In order to give vent to male sexual aggression and sadism in homosexual pornography and also to circumvent the cultural stigma that ordinarily attaches to men who are “treated like a woman” in sex, gay male pornography has developed several specific “codes.” One such code is that a man who is “capable” of withstanding “discipline” —extremely punishing bondage, humiliation, and fistfucking, for instance—is deemed to have achieved a kind of supermasculinity, almost as if the sexual violence his body ingests from another man enhances his own sexual identity as a man. (This is quite the reverse in heterosexual pornography, where sexual sadism against a woman simply confirms her in her subordinate status.) Another code common in gay male pornography, one found frequently in films, is that if a man is shown being assfucked, he will generally be shown assfucking someone else in tum—this to avoid the connotation that he is at all feminized by being fucked. Still another code in gay male pornography is that depictions of mutuality are not sustained for very long without an intimation or explicit scene of force or coercion—so you don’t go limp out of boredom or anxiety that you’ve been suckered into a scene where there’s no raw male power present.
John Stoltenberg, Refusing to be a Man (1989)
Found at Indigenous Feminist
Anti-Porn Feminists 