A Very British Carnival: Women, Sex and Transgression in Fiesta Magazine
A Very British Carnival: Women, Sex and Transgression in Fiesta Magazine
A Very British Carnival: Women, Sex and Transgression in Fiesta Magazine
Fiesta magazine
ATTWOOD, F.
Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at:
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Published version
ATTWOOD, F. (2002). A very British carnival: women, sex and transgression in
Fiesta magazine. European journal of cultural studies, 5 (1), 91-105.
Abstract
Key Words
Vulgar Pleasures
1
notion that pornography expresses relations of male
dominance and female submission has been challenged, its
potential for the transgression of sexual norms emphasised
and questions of pornographic style and sensibility
foregrounded (Kipnis 1996, Penley 1997). While each of
these approaches have stimulated valuable debate, both tend
to conceptualise pornography in rather abstract terms.
There is clearly a need for new work which attempts to
remedy this kind of abstraction by contextualising various
types of pornographic texts in relation to forms of
production, distribution and consumption, but this paper
attempts something rather more modest, the examination of a
single issue of Fiesta, as an example of a popular
pornographic sub-genre, the British downmarket softcore
magazine. My aim is to examine the magazine’s style and
content in the light of those accounts which stress
pornography’s ‘dominant’ or normative characteristics, and
of those which stress its ‘transgressive’ features. In this
way, I hope to accomplish three things: to locate this text
in terms of its cultural status and its relation to
existing forms and traditions, to examine the text as a
mode of sexual representation, drawing attention not only
to its status as a 'problem', but to its regimes of visual
imagery, linguistic features and ways of 'speaking sex',
and to investigate the extent to which the influential
notions that pornography is either oppressive or
transgressive are of use in making sense of such a text.
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shares the status traditionally ascribed to forms of mass
entertainment which are imagined to offer ‘satisfaction at
the lowest level’ (Leavis & Thompson, 1964:3) and a low
style found, and denigrated, in other cultural texts and
forms of entertainment. For example, its attempt to ‘move
the body’, like ‘the weepie and the thriller, and also low
or vulgar comedy’, relates it to other socially reviled
popular genres (Dyer, 1992:121), while its emphasis on and
eliciting of vulgar pleasures can also be found in forms of
entertainment such as the pantomime and fun fair (Carter,
1995, 1982).
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between the ‘female sexual energy’ of the ‘harridan’ and
the uncontrollably arousing ‘busty blonde’ (Dyer, 1985:34-
35).
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clearly can (Wicke,1993:68). A similar contrast can be
drawn between a British ‘upmarket’ porn magazine such as
Mayfair which packages sex and women as glossy, classy
commodities and its ‘downmarket’ counterpart, Fiesta, which
revels in a dirtier, bawdier ‘cheap and cheerful’
celebration of the physical (McNair, 1996:120).
Distinctions may also be drawn between downmarket texts; a
comparison of Fiesta with its American counterpart,
Hustler, reveals it to be far less overtly political, less
antagonistic, less ‘gross’ and less sexually explicit than
Hustler is.
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seen’ quality (Hunt, 1998:93), absent from a text like
Hustler, though endlessly recycled in many British
representations of sex, particularly in sexploitation
films, sex comedies, seaside postcard humour, and in the
Carry On and Confessions films. In all of these, sex is a
vulgar and naughty pleasure to be pursued in the context of
ordinary, everyday life, but one in which ‘the promise…of
sexual freedom’ is signposted as ‘a fleeting aberration’
(Jordan, 1983:317); a carnival paradoxically represented as
common place and forbidden territory.
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the endless opportunities which can be filched from the
routines of life for physical pleasure - for sex and laughs
- a utopian and vulgar practice of everyday life.
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female come to that, dress her up in a butcher’s
smock, or as a dinner lady, or don’t bother dressing
her up at all, cover her tits with whipped cream,
smear jelly in her juicy bits, baked beans in the
gusset, have a bun fight and fill her cleavage with
raspberry jam.’ (Fiesta, p.23)
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This erasure of differences between good and bad
women, so crucial to many other mainstream representations
of femininity, clearly and transgressively turns all women
into sexual spectacle; ‘all social constraints…deliciously
sacrificed, dissolved by sex’ (Snitow, 1995:195). Notions
of sexual ownership of individual women or of marital
fidelity are also undermined; the Reader’s Wife is clearly
for sharing, as the captions, ‘This is your wife’ and
‘Readers’ Wives Striptease’ indicate. The conventional
significance of the heterosexual couple is overturned; its
‘private’ and exclusive sexual relationship becomes
promiscuous, public and accessible within the world of the
magazine. These transgressive elements do not simply work
to upend ideals of domesticity and romance, but also appear
to enact a fantasy of sexual equivalence. The depiction of
Fiesta women shows them to be as sexually eager and active
as their male counterparts, represented visually in a
desire to ‘show off’ to readers, and through their
narration of explicit stories of sexual adventure. While
Fiesta’s imagery may be understood in terms of the
convention of woman as spectacle and of a fascination with
sexual difference (Kuhn, 1985), the narratives set out in
the form of readers’ letters work rather differently.
Whether attributed to male or female authors, these feature
roughly the same number of male and female narrators, the
same number of male and female sexual performers, and tell
virtually the same story. Fiesta narratives appear to
demonstrate male and female sexual similarity; indeed it
can be argued that a key feature of the Fiesta fantasy is
the insistence that women’s sexual desires are the same as
men’s.
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without complication, envy, disappointment or failure is
shot through with anxieties which surface, predictably, in
Fiesta’s jokes and cartoons. The joke, ‘Why is a blow-job
like a plate of lobster thermidor? They’re both very nice,
but you don’t often get them at home’, draws attention to
the ‘fleeting aberration’ of Fiesta’s sexual carnival,
while images of an old man unable to perform sexually and
of a ‘young brickie’ who ‘cemented his prick’ in a wall
offer an interesting contrast to the sexual abundance and
success celebrated elsewhere. Men’s pricks are ‘all in a
twist’ after all. In another cartoon, ‘Nobbem Hall’, a
young couple is attacked in a wood by a pack of sexually
voracious ‘dogs’; hairy, scrawny, muscular harridans with
huge biting mouths - an image which seems to cry out for an
analysis using the ‘psycho-symbolism gubbins’ which Fiesta
mocks.
Talking Dirty
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debasement of romantic, aesthetic and domestic ideals, the
transfiguration of the ordinary and everyday, a commitment
to the pleasures of the body and a sense of submerged guilt
and anxiety. It is expressed in the downmarket ‘home-made’
presentation of women’s bodies in everyday settings, in the
visual language of garish colour and cartoon, and also in
the linguistic features of the magazine. Fiesta’s
linguistic features, its narrative structures and styles
and its mode of dirty talk are particularly interesting for
their construction of a very specific bawdy sensibility.
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the body which celebrates its rudeness, its gushing,
slurping, grunting and panting, and which relates Fiesta’s
carnival to the ‘Rabelaisian transgression’ which Laura
Kipnis identifies in Hustler (Kipnis, 1996:133), and
perhaps also to the desire to embody what a sexual utopia
of energy, abundance, intensity and transparency ‘would
feel like’ (Dyer, 1992:17-34). The journey towards climax
is fragmented and short-circuited through the repetition of
dirty words and phrases, overwhelmed and interrupted with
moments of 'premature', incoherent pleasure. This dirty
talk is also crucial in overcoming the severe legal
limitations surrounding the production of British
pornographic imagery. In Fiesta, crude and explicit
language functions to incorporate a sense of ‘hardcore’ or
‘real’ sex into a visual regime which necessarily depends
on softcore images of female sexual display, however
‘downmarket’. It is sex talk which comes to signify real
sex and sex-as-transgression. Advertising text becomes the
repository of the sexual ‘perversions’ which literally
cannot be depicted and the prevalence of adverts for phone
sex underlines the limited pleasures of visual
representation which can be offered within the magazine
itself. Indeed, the magazine offers itself as a bridge
between the reader and the really dirty sex he is imagined
to desire; the ‘dirty talk’ of phone sex is ‘guaranteed’ to
do what the magazine’s visual imagery cannot. In this move,
aural sex becomes the ‘real thing’ in which, as one ad puts
it, ‘Hearing is Believing’.
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Readers’ Wives
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pleasure as outrageous. This is not merely the
‘methodological defect’ of porn written by and for men, ‘a
manual of navigation written by and for landlubbers’
(Carter, 1979:15), but a sleight of hand in which Fiesta's
apparent celebration of female sexuality is recast as
sordid detail and the female subject is transformed into
subject matter. It is also, finally, in this positioning of
its carnival in the marketplace, that Fiesta maps out its
relation to women, to readers and to the real.
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References
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