Sexual Intention in Pornography

Did eighteenth-century people intend to have sex? We have known at least since Frances Ferguson’s “Rape and the Rise of the Novel” that volitional states do not tell the whole story of subjects’ relationships to the sex acts their bodies engage in. For women in particular, whose bodies are regularly sexually instrumentalized irrespective of their intention, the potential disjointedness between consciousness and embodied sex act can be seen as proof of an “ongoing condition of the impossibility of consenting,” an injustice whose exposure becomes Clarissa’s singular mission after Lovelace’s penetrative rape.¹ Sandra Macpherson has shown this form of sexual harm to extend to masculine persons in her discussion of Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph, where “erections are, or might be, accidental,” emblematic not of mindful commitment to perform a sex act but of a body that can be put to sexual use regardless of its owner’s mental state.² Broadening the unstable link between consciousness and sex to include the non-harmful and ostensibly voluntary, I ask here if intention is the primary condition through which minds perceived their bodies to be moved to sexual postures—states of arousal or pursuit of another body upon which to act.

Like eighteenth-century characters, we regularly seem to attribute intention to libidinally poised bodies. “Don’t stand dilly-dallying,” Mrs. Jewkes chides Mr. B as he pins his maidservant down in bed. Even though he claims verbally only to want “One Word” with Pamela, Mrs. Jewkes (like the rest of us, who regularly speak of this encounter as a rape attempt) believes that his intention is to sexually assault, an intention that he mercifully (or, in Jewkes’ view, foolishly) abandons in the face of Pamela’s chastity.³ But what if penetration is an ancillary possibility accidentally facilitated by setting (bedchamber) and posture (Pamela prone, held still), a secondary meaning awkwardly cast across Mr. B’s primary goal of talking to Pamela about his proposal to make her mistress? Perhaps Mr. B’s apprehension of sexual possibility is more like that of the sailor in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, who is content to put his penis in “any port in a storm” at a moment’s notice—if an opportunity presents, bodies might make use of one another, but minds are not primarily occupied with sexual premeditations or stipulated outcomes.⁴ The vaginally penetrative practice that ascended in popularity in midcentury, which Henry Abelove has dubbed “sexual intercourse so-called,” has increasingly come to look like an unpremeditated happenstance in sex plots, especially in comic pornographic fictions.⁵ Woman of Pleasure has conditioned us, erroneously I think, to see the genre as a narrative pattern dependent on something like intention or directed appetite, such that men will always call for mistresses and prostitutes, undergo transactions to obtain them, and sexually instrumentalize their bodies.⁶ But, other kinds of pornography—looser, less organized bawdy fictions—reveal sex to be what we have come to consider action and consent: amorphous, unanticipated, extra-subjective, and products of “externalism.”⁷ Rather than consciousness driving a subject to penetrate other things, sex seems to penetrate consciousness.

The practice of vaginally penetrative sex seems to come under scrutiny in midcentury pornography concomitantly with a cultural intensification of heterosexuality and companionate marriage as normative. These fictions represent this increasingly naturalized model as potentially illogical. For example: Camillo sees his sister’s genitalia as they play together in an orchard, and cries over the wound he believes she has sustained. He lacks an articulated goal in his first adolescent experiments with a girl; he “has no Thoughts of entering the sacred Circle, but content[s] himself with beating the Bush.” During his grand tour, he sheepishly skulks about after a striptease, fumblingly accepting the services of two prostitutes, even though he finds “no great Stomach for two of them at a time.”⁸ Miss Forward dreams of a rough posterior sensation, and wakes up ecstatically to find her body being penetrated from behind by a man she cannot see. Her friend Polly tries to use a dildo, but can’t make it...