. Austin's firstexample of the performative utterance is the "I do" of the wedding ceremony (5).Likewise, the making of pornography is one of the few forms of "degrading labor"that must "emphasize that its conditions of paid employment are not just contrac-tual . . . but that they are also entirely consensual" (Ross 224) .6 Both weddings andpornography are consensual contracts consummated in and through the perfor-mance of sex.

Performance in weddings and pornography is more than constitutive, it is alsoutilitarian. Dwight Conquergood claims that performance has been construed as"faking," "making," and "breaking" roles, events, and cultures. Conquergood'sanalysis is a historical one, walking through a timeline of various constructions ofperformance. "Faking" was the centerpiece for Erving Goffman's conception ofperformance-the deliberate roles constructed and embodied in the "presentation ofself in everyday life." Victor Turner shifted the emphasis from faking to "making";that is, individual and collective performances make cultures-through the embodiedand participatory enactment of structured forms. Postmodern and postcolonialtheorists emphasize performances that "break" those roles, events, and structures-reminders of the performative rules that underlie and constitute identity, in turnre-making the subaltern identities and cultures of the disenfranchised.

While Conquergood's timeline is an invaluable one for tracing the sea changes inperformance theory, the tension among "faking," "making," and "breaking" is bothconstant and simultaneous, for cultural performances hold the possibility of doing allat once; or, at least, cultural performances can illuminate the precarious boundariesbetween these utilitarian approaches. For Conquergood, "Performance flourishes inthe liminal, contested, and re-creative space between deconstruction and reconstruc-tion, crisis and redress, the breaking down and the building up of the workshop-rehearsal process, the Not Me and the Not Not Me." Ultimately, characterizations ofperformance as "faking," "making," and "breaking" are claims about utility astheorists attempt to answer the question, "What does performance do?"

When the performance is sex, however, the utility of "performance" as afunctional and constitutive term quickly unveils the political stakes in culturalperformances. Not only are weddings and pornography reflections of "some primary

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cultural realities such as values, patterns of action, structures of social relations, andthe like" (Bauman, "Performance" 47), but weddings and pornography are alsoreflexive. For Bauman, "performance may be seen as broadly metacultural, a culturalmeans of objectifying and laying open to scrutiny culture itself ("Performance" 47).Analyzing weddings and pornography as complementary performances, not asopposite constructions, is a perspective by incongruity that authorizes a number ofunasked questions: How are these performances the same? In what ways do theymirror identical cultural values? In what ways do they depend on their complementa-rity for their respective efficacies and entertainments? As reflexive performativeactions, what do they tell us about ourselves? The tentative answers to thesequestions circulate around the cultural construction of sex. To borrow a previewfrom Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter: "In what follows, what is at stake is less atheory of cultural construction than a consideration of the scenography and topogra-phy of construction" (28).

Making, Breaking, and Faking Weddings

... [N]o matter how total, exclusive, and permanent the commitment between two loversmight turn out to be, it lack[s] the dimensions of spiritual seriousness and publicresponsibility which only marriage, with its ancient vows and symbols, rites and risks,providefs]. (Barth 35)

Wedding ceremonies are acts "made" through performance at the intersection ofthe sacred, public performance, and the state. Whether performed as religious ritualor secular ceremony, the tripartite structure of the event follows most rites ofinitiation:

a separation from the old phase, transition through a liminal period, and incorporation oraggregation into the new phase. The ritualized celebration (we might say "performance")of such a change signals the personal and communal significance of the event, providing apattern of behavior for those involved that is simultaneously conventional and symbolic.(Rehm 5)

The liminal period, the wedding ceremony itself, is almost always fraught with thebetwixt-and-between doubts of "What will happen next?" punctuated by thetraditional question in many Christian ceremonies, "Is there anyone present whoknows why these two should not be joined in marriage? Let him speak now orforever hold his peace." Long a stock-phrase and transitional moment in soapoperas, melodramas, romances, even the 1967 film The Graduate, this moment in theceremony is the crux of the wedding's liminality as a rite of passage. The kiss at theend is the promissory note for sex to come, as well as the demarcation of safe passagethrough the liminal space.

But weddings are more than rites of passage, weddings also "make" private sexualrelationships public. In ancient Greece, the purpose of marriage was to sanction "arelationship between a man and woman which had the primary goal of producingchildren and maintaining the identity of the oikos unit (the household) within thesocial and political community" (Patterson 59). The Catholic Church in the thir-teenth century made marriage a sacrament-with its insistence on a priest officiat-ing-as a way to consolidate its power over individual behavior, as well as to protectwomen and children "from easy abandonment" (Johnson 45). First wave feminism

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five centuries later was, in large part, a reaction against women as chattel, owned bytheir husbands, granted in the contractual agreement of marriage (Ettelbrick). Eventoday, marriage is seen as a way to curb the promiscuous sexual activity of men as if"bachelorhood [is] equivalent to moral lassitude, where all sexual expression outsidewedlock is morally tainted" (Johnson 47). Indeed, the church and state join forces tocreate a sanctioned relationship that serves many "idealistic" purposes: procreation,economic stability, sexual regulation, and the maintenance of asymmetrical genderroles.7

While these historical constructs and their political currency are under constantrevision,8 the structure of the state/performance/church matrix remains fixed."Current marriage formalities" in Great Britain, writes anthropologist Diana Leo-nard,

still derive from the long-standing concern of Church and State to control who is and is notmarried, and is still based on verbal consent (followed by sexual intercourse, otherwise themarriage is voidable) made in an authorized place (church or register office) in front of anauthorized person, and then recorded at the General Register Office. (12)

Indeed, art critic Dave Hickey maintains that a community's highest interest ismanifested in its construction and regulation of courtship and sexual relations("Live"-, Air Guitar 16-7); hence, each culture maintains elaborate cultural con-straints against and rewards for coupling in/appropriately. As cultural performances,weddings are a complex nexus that not only grants political, social, and economicprivileges to its sanctioned participants, but weddings, conversely, create outsiders tothe matrix, instantiate sexual norms, and depend on frames of belief for theirefficacy.

Lately, numerous "outsiders" to the state/performance/church matrix have voicedtheir demands for the political and economic privileges that come with state-sanctioned marriage: joint income tax returns, community property, retirementfunds, employee benefits, medical insurance, inheritance practices, to name just afew. In 1991, three couples in Hawaii tested same-sex marriage as a politically andsocially viable contract (Eskridge); in 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that thedenial of same-sex marriage was a violation of equal protection under the law. Asproponents and opponents made arguments, the implicit norms of heterosexuality,procreation, and gender roles in the state's interests were made visible in legislaturesacross the nation, culminating in the passage of the "Defense of Marriage Act" bythe U.S. Congress. This Act guarantees federal privileges for different-sex marriagesand maintains state's rights in denying recognition of same-sex marriages performedin other states.

While numerous churches and congregations are recognizing same-sex unionsand performing church sanctioned ceremonies, most are not labeled "weddings."They are called "bonding ceremonies," "celebrations of commitment," "blessings,"or "union ceremonies" (Sherman). Church, state, and community are divided on theissue of gay marriage: "it is both radical and conservative.... For some, gaymarriage is unnatural or abominable. For others, it is an assimilative sellout"(Eskridge 4-5). In the discourse about same-sex marriage, the implicit assumptionsof heterosexuality, procreation, sexual regulation, and asymmetrical gender rolesare unveiled when church, state, and community are unable to reconcile religiousdoctrine with political policy; doctrine and policy that are denaturalized when

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gender is not a given. Performances of weddings that "break" the sacred/performance/state structure expose the underlying assumptions of the institution ofmarriage, assumptions that have much more to do with contracts-heterosexual,fiduciary, and proprietary—than with relationships.

A second group of "outsiders" are those who will lose political and economicprivileges if married. The Rev. Wallace Tervin offered his services through AnnLanders' syndicated newspaper column to "Florida Jill," an "80-year-old womanwho had met her sweetheart at the senior center and wanted to marry him but didn'twant to run the risk of losing her pension and health benefits from her previousmarriage. Living together was out of the question...." While Ann Landers "blessed"Rev. Tervin for his benevolent offer to "marry" the elders in a church-sanctioned,state-less wedding, Rev. Tervin also had his own stipulations: "I must first beconvinced that a true commitment exists and the couple's belief in God is themotivating factor behind their request. Secondly, I must see that a legally bindingwedding would cause undue hardship because of the resulting loss of pension ormedical benefits by one or both parties" (Landers D2). Here the contract shifts itsemphasis: while the state may deny economic privileges to same-sex couples forviolation of the heterosexual contract, the church ensures that the state does notwithdraw economic privileges from elderly, God-fearing heterosexuals.

These contractual obligations and privileges instantiate sexual norms. Indeed,sex/uality is overdetermined between the lines of both contracts as church and statebecome an elaborate check-and-balance system in regulating "coupling": homosex/uality is dangerous, subversive, excessive and should never be sanctioned by thestate; heterosex/uality at 80 is harmless, laughable, doubtful, yet still deserving ofsanction by the church. The respective lines drawn in the sand by church and statecross each other at the most normative—gender, age, and blood appropriate-intersections. Always and already at the center of this diagram is sex. Organizingsociety around "sexually connected people is wrong," according to AmericanUniversity law professor Nancy Polikoff. "The more central units are dependentsand their caretakers" (qtd. in Johnson 48).

If the state, performance, and the church "make" weddings and "breaking" withthese conventions reveals their underlying normative sexual structures, then wed-dings can also be "faked."9 Here the performance frames created in and through theritual guide the actions of the participants. Under the tutelage of Victor and EdieTurner, graduate students in the Anthropology Department at the University ofVirginia staged a wedding. Their collective goal was to move anthropology out ofthe cognitive realm into the experiential and to gain "the actors' 'inside view',engendered in and through performance, as a powerful critique of how ritual andceremonial structures are cognitively presented" (Turner 140). As the Turnersunpack conclusions about this performance of wedding, one stands out:

Most participants told us that they understood the cultural structure and psychology ofnormative American marriage much better for having taken part in an event thatcombined flow with reflexivity. Some even said that the fabricated marriage was more"real" for them than marriages in the "real world" in which they had been involved. (144)

Despite the overall understanding that all participants were "faking" this ritualperformance, the tensions between the ritual frame of "let us believe" and the largerframe of play, "this is make-believe," (142) were palatable.10

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For the Turners, the wedding was a smashing success-as heuristic play. The stakesfor the performers, however, were elided. "Of course," write the Turners, "in a realmarriage the couple's intentions are all-important. They must seriously 'intendwedlock' " (142). Although Austin's performative utterance is operative here, theTurners' easy claim about a real marriage is much too simplistic-for gay couples inHawaii and for FloridaJill-and glosses over the state/performance/church matrix inthe creation and maintenance of insiders/outsiders, normative sex, and performanceframes.

Making, Breaking, and Faking Pornography

... "pornography" names an argument, not a thing. We have always had obscenity, at leastas long as we have had a scene of public, reportable life that requires a zone of darkness tolend sense to it by contrast. (Kendrick 31)

Pornography, too, is a particularly interesting interplay of "faking," "making,"and "breaking" sex, and, like weddings, pornography is "made" at the intersectionof the sacred, public performance, and the state. In The Invention of Pornography, LynnHunt argues that, indeed, pornography was invented: "pornography was not agiven; it was defined over time and by the conflicts between writers, artists andengravers on the one side and spies, policemen, clergymen and state officials on theother" (11). In 16th century Europe, the availability and consumption of printpornography was inextricable from the rise of the printing press, burgeoningmarkets of literate consumers, and the desire of both church and state to monitor andregulate behavior in rapidly shifting political and cultural times.

Most literary historians agree that pornography in Europe-written by and distrib-uted among the elite classes of white men-was not considered a "problem" until theworks of Pietro Aretino in 16th century Italy.11 The "first modern pornographer,"Aretino published both in prose (Ragionamente, 1534-1536) and in sonnet form[Sonnetti lussuriosi, 1524); the later work was accompanied by engravings thatgraphically depicted sexual positions and became known as "Aretino's postures."Aretino laid the groundwork for pornographic conventions in print that would lastfor centuries across Europe: "the explicit representation of sexual activity, the formof the dialogue between two women, the discussion of the behavior of prostitutes andthe challenge to the moral conventions of the day" (Hunt 26). Paula Findlencharacterizes the sea change in pornography with the works of Aretino: "Aretinowas more dangerous than all the erotically inclined artists and humanist pornogra-phers put together, not because of his frank portrayals of sexual behavior butbecause of his refusal to restrict his audience to men of virtue who were allowed toread the erotic classics due to their 'eloquence and quality of style' " (101-102). Thestate and the church converged to produce lists of "banned" books and to criminal-ize their production, sale, and possession, thereby "making" pornography a distinctcanon; a canon that even Rousseau evoked in Book One of the Confessions as "thosedangerous books that a beautiful woman of the world finds bothersome because, asshe says, one can only read them with one hand" (qtd. in DeJean 110).

But the audience, canon, and conventions of print pornography in 16th centuryEurope also created a distinct cast of literary performers in pornographic texts. Bywriting sexual exploits in the mouths of both courtesans and courtiers, street

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prostitutes and learned noblemen, and by centering much of their descriptions onanal intercourse between men, pornography created a "third sex"—writers ofpornography, sodomites, and whores. Contemporary same-sex marriages, elderlypensioners, and the "third sex" of pornography are "outsiders" created by theperformance of heterosexuality, procreation, and normative sexual contracts:

Neither [prostitutes nor homosexuals] had to answer for the procreative relations betweenmen and women, but their omnipresence in pornography and everyday life threw intodoubt the stability of the heterosexual regime. Their membership in the so-called third sexgave them a privileged view of the practices of others and, thus, empowered them to speak,quite literally to "authorize" a portrait of society. Their gaze, however, was not thepornographic one, though they existed to foster it. Instead, it was the critical gaze of thepornographer, who looked into the souls of men and told them what they least wanted tohear. (Findlen 107)

Indeed, weddings and pornography, as and when "broken" performances, reinstan-tiate the "insider/outsider" roles through normative cultural assumptions about sex.In Robert Stoller's ethnographic interviews with pornography industry workers, hereiterates the claim of the 16th century "third sex": "The primeval joy in pornmak-ers is 'fuck you', not 'let's fuck' " (Stoller and Levine 119).

The "making" of pornography experienced another sea change, however, withthe invention of motion pictures. Pornography was no longer limited to stilldepictions of sexual acts in engravings, paintings, and photographs, and the "perfor-mance of pornography" was no longer simply the "writing" of pornography.Indeed, with the invention of film, "performance of pornography" became the"performance of sex." As Steven Marcus claims, film was what the genre ofpornography "was all along waiting for," since language in literary pornography hadonly been a "bothersome necessity" (208).

The difference between "faking" sex and "making" sex has long been the line ofdemarcation between soft-core and hard-core pornography; here the performanceframe, like that of "belief in the ritual of weddings, is implicated. The codes andconventions of hard-core depend upon an ironic tension between "real" sexual actswithin "faked" sexual contexts. In nesting Chinese boxes, the performance frame ofhard-core pornography implies "faking." Yet, the sex taking place within that "let uspretend" frame is very real; and the autoeroticism, if masturbation is the result ofpornography's "singleness of intention" (Marcus), of viewers is also very real.Indeed, the tension in pornographic film between "faking" and "making" sex andthe concomitant "breaking" of sexual norms creates its own obverse; that is, the"breaking" of sexual norms "makes" pornographic conventions, and the "faking" ofsexual contexts "makes" sexual acts possible.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

That weddings and pornography are cultural performances should come as nosurprise: all cultural performances reflect implicit and explicit cultural values and areopportunities for reflexivity regarding those same values. And yet the discourses thatvalorize weddings and demonize pornography constantly construct them as radi-cally different. The "white" wedding, publically performed, stands in opposition tothe "dark" recesses of private depravity. This oppositional binary, too easily

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naturalized through language and stabilized as unchangeable, shuts down possibili-ties for both change and subversion (Butler, Gender Trouble).

Viewing weddings and pornography as complementary, not oppositional, culturalperformances allows the mirror metaphor to reveal striking similarities: bothweddings and pornography depend upon the state/performance/church matrix fortheir efficacy and entertainment, slipping among the making, breaking, and faking ofsex. They both create insiders and outsiders to the rights and privileges granted bychurch and state. They both erect interchangeable frames of belief and play for theirenactment. And, most importantly, they both hold sex as and at their center.

Indeed, it is not the presence or absence of sex that is problematic for weddings orpornography, rather, it is the word "performance," as it slides across the field ofsocial meanings in the service of political agendas, that mobilizes the discoursessurrounding pornography.

The Rhetoric of Performance in Pornography

Sex is at the center of both weddings and pornography-as both implicit andexplicit assumptions. In the institution of marriage in the West, sex is the physicalcomplement to the performative utterance "I do." Marriages must be consummatedthrough sexual union. The centrality of sex to weddings is most apparent in itsnoncontroversial acceptance as a cultural practice-until, of course, outsiders ques-tion its exclusivity, norms, and privileges.

Sex is also-inescapably and controversially-at the center of pornography, aproverbial battlefield with its multiple camps, strongholds, generals, foot soldiers,and defensive strategies. Indeed, the rhetoric of war pervades the pornographydebates. But, surprisingly, a rhetoric of performance also pervades the same debates.If pornography is seen as a cultural performance at the service of society, then thecamps aligned around pornography-pro, con, feminist, and postmodern-manipu-late the term "performance" to serve their political ends, variously highlighting sex,erasing sex, or replacing sex in their use of the word "performance."

Performance as a term slips and slides around the pornography debates in severalways. 1) Performance is the doing of sex, as opposed the simulation of sex. Thedifference between actuality and simulation serves to distinguish between the genresof hard- and soft-core pornography; performance in this case is a descriptive term forthe content of the material and its conventional depictions. 2) Performance is acting:in Richard Schechner's vocabulary, the "not me/not not me" awareness andenactment of restored behavior (Between37). Here the tension rests, not in the sexualactivity itself (as in example #1), but in the consciousness of the performer. 3)Performance is real, and its reality is located in the audience. In this third sense,performance is an evaluative term for measuring the audience's reactions to andconstructions of performance competence. 4) Performance is re-presentation that isalways a tensive negotiation between the material and the symbolic, betweenaudience and performers, between the fields of social discourse that constantlydisplace any claims to reality.

Performance # 1: Doing Real Sex

Almost all theoretical treatments of hard-core pornography, despite their widelydivergent agendas, begin with the declaration that the performers are engaged in

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real sexual activity. Stoller defines pornography as "adult men and women perform-ing, not simulating, erotic acts" (3). Linda Williams, feminist film theorist, begins herdefinition with the distinction between "real" and "faked" sexual acts, landing on"performance" as doing.

A first step will be to define film pornography minimally, and as neutrally as possible, as thevisual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit,usually unfaked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers. What distinguishesfilm and video pornography from written pornography—or even, to a lesser degree, fromstill photography-is the element of performance contained in the term sexual act. (29-30)

For anti-pornography feminist Susan Cole, pornography "is a practice consisting ofspecific activities performed by real people" (18). For Marxist philosopher AlanSoble, such definitions of pornography are valuable only if they enable communica-tion without the need for claims about truth or falsehood (8). Indeed, ground zero inthe pornography debates rests on "performance" as the doing of sex.

For makers of heterosexual video pornography, the "doing" of sex is shaped byfairly limited depictions. Ira Levine, X-rated actor, assistant director, and screen-writer, distinguishes between hard- and soft-core pornography: "Hard-core is foot-age of people having intercourse, complete with genital close-ups. If you do notactually see the hydraulics-even if the players are really performing intercourse-it issoft-core" (Stoller and Levine 16). Conventional as well are the sexual activities-penetration, oral sex, and masturbation-and the jargonized pairings in which theyare performed-boy/girl, girl/girl, threesomes, and orgies. The conventions of U.S.heterosexual pornography are dysphemistically categorized as "meat and heat" or"meat shots and money shots"-the graphic close-ups of genitalia, erections, andejaculations. In The Film Maker's Guide to Pornography, Stephen Ziplow claims: "Thereare those who believe that the come shot, or, as some refer to it, 'the money shot', isthe most important element in the movie and that everything else (if necessary)should be sacrificed at its expense.... If you don't have the come shots, you don'thave a porno picture" (qtd. in Williams 93). The male orgasm is the organizingprinciple of U.S. heterosexual pornography: it punctuates, constitutes, and ends theperformance as both the "visible proof of pleasure" (Williams) and the visible proofof the reality of the performance.

As performance, "Pornography in the making is nothing if not all-too-real"(Stoller and Levine 234). This "reality" of sex in video pornography both undergirdsand undermines the term "performance" in its subsequent uses.

Performance # 2 : Sex Workers Are Acting

Sex workers and filmmakers are quick to arrive at the word "performance" todescribe what they do. Levine compares pornography to other aesthetic and athleticperformances: "That cassette you are watching documents a spontaneously createdphysical performance, more related to dance or gymnastics than to conventionalfilm or theatre. Elements of drama or comedy may be used to stage this perfor-mance, as music structures ballet.... Porn actors are physical performers. They'remore like athletes than actors" (Stoller and Levine 8, 178). Elsewhere he offersfurther comparisons: pornography is like burlesque, documentary (akin to footage ofanimal copulation), performance art, even the circus; the physical comparison mostoften made, however, is to athletics.

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Indeed, Randy Spears, praised by all the production staff and crew interviewed inComing Attractions, is the consummate "professional" X-rated video actor. Spearsdescribes his performance-to maintain an erection and to ejaculate both on cue andin the center of the frame12—as a football game: "You want to be able to deliver whensomebody leans on you like that. It's like, okay, there's one minute left, you're on thetwenty, the quarterback's down, get in there and throw the long one. When youthrow a touchdown, everybody's happy. If you bungle it, then the game is suffering"(Stoller and Levine 171).

Nina Hartley, veteran porn performer, comments on her own performanceconsciousness, "I'm always thinking: 'back arched, stomach in, tits out, make apretty picture and enjoy as much of it as you can' " (Stoller and Levine 148).Hartley's description echoes Michael Kirby's continuum of acting and nonacting:actors are "aware of an audience-to be 'on stage'-and they react to this situation byenergetically projecting ideas, emotions, and elements of their personality, underlin-ing and theatricalizing it for the sake of the audience." "At what point does actingappear?" Kirby asks. "At the point at which the emotions are 'pushed' for the sake ofthe spectators" (47). Hartley's description of her responses are, indeed, "pushed.""My responses are real," says Hartley. "I just turn the volume up. I magnify thembecause it is cinema" (Stoller and Levine 153). lisa Palac, founder of Future Sex andpornographic film maker, also lands on "acting" and suspension of disbelief: "I don'tcare if the actors are really fucking or really coming. I don't care as long as I believethey're coming. Everyone knows that the people who are shot and killed in LethalWeapon don't really die. They know what acting is. Why can't they believe pornogra-phy is acting, too?" (qtd. in Tisdale 137).

For sex workers, "performance" is acting. In this field of discourse, performance,as a term, is a safehouse and borrows from the legitimacy of other staged-for-the-camera performances-dance, film, and sports. Sex workers, perhaps more than anyother camp in the pornography battlefield, cannot escape the physical materiality oftheir work, but performance as a term to describe it, rescues and legitimates the sex.

This rescue and legitimation, however, is always compromised by the reality of thesex. While female performers endure uncomfortable, if not dreadful, sexual posi-tions in their performances of pleasure, male performers must display a markedlydifferent performance competence. "Other men look at these pictures and say,'Those lucky sons of bitches. They get to fuck all these great-looking girls. I wish Icould be one of them," says Ira Levine. Behind the camera and on the set, Levinecontinues with his insider's viewpoint: "But when I watch [male performers] work,the impression is not of men having a good time. It is the impression of men doing agrim piece of work" (Stoller and Levine 219).

The pornography industry values men's and women's performances differently.Women are valued, not just for their bodies and faces, but for their novelty-the"new girl" is replaceable when she is no longer new. Men are "valued primarily fortheir ability to perform on cue. Perhaps a dozen men consistently display that skill"(Schlosser 48). Schlosser's use of "perform" is, of course, a euphemism for maintain-ing an erection and ejaculating on cue, but this sense of the word "performance" isthe double bind for "actors" in pornography. Men in X-rated videos have little roomfor failure "to perform" in the industry's "search for wood"; by the third time ithappens on a set, the man is no longer hired (Stoller and Levine 93).

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Acting, then, is very much a part of the discourse of performance of sex workers.But performance as "faked" is undermined by the "real" competence necessary toenact the conventions of the genre. Male actors perform in both senses of the word.Female actors, valued for a different performance competence, are not mined fortheir orgasm-always a dark and mysterious interiority with no distinct visual"proof of pleasure; instead, female pleasure is erased by both conventions anddiscourses of sex work. While the "come shot" is the sine qua non of videopornography, female orgasm is unrecordable, unspeakable, and-quite Iiterally-unperformable. Tisdale interviewed numerous pornographic film stars, and HowieGordon told her of his early days in porn and of his first scene with a woman he'dnever met before: "We started, took about fifteen minutes, whoosh, everything wasperfect. After we came-after /came—I said, 'Do you want to come?' And she said,'Are you kidding? In front of all these people?' " (271).

Performance # J : Real People Watching Sex

The third use of the term "performance" is an evaluative one, and performancecompetence, according to Richard Bauman, is always measured by the audience( Verbal Art). Audience, however, is a terribly problematic term for pornography andthe term is rarely used. Instead, we are "viewers," "consumers," occasionally"spectators," terminology that emphasizes the solitariness of watching and theexplicit masturbatory "effect" of porn.13 The intent to arouse, after "real" sex, is asecond uncontested component of pornography. At the same time, audience "de-sires" are implicit in the conventions of porn; "raincoaters," the pejorative character-ization of the once typical audience member, want "meat and heat."14 As the typicalvenue for pornography has moved from adult bookstores and theatres to theneighborhood video store, however, the typical audience member has changed, too.According to Williams, "women now account for 40% of the estimated 100 millionrentals of X-rated tapes each year" (231). If women now "consume" pornography inthe privacy of their homes, then "the socially shared meanings" of "what arousesmembers of the intended audience" (Soble 110) is an ongoing reconstruction. Therelatively unproblematic "doing" of sex (#1) and the gendered problematics of the"acting" of sex (#2), now incorporate audience in this third use of the term"performance." Here audience quickly splits into a number of factions, all attempt-ing to capture and to evaluate performance competence.

Performance #3a: Watching Real People Acting Badly

This, for me, is the most interesting tension between audience and performer in itsreversal of performance competence: because the performers are such bad actors,they are not really acting; they are simply doing (back to Performance #1). For AlDiLauro and Gerald Rabkin, this tension is the hallmark of the early stag film: "Herewere real people and real sexual activity made all the more real because theiresthetic embodiment was so weak, the 'performers' so clearly not 'actors' " (qtd. inWilliams 58).

The amateurism of the early stag film is returned to in the fastest growingcomponent of the pornography market, "home porn." These are "short videosproduced by 'real' people, with ordinary bodies, who then sell the tapes of their

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sexual encounters for public viewing" (McElroy 28). Wendy McElroy wondersabout this return to amateurism, but she also lands on home pom's audience appeal:"buyers knew the action was real" (29). Ordinary, aroused people—not actors, andby implication, not performing-hold a special attraction for audiences who value the"real." Homegrown Video, an amateur porn company in San Diego, is oneclearinghouse among many for amateur hard-core videos, taped and sent in by "realpeople," and then collected and distributed by the company. Schlosser maintains"these crude but authentic sex tapes" now comprise approximately one-fifth toone-third of the pornographic video market (48). "Authenticity" for this camp ismeasured, interestingly enough, by performance incompetence; the efficacy-entertain-ment braid is enhanced by the audience's perception of "reality" and the ways inwhich the industry "delivers" it.

Performance #3b: Watching Real People Not Acting Married

While the audiences for (and against) pornography are divergent and multiple, itis surprising how many of these audiences cast the sexual performances in pornogra-phy over and against the performance of "married" sex. Indeed, in the 1986Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Commissioner Park Elliott Dietzblames pornography, not for its explicit performance of sex, but for its lack ofperformance of "married" sex:

A person who learned about human sexuality in the . . . pornography outlets of Americawould be a person who had never conceived of a man and woman marrying or falling inlove before having intercourse . . . who had never conceived of vaginal intercourse withejaculation during intromission, and who had never conceived of procreation as a purposeof sexual union. (1:43)

This endorsement of love, marriage, monogamy, heterosexuality, procreation, andasymmetrical gender roles, at once made explicit and public by both church andstate in the marriage contract, yet performed implicitly and privately in the marriagebed, is thoroughly routed in pornography. This audience vilifies pornography notfor the performance of sex, but for the performance of the wrong kind of sex.

A number of anti-censorship feminists follow this line of argument, but instead oflamenting the lack of "married" sex, they celebrate it. Even if limited by theconventions of male-produced, male-oriented sexual scenarios, pornography is "oneof the few areas of narrative where women are not punished or found guilty foracting on their sexual desires" (Williams 260). Moreover, pornography presentswomen's sexual desires outside "zones protected and privileged in the culture:traditional marriage and the nuclear family" (Vance 3). For McElroy, both feminismand pornography "rock the conventional view of sex. They snap the traditional tiesbetween sex and marriage, sex and motherhood. They both threaten family valuesand flout the status quo. Because of this, when conservatives look at both feministsand women in porn, they see homewreckers, harlots, and sexual deviants" (128). PatCalifia, self-described sexual "pervert" and writer, maintains that "sex alone can'tliberate us, but in the meantime it comforts us." She continues: "Women want andneed the freedom to be outrageous, out-of-doors, out-of-bounds, out after dark,without being silenced or punished by stigma, battery, forced reproduction ormurder. We have a right to pleasure ourselves, and access to pornography is part ofthat" (16).

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So while the sex performed in these scenarios is not perfect, anti-censorshipfeminists look to pornography for sex that celebrates female desire, scripts it outsidemarriage and procreation, and is one accessible site of pleasure. Ultimately, anti-censorship feminists, like many sex workers, celebrate the breaking of taboos; again,the attitude is not "let's fuck," but "fuck you!"

Performance #3c: Watching Real Women who are Really Hated

If anti-censorship feminists are watching female desire, anti-pornography femi-nists are watching female subordination, degradation, and exploitation. Here perfor-mance competence takes an interesting turn. No longer is the performer "account-able to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above andbeyond its referential content" (Bauman, Verbal Art 11). Indeed, women performersare victims of, and unwitting perpetrators of, the sexist production, consumption,and depictions of pornography. Performance competence is erased and replacedwith performance of consent. Anti-pornography feminists maintain the impossibilityof consent and sexual pleasure in a patriarchal system in which the power imbalancealways already casts women as victims—in society and in pornography, in short,watching pornography is watching "concentration camp orgasm" (Williams 21).

For anti-pornography feminists, pornography is not really about watching sex, butabout watching the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women. For Cole,"pornography is not a picture, or words or ideas, but a practice of sexual subordina-tion in which women's inferior status is eroticized and thus maintained" (9).Ultimately, for Andrea Dworkin, sex is not really the performance of physicalactivities, but the dancing of attitudes: "sex is a medium to convey hostility andantagonism and ownership and control and outright hatred" (Stan 60). Dworkinwrites, "The woman's sex is appropriated, her body is possessed, she is used and sheis despised: the pornography does it and the pornography proves it" (223).

The discourse of audience for anti-pornography feminists is a discourse of"other." While industry jargon distances itself from audience as "raincoaters" and"lunchbuckets," anti-pornography discourse creates a symbolic order of the phallus,the material consubstantiality of both male audience members and male performers:

Pornography, like rape, is a male invention.... The staple of porn will always be the nakedfemale body, breasts and genitals exposed, because as man devised it, her naked body isthe female's "shame," her private parts the private property of man, while his [genitals] arethe ancient, holy, universal, patriarchal instrument of his power, his rule by force over her.(Brownmiller 394)

Performance competence, measured by the audience, is a gendered construct here,too. For women performers and women audience members, no performancecompetence is possible in an a priori system of dominance and submission; for menperformers and men audience members, performance competence is a given-aspower, as violence, as will. Their performances are "picture perfect" posters forpatriarchy.

Performance #4: There is No Real, Really

In Peggy Phelan's sophisticated and enlightening study of visibility and represen-tation, Unmarked, she argues that all forms of discourse about the "real" make

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claims to being the "Real-real," which "can only disable the possibility of aReal-real" (3). Her claim, at this point in the discussion, is not only inevitable, butindisputable. For pornography, this fourth sense of the word "performance" placesthe emphasis, not on sexual activity, performance consciousness, or on audienceevaluation, but on representation. Here postmodern film theorists, cultural critics,and historians are interested in the tensiveness between the real and the representa-tional created in the term "performance." For Andrew Ross' astute summary of thehistory of intellectuals' debate about pornography, the focus has been on "the vexedrelationship between sexual performances and real sexual conduct: often abstractquestions about representation, its distance from the real, its place in and its effectupon the real, and its relation to fantasy and the construction of sexuality" (224-25).True to Ross' prediction, Williams arrives at the tension between real and represen-tation implicit in the performance of sex: "The genre of pornography... works veryhard to convince us of its realism . . . sex as spontaneous event enacted for its ownsake stands in perpetual opposition to sex as an elaborately engineered andchoreographed show enacted by professional performers for a camera" (185, 147).This tension not only complicates pornography as a "realistic" genre, but compli-cates all the above senses of the term performance. Performance is a construct thatfalls in the middle of a continuum with discourse at one end and materiality at theother.

Still another move in this problematic definition of performance is the tendency toerase sex all together; here materiality of sex is elided, while discursive constructsenvelope the entire continuum. Sallie Tisdale, Walter Kendrick, and Jean Baudril-lard all claim that sex is not the subject matter of pornography at all. For Tisdale,pornography is "a story we tell about ourselves-and maybe the only, or mostrevealing, way to tell certain secrets that are not necessarily sexual at all" (140).Kendrick unpacks the rhetoric of metaphors in the discourses of pornography:

Metaphors are essential in this realm of discourse, because there seems, and always hasseemed, to be no possibility of a literal statement.... [When Comstock) spoke of poisonedswords piercing tender flesh, or of diabolical parents giving their children scorpions to playwith, he could count on arousing powerful emotions. The history of "pornography" is apolitical one [and its rhetorical metaphors] . . . sidestep the literal at every opportunity.(218)

And for Baudrillard, "there is no longer any identifiable pornography," as porno-graphic images "have passed into things, into images, into all the techniques of thevisual and the virtual" (139). In advertising, "the comedy of the bared female body. . . is played out. Hence the error of feminist recriminations: if this perpetualstriptease and sexual blackmail were real, that would be unacceptable" (139). Phelansubstitutes the "real" for "power" and makes a similar claim, "If representationalvisibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be runningWestern culture" (10).

Postmodern theorists, disclaiming the real while claiming the performative, havediscursively written sex out of the pornographic picture. Sex workers, by compari-son, cannot so conveniently erase sex or performance consciousness in theirmaterial practices. Discourse and materiality, for both anti-censorship groups andanti-pornography groups, are defined conversely: as desire and agency on one hand,

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and as coercion and victimage on the other. Performance, then, is the operative andconstitutive term for all camps in the pornography debates. The divergent, overlap-ping, and contradictory uses of the term unveil the politics, not only of performance,but of the cultural construction of sex.

Looking in the Mirror at That Woman in Florida

Jim Falco edits pornographic videos. He understands the demographic changes inthe pornographic market from the "raincoats" and "lunchbuckets" of the past to themarried, heterosexual couples of the present, and Falco places himself in these newshoes when he edits tape: "I'm that woman in Florida, that guy in Iowa. 'This sceneright now is too long' " (Stoller and Levine 194). Falco tries to read my mind, tocreate my desires, to edit in and out what I want to see. I am "that woman inFlorida."

The sexual center of weddings and pornography is a reminder that "this culturealways treats sex with suspicion. It construes and judges any sexual practice in termsof its worst possible expression. Sex is presumed guilty until proven innocent"(Rubin 278). Married sex, created in and through heterosexual, age-appropriate,blood-appropriate consensual weddings, is our culture's "proven innocent" sex;pornography is our culture's "worst possible expression." In both constructions, therelationship between culture and sex is an adversarial one: that is, culture is a blockto sexual drives, a means of redirecting, and channeling sexual energies. This"hydraulic model" maintains that "sex is like a gushing stream whose force can begiven full reign, or dammed, left to roam free or channeled into harmless byways"(Weeks 8).

If cultural performances are always at the service of the culture, then what ends arecreated and served in the performance of sex? Weddings are expressions of, indeed,creations of, the need for order, control, stability. Every culture guards its couplingwith implicit and explicit regulations, doles out rewards and punishments, andmeasures individuals by their enactments. Weddings are celebrations, ultimately, ofindividual complicity in societal conspiracy to control sex-the necessary channelingof the gushing stream.

What societal ends are created and served in the performance of sex in pornogra-phy? Here the gushing stream of sex takes two turns. Pornography is a destabilizingforce: an unchecked, undammed, chaotic anarchy that undermines social orders offamily, heterosexuality, and normative sexuality; for others, pornography is astabilizing force in its perpetuation and valorization of women's oppression andmen's power-just one more example of the status quo. While the stream forks here,pornography is still a force, a rushing current of sex, and society conspires to controlits performance.

There is no "pre-social" sex (Connell and Dowsett 50). Sex cannot be attended toapart from the language, social systems, and material practices that create it. Ascultures organize around sex, the performances that accomplish this organizationare always fecund, ripe for political action in groups, and pregnant with socialmeaning for individuals. The procreative metaphors are deliberate here. Culturalperformances are productive ones: faking, making, breaking, and re-making roles,events, and cultures, in a tensive braid of efficacy and entertainment, always at the

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service of the culture. Lines between participants and observers, duration and space,real and contrived, are fluid ones: real bodies, engaged in real intercourse, beforereal audiences, as the video camera records the wedding; contrived costumes,scripted promises, choreographed kisses and the tape rolls at the X-rated videoshoot. Pornography and weddings are not cultural opposites, but mirror doubles,complementary and necessary to each other for the construction of sex as alwaysalready in need of control.

There's the rub in the mirror that is both reflective and reflexive. The complemen-tarity of weddings and pornography is necessary to complete sex as control. Comple-mentarity demands completion in its implied lack, just as "Thank you" demands"You're welcome" and "I'm sorry" demands "That's all right," to complete thecommunicative interaction and to reestablish balance in the relationship. So wed-dings and pornography demand each other to complete the construction of sex-as-control-a discursive construct and a material practice that ironically enable theflourishing of multiple performances and interpretations of those performances. Forwithout control, and herein lies the irony, no multiplicity of performance would bepossible: "I suppose it takes some authoritarian political order to make [perfor-mance] seem important, a matter of life and death. When you can go to jail for it, youwill listen to it. The transformative threat of performance seems to require an agencyof repression" (Blau 270).

Performance is ultimately about transformation;15 and cultural performances-even as they maintain the status quo through unerring reflections of culturalvalues-are always threatened by the potential for radical and reflexive ways ofperforming anew. Performances of sex are always potentially transformative onesbecause they are always enacted against a backdrop of control. Without control, thereis no resistance, no subversion, no change. If a culture's most important interest is thecontrol of sex, then the performances that perpetuate that economy are its most dearand unexamined, and the performances that subvert that economy are its mostdespised and problematic. Indeed, when cultural performance is approached as amirror held up to a culture, it not only reflects basic cultural values, it also deflectsattention from the backdrop of control against which these performances areenacted. In short, we're so busy watching performances of sex that we forget to payattention to the scenery. Until, of course, a performance occurs that transforms thescene.

Almost two years ago, I took off my 13-year-old wedding band and decided to nolonger participate in that particular symbolism-a visible sign of my wedded sta-tus-in the Western institution of marriage. At the time, it seemed a radical, but right,choice. In the following days, I was uncomfortably aware of its absence: my left handfelt awkward and incomplete as I rubbed the back of my third finger with my thumband felt the seemingly new, smooth skin, protected all those years by gold. I studiedmy fingers for days, and I was quite sure that my third finger had atrophied in morethan a decade of stricture. It didn't look as strong, as well-formed, as capable as theothers. Chinese foot-binding came to mind.

Ever since then, I have made a point of paying attention to the hands around me.Married women, I have discovered, wear wedding rings: from thin, plain goldbands, elaborate clusters and mixtures of gems, antique heirlooms, to knock-your-socks-off diamond solitaires. "This belonged to Jim's great grandmother," I hear,

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and "How will she ever wear that huge rock under her surgical gloves?" mysister-in-law laughs. Married men show no such variety or inclination to talk, butthey do seem to make a more fundamental choice. Indeed, in my informal poll, thechances are 50% that a married man doesn't wear a ring at all.

Why the gendered difference? While married women seem to have many choices,the choice not to be marked as married doesn't appear to be an option. Indeed, evenconsidering it, for many women I spoke with, seemed unthinkable. While weddingsand pornography are mirror doubles, the images of our hands in that mirror areevidence of control: choices that are not choices, a gendered grammar of deep-structures for coupling, a performance that, at once, maintains the sexual status quowhile it also contains possibilities for change. These familiar, unexamined, unques-tioned performances of sex—like wearing a wedding ring, like participating in atraditional wedding, like viewing pornographic videotapes-always manifest whatwe hold dear and what we despise.

Today, as I put an X-rated video tape into the VCR, I look at my bare fingers. I'mcomfortable now with their blankness, the clean slate, my unmarked status. But Iwonder, as the scene on the tape comes into view, about my own complicity-myown loves and hates-in the cultural performance of sex.

Notes1 I am drawing on Richard Schechner's characterization of performance events as a continuum that, dependent on

their contexts and functions, moves between efficacy (ritual) and entertainment (theatre). Schechner claims, "Whenefficacy dominates, performances are universalistic, allegorical, ritualized, tied to a stable established order. . . . Whenentertainment dominates, performances are class-oriented, individualized, show business, constantly adjusting to thetastes of fickle audiences" (Performance Theory 123).

2 While I may be politically incorrect and morally suspect, I am not alone. A 1987 Redbook survey of 26,000 readersfound that almost half of the respondents regularly watched pornographic movies in the privacy of their homes(Rubenstein and Tavris). An August 1994 cover story in Parade Magazine, a nation-wide Sunday newspapersupplement, surveyed 1049 respondents, aged 18 to 65 ("representing nine geographic divisions by age, householdincome and household-size") and found that 18% reported "frequent use of pornographic material during sexualactivity" (Clements).

3 Frederick Corey and Thomas Nakayama's "Sextext" appeared very early in my work on this essay. I was sodistressed at the virulent debate over "Sextext" as pornography on CRTNET that I put this essay away for more than ayear. The 1997 NCA convention panel, "What Counts as Scholarship in Communication: Evaluating Trends inPerformance Studies, Autoethnography, and Communication Research," convinced me it was time to pick it up again.I have joked with friends that my greatest fear is that CRTNET pundits will declare this essay "scholarship."

4 Myrna Kostash in the collection Women Against Censorship concludes her essay, "Second Thoughts," with aninteresting contention (and wonderful example of the "yes-yes" technique of persuasion). It is worth offering in full forits macrostructural approach to my weddings and pornography argument:

I have argued that pornography is not about sex. What is it about? Given the fact thatsexual repression in the family together with prostitution and pornography . . . are onehighly interdependent system, at the heart of which is the "exchange of women"; and giventhe fact that this exchange of women (in which a man gives another man a woman as a giftin order to establish kinship between them) means that women are for men to dispose ofand we are in no position to give ourselves away (which describes our situation inpornography as well); and given that the exchange of women is otherwise known asmarriage, may I suggest that pornography is about marriage? Smash monogamy!Remember that one? Maybe we were on to something . . . (38-39)

5 I borrow this phrase from Sue Ellen Case's contention that women performers were historically "situated on theboundaries of notions of the sacred, public performance, and state politics" (5).

6 The issue of consent and its contest in feminist anti-pornography arguments will be addressed later.7 The asymmetry of gender roles and division of labor within the marriage contract have been elegantly argued

elsewhere; two classics—Simone DeBeauvoir's The Second Sex and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch-come to mind.

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But my colleague John Giancola, calling for a coalition between heterosexual women and gays and lesbians, expressedthe asymmetry this way. "What is clear in the same-sex marriage debates is this: not only are marriages 'supposed' tobe about men and women, but they are supposed to be about . . . " Here John held one fist high in the air as hereiterated, "Men!" and held is other fist substantially lower to state, "women."

8 In 1967, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws in 16 states forbidding mixed-race marriages (seeEskridge for a history of state marriage laws).

9 Just as the "speak now or forever hold your piece" is a stock moment, the mistakenly "faked" wedding is also acommon device. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, Rob and Laura Petri, the Howells on Gilligan's Island, even Greg's parentson the new hit Dharma and Greg, all found themselves "not married," through some technical glitch in the stateapparatus. The comedic results of long married couples suddenly "not really married" throws their personal habits,and their socially sanctioned relationship, into question.

10 The play frame made possible comments during the ceremony itself. A student role-playing a senile grandfathershouted "Battlestations! Battlestations!" and one "dotty" relative "denounced the sexual innuendoes of Solomon'sSong of Songs in loud tones" (Turner 143, 144). Tony n' Tina's Italian Wedding (Allen) is a script that engages in much thesame kind of play. Staged across the country, the event is performed for a paying audience who "attend" the weddingand then "enjoy" the dinner/dance wedding reception while playing the roles of invited guests. Italian-American stockcharacters comprise the wedding party.

11 Walter Kendrick, in The Secret Museum, argues for a different timeline, or rather, for a different location ofpornography as "a problem." Kendrick begins his fascinating analysis with the discovery of Pompeii and attempts tocatalogue the numerous "obscene" artifacts discovered there. Hence, the title of his book, The Secret Museum, is takenfrom the eighth and last volume of M.L. Barre's 1875-77 compilation of Pompeii's ruins. Both the artifacts displayedand the writing about the artifacts "excluded women, children, and men lacking the price of admission" (Kendrick 15).

12 Actually, Spears' job was much harder than even this. In the making of Stairway to Paradise, one male performerwas unable to "perform" at ten minutes until "golden time"—twelve o'clock midnight in which the entire crew wouldgo on triple overtime—on the last day of a two-day shoot. Jim Holliday, the film's producer, described Spears'performance as the "penis double": "They come back from the stage to the back saying, 'You're up', bingo, Randywalks in there, puts the cowboy bandanna around his neck so that things will match properly and within two minutes:has an erection, comes between Lee Caroll's tits, they finish the scene, we wrap the shoot, and we're out of there"(Stoller and Levine 83).

13 This was not always the case. Al DiLauro and Gerald Rabkin's Dirty Movies points to the communal functions of theearly stage film (1896-1911). They claim that "smokers" were a ritualized setting for male bonding. Peggy ReevesSanday, in Fraternity Gang Rape, makes a similar, but much less celebratory, case for the group "consumption" ofpornographic films in contemporary college fraternity houses. In both situations, male bonding takes place through,and at the expense of, women's bodies in pornographic film.

14 An unintentionally funny example of this confusion about audience was illustrated in the making of the videoStairway to Heaven. Directed by porn star Sharon Kane, the video was an attempt to incorporate "women's" desireswithin male conventions. Kane originally wrote a line in the script, "performing sex with members of your owngender." Producer Jim Holliday insisted that the line be changed to "performing sex with members of your own sex."Why? "Because the lunchbucket audience wants to hear the word sex as many times in one sentence as is humanlypossible" (Stoller and Levine 129).

15 Della Pollock, for example, defines performance as "a site of transformation and even a paradigm for culturalresistance" (657), and Henry Sayre claims, "performance can be defined as an activity which generates transforma-tions" (103).

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