Visual pleasure and gonzo pornography: Mason’s challenge to convention in ‘the hardest of hardcore’

Abstract

This article focuses on the work of enigmatic female gonzo director Mason, and examines her filmic negotiations of genre convention within the mainstream American gonzo industry. Close analyses of her films reveal a rich, textured set of filmic strategies which complicate conceptions of what mainstream gonzo pornography looks like and how it functions. This article presents an overview of her career to date, examine the articulation of her relationship with her female performers, and discusses her authorial tropes. It asks how her films differ from those we might have come to expect from male directors, and I question how we might account for her female gaze (as both producer and consumer) upon extremely hardcore scenes. In particular, I seek to demonstrate that as Mason navigates, negotiates and negates a variety of gonzo conventions, her work is best understood as a series of responses to the norms of her chosen genre.

Sexual Subversives or Lonely Losers? Discourses of Resistance and Containment in Women's Use of Male Homoerotic Media

“…Monica speaks implicitly to the visibility of men's arousal as a marker of the authenticity of the sexuality represented in gay pornography. Indeed, the symbolic embodiments of masculine physicality (erection, the cumshot) have long been relied upon as tangible proof of the authenticity of men's sexual pleasure in pornography (Lodder, 2016;Shamoon, 2004;Williams, 1999). However, the validity of these markers, too, can be called into question, for example, by the existence of "fluffers," the ability to edit video to produce the illusion of unbroken penile tumescence, marathon-esque longevity, and powerful ejaculations, and the rampant use of sexual enhancement medications in pornography (Farvid & Braun, 2006;Gurevich et al, 2017;Gurevich, Cormier, Leedham, & Brown-Bowers 2018;Potts, 2002, Williams, 1999.…”

Pleasure, pain and pornography: A gendered analysis of the influence of contemporary pornography on the lives of New Zealand emerging adults

“…For children and young adolescents, much of their viewing of pornography is accidental or unintentional (Baker, 2016;Flood, 2007;Nash et al, 2015;Ybarra & Mitchell, 2005), and research with young people suggests that some young people are distressed by pornographic content they have seen online (Green, Brady, Holloway, Staksrud, & Olafsson, 2013;Livingstone, Haddon, Gorzig, & Olafsson, 2011;Smith, 2012), or concerned about the impacts of pornography for their friends (Walker, Temple-Smith, Higgs, & Sanci, 2015). That said, young people experience and negotiate pornography in a multitude of ways, and their interactions with pornography online are not always unintentional, nor are they always viewed as distressing and/or harmful by young people themselves (Attwood et al, 2018b;Mulholland, 2013;Rothman, Kaczmarsky, Burke, Jansen, & Baughman, 2015;Smith, 2012).…”