The Sub-Centric Ass Buffet

(NOTE: I’ve been informed that this post violates WordPress’ rules against explicit pornography, so I have to remove the image I’m going to be discussing. I’ll provide a description of it.)

A couple weeks ago, I posted a porn pic because I wanted to analyze it, and I’m going to do that again today.

[The pic in question shows five naked or mostly-naked men with their asses to the camera. A six man leads a seventh naked man on a rope leash, who is rimming the third of the five men.]

This is a pretty common sort of porn pic, and if you look at kink porn at all, you’ve probably seem something like this. The sub is being used and humiliated, in this case by being ‘forced’ to rim a series of asses that are presented as dominant. His handler is pushing his face into the dom’s ass and the dom being rimmed is doing it as well. He is wearing an anal hook, so his ass is getting stretched. So on the surface, the sub is serving a series of doms who are forcing him to do humiliating things and violating his dignity. Although I haven’t seen the video this still is from, I have no doubt that it eventually gets around to the sub being gang-banged, probably while he’s tied up.

Analyzing porn effectively requires use to recognize several layers of meaning. The first layer is the surface level that I’ve just laid out. This is the easy level to make sense of, at least if you’re kinky. If you’re not kinky, you might be disgusted by this image–the idea of rimming may turn you off, the idea of a group of men ganging up on one guy might seem terrible, and if you’re anti-porn, this image might even be the sort of ‘violent pornography’ that discredits all porn in general. But for most people watching it, it’s kinky sexytime of a familiar sort.

But it’s also important to remember that most pornography is produced by consenting adults. (Obviously, things like child porn, revenge porn, recorded sexual assaults, and so on are an exception to this and are, quite properly, illegal because the victim can’t or doesn’t consent.) So even though the sub is acting the role of a possibly unwilling victim of this humiliation and abuse, the sub has consented to play this role and has almost certainly had a thorough conversation with the producers about what specific sex acts he is and isn’t willing to engage in. (I suspect this is a still from a Bound Gods video. One of the things I like about BG videos is that they open with an explicit discussion of consent to specific sex acts and the safety procedures they will be using. To me, that’s the gold standard for all kink porn.)

Of course, it’s possible the sub is only agreeing to make porn because he’s financially strapped or being brow-beaten into it by a partner (a claim that a few porn performers make after they leave the business) or that he made the video fully consenting to it but later came to regret it, but at a basic level, porn performers consent to the sex they are having, and most subs in porn get into it because they enjoy being submissive.

The studio also probably required the bottoms to douche and engage in other hygiene practices and probably required evidence of a negative test for HIV and possibly for other STIs as well. So when we think about the issues of forced sex and humiliation, we have to acknowledge that the ‘forcing’ is really the handler playing the role of a dom forcing a sub to do something. If this sub dislikes rimming, presumably he wouldn’t have agreed to do the scene, or he might have been compensated with higher pay.

Notice also that there is an audience for this scene–the face in the lower right-hand corner of the scene demonstrates that there are non-participants watching this. So this is a live performance, a sex show being recording. It doesn’t pretend to be something that just happened one day.

But that’s all behind the scenes stuff. It’s analysis that factors in what goes on before the filming of the scene starts. Mostly people watch porn for what happens during the scene. They treat the scene as a sort of story, a narrative of sexual pleasure that allows themselves to enjoy kinky sex, imaging themselves to be the participant as either dom or sub.

And here’s where I think things get interesting, and perhaps problematic. The scene is ostensibly what it presents itself to be–a dominant sharing his sub with other men. The scene claims that the focus of the action is the dom and his friends, who get to have their asses rimmed while degrading the sub and probably eventually fucking and either bukkaking or breeding him. This is supposedly what doms want.

However, looking at this image as a dom, I see something very different from what the scene nominally presents. I see this as an image of submissive pleasure rather than dominant pleasure. The sub is the center of what’s happening in this still and I expect he’s the center of everything in the video, because this is submissive paradise (at least for subs who like rimming). Here the sub has an ass buffet before him and he’s being ‘forced’ to work his way down the buffet about as much as Br’er Rabbit is being forced into the briar patch. He is getting a prolonged scene of rimming and humiliation and anal play, probably accompanied by verbal abuse, and once the anal hook is out, it’s going to be replaced by perhaps as many as 7 cocks in sequence. And he has an audience watching and validating his humiliation.

This is exactly what I mean by ‘sub-centric porn‘. The whole scene is focused on submissive pleasure–the pleasure of rimming, the pleasure of being humiliated, the pleasure of being seen to be inferior, the pleasure of getting a long series of cocks pushed into various holes. The sub is the star of the show. It can’t happen without him, whereas if one of the doms in that ass buffet walks off, the show continues basically unchanged. The doms are interchangeable and expendable, but the sub is vital. In fact, even the composition of the shot makes it clear the sub is the center of all this.

If you look at this from the dominant point of view, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there isn’t a whole lot of pleasure here for any one dom. Sure, if the handler really gets off on humiliating and controlling his sub, he might be loving this scene. But notice that the handler isn’t hard at all–this is work to him, not play. Perhaps the doms on the buffet are really into being rimmed. But I doubt that any given dom here was getting rimmed for more than a minute or two before the sub moved on to the next dom, and before and after, the dom is just standing around waiting for the other guys to get rimmed, during which he’s probably not getting any attention or sexual pleasure unless he wants to stroke his dick. During the gangbang, only two of those guys can get their dick in the sub at any one time. The others just have to stand around and wait their turn. So each dom is getting only 1/7th the pleasure of the tops, while the sub is getting 100% of the pleasure of the bottoms.

Why would a dom want to do this? Why would he want to stand around for a long time not getting his dick or ass serviced, waiting while other guys get the pleasure? Sure, there’s some degree of pleasure simply in being in the superior position, getting to verbally abuse a sub while someone else fucks him. If it’s your sub getting used, you get some compersion that your sub is enjoying himself and you can take some pride that he’s serving your buddies well and making you look like a good trainer. But overall, there’s not much in this scene for the doms except the money they’re being paid and their brief turn as the starring ass or cock.

In other words, the doms in this scene are serving the pleasure of the sub. So really, the doms here are subbing and the sub is the dom because he’s getting a non-stop flood of pleasure and the other guys are just playing the role the script has cast them in. His handler is just ordering him to do what he already wants to do.

This porn is being made to reflect the desires of the sub, not the desires of the doms. And this is true for the vast majority of all kink porn. It’s made for the subs, marketed to the subs, and reflects almost unwaveringly what subs fantasize about. The whole kink porn industry is dominated by the assumption that the primary consumer is a submissive and so they give the customer what he wants.

I don’t know for sure that this is a conscious assumption, that they actively think about centering the sub’s pleasure, but it’s definitely the unconscious assumption. One has to search high and low for kink scenes that clearly center the dom’s pleasure instead of the sub’s.

What would dom-centric porn look like? Well, first, it would drastically change the dom/sub ratio. Instead of seven doms with one sub, requiring the doms to wait their turn, there would be at least one sub for every dom, so that in every shot, each dom would be getting some form of pleasure. Ideally there would be more subs than doms, so that each dom could have the potential of multiple subs serving him at the same time and some of the subs would have to wait their turn or perhaps not get used at all.

The focus would be on the dom’s body–his tits, his dick, his balls, his ass–much more than the sub’s body. The dom would not spend much time rimming his sub’s ass or playing with his sub’s dick, because those aren’t sex acts that center the dom’s body and pleasure. Yes, doms can enjoy eating ass and sucking cock and should do that if they enjoy it, but then it needs to be framed as something the dom specifically wants. Yes, rimming a sub’s ass helps him get ready to be fucked, but so does a session with a dildo off-screen before the shooting starts. My point is that Dom-centric porn would be framed around actions that directly pleasure the dom and de-center the sub’s pleasure.

Torture scenes would center on the dom’s pleasure in beating his sub, whereas often the camera works cuts the dom out and focuses on the impact on the sub’s body. The focus would be on conveying what the dom gets out of tormenting the sub. Instead, think about all the scenes where a dom shoves something that isn’t his dick into the sub’s ass. What does a dom get of shoving a police baton or a dildo on a broomstick into his boy’s ass? Why wouldn’t he be using his cock?

Obviously, you might be thinking that as a dom, you often do things that focus on your sub’s pleasure rather than your own. You put toys in his ass, you make him wear a butt plug to work, you indulge his interest in a kink that doesn’t do much for you, because you recognize that power exchange is a two-way street and you want your partner to be happy. But porn doesn’t worry about those sorts of things. Porn simplifies complexities and hand-waves away the nuances of relationships in favor of the essence of what gets our dicks hard.

You really have to look hard for porn that centers the dom’s pleasure. Some of Boyforsale‘s videos have group scenes with a 1:1 ratio of doms and subs, although most of their group scenes have several doms and only one sub. There are a few Bound Gods scenes where multiple subs serve one dom. And that’s about all the dom-centric porn that comes easily to mind. If you know others, please comment below, because I could use some new porn to watch.