Text by Asa SeresinAll images courtesy of Gray Wielebinski 

Recently, walking through Notting Hill, I passed a primary-school playground that was surrounded by a tall, slatted wall. There was a thin gap between the wall’s panels at eye level, as if designed to tempt passers-by to peer through. A friend I was walking with obeyed the wall’s invitation, stepping close and peering through, before quickly pulling back.

“I probably don’t need to be staring at children through that wall,” they laughed. That the act of simply looking at children has been rendered morally suspect is a telling sign of our strange times. In her 2020 book, Virtual Pedophilia, academic Gillian Harkins tracks the way that the slippery figure of the “virtual pedophile” has driven the 21st-century acceleration of mass data gathering, surveillance, and incarceration. “Virtuality describes predators who are alleged to exist in a liminal state combining potentiality, information, and prediction. Potential threat becomes more important than actual danger,” she writes. It is this fixation on potential threat that provoked my friend to jump back from the wall, despite knowing that they intended no harm. Looking at children no longer needs to be a step toward actual injury in order to be problematic. There is a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality at work, made worse by the fact that it is impossible to ever definitely prove to others that one isn’t looking with pleasure.

I wondered about the purpose of the slatted wall. Was it intended to shield the students from the eyes of strangers? Or alternatively, to protect the children from the (dangerous, distracting) sights of the street? Given the non-reciprocal gazing that the wall’s form mandated, I guess the latter is more likely. Or maybe those thin gaps were there to let light peek through, to make the playground feel like less of a prison.

Back in April, a minor scandal erupted over an OnlyFans performer who filmed himself walking through a supermarket with cum on his face. Outrage came fast and quick. Among the denunciators were other gay-porn performers, who insisted that the legitimacy of homosexuality, pornography and kink rests on the consent of everyone involved – not just active participants, but anyone in the general vicinity. Inflicting a chance glimpse of cum on oblivious shoppers was pronounced to be obviously abhorrent. That some kinks require the presence of an unsuspecting public was not mentioned. (I suspect that the detractors’ position would be that such practices do not count as kink and should be categorised as something else. Maybe abuse?)

The carving up of space into what can and cannot be looked at is an issue at the heart of sexual liberation. When England took a first step toward legalising sex between consenting adult men in 1967, emphasis was placed on curtailing the ability of the state to intervene in people’s private lives. Yet as historian Jeffrey Weeks argues, “The logic of the distinction between private and public behaviour was that the legal penalties for public displays of sexuality could be strengthened at the same time as private behaviour was decriminalised.” (One witnesses the individual uptake of this logic among the OnlyFans performers who castigated the man in the supermarket.) Similarly, when the US Supreme Court rendered the criminalisation of sodomy unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, it did so by upholding the constitutional “right to privacy”.

A major problem with this strategy is that – as the past few decades have shown – having a right to privacy both conceptually and pragmatically depends on the existence of private property. Indeed, it means that sex itself becomes relegated to private property, the only house in which it can live.

Recalling walking through Times Square in 1966, Samuel R. Delany, among one of the greatest chroniclers of sexual diversity of all time, remarks: “Like many young people, I’d assumed that the world – the physical reality of stores, restaurant locations, apartment buildings, and movies theatres and the kinds of people who lived in this or that neighbourhood – was far more stable than it was.” Implicit in this infrastructural assemblage is a sense of the very coordinates that produce life’s meaning. Familiar surroundings, repeated journeys, reliable rituals: these are the things that make us feel real. Part of growing up, Delany reminds us, is feeling the ground move beneath your feet. He goes on to describe the seedy Midtown Manhattan ecosystem lost to gentrification – and specifically the porn theatres of Times Square – composing a vibrant elegy to these now non-existent spaces.

When sanitising urban-development projects “revitalise” places such as Times Square and similar zones of subterranean intimacy, one of the things we lose is the chance to witness desire in public. This loss is thematised in artist Gray Wielebinski’s sculpture Pain and Glory, which was commissioned by arts organisation Bold Tendencies to stand on top of the Peckham multi-storey car park in London from 20 May to 17 September 2022. The piece takes the form of a working mechanical bull encased by a tall metal fence. Decorated with metal spurs and butt plugs, the fence also has coloured panels, reminiscent of stained glass, that frame gaping holes. The sculpture’s title, a nod to Pedro Almodóvar, hints that these are glory holes – one set placed at crotch level, the other at eye level. Together, the panels and holes resemble eyes, their vacant pupils piercing through the lids. Like the slatted wall surrounding that primary-school playground, the fence solicits and manipulates the gaze of viewers, keeping them out while drawing them in.

In creating a kind of shrine to the long-standing association of vision and penetration, Wielebinski invokes familiar anxieties around both being – and being the victim of – a voyeur. Riding the bull might conjure fantasies of heroism and taming, but the reality of straddling a mechanical animal in front of a crowd is one of deep vulnerability. In this sense, the sculpture might be seen as an exposure of the helplessness at the heart of domination itself, as well as the inevitable collapse of the ultra-masculine into homosexuality.

While Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is often described as a hymn to a lost queer world, the Times Square that Delany describes is in many ways dominated by heterosexuality. The porn that plays at the theatres is entirely heterosexual, and many of the men who cruise there – although they might engage in sex with other men – identify as entirely straight. A significant part of the book consists of a record of the many conversations Delany had with the men in the theatres, conversations that drift placidly from political and philosophical issues to sex, desire, and the day-to-day business of survival. In a claim that directly contradicts the canon of common sense about pornography and its effects, he writes that: “Generally, I suspect, pornography improved our vision of sex all over the country, making it friendlier, more relaxed, and more playful – qualities of sex that, till then, had been often reserved to a distressingly limited section of the better-read and more imaginative members of the mercantile middle classes.” The evidence he marshals in support of this view is that in the first years he spent in the porn theatres, he remembers that the (mostly working-class, straight male) audience tended to laugh and groan “Yuccch” at every sex act shown aside from “male-dominant” penetration. Over the years, Delany notices, these reactions become more and more sparse, until he hardly ever hears them at all.

What Delany recalls is a twist on the anti-porn truism that pornography desensitises the viewer. In a way, the movies playing in the theatres do have a desensitising effect – but what they erode is a restrictive sensitivity, the knot of anxious masculinity and limited sexual imagination that can lead viewers to recoil from the sight of different kinds of sex acts.

Delany would never have been able to make this argument had he not been watching porn in public. (Perhaps the more accurate term would be semi-public; he points out that the porn theatres offered, for a minuscule admission fee, the chance to hang around all day doing pretty much whatever you wanted.) Today, watching porn is something you mostly do in private. In fact, it is one of the most private of all acts, certainly the most private form of media consumption.

Yet to say that there is no conversation about the viewing experience of contemporary pornography is not quite accurate. The comments section on any online porn platform is usually dominated by appreciative interjections (“It’s great to see real women really masturbating to orgasm”), often in the first person (“From toes to head he is so fucking hot I want to farm with him!!!!!!”), with heavy use of the subjunctive (“I would have made a baby with Ms 4:15!!!!”). There is criticism to be found – “she needs to wear a supportive bra when she’s not fucking (even in bed) because her beautiful breasts are already starting to sag” – as well as questions (“Is the train room actually designed for sex?”). But for all the chatter, the comments section is far from conversational. Most comments are obviously not written with the expectation of a reply, nor are their outlandish claims meant to be all that convincing. Online commenting is a form of communication devoid of what Delany calls “contact”: authentic, live interaction between people of different backgrounds. It does not permit people to be open to one another, to learn from and transform each other.

When we watch porn alone, we hear no other viewer’s moans, laughs or “yuccchs”. There is no discussion, no dispute over what everyone thinks is happening. I think this is why so many “common-sense” beliefs about porn are able to circulate like truth, when in fact they are just opinion. One can easily be lulled into belief that a given pornographic film or sex act has a single, obvious meaning. This kind of logic is rife in the way sex and porn are discussed in contemporary British media, which regularly indicts specific sexual practices – to take one example, choking – and their representation in porn as straightforward iterations of women’s degradation. No room is left for the fact that plenty of people, including men, enjoy the sensation of being choked, because the association between choking and misogyny is deemed to be immediately visually perceptible to everyone.

One of the most prominent misconceptions flying around is that watching porn has a straightforwardly indoctrinating effect, as if desire works like a file transfer, an image uploaded directly to your brain. (I’m sorry, but Sigmund Freud did not invent psychoanalysis so that we could go around thinking this is how desire operates.) Andrea Long Chu takes up this question in her essay, “Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?”, playfully leaning into radical feminist talking points about porn’s brainwashing effects and trans women’s supposed obsession with bimboification. Chu makes a convincing case that critics of porn, be they feminist or fundamentalist Christian, are concerned about the emasculating effect of porn consumption. She argues that watching porn, like bottoming and being female, “is essentially to have the burden of desiring taken out of your hands, which are thereby freed up for other endeavours”.

Chu persuasively identifies that the image-transfer model of desire carries, in itself, a powerful erotic charge – hence the appeal of a genre of pornography that takes the form of hypnosis. At the same time, I don’t think it’s possible to let someone else do your desiring for you, no matter how much power you hand over to them. But more than that, I think the supposed pacification porn stimulates – its brainwashing, bimboifying effect – is easily overstated. Looking at something, even if one is looking with pleasure, does not equate to believing it or wanting it. And it hardly means letting it colonise your subjectivity.

In a lecture given at MIT in 1992, “The Rhetoric of Sex / The Discourse of Desire”, Delany observed that: “The power involved in desire is so great that when caught in an actual rhetorical manifestation of desire – a particular sexual act, say – it is sometimes all but impossible to untangle the complex webs of power that shoot through it from various directions, the power relations that are the act and that constitute it.” In other words, a hard dick doesn’t necessarily equate to aggression; being a woman does not equal getting fucked; there is power to be found in what seems like passivity; domination can look a lot like surrender.

Delany goes on to provide a set of questions for the would-be sexologist, a primer for how to read the scene of sex:

You’re having sex with someone. Very well. Whose scenario is it? Who is exerting the most physical energy to bring it off? What is the social value assigned to each player in the particular act? What sorts of energy, action, and articulation are needed to transform or reverse any one of these?

When it comes to the topic of sex, the placid curiosity and radical anti-essentialism Delany displays here is almost unheard of. Yet this needn’t be the case. Delany’s questions are hardly complicated; they don’t require any expertise, just calm interest and an open mind. I think of this approach to sexuality as a matter of bringing the question mark back. It is so easy to assume that a given sex act, encounter, scene, or representation has a single, visually apparent meaning, or is a transparently legible manifestation of power. Delany reminds us not to be so sure.