Online porn fan discourse

An edited volume featuring a chapter written by me was just published in Peter Lang’s series on Digital Formations. Feona Attwood, who does highly interesting research on new pornographies, online sex practices, and controversial images at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, did a great job editing this book. It also seems as if there will be an AOIR panel based on the book at the Gothenburg conference in October. I really hope that I can participate in that, even though my autumn programme is already filling up. Returning to the book, this is the description from the publisher:

porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography Ed. Feona Attwood.
Digital Formations/Peter Lang

Pornography has often been central to debates about sex and about new media technologies as they emerge, and today debate is increasingly focused on online pornographies. This collection examines pornography’s significance as a focus of definition, debate and myth, its development as a mainstream entertainment industry, and the emergence of a new economy of Porn 2.0 and of new types of porn labor and professionalism. It looks at porn style behind the scenes of straight hardcore, in gay, lesbian, and queer pornographies, in shock sites, and in amateur erotica. It investigates the rise of the online porn fan community, the sex blogger, the erotic rate-me site and the visual cultures of swingers. Treating these developments as part of a broader set of economic and cultural transformations, the book argues that new porn practices reveal much about contemporary and competing views of sex and the self, the real and the body, culture and commerce.

My chapter is entitled “Widening the Glory Hole: the Discourse of Online Porn Fandom” and explores participation and communication in online porn fandom. The traditional image of the porn consumer is that of the perverted and shamed loner. In pre-internet times such an image was probably rather adequate, and even today – when pornographic materials are easier and easier to come by – it is still a qualified guess that most porn consumption takes place in individualized and private situations. The porn audience, thus described, becomes an archetype of late modern man: Part of a global media and consumer culture, yet detached and left to himself. Blasé and numb from visual overload, yet constantly looking for new sensations (cf. Baudrillard etc.). In this type of male user, pornography is an expression of “episodic sexuality” and the will to sexually control women – an urge that gets increasingly compulsive as traditional roles and structures are liquefied in late modernity (cf. Giddens etc.).

But what happens, I ask, to the audience when porn goes online? The anonymous masturbatory onlooker certainly remains, but porn inevitably also reaches new audiences. The Internet has brought pornography, by its exploding availability, closer to the popular culture mainstream (cf. Paasonen, McNair, Attwood etc.), and in so doing connected it to audiences more like those of popular culture in general. The aim of my chapter is to analyze how porn users collectively construct their viewer position in the online community FreeOnes <http://board.freeones.com/>. The discussion of empirical material gathered from conversations on this bulletin board takes current research on participatory culture and fandom as its point of departure (cf. Jenkins; Hills) in assessing how audience members consume, use and integrate pornography in their everyday lives.