Tech porn

In anticipation of Iron Man 2 (which I still have yet to see ;_; ), I re-watched Iron Man 1 with several of my friends the other day. It's a favorite of mine, and I think it and The Dark Knight exemplify the best of what a comic-book movie can be: either a joyful, silly romp or a dark, meditative exploration.

But Iron Man is more than just a silly romp (though it is very much that, and it revels in it). It's tech porn. I'd heard the term used before in reviews of the movie, and I understood what it meant, but I'd forgotten just how appropriate the term is. As I watched the camera lovingly and sensuously pan over the metallic body of Iron Man in the same way Michael Bay panned over Meagan Fox's body, I realized I wasn't just drooling over how cool and awesome the technology was (or would be, if it actually existed); I was actually getting turned on.

Well, that wouldn't be too unheard of, for me. I already knew I liked fantasies about robots and such. I half-jokingly mentioned my arousal to my friends (we don't hide much from each other), I was mildly surprised to learn that they all were similarly affected, even those not generally attracted to male figures.

I realized this should have been expected - that the creators of this movie had wanted to elicit this reaction (hence "tech porn"). After all, Iron Man is undeniably a phallic figure; not only is he literally hard as steel, but he represents (Tony Stark's/the US's) masculinity via physical and economic strength, as well as superior intellect. As most of society is taught to be attracted to masculinity, whether subjectively ("I want to be like that") or objectively ("I want that in my partner"), it makes sense that most would respond sexually to that.

Given this, I decided to look for Iron Man porn. As in actual porn. Given that Rule 34 has applied to some of the most bizarre and obscure things one can think of (a dragon fucking a sports car? turkey sandwiches? what?), I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to find. After all, all one would need to do is add a red-and-yellow cock to the suit and stick it in whomever one chose.

And yet I found nothing.

Not a single metal cock in sight.

I found a few pics of Pepper Pots and Tony Stark, but nothing that blatantly sexualized the actual suit, which I found odd. The Autobots and Decepticons have plenty of dicks and pussies to go around; couldn't they spare one for Iron Man?

So why aren't there any porno pics of the suit? I doubt complexity of the suit's design is a deterrent to any would-be artists, as many of the beautiful renditions on DeviantArt prove. Perhaps it's because sexual objectification is antithetical to the phallic symbol of Iron Man? Indeed, many of the fan art I found made a point of de-emphasizing the would-be genital area on the suit as much as possible; even a Ken doll has more of a bulge than some of these depictions (when the bulge is even visible and not hidden by a posed leg or arm, that is). But I don't think that male sexuality is mutually exclusive with the phallus - and Tony Stark's hyper-active sexuality would seem to make such a connection even more plausible.

Maybe Tony Stark/Iron Man represent a dichotomous version of masculinity: the explicitly sexual Stark, who exerts his power over women (Pepper Potts and his various "conquests") vs. the apparently asexual Iron Man, who exerts his power over men (the bad guys). Thus, the simultaneous sexualization/de-sexualization of Tony Stark/Iron Man may be an attempt to remove any homoeroticism, which seems to run rampant among super heroes in general. And we all know how "dangerous" homosexuality is to traditional masculinity.

Conversely, perhaps Iron Man was so explicitly "pornified" in the movie that to make Rule 34 of him was redundant, like making pornographic fan art of... porn. Why not just use the original material?

Or, perhaps, I just fail at searching for it.