The end is not to fuck
By Amanda Juico Dela Cruz
Goldie Poblador, The Georgia, Babae series, 2020.
Image description: Small vase rendered in opaque jade white glass with hints of flesh and nude, inspired by the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.
I want to talk about female sexual pleasure. Mine, to be specific, and how I thought it was mine until I stopped forcing myself to believe that it was.
Eleven years ago, I started writing a research paper asking whether BDSM could be a form of women’s sexual empowerment. It was for my Postmodern Philosophy class in college. I wanted to ask whether assuming the submissive role necessarily meant being objectified, whether an act that looked oppressive could still be empowering when a woman chose it for herself.
I remember an instance in which a Philosophy major from another university messaged me on Facebook to ask about my paper. He said he had attended my presentation at a conference and still wanted to hear more. Back then, the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, whose depiction of BDSM has been widely criticized, complicated the discourse around the practice.[1] I liked rehearsing my ideas aloud and receiving questions because every question gave me another opportunity to test what I thought I understood about BDSM.
Except he did not ask questions. He only gave passive remarks every now and then, nothing substantial that could dictate the course of our discussion. I began to feel suspicious. Still, I shrugged it off. Benefit of the doubt, yes, given. There was nothing wrong in just listening, was there? I went on talking about what I knew and what I thought about the sexual revolution in the United States: how the sex-positive feminists responded to what was later labeled as the “anti-sex” stance of the anti-pornography faction, the feminist sex wars, and the sexual revolution’s unfulfilled promise of women’s sexual liberation.
Both camps sought women’s sexual agency, but they imagined different paths toward achieving it. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, first published in 1981, Andrea Dworkin, a prominent figure amongst the anti-pornography feminists, argues that pornography is neither a form of entertainment nor a form of free speech. It is a tool to dehumanize women. Rape and assault are tropes in pornographic materials, reinforcing the power of men over women whose sexuality is portrayed as something to be exploited and consumed. Allow me to quote an excerpt from the introduction of her book and demonstrate the crux of her philosophy: “pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny.”
Feminist organizing against pornography and violence against women intensified in the mid-to-late 70s. In 1976, activists protested outside of cinemas screening Snuff, a film marketed in ways that encouraged audiences to believe that the on-screen murder and dismemberment of its female lead were real. Organizations such as Women Against Violence Against Women, Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, and later Women Against Pornography emerged from this growing anti-pornography movement. The same groups picketed the Barnard Conference on Sexuality in 1982. Organized by some faculty from the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the conference was meant to counter the growing influence of anti-pornography feminism within feminist and academic circles. It became the flashpoint of what would later be known as the feminist sex wars.
Ellen Willis, one of the conference’s organizers, argues in her 1981 essay “Lust Horizons: Is The Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?” that pornography should not be condemned outright. She calls for a critical engagement with sexually explicit materials, arguing that feminists should distinguish between sexual exploitation and sexual autonomy. At the core of her response to the anti-pornography camp was the conviction that women should be free to define their own desires. She concludes by declaring that “it is axiomatic that consenting partners have a right to their sexual proclivities, and that authoritarian moralism has no place in a movement for social change.” Those debates gave me the feminist framework through which I began thinking about BDSM.
Instead of engaging my ideas, the Philosophy major suggested that the best way to test them was for us to put them into practice, ending his sentence with a winky face emoji instead of a period. I told him that I only discussed BDSM in the strict context of my scholarship. He told me to message him if ever I changed my mind. He was not the first man who positioned himself as interested in my work only to reveal that what he really wanted was to sleep with me. I blocked him.
It took a while before it occurred to me that the sudden sexualization I experienced from the men around me was triggered by my research interest. I realized that my intellectual curiosity was being read as a declaration for what I wanted in the bedroom. Decades after the sexual revolution in the West—whose ideas reached the Philippines gradually[2]—the era I lived in promised women the freedom to articulate their desires. The irony was that I had never intended to declare anything about my own. Yet a declaration had been made on my behalf, and I did not know how to take it back.
Goldie Poblador, two works from the Babae series, 2020.
Image description: Two tall vases inspired by the female form: the left rendered in clear pink, the right is clear with flesh tones.
My conservative upbringing, shaped by an all-girls’ school whose sex education sanctified abstinence and parents who treated anything related to sex with condemnation, taught me that the safest way to talk about my desire was not to talk about it at all. Lessons often felt more like warnings—female anatomy reduced to diagrams and parts, and purity emphasized as protection. At home, my mother’s voice would cut through kissing scenes on TV: "Huwag kang nanonood ng mga ganyan. Bad 'yan." In this light, desire became something dangerous, something to fear rather than embrace.
By the time I started having sex, I had already spent years learning what sex was supposed to look like and what kind of woman I was supposed to become. When I was five, my parents bought my kuyas a desktop to deter them from visiting neighborhood internet cafes, which were beginning to boom then, and on that family computer, my brothers stored the pornography they watched, which I went on to watch too. Later, I never said, "this hurts," when a partner was too rough. I did not know how to describe the pain in the first place. It was not sharp like a needle. It was deep. Stretching. Bruising. But I convinced myself I was the kind of woman who could take it. That I was the kind of woman who could “fuck like a man.” Bring it on. I lay there, legs spread, focusing on the ceiling, counting my breaths, waiting for it to end. When he pulled his fingers out, slick and satisfied, I smiled. It felt easier to perform pleasure than to admit how much I wanted him to stop. I told myself this was how sex worked—how desire should look—and that one day, if I practiced enough, it would stop hurting.
I was often asked later in my sexual exploration why I was not into BDSM “anymore”—whether I had simply not found the right partner, tried the right kink, or learned how to enjoy it properly—when the truth was that my intellectual curiosity in BDSM had never translated into sexual enjoyment, despite having always considered myself sex-positive. The question was always asked as though a woman owed an explanation for saying no to certain sexual practices. Is always saying “yes” the only way to be liberated? Is being into kinky practices the only measure of being progressive? To those women who asked for a copy of my paper, telling me it was what they needed, I still wonder: was it really what you needed?
Maybe I am writing this as repentance for possibly being what Ariel Levy calls a “female chauvinist pig.” In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Levy describes raunch culture as the ways in which women participate in the sexual objectification of themselves and of other women. Driven by the hypersexualization of women in the media, women act raunchy not out of their own desire but out of a desire for men’s attention. Levy argues that this performance of sexual “freedom” ultimately reinforces the idea that women’s sexuality exists primarily for male consumption. Looking back, I notice how often I mistook performance for liberation. I once kissed a girl because some men dared me to do it. At that time, I believed that a woman who advocated for sexual freedom should seize every opportunity to embody it. I realize now that I wasn’t expressing my own desire. I was putting on a show for the men around me.
***
My college best friend told me one time while we were smoking that she met someone who was into BDSM. She talked about getting tied to the bed, stared at while naked, spanked, and penetrated with toys. “Masarap,” she said when I asked her what it was like. “Pakiramdam mo ang hot mo.” It would take me years to realize that what she described—and what many of us understood BDSM to be—was largely pornography’s version of BDSM: a set of provocative acts stripped of the conversations, negotiation, consent, and aftercare. I had not had sex yet. I felt that I was falling behind. She told me that giving a blowjob and getting fingered felt great, but neither act felt great to me once I tried. I did not tell anyone this because I thought something was awfully wrong with me.
Pornography taught me how to moan, how to part my lips, and how to arch my back. As Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex, “Porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” It trained me to believe that my body existed for another person’s pleasure before my own. The men always seemed to set the terms of the encounter, while the women proved their desirability by welcoming whatever was done to them. For a long time, I believed that to be sexually liberated was to meet men on those terms—to prove that I wanted sex as much as they did, that I could take whatever they wanted to give, that I could keep up. That I could fuck like a man.
But what does it mean for me, a woman, to “fuck like a man” if I did not have a penis that could penetrate a vagina? To count bodies? To conquer? Why does fucking like a man borrow the language of war? Is sex a war among bodies? No. Sex is often a war against the female body. We do not say that “Jane fucked John” for instance but that “Jane was fucked by John.”[3] Rodrigo Duterte once ordered his soldiers to shoot women rebels in the vagina. When the directive drew backlash from the women’s rights groups, what response did they get? It was a joke, the Malacañang said, and that by now we should have been used to Duterte’s jokes.
Goldie Poblador, The Octavia, Babae series, 2020.
Image description: A clear violet glass; named after Octavia E. Butler, one of the founding women writers of Afrofuturism.
Men have told me that they would “destroy” my pussy. That was how much they wanted to fuck me—deep and hard and fast like how men do it in pornography. The destruction was supposed to be a measure of their desire for me. For me? I thought something was wrong with me again because having my pussy “destroyed” never turned me on the way it seemed to turn on women in pornography, squirting like a broken water pipe as they were jackhammered by a dick (or two or three). I remember when another friend in college destroyed my lip balm on the edge of his plate to show me what Maria Ozawa’s pussy looked like after all the gangbangs she had done. We were in a budget-friendly katsu restaurant in Taft. We had been talking about her inclusion in the TEDxADMU speaker lineup. I did not know how to protest the rhetoric of pussy destruction, or the realities it helped produce, because “fucking like a man” was the only language of sex that I knew.
***
I had a professor who took an interest in my ideas on sexuality studies. I had taken his class a few trimesters earlier where he discussed the hypersexualization of women’s bodies in media and introduced me to sex-positive feminism as a framework for thinking about female desire beyond shame and prohibition. It was the first time I encountered the possibility that sexuality could be a site of inquiry rather than moral panic. I began asking what sexuality itself could reveal about consent, desire, and women’s sexual agency.
Somewhere between classes and long conversations, the professor and I became friends. We often had dinner and beer in one of those hangout spots along Leon Guinto Street. Many of the menu items were named after rock music. The restaurant itself was named after the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album. Its setting was important. The bohemian atmosphere allowed us to put our guards down. Our friendship was built on conversations about feminism and body politics—Stoya's feminism, James Deen and consent, Annabel Chong and power dynamics, name it. Before long, he was ranting about his students while I complained about schoolwork. Eventually we were talking about things outside our university life—my sexual curiosities, his fantasies, my dates with college boys, and his relationship with his girlfriend, an events model. She added me on Facebook. I declined. He said she was probably jealous. It pleased me.
Once, I told him I wanted to sleep with the boy I was dating. “Don’t,” he said and took a drink from his beer. He wanted to be my first. He said it so casually. Was I supposed to like the proposal? I thought so because my friends thought he was hot. Did I grow uncomfortable with him? Yes. Did I end our friendship? No.
By this point, I had decided to develop my paper from my Postmodern Philosophy class into my undergraduate senior research. As I immersed myself in BDSM scholarship and communities, I realized that the practice was far more structured than pornography led me to believe. Consent was not an afterthought. It was BDSM’s organizing principle, negotiated through boundaries, safe words, continual communication, and mutual trust. The more I learned, the less convincing the assumption became that BDSM was simply patriarchal violence by another name. Drawing on feminist scholarship, particularly from the sex-positive camp, and practitioners’ own accounts, I argued that BDSM could be empowering when practiced with mutual respect, consent, and recognition of each participant’s autonomy.
The professor was not my mentor. He was from a different department. But he often brought my paper up, using it to steer our conversations toward sex. Sometimes, we “analyzed” kinks—anal sex, threesomes, gangbangs, girl-on-girl, humiliation—always circling back to sex-positivity. It started to feel like being sex-positive meant having a bucket list. I didn’t like it, but I played along. I did not want to be labeled uptight. “Uptight” was an adjective that unjustly reminded me of Dworkin. “Unjustly,” because I knew full well where her anger came from. She had survived repeated sexual abuse.
When I told him I was not into BDSM, he responded by calling vanilla boring. “I don’t like normies.”
“Why,” I asked.
“There are so many normies already, why the hell would you want to be one?”
I said BDSM felt objectifying. I did not like being slapped or called a “whore,” although I already knew even then as a result of my ongoing research that BDSM encompassed far more than those acts. The encounters in my own sexual life only resembled what many of us casually called BDSM but which lacked the deliberation and negotiation I had come to understand as central to the practice. Though these encounters were consensual, I often felt less like a sexual partner than a sex doll. The slurs lingered long after the encounters ended. Linda Martín Alcoff wrote in Rape and Resistance (2018),“Past experience colors the present... and thus contributes to the processes by which meaningfulness emerges.” I began to connect my personal experiences to my scholarly work and wondered whether what had felt destructive was not BDSM itself, but the pornographic scripts through which I had learned to understand domination, submission, and even my own body.
Nevertheless, when the professor said, “I thought you were a sex-positive,” I found myself defending my intellectual position while doubting my own refusals. Though I argued that sex-positivity did not require me to want to practice BDSM, the self-doubt stayed with me long after our debate. It felt like I was undressing before him, as I explained how certain acts made me feel while he peered through the open curtains of my private life. I felt like prey.
***
I’d spent almost my entire adult life trying to dissociate my sexuality from gentleness and slowness. I did not want to be seen as fragile and as delicate as a piece of glasswork. That was not how to fuck like a man, I thought. So, when Goldie Poblador’s Babae ended up on my newsfeed during the pandemic—“an interactive installation that lets one ‘take a shot out of a vagina,’” the post said—I tried not to give too much attention to it. One such shot glass is pictured, elongated and softly tapered, almost like a small hand-blown tumbler or bud vase. The glass is translucent with a warm blush that sits somewhere among rose quartz, peach, and flesh tones. Because light passes through it unevenly, the object seems to glow from within. The rim is gently flared and asymmetrical. It undulates, giving the impression that it has yielded to heat and gravity. It carries the memory of its once-molten state. And the most striking feature is the sculpted clitoris, which protrudes from the outer wall near the lip. Beneath it, two curved ridges descend like labia framing a negative space. The material suggests fragility. It could shatter. The walls, however, appear surprisingly thick. The rounded contours invite touch rather than inspection. No matter how much I ignored the image, I kept going back to it, until I eventually looked into the rest of the installation, composed of seventy shot glasses in all.
In a country where Duterte’s "joke" about shooting women in the vagina echoes the colonial history that exoticized and commodified Filipina bodies, Babae offers a counter-image. Goldie’s glassworks are a reaction to the way Duterte’s statement normalized and humored men’s violence, stripping the female body of dignity. It feels like no coincidence that Goldie, who moved to New York City to pursue glass art, found herself once again confronting misogyny under the presidency of Donald Trump, who was caught on tape bragging, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Babae stands at the intersection of these violences—Duterte’s vulgarity, Trump’s entitlement, and the long shadow of colonialism—and reclaims the female body as something more than a site of conquest.
Goldie Poblador, The Anaïs, Babae series, 2020.
Image description: Vase rendered in pink sapphire glass, set against a white background. Inspired by French feminist writer Anaïs Nin.
In her conversation with Danna Gonsalves for The Wonder Journal by Adora, Goldie said that she wanted her sculptural works to take the shape of the vulva “but as glorified as possible.” She wanted her glassworks to look precious like “something beautiful and empowering that you could be proud of […] even if it is feminine.” Especially because it is feminine, I would say. Each glass vulva in Babae is both bold and breakable, a refraction of human reality. The physicality of her process—the heat, the fluidity of molten glass, the way each piece takes shape through her breath—mirrors the sensuality she seeks to reclaim. It’s a reclamation I also see in Julie Lluch’s Lily for Georgia, a terracotta sculpture that folds and unfurls like a flower, though its undulating curves unmistakably echo the form of a vulva. Julie, who admires the tactile intimacy of clay work, shapes her pieces by hand, each press of her fingers a gentle assertion of control and care. There is a warmth in the way both artists handle their mediums: Goldie’s glass and Julie’s clay, elements shaped by touch and fire. Their art becomes an extension of their bodies, a way of reclaiming the sensual from the consuming gaze.
This approach to the female body couldn’t be further from the treatment of it as nothing more than meat meant to be destroyed by a penis, shot by a gun, grabbed by a strongman’s hand. Coming into contact with Babae made me realize the insidious ways in which we too are recruited to partake in our own subjection. It was Babae that made me finally see, four years after I finished my undergraduate senior research, that what I did in the name of sexual freedom did not always liberate me. Some of what I had mistaken for empowerment had, in fact, deprived me of it. How many women were complacent with the rhetoric of “pussy destruction?” How many laughed at Duterte’s joke? How many supported—support—Trump? Pornographic scripts helped teach us to take such violence lightly, to think this was what sex was supposed to look like.
In rejection of this rhetoric, Goldie placed a clitoris at the tip of each shot glass, to be kissed by the lips of those who drink from it. I cannot stop thinking about that gesture. The mouth, so often imagined as a site of hunger and consumption, approaches the clitoris not to devour but to attend. A kiss asks something entirely different of the body. The lips hover. The lips linger. Between one pair of lips and another is the warmth of shared breath. The lips wait for the slightest response before moving again. To kiss is to discover a body by remaining close enough to notice how it wishes to be touched. And the moment the lips meet, they cease to know whether they are touching or being touched. One softens because the other softens. One pauses because the other pauses. I wonder now why I had spent so many years learning sex through the logic of penetration when a kiss already knew another language.
I was never asked how I liked sex done. Instead, I was asked about the largest dick that had fucked me, the number of fingers I could take, and the body count of men I had slept with. “It seems clear to me,” Anne Koedt writes in The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, “that men in fact fear the clitoris as a threat to their masculinity.” Would it erode men’s entire sexual knowledge system if they learned that the female pleasure depicted in pornography is too often a fiction?
Stoya wrote in “Stoya: Feminism and Me” for Vice:
Nothing about the pornographic material I perform in does anything to intentionally further feminism. It is bluntly superficial entertainment that caters to one of the most basic human desires. Pornography exists and is not going to go away anytime in the near future. I see it as neither inherently empowering nor disempowering. Showing up on set and doing my job is not an act of feminism.
As entertainment, mainstream pornography is no more responsible for educating viewers about sexual health and etiquette than Lions Gate is responsible for reminding kids that it’s actually not OK to kill each other despite what they may have seen in The Hunger Games. It isn’t Michael Bay or Megan Fox’s job to mention in every interview that giant robots from outer space are fictional, nor is it the job of every pornographic performer to discuss the testing protocols we use or how consent is given before shooting. I do feel the need to discuss these sorts of things, and there are other performers like Jiz Lee, Danny Wylde, and Jessica Drake who seem to feel a similar need to highlight the context already available for adult films and provide further context.
But what about the wider reaching cultural effects of pornography? I can’t entirely discount the accusation that seeing a video in which I go from giving a blowjob directly to being pounded in the ass has inspired the occasional man to rudely shove his penis into his partner’s rectum without discussion or care. Whoever those guys are, they could probably use a refresher in the difference between TV and real life.
I take her statement to be applicable to women, too. It should also be heeded by those of us who thought that being pounded by a dick (or dicks), drooling, and rolling our eyes in ecstasy was simply how sex was supposed to go. But unlike learning from a young age that killing is not okay from the adults around me, or learning in Literature class that robots fighting in outer space belonged in science fiction, I could only learn about sex through pornography. That is until my research brought me into contact with the BDSM community.
I have never encountered another community that regarded consent with such sacredness. Conversations about boundaries and expectations preceded every scene. Safe words were treated as the highest form of command, meant to be heard at all costs. It was from BDSM practitioners—not pornography—that I learned that respect for the body, care, and negotiation could coexist with desire.
I am still lukewarm about Dworkin’s call to ban pornography, though I understand her arguments now more than ever. Years after my first encounters with pornography, I found myself returning to it differently. By then, research, experience, and conversations with BDSM practitioners had already changed the way I looked. Some videos showed me other possibilities for female desire. It could look like Bonnie’s from the bonniealex PornHub channel who makes tantric sex and lazy morning mutual masturbation with her lover equally great as rough sex. And there was Diana from the Damien Soft channel who showed how a woman who experiences vaginismus can still be sexual. How realistic! The first porn I ever watched, the one my older brothers had saved onto the family desktop computer, featured a Filipino woman and the word “scandal” in its title. It was only when Emma Rogue and Tina Slick joined PornHub that I learned that Filipino women can be sexual without being a scandal. Their visibility on the platform felt as if I could reclaim my own sexuality.
***
Eleven years later, I find myself asking a simpler question: What do I actually like?
To make love? To cry out a lover’s name at the peak of pleasure? To pull him closer and feel him pull me closer? Yes, yes, and yes. To run my hands over his body because I want more of him? Yes. To move slowly, feeling every spark of friction? Yes. To let a sigh escape, unbidden? Yes. To kiss him and feel him kiss me back? To hear and feel his breath against my neck? Yes, yes, and yes. To notice what makes him shiver and feel him learning the same about me? Yes. To move against him and feel him move with me? Yes. To want the feeling to continue without needing it to arrive anywhere? Yes.
Goldie Poblador, Babae series, installation view, 2020.
Image description: Vases of different colors and opacity installed on a white table, lit dramatically, the darkness of the gallery space behind them.
Notes
[1] Amy E. Bonomi, Lauren E. Altenburger, and Nicole L. Walton conclude in their 2013 article “‘Double Crap!’ Abuse and Harmed Identity in Fifty Shades of Grey” that the relationship of the protagonists—Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey—is characterized by intimate partner violence according to the standards for emotional abuse and sexual violence set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, professional dominatrix Lady Velvet Steel points out in her 2015 guest column piece for The Hollywood Reporter, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’: A Dominatrix’s View,” how the film adaptation gets BDSM practices incorrect in ways that increase the risk of injury. Christopher Ingraham reported the surge in sex toy-related injuries following the publication of the books in his 2015 Washington Post article, “Sex Toy Injuries Surged After ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Was Published.”
[2] I use the phrase “sexual revolution” here as shorthand for the cultural and political transformations that took place primarily in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The Philippines did not undergo an equivalent sexual revolution. While Philippine feminist organizations such as the Malayang Kilusan ng bagong Kababaihan (1970), Kilusan ng Kababaihang Pilipina (1981), and GABRIELA (1984) emerged during this period, their struggles were shaped by dictatorship, labor, nationalism, violence against women, and reproductive rights. Ideas associated with the Western sexual revolution circulated less through a local political movement than through English-language feminist scholarship, global popular culture, and later, the internet.
[3] In the Language of Sex: Our Conception of Sexual Intercourse, Robert Baker (2000) offers some explanations as to why the male always assumes the active role while the female assumes the passive role in sentences synonymous to “X had sexual intercourse with” such as those using the term “fuck”, one being that the English language reflects the natural physiological asymmetry between a male and a female. Another explanation he offers is that sexual terms such as “fucked” when used as a metaphor can also mean the state of being harmed.
Amanda Juico Dela Cruz’s scholarly and creative projects write through the female body in post-sexual revolution narratives, positioning it as both a subject and a source of theory, text, and art. Her works have appeared in Kritika Kultura, Philosophia, TOMÁS, and SUSPECT. She teaches in the Fine Arts Department of Ateneo de Manila University and the Literature Department of the University of Santo Tomas.
*
Goldie Poblador (BFA University of the Philippines; MFA Rhode Island School of Design) is a Filipina visual artist. Her multi-sensory installations merge glass, scent, sound, and performance to address themes of ecology and decolonization as they relate to the emancipation of the female body. “Babae” is an interactive installation involving scent and taste that celebrates women and woman-identifying bodies, particularly immigrant woman. Its main component comprises 70 shot glasses shaped like female reproductive organs. Poblador’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally, notably at Artpace San Antonio, Corning Museum of Glass, Urban Glass, 601Artspace, Knockdown Center, Saudi National Museum, Rubin Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Fine Art Museum of Hanoi, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, National Museum of the Filipino People and The Cultural Center of the Philippines. Her work can be found here: https://goldiepoblador.com and here: https://goldieland-studio.com
