A Very British Carnival: Women, Sex and Transgression in Fiesta Magazine

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 17

A very British carnival: women, sex and transgression in

Fiesta magazine
ATTWOOD, F.
Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at:
http://shura.shu.ac.uk/2/

This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the
publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.
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.

Repository use policy


Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the
individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print
one copy of any article(s) in SHURA to facilitate their private study or for non-
commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or
use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain.

Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive


http://shura.shu.ac.uk
A very British carnival: women, sex and transgression in
Fiesta magazine

Published in European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol.


5(1). 2002. pp.91-105.

Abstract

This article addresses the claim that pornography’s theme


is ‘male power’ and the recent counter-claim that
pornography may embody transgressive potential. It pursues
the apparent contradictions in these claims by focussing on
a specific pornographic text, the British downmarket
softcore magazine, Fiesta, and locating it in relation to
other forms of sexual and non-sexual representation. In
considering the text’s relation to other ‘mass’ and ‘low’
texts, ‘bawdy’ and ‘carnivalesque’ sensibilities, it
becomes possible to establish its particularly British and
vulgar representation of sexuality which relies not only on
its sexual content, but on a ‘dirty style’ in which notions
of sexual propriety are self-consciously transgressed. The
analysis of Fiesta plays particular attention to the role
of women’s bodies and a mode of ‘dirty talk’ as key
elements in its representation of sexuality which
illuminate the rather abstract claims made about
pornography’s structures of dominance and transgression.

Key Words

Pornography, British, transgression, carnivalesque,


objectification, Fiesta magazine, representation of women,
low texts, bawdy, dirty talk

Vulgar Pleasures

Despite an extensive and ongoing debate about


pornography, surprisingly few analyses of individual
pornographic texts exist. Questions of regulation, harm,
and ‘effects’ have tended to outweigh those of generic
composition; pornography is most often discussed as a
social and political problem rather than a mode of sexual
representation. Those textual analyses which have been
undertaken have tended to focus on pornography’s visual
content as the chief indicator of its significance; content
which, as many feminist writers have noted, positions women
as sexual objects or ‘things’ for men (Griffin 1982,
Dworkin 1999, Kuhn 1985). ‘The major theme of pornography’,
writes Andrea Dworkin, ‘…is male power’ (Dworkin, 1999:24),
figured in its insistent portrayal of woman as an object,
‘used until she knows only that she is a thing to be used’
(Dworkin, 1999:128). However, in some recent studies the

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.

The question of sensibility is an important one in the


attempt to understand pornography as a transgressive form,
and to situate it as a mode of sexual representation which
can be related to other cultural forms. While pornography’s
sensibility has attracted little critical attention, it is
often this which is implicitly evoked as the sign of its
offensiveness. Attempts to distinguish between pornography
and art, or pornography and erotica may be complicated by
their similar content. They may be equally ‘sexual’ and
equally ‘explicit’, in these cases, a style which is held
to suggest an ‘intention to arouse’ enables the act of
categorisation to take place. The low quality attributed to
pornographic, as opposed to artistic or erotic, sensibility
is clearly signified by the soubriquets, ‘dirty magazine’,
or, ‘mucky book’, which refer not only to the genre’s
visualisation of the body as disordered and grotesque or to
its smutty and explicit language, but to its provision of
cheap thrills to an audience portrayed as ‘brutish’ and
‘voracious’ (Kipnis, 1996:175). Porn texts are texts whose
pages are stuck together, a ‘realm of the profane and mass
culture where sensual desires are stimulated and gratified’
(Nead, 1992:85). But while pornography can be located at
the very bottom of a cultural hierarchy, beneath ‘tabloid
TV, the National Enquirer, Elvis paintings on velvet’, the
lowest of low class things (Kipnis, 1996:174), it also

2
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).

It can be argued that it is the vulgarity of such


pleasures, lacking in ‘class’, concerned with physicality
and sensation, spurning sophistication and intellect for
excess, thrills and fun, which marks the distinction
between dominant and popular aesthetics, high and low
cultural forms. As Angela Carter notes, the separation of
this kind of ‘fun’ from the more ‘obscure’, ‘swooning’ and
‘elevated’ delights of erotic pleasure seems to depend on
the association of the former with cheap thrills and with
‘the working class, as defined from outside that class’
(Carter, 1982:110-113). The vulgar pleasures of ‘the
straightforwardly sexual’ (Carter, 1982:113) which
pornography purveys most directly have led some theorists
to categorise it as a transgressive or carnivalesque form.
Laura Kipnis identifies a number of carnivalesque elements
in porn; an obsession with excess, an inversion of
established oppositions and of official hierarchies, and a
fascination with a body which is ‘insistently material,
defiantly vulgar, corporeal’ (Kipnis, 1996:132), while
Constance Penley notes that what connects porn with other
American vulgar texts is its ‘lumpen bawdiness’, ‘based in
a kind of humor that features attacks on…middle-class ideas
about sexuality, trickster women with a hearty appetite for
sex, and foolish men with their penises all in a twist,
when those penises work at all’ (Penley, 1997:99). Leon
Hunt traces a similar bawdy tradition in Britain, recycled
in seaside postcard art, music hall and the work of
comedians such as Benny Hill (Hunt, 1998); a British
tradition, according to publicity for the sex comedy,
Confessions of a Window Cleaner, of ‘good, naughty
laughter’ (quoted in Hunt, 1998:118). In her discussion of
the Carry On films, Marion Jordan identifies some
characteristics of this ‘tradition of English working-class
humour’; a ‘grotesque exaggeration and repetition’ of
stereotypes, rude puns, a ‘masculine view of the world’, an
anti-work, anti-middle-class, anti-education stance, a
‘resistance to ‘refinement’ and an ‘insistence on
sexuality, physicality, fun’ (Jordan, 1983:312-327). In
texts like these, anxieties about male sexuality surface,
despite their masculine viewpoint. As Penley and Dyer note,
men are often depicted as foolish and impotent, caught

3
between the ‘female sexual energy’ of the ‘harridan’ and
the uncontrollably arousing ‘busty blonde’ (Dyer, 1985:34-
35).

A recognition that pornography’s bad reputation can be


connected not only to its sexism, but through its relation
to these mass and crass traditions of bawdy is a useful
starting point for considering the contradictory nature of
pornographic texts. Pornography and other bawdy traditions
may embody a masculine view of the world, but they may also
mock and undermine it. What is more, the perceived lowness
of porn may derive in part from its association with the
working classes, its celebration of the physical and its
determined upending of social and cultural values, in
particular those of social refinement and cerebral
endeavour. These features, it is argued, appear to signal
some kind of transgressive potential. The notion that
pornography transgresses social and cultural norms sits
uneasily with feminist analyses which stress its conformity
to dominant ideologies of sex and gender, however, and it
is this apparent contradiction which I want to pursue in
relation to Fiesta magazine. In order to do this, it will
be necessary to locate Fiesta in relation to the categories
of pornography and bawdy more precisely, and to describe
its particular brand of carnivalesque transgression.

The Bawdy World of Fiesta

Textual analysis is particularly useful in debates


about pornography, not only as a means of reading specific
texts, but in isolating features of style and content which
are shared with other forms of representation. At the same
time, this kind of analysis directs attention to the
variety within the pornographic genre. Sweeping statements
about pornography’s relentless objectification of women or
its embodiment of patriarchal structures of dominance and
submission cannot be borne out by a detailed examination of
the many different types of pornography which exist.
Equally, and despite the links made between porn and low
cultural forms above, not all pornographies will be
transgressive, carnivalesque or even bawdy. Two examples
given by Jennifer Wicke in her discussion of the
pornographic genre’s ‘internal divisions and distinctions’
clearly illustrate this. Whereas ‘the intricate
confessional medical mode of a publication like Forum’
which ‘builds verbal fantasy worlds out of middle-class
managerial and professional milieux, interlaced with a
vocabulary of the aesthetically upscale’ cannot really be
located within the sort of bawdy tradition which I describe
above, magazines dedicated to the depiction of enormous
breasts which ‘are caught up primarily in extending the
genre of the sexual pun…related to a working-class British
tradition of pun and rhyme melded to sexual content’,

4
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.

Such comparisons are useful in situating Fiesta’s


brand of carnival in relation to a variety of traditions
and sensibilities, and show it to be not only a ‘mass’,
‘low’, ‘bawdy’ ‘carnivalesque’ ‘transgressive’ or
‘pornographic’ text, but a form of textual carnival
associated with a particular nexus of British, downmarket
texts concerned with fun, ‘naughty laughter’, ordinary
everyday life and the working class. In particular, it can
be noted that while general similarities exist between
texts categorised as pornographic or bawdy, variations in
emphasis, focus and style can also be found within
differing cultural contexts. What emerges, even from this
brief overview, is the difficulty of generalising about
what pornography 'is' and the necessity of specifying what
elements typify a particular sexual representation. In the
case of Fiesta, the tendency to articulate the desire for
transgression in a rather playful, awkward and self-
conscious manner and to contain that within an imaginary
'everyday' world is one of the elements by which it can be
located within a British bawdy tradition which encompasses
both mainstream and pornographic texts. The precise extent
to which British and American bawdy traditions differ in
relation to this characteristic is clearly beyond the scope
of this paper; however, this difference is certainly borne
out in a comparison of downmarket pornographic magazines
such as Hustler and Fiesta. While Hustler's political
satire, its anti-clericalism, its attacks on privelege and
its obsession with the pleasures of the polymorphous and
abject body give it a prominent and scandalous position
within American culture, Fiesta attracts little public
attention. Its concerns are with everyday pleasures rather
than public affairs and its portrayal of these is far more
closely related to other British mainstream representations
of sex, the body and of women than Hustler is to its
mainstream counterparts. Thus, while Kipnis' depiction of
pornography as an 'outlaw' or outrageous cultural form is
clearly borne out by a publication like Hustler, the idea
that pornography per se is transgressive must be more
precisely established in relation to Fiesta magazine. The
self-conscious ‘rudeness’ which Fiesta displays is a
characteristic which Hunt describes as a ‘not-meant-to-be-

5
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.

Fiesta magazine announces its particular brand of


sexual carnival through the visual style of its cover page,
which is eye-wateringly bright and garish. A half-dressed
female model displaying the ‘come-on’ look traditionally
associated with soft-core pornographic address is set
against a pulsating background of fierce red, yellow and
blue. There are no subtle, erotic overtones here; standing
at the gateway to a world of treats and greedy consumption,
she invites the reader to ‘Go on, Give your trousers a
treat’ and ‘Slaver over FOOD & SEX’. Inside, the treats of
soft-core photosets, reviews of sex shows and interviews
with porn stars are set alongside more mainstream magazine
fare; book and music reviews, cartoons, jokes,
competitions, a horoscope and crossword. ‘Reader input’ is
prominent in the form of letters and pictures of ‘Readers
Wives’. The combination of mainstream editorial categories
and sexual content creates an overall effect of a ‘bawdy
world’, an effect heightened by Fiesta’s downmarket, light-
hearted and vulgar ‘comic-book’ tone (Hardy, 1998:52).
While the fantasy world of many magazines, pornographic and
non-pornographic, is constructed as a world of exotic,
affluent celebrity, Fiesta’s realm is one of resolutely
‘ordinary’, accessible, physical, everyday pleasures.
Outside or inside, models are displayed in the most mundane
settings; living rooms, bedrooms, front drives, amongst
road sweeping equipment. Readers are introduced to other
‘Reader’s Wives’ who are ‘thrusting their bums up From
Glasgow to Sidcup’ (Fiesta, p.3). Sex takes place within
the routines of work, domestic and social life, at office
parties, in the suburban home, at friends’ houses. If this
is a carnivalesque scenario where every encounter leads to
messy, rude, noisy pleasure and where every body gapes,
squirms, pounds and gushes, it is a carnival with its feet
firmly on the ground. Peopled by ‘bored housewives’ and
handymen, Fiesta displays surprising common ground with
other popular fictions which stress the ordinary
transfigured; with the paperback romance whose characters
are ‘in a constant state of potential sexuality’ (Snitow,
1995:191), and with the pantomime where ‘everyday
discourse…has been dipped in the infinite riches of a dirty
mind.’ (Carter, 1995:384). This is a particular brand of
carnival in which ordinary life becomes a fiesta because of

6
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.

Although it is possible to locate Fiesta’s version of


carnival in terms of its ordinary, everyday, working class
and British characteristics, its frame of reference is not
contemporary British life, but the British bawdy tradition
itself. ‘Real’ and fictional low worlds collide throughout
the magazine; the Assistant Editor greets a reader’s
account of the sexual encounters of plumbers with the cry,
‘Fuck me, it’s Robin Asquith!’ References to the Seventies’
star of the Confessions films, to mothers-in-law, ‘cracking
birds’ bored at home, their ‘hubbies’ at work ‘on the rigs’
and to ‘nookie’ give the Fiesta world a curiously outdated,
backward looking, nostalgic feel. Many of its cartoons and
jokes reproduce the conventions of the seaside postcard,
though they are more explicit, and photosets are framed by
text dripping with word-play, puns, and dirty jokes which
call to mind an older tradition of British comedy, with its
slightly anxious, robustly chauvinistic, naughty tone. Here
is an account of a meeting with photoset model, ‘Justine’.
‘We met at the shoot, got on like a house on fire, and
went for a little romantic wander prior to her sodding
off forever. One thing led to another and, before you
know it, we were getting intimate in a way I’d hardly
ever experienced without paying for the privilege.
“ T ell me, Julie,” I said, in my most seductive
voice, “ how do you like the feel of a real man’s
cock? ” “ It’s Justine, ” she said. “ Well it’s as far
in as it’ll go, love, ” I replied, “ so you’ll have to
make do. ” ’ (Fiesta, p.105)

This tone of voice, like the dirty jokes it recycles,


betrays a view of the male body forever in search of
pleasure, but forever foolish and failing to deliver (Dyer,
1985:36). Despite this, it persists in its mockery of other
sexual styles of presentation; of the romantic, the
beautiful and the erotic. The Fiesta investigation into
‘sploshing’, the practice of combining food and sex, makes
this so clear that it is worth quoting at length.
‘To some there is a gentle, delicate relationship
between sex and food. The divinely suggestive vulva-
like appearance of mussels and the phallic impudence
of asparagus tips dripping with white sauce fuel
flights of fantasy. Erotically-charged foods pre-empt
long evenings of languid seduction. Not in Fiesta. The
closest we get is having a woman in a butcher’s shop
taking a chopper to an over-sized salami or giving a
frankfurter a gob-job. You see, when it comes to sex
and food, there is another school of thought to all
that sublimated psycho-symbolism gubbins. In short it
goes something like this: get a gorgeous girl, any

7
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)

Fiesta’s carnival style is constructed within a frame of


reference which encompasses an existing repertoire of
British low culture texts and through the rejection of
other sexual styles and sensibilities. The effect is to
bring sex down to earth, make it basic, cheap, ordinary,
easily available - not mussels and flights of fantasy, but
baked beans in the gusset. Yet its transgressiveness has
clear limits; it is not so crude and excessive as to down
tools and have a real holiday and while it asserts its
vision of sexual utopia as one which is so self-evidently
base as to be ‘real’ and ‘true’ about sex, its self-
conscious naughtiness and obvious anxieties about female
pleasure hardly suggest repression cast aside. If this is a
fantasy of fun, it is one in which ‘half the fun of the
thing is the guilt’ (Carter, 1982:111) and in which even
carnival, even sexual utopia, cannot secure pleasure for
women. ‘Justine’ is still left to ‘make do’.

‘You make my pants damp’: Women and Sex in Fiesta

Many feminist accounts of women’s representation in


pornography emphasize their ‘graphic depiction’ as ‘vile
whores’ (Dworkin, 1999:200) and the obsessive
spectacularisation of their difference and sexual pleasure
(Kuhn 1985, Williams 1990). In downmarket porn texts, the
representation of woman as whore and as sexual object has a
specific significance, upending the convention of woman as
beautiful object and the repository of domestic value.
Downmarket porn like Fiesta overturns idealized views of
women as asexual and refined, wiping these out through a
fascination with a female body composed of ‘leaky’ orifices
rather than ‘laminated’ surfaces (Nead 1992, Kipnis 1996),
and through their portrayal as sexually insatiable. In
Fiesta, the figure of the ‘Reader’s Wife’ is particularly
significant in this respect. Far from connoting women’s
maternal, familial and domestic significance, the Reader’s
Wife represents the sexualizing of these roles and the
sexualizing of all possible relationships with, and indeed
between, women. Age, occupation and kinship are no obstacle
to women’s inclusion in Fiesta’s world; ‘Wives, mistresses,
girlfriends, aunties, grannies, even the mother-in-law -
they’re all in the wonderful Readers’ Wives’ (Fiesta,
p.123). Professional or amateur, celebrity porn star or
girl next door, whore or virgin, the place of women in
Fiesta is always and only ever sexual.

8
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.

Andrea Dworkin’s description of the pornographic


portrayal of women as ‘vile whores’ is interesting in this
context. Clearly, the ‘dirty’, ‘filthy’ ‘cunts’, ‘bitches’
and ‘sluts’ figured in Fiesta’s advertising and the ‘lovely
lasses’ of its photosets embody an insistence that all
women are whores, yet the fantasy of promiscuous sexual
equivalence and the absence of clear positions of male
dominance and female submission within the text undercut
any sense of the objectification and degradation of women
for men which writers like Dworkin and Kuhn identify. What
is more striking is the use of women’s bodies and voices to
personify a carnival world which celebrates the vulgarity
and lowness of bodies, relationships, sex and pleasure.
This world is also characterised by a type of ‘dissolved’
utopianism which Linda Williams identifies in some hardcore
porn films, achieved through women’s sexual agency and
insatiability, through endless sex, through the ‘banishment
of the ill effects of power in pursuit of cheerful
pleasure’ (Williams, 1990:178). All the same, as the figure
of ‘Justine’ indicates, all is not well in this Paradise.
This sexual utopia where desire appears to be satisfied

9
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.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Fiesta's


depiction of women is the way in which they are used to
represent its utopian and dystopian fantasies, to stand for
sexual difference and equivalence, and to embody convention
and its overturning by carnival. 'Woman' becomes a sign of
pleasure-seeking, release from the constraints of
domesticity and respectability, bodily celebration and of
fearfulness and distaste. The concept of objectification
still pertains here, not particularly in the sense of woman
as an object to be sexually abused by man, but in the
broader sense of woman as an ‘object’ which stands for sex.
This use of women as representational currency appears to
extend to the whole range of sexual practices referred to
in Fiesta, from the ‘soft’ sexual display of the photosets,
through the narrated accounts of group sex and ‘lesbian’
sex, to the adverts which offer kinkier, more perverse
pleasures. Differences between sexual practices become
erased in the sense that women are used to represent them
all; to stand for desire, the body, pleasure, sex itself in
all its variety. An advert for phone sex sums up the
elasticity which women’s bodies appear to possess
representationally for their male viewers; ‘We will perform
every sex act imaginable. Wank with us as we live out your
fantasy’ (Fiesta, p.46).

Talking Dirty

As I have indicated, the representation of sexuality


within a magazine like Fiesta depends not only on its
sexual content but on the representational style employed,
an element generally overlooked in discussions of
pornography. An examination of Fiesta’s ‘dirty’, ‘naughty’
style is crucial in terms of locating its carnivalesque
sensibility and in making sense of its representation of
sexuality and gender. Fiesta’s dirty style depends heavily
on a self-conscious notion of propriety transgressed; the

10
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.

The ‘porn narrative’ has been characterized both as an


absence which simply provides ‘as many opportunities as
possible for the sexual act to take place’ (Carter,
1979:13) and as the goal directed narrative par excellence
(Dyer, 1992:127), a structure in which narrative ‘climax’
is overwhelmingly important. Much of Fiesta’s speaking of
sex may be understood in terms of a journey towards climax,
most economically in the narrative structure of advertising
which exhorts its readers to ‘Phone, Wank, Spurt’ and at a
more leisurely pace in readers’ stories which amplify that
journey through the orchestration of a variety of partners,
sexual positions and orgasms. The notion of ‘narrative as
goal’ is dependent to some extent on the visual depiction
of women’s bodies as the landscape for the journey taken by
the male subject, yet the use of female narrators and the
presentation of women as active subjects in pursuit of
their own pleasure works to undercut any clear association
of masculinity, subjectivity and dominance. Moreover, while
the spectacle of women’s bodies throughout the magazine
appears to employ the notion of woman as a necessary object
for the achievement of male pleasure, the particular
linguistic low style of dirty talk used in Fiesta may
undercut what is often seen as the dominant specularity of
pornography - its emphasis on visual distance between an
active male surveyor and passive female object - through an
attempt to represent 'what sex feels like' on a visceral
level.

Fiesta’s dirty talk is characterized paradoxically by


an apparent transparency of sexual style which relates it
to a notion of ‘hardcore’ or ‘real’ sex and a heavy
reliance on the innuendo, double entendre and cultural
references which link it to a British bawdy tradition. Its
transgressiveness is inflected in both of these directions.
The use of a transparent style composed of plain and vivid
terms emphasizes the dirtiness, hardness, immediacy and
vitality of sex in marked contrast to the languid, hazy
prose of erotica. This reinforces a sense of sex as
overwhelmingly physical and straightforward, appearing to
strip away 'meaning' and 'emotion' from act and sensation
and evoking sex as a tactile and noisy practice firmly
rooted in flesh. It is a kind of carnivalesque poetry of

11
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’.

Dirty talk may be understood in terms of its


transgressive, sexualizing function, but in Fiesta, that
talk also depends on linguistic cues which relate it back
to a British carnivalesque sensibility which is always
mindful of the taboos it appears to be breaking. Comic
innuendo and double-entendre serve as a kind of verbal
striptease in which the crudity of sex is endlessly
revealed and obscured, marking off what is apparently
celebrated as straightforwardly sexual as actually
improper, comical, naughty, guiltridden. This insistent
signposting of the magazine’s textual ‘dirtiness’ plays a
major part in drawing attention to its own transgressive
status and in constructing the ‘not-meant-to-be-seen’
quality of this type of pornography. Seen, but not-meant-
to-be, spoken, but not-meant-to-be, sex is recuperated both
as a straightforward pleasure and a source of distaste and
guilt. In particular, it is women's bodies and voices which
are made to signify in this contradictory and self-
conscious way. Fiesta's women hold out the promise of
pleasures which are always marked as dirty and always
somehow 'elsewhere'. Its sexual carnival is offered as a
‘fleeting aberration’, real and fantastic, accessible and
out of reach, everyday life and outlaw country.

12
Readers’ Wives

Throughout this discussion, I have tried to emphasize


the contradictory nature of Fiesta which is expressed
through the very particular kind of carnival world it
constructs. Although the text is clearly marked by a desire
to transgress all manner of social and sexual norms, my
reading of Fiesta suggests a great deal of ambivalence
about that desire. Indeed, the more Fiesta revels in its
transgression of social and cultural values;
sophistication, intellect, sexual propriety, domesticity,
sexual difference, the more it reveals an anxious awareness
of the boundaries it appears to be breaking, and an
inability to imagine this as more than a fleeting moment of
naughtiness. Women's bodies and voices become crucial
signifiers of this ambivalence - of bodily pleasure and a
squeamishness about the body, of cheerful transgression and
its anxious recognition, of an insistence on speaking sex
plainly and on the unspeakability of sex.

For Fiesta, the figure of the Reader's Wife bears the


particular burden of this ambivalent signification as its
principal object and its representative subject, the point
at which the carnival is apparently anchored in real life.
Here, women appear to be incorporated as real participants
in the carnival they represent, not only as visual objects,
but as subjects asserting the right to speak sex. The
transgressive potential of this downmarket strategy is
clear, yet its main function seems to be, as Simon Hardy
notes, to provide men with imaginary access to women, ‘both
in the conventionally understood sense of objectifying the
female body through the image and in the generally
overlooked sense of representing the subjective aspects of
female sexuality through the text’ (Hardy, 1998:69). It is
the framing of women's sexual speech which perhaps betrays
the real limits of Fiesta’s transgressiveness and the
tremendous anxieties which underpin its construction of a
sexual carnival. For while the magazine appears to enact a
fantasy of equivalence in which both men and women
celebrate the body and its pleasures, its incorporation of
readers' voices tells a different story. Readers' letters
are segregated by sex; men's letters provide a point of
‘Interchange’, while women’s letters occupy a space titled
‘I Confess’. This marking of men's talk as plain speech and
women's talk as confessional currency is further emphasised
in the magazine’s appeal to women to provide ‘your
raunchiest confessions’ for a phoneline aimed at ‘our
readers’. In contrast, male readers are invited to
‘Listen...as they confess the sordid details of their most
outrageous sexual encounters...’ (Fiesta, pp.123-129). This
dual address both frames and underscores the ambivalent and
contradictory nature of Fiesta's carnival, its insistence
on pleasure as guilty and in particular, on women's

13
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.

As Linda Williams points out, ‘the modern age’s


compulsion to make sex speak’ (Williams, 1990:30) has a
long history, yet elsewhere in contemporary culture, ‘the
mere fact’ of women speaking desire ‘is not enough to
sustain a story’ (Williams, 1990:31) any longer. In Fiesta,
despite the marking of sex talk as the ‘real thing’, the
intersection of a magazine fantasy of sex and a real sexual
fiesta beyond its pages, it is ultimately men's talk which
is framed as real speech about real sex - male readers'
letters are ‘real alright’ (Fiesta, p.11). In contrast, the
reader is advised to approach the women's letters with
caution, ‘Just how true they are is something you’ll have
to decide for yourself’ (Fiesta, p.95). In this very
British carnival it is women’s bodies, stories and voices
which are required to ‘speak desire’, yet despite their
visibility they are not meant to be seen, and despite their
verbosity they are not meant to be believed. As 'reader's
wives', women are transformed into fantastic creatures
telling fabulous tales. The 'mere fact' of female sexual
desire is only a dirty joke after all.

14
References

Fiesta Vol 33, Issue 11, Galaxy Publications


Carter, A. (1982) 'Fun Fairs' in Nothing Sacred, pp. 110-
116. London: Virago
Carter, A. (1995) ‘In Pantoland’ in Burning Your Boats:
Collected Short Stories, pp. 382-389. London: Chatto &
Windus
Carter, A. (1979) The Sadeian Woman; An Exercise in
Cultural History. London: Virago
Dyer, R. (1992) 'Coming to terms; gay pornography' in Only
Entertainment, pp. 121-134. London and New York : Routledge
Dyer, R. (1992) ‘Entertainment and utopia’ in Only
Entertainment, pp. 17-34. London and New York : Routledge
Dyer, R. (1985) 'Male sexuality in the media' in A. Metcalf
& M. Humphries (eds) The Sexuality of Men, pp. 28-43.
London: Pluto
Dworkin, A. (1999) Pornography: men possessing women.
London: The Women’s Press
Griffin, S. (1982) Pornography and silence: Culture’s
revenge against nature. New York: Harper & Rowe
Hardy, S. (1998) The Reader, The Author, His Woman & Her
Lover. London and Washington: Cassell
Hunt, L. (1998) British Low Culture; From Safari Suits to
Sexploitation. London and New York: Routledge
Jordan, M. (1983) ‘Carry On…Follow That Stereotype’ in J.
Curran & V. Porter (eds) British Cinema History, pp.312-
327. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Kipnis, L. (1996) Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the
Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press
Kuhn, A. (1985) 'Lawless Seeing' in The Power of the Image:
Essays on Representation and Sexuality, pp. 19-47. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul
Leavis, F.R. & Thompson, D. (1964) Culture and Environment:
The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus
McNair, B. (1996) Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern
Culture. London and New York: Arnold
Nead, L. (1992) The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and
Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge
Penley, C. (1997) 'Crackers and Whackers: The White
Trashing of Porn' in M. Wray & A. Newitz (eds) White Trash:
Race and Class in America, pp. 89-112. London and New York:
Routledge
Snitow, A.B. (1995) ‘Mass Market Romance: Pornography for
Women Is Different’ in G. Dines & J. Humez (eds) Gender,
Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, pp. 190-201.
Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage
Wicke, J. (1993) ‘Through a Gaze Darkly: Pornography’s
Academic Market’ in P. Church Gibson & R. Gibson (eds)
Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, pp.62-80. London:
BFI Publishing
Williams, L. (1990) HardCore: Power, Pleasure and the
'Frenzy of the Visible'. London: Pandora

15
16

You might also like