Nude playing cards

I have two decks of nude playing cards, one of which is definitely "hardcore" pictures of fucking, the other is much softer-focus solo nudity with no sex or toys involved. For the purposes of this post, I'll call them "H" and "S" respectively.

Deck "S" has 54 cards, including the two jokers. Every single one of them has an image of a naked woman. Every. Single. One.

They are attractive images, to be sure (which is why I still keep the deck despite these objections to its sexist premise), but why are there no men? I confidently expected the jokers at least to be male images (as a joke) and maybe the Kings would be as well (I mean - they're the Kings - how much more male a card designation could you wish for!?) But no - 54 women and 0 men.

Sexist premise? Only heterosexual men have any interest in erotic imagery.

Deck "H", on the other hand, obviously needs some evidence of a male presence, because it's about fucking, and not simply nudity.

Does it also have the same sexist premise? I think so, but we have a little bit more variety. For a start, though, the claim of "54 Babes" on the packet they came in is somewhat misleading. The jokers bear the same image (the only one in the deck with nobody's face showing), and there are several images of lesbian porn. It should be noted that these are really girl-on-girl het porn images (the absurdly long nails of the women in the pictures pretty much stand as proof of that). However, there is also one image in which the man looks very androgynous, and another that could conceivably be taken as a man giving a blowjob (it's hard to say because most of the giver's face has been blanked out by the card's designation).

The big difference between the decks is in the type of agency and the type of message being sent out.

Deck "S" to me reinforces the "no-sex class" dominant paradigm. The images fall into two basic types - one, where the woman is lewdly displaying herself and her cunt for the camera, and the other where she is doing so only coyly. In each case, the message is, "Look, but don't touch"; her agency is, "Do you want some of this?" In other words, she is the gatekeeper and the man is sent the message of "pay up to get it off".

Deck "H" has a different message. The images show mainly het sex, PiV or oral. In almost every image the woman's face is clearly visible. She is actively involved in what's going on. In the oral sex images (which form the majority of the pictures in the deck), her hands are usually on his dick and she is in control. In the PiV images, she is smiling, or head thrown back in apparent ecstasy. There is a constant theme of her pleasure that runs through all the images, smiling, grinning, gasping, and very often active in the sex. In these images, her agency is, "I want this! Give it to me!" and the message is that women are sexual beings too, and (*gasp*) enjoy sex.

Some radical feminists claim that "porn tells lies about women". I need to ask whether this is what they describe as a lie - that women have sexual desires?

So once again I return to the same conclusion I reached when I first discussed the messages in differing types of porn - hardcore sends out more positive (or at least, less harmful) messages than softcore does. Yes, it's a bad thing that both decks seem specifically designed to cater to the heterosexual male audience only, and frankly I'd much rather see a deck in which the different suits represented different forms of sexuality (if only to freak out the college boys who bought the deck and then found themselves with a hand full of dicks!)

In general, I think that these types of playing card decks probably are quite an insidious instrument, because of the context in which they are most likely to be used. It seems to me that they will almost certainly be used in the context of "old boy network" type men-only environments (whether that's all-male college settings, or smoky backroom men's clubs or wherever else), and they will most likely be used as a way to instigate and propound the same old attitudes about women, not merely commenting on the attractiveness of the images but using the images to comment on the worth of the women in them, and also the women in the men's lives. (Incidentally, the only time I was in one of those situations, it was also used to target me and ridicule my sexual nature - also rather harmful!)

I still do not accept that porn is inherently harmful (and, as explained in my analysis of deck "H", I think it can in the right context actually have something of a positive message for women's agency and sexuality). However, that is no reason to turn away from the fact that any form of art or media can be turned to negative ends. While porn per se is not that easy to share (and certainly not that easy to comment on in a group to spread the message), playing cards in general form a part of a social event involving some level of talking - and putting porn into that mix might make a very good way to reinforce the male programming. [NB this is not saying that it is done with conscious intent, but rather saying that this is the way that the ideas are propagated subconsciously]