"The New Media Schooling of the Amateur Pornographer:
Negotiating Contracts and Singing Orgasm."
by Katrien Jacobs
(For Publication in Spectator, Spring 2004)
Abstract

This article presents the works of amateur pornographers engaged in the
production and consumption of mediated sex scenes as web-based performances
or home-made filmmaking. These are skilful amateurs, a wave of savvy media
practitioners who make products around their candid bodies and sex acts,
thus challenging the business goals and performance management of commercial
pornography. Their efforts are not to be confused with individuals who pose
for porn sites and simulate sex as “glossy amateurs” --bored housewives,
horny freshmen, nasty teen virgins, battered Russian migrants, pregnant
mommies, crude aunts or rapist uncles. In most types of commercial porn,
amateur roles are scripted, filmed and edited by producers who direct and
pay models to enter their stage setups and sex scenes. Real amateurs, on the
other hand, are sexually driven media practitioners who make sex scenes to
explore personal desires and respond to cultural phantasms as mechanisms of
power. Amateur pornographers are sexual beings who record their affairs and
adventures for the pleasure of others. They use low-budget cameras to
capture moments, screening scenes privately or in small groups, or uploading
them on the global web through web cams, live journals and web logs. The
article develops concepts and profiles for amateurs and their ways of having
sex, focusing on their performative schooling in new media and their habits
of sharing sex within peer communities. Amateur pornographers thus live the
premises of Jon McKenzie performance theory, developed in his study Perform
or Else: From Discipline to Performance. They thrive on complex sexual
feedback loops, as participants negotiate small-scale “business” deals and
“love” contracts to steer desire and relationships with partners. The
article looks into collaborative work practices that produce the
“pornographic contract” between producers, actors and consumers of amateur
pornography. The article features work and profiles of new media producers
Isaac Leung, Tanya Bezreh, and Barbara DeGenevieve, and includes an analysis
of the HBO TV program Porn 101: xxxtra Credit, a special edition of the
magazine Real Sex that highlights a group of Boston-based amateur
pornographers.
---
Amateur means “the love of doing it.” In the final scene, where she is
getting fucked and she has her orgasm and she walks up the stage and is
singing. That is just exactly right. Somebody who has sex on the screen is
not just a porn-star. They are also a singer and dancer and so many other
things.
Tanya Bezreh, The Naughty Garden.
Introduction: Will the True Amateur Please Stand Up?
This article discusses a new wave of amateur pornography, where the central
metaphor is that of a mutually developing sexual act, a bodily communication
with one party responds to the other, and language and lust spiral together
into a recorded pornographic process. In this article, pornography simply
means a recording of a sexual act implemented for the excitement of others.
Pornography thus breaks way from more current uses of the word, as
profit-oriented entertainment industries that efficiently invade our senses.
If pornography today is mostly understood as methodically organized
industries, the article hopes to investigate productions and strategies that
are produced and invented “in-between” official work sessions. Pornography
becomes more fun, and means an amorphous bundle of sex scenes made with
divergent goals in mind. Amateur pornographers are female or male, gay or
straight, polyamorous or monogamous, regardless, their recorded sex lives
traverse the organized industries to hatch new moments of sexual pleasure.
The schooling of amateur pornographers is an important aspect of their
pleasure, as they engage in collaborative work practices, learn how to plot
a course in public sexual representation and consumer desire. The language
of sex is drenched in calculated physical and discursive gestures, as we can
see for instance in the trendy “punk-porn” site www.suicidegirls.com
<http://www.suicidegirls.com/> , where young females become “suicide girls”
by creating sophisticated sexual profiles and performing sex acts for
fee-paying members.
Besides the trendy suicide-girls, we will examine three types of
contemporary amateur pornographers and their schooling in new media, or
web-based networking and communication methods. A first pocket of porn
awareness stems from Peer-to-Peer Porn, or web-based consumers using
peer-to-peer platforms to exchange products. Most peer-to-peer porn is
traded between anonymous consumers and involves mainstream commercial
images. However, these groups have begun to cultivate a responsive
environment in which alternative porn makers can build on economy. Porn
consumers may resort to privately managed mammoth porn sites such as
www.sublimedirectory.com <http://www.sublimedirectory.com/> (with 10903
pages of “true” amateur porn) or www.frogsex.com <http://www.frogsex.com/> .
They also typically trade porn on “peer-to-peer” networks and file-sharing
programs such as Napster, Morpheus, Grokster and KaZaA.
Pride Porn is made up of sex and queer activist networks who distribute porn
to their sex partners, social circles, or larger groups of web users and
movie audiences. This category includes work by individual activists, who
may have traditionally been left out of public sexual imaging and are
opening doors to a coalescence of pornographic “coming out” and politics.
Take for example Asian-American scholar Darrell Hamamoto’s “yellow porn”
movie Skin-T0-Skin, whose activist-intellectual impetus he unfolded in the
1998 essay ”Joy Fuck Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian-American Porno
Practice.” Yellow porn stems from an urge to unleash and represent potent
Asian-American male bodies. Hamamoto explains that the Asian-American male
sex is typically ignored in the American porn industry, where Asian-American
white males are typically featured with “submissive Asian girls”.
Hamamoto’s idea of sexual renovation is to produce a new line of
Asian-American produced porn: “To engage more specifically in an Asian
American porno practice is to take self-determined control of an unfixed,
variable, malleable, but thoroughly radicalized human sexuality, shaped and
constrained over time by politically oppressive forces.” (Hamamoto, 1998,
85). Hamamoto uses the concepts of radical jouissance to describe porn
productivity that contains a release of libidinal energy and makes viewers
aware of sex political struggles.
Thirdly, Art Porn, or artistically inclined amateurs, who frame their
cultural performances as “body art” or their movies as “erotica” and exhibit
sex in (virtual) galleries or arthouse theaters. Web-based platforms have
certainly helped these producers to expand the aesthetics of sexual
representation, to distribute their works and find supportive networks for
pornographic work that will not get endorsed by official art institutions.
I will show that these three groups of amateur pornographers inhabit
“performance strata” of their porn-societies and are ruled by the axiom of
“Perform Or Else.” As explained by Jon McKenzie in Perform or Else: From
Discipline to Performance: "Performance will be to the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth
an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge." (McKenzie, 2001, 176)
Strata are layers of forces and intensities that give form to matter by
organizing small molecular entities into aggregations. (McKenzie, 2001, 173)
The performance strata bundle a variety of cultural, organizational and
technological performances as discursive and embodied working methods.
McKenzie explains that the agents of the performance strata harbor new forms
of normativity, while recognizing cracks, fissures and “outside” discourses
as agents in their force field. There is no dominant voice in these strata
as they thrive on a further dissolution of grand narratives of science and
political ideology, a moment in intellectual history labeled by Jean
Francois Lyotard in 1985 as a “postmodern condition.” The strata are
cultivated and solidified by an attentiveness to the active-performative
nature of language and bodily gestures, developed in
corporate-organizational settings as modes of efficiency, as creativity and
competence in our dealings with art and technology, as a new attitude
towards social-sexual networking and cultural vitality. Work ethics, the use
of technological languages, social and intellectual curiosities intermingle
and intersect to become strata of power and knowledge.
Whereas nation-state governments and capitalist porn industries are arguably
organized by the older “discipline or punish” maxim (as consolidated empires
decide to “push-down” content onto consumers, or punish consumers who access
porn in surveilled places), the performance strata thrive on a different
type of consumerism. In the performance strata, agents negotiate and
articulate everday fluctuations of their sexual relationships and
pornographic roles. To perform sexually, according to McKenzie’s maxim,
simply means to respond to communication signals.
Performance theorist Luk Van den Dries describes a similar tendency in
theatrical events that make us of electronically manipulated outsider
discourses. For instance, In Emil Hravtin’s performance piece Miss Mobile
(2001), the audience shares private cellphone conversation with the onstage
performer, who finishes the phone-call and amplifies them for the wider
audience. The audience here is neither a passive voyeur, nor an active
performer who jumps on a stage, but somebody who is linked to to the chaos
of surrounding technologies and discourses. As Van den Dries writes:

In this form of theatre the movement on stage is no longer regulated like a
ribbon of motorway with the teleological transport of meaning from point A
to point B, and to which the spectator can surrender blindly. It offers the
endless arranging of possibilities, a highly diffuse field of points of
energy between which there are countless connections …” (Van Den Dries,
2001, 12)
For Internet critic Clay Shirky, to perform on the web equally means to
enter the wet fields of decentralized communication, a sharing of personal,
social and artistic issues and work/play practices. In an article on
weblogging, he describes bloggers as writers whose stories thrive on an
active sharing of thought and culture. Even though some blogger efforts are
supported financially by publishers, or an occasional “star” blogger will be
published in book format, “pure” bloggers write to explore the economies of
pleasure and networking:
But the vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because
a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those
who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million
micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail
party, where most address not "the masses" but a small circle of readers,
usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points
to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward.”
(Shirky 2001)
Looking at a variety of “porn blogs” on the web for instance, we can see
how a person’s ideas and body images are revealed through daily writing
modes, how such personal writings are easily linked to amateur porn or
commercial porn fields.[1] <#_ftn1> In short, the new pornographers master
the overlapping discourses of knowledge and lust. In this way, they learn
how to write the performative movements of sexual survival in par with other
individuals – amateurism can be a life-long lesson indeed !
Katrien Jacobs continued
1. Peer-to-Peer Porn and the Legal Arm
Historically, a wide range of web-based “peer-to-peer” networks have been
developed and used by web consumers of porn to anonymously trade images,
such as BBS’s, MUDS, Usenet newsgroups, AOL chatrooms; some of them offer
more personalized spaces for sexual performance and conversation. Shirky
explains that “peer-to-peer,” as an enabling concept within web culture,
went through a rough patch in 2001 when p2p file-sharing companies were hit
by fierce legal battles over copyright, and investors started to withdraw
their money. In March 2003, peer-to-peer networks in the United States
received another major blow when Congress came out with a report to show
that such networks were being used for the trading of illegal porn,
specifically child pornography. Unites States Congress thus initiated a
widespread crackdown on popular peer-to-peer networks. The General
Accounting Office and the House Government Reform Committee came out with a
report entitled “File-Sharing Programs: Child Pornography Is Readily
Accessible Over Peer-to-Peer Networks” and carried out surveillance tests on
the networked computers of individuals and student communities. The study
concluded that web users are at significant risk. To document the risk of
inadvertent exposure to pornography, the GAO invited the Customs
Cybersmuggling Center of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to perform
additional searches on KaZaA and found, indeed, child pornography was being
traded: “Juvenile users of peer-to-peer networks face a significant risk of
inadvertent exposure to pornography when searching or downloading
images“(Koontz 11). Koontz’s report also cites that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in the fiscal year of 2002 allocated 38.2 million dollars and
228 agents to an “Innocent Images Unit,” in hope of collaborating more
efficiently with p2p companies on the issue of child pornography. (Koontz
2003)
Under the U.S. Constitution it is legal for adults to own and distribute
most types of pornography. However since the 2002 Supreme Court ruling over
COPA (Child Online Protection Act), the US government has made efforts to
excessively monitor Internet pornography, arguing that minors are
automatically exposed to, and harmed by, pornographic images when they surf
the web. Some producers within the porn industry have equally denounced
“peer-to-peer porn,” suggesting that the adult porn industry itself follows
a more rigorous code of ethics and does not make products that would be
harmful to minors.
Despite a widespread “peer-to-peer porn” backlash, the web has continued to
foster its porn societies, enabling sexual encounters and the non-commercial
trading of products.[2] <#_ftn2> Meanwhile, software companies, such as
Verso Technologies, are making money out of the backlash, trying to sell
Internet Access Management Appliances (porn filters) to “minimize our risk
of porn liability and increase access to a truly business class Internet.”
In one of their web ads, a well-groomed business man expeditiously types
away on his laptop computer, presumably unperturbed by porn or sexual
emails. Files-sharers, on the other hand, may want to draw social contours
around the sexual web, and be inclined to govern their own mediated bodies
and desires.
For instance, Cloei, owner and web manager of www.nakkidnerds.com
<http://www.nakkidnerds.com/> , wants to feature her community of nerdy
girls. As she explains her objectives:I wanted to capture the girl you see in the back of the class sitting there
reading her book, not paying attention to anybody; the girl you see on the
street walking to work, or the girl who sits in the cube next to you day
in/day out coding her little heart out. (…) These girls are not professional
models who go from site to site, they are not even real “amateurs,” just
friends, and friends of friends whom I have with my sly smile convinced to
model for the site, who believe in the site, and who are just in it for the
fun and maybe a little ego boost. Who does not need one of those these
days?” (Nakkidnerds 2003)
“Suicide girls” and “Nakkid nerds” are models who negotiate the powers of
lust and knowledge as complementary forces within their body-packets. They
respond with mixed feelings to the glossy formulas of commercial pornography
and know that their own ideas and bodies occupy a space of learning. Amateur
pornographers have sexual urges despite the Internet backlash, and it will
be interesting to see how governments may use “peer-to-peer porn” as an
excuse to invade sex-active or activist schools of the Internet. Because
pornography is such a sensitive issue in the political world, particularly
how it pertains to young children, one has to wonder what laws governments
may enact in efforts to stifle not just porn, but the schooling of porn as
mutually negotiated sex, all under the guise of keeping the nation-states
safe and clean.
2. Pride Porn: Reading and Fleshing Out the Pornographic Contract
A good example of pride porn’s coming of age would be queer networks who
co-author pornographic portraits. Www.ssspread.com
<http://Www.ssspread.com/> was such a site, launched in january 2001 and
closed down in january 20o4 because of a lack of resources. The site
encouraged queer and transgender people to produce pornography by organizing
performances and film-shoots, which were uploaded to the site on a weekly
basis. The site was set up by Barbara DeGenevieve, Professor at the School
of the Art Institute Chicago, in collaboration with Terry Pirtle, who was
the web master and managed the site. As the announcement read, the site was
“… committed to the queer community, to serve a segment of that community
that is under-represented in web pornography.” (www.ssspread.com 2003) The
site was marketed towards lesbians and transgender individuals, encouraging
them to become producers and consumers of porn, and paying participants to
the web community. The ssspread.com members had access to weekly updated
slide-shows of porn movies, scripted by members and other participants and
filmed in collaboration with the www.ssspread.com team. As DeGenevieve
explains: “We wanted to create a space on the web that would feel
comfortable for dykes and transpeople. It would be a membership site but
without distracting advertisements, where people would se themselves and
their bodies represented in porn.” (DeGenevieve 2003)
Www.ssspread.com solicited participants who agreed to be showcased on the
site, who were paid a nominal amount of money for each film shoot, and who
did not necessarily conform to beauty norms. For instance, in the “Road
Side Service” slide-show posted on October 30, 2003, Chicago-based singer
Nomy Lamm acted out a macho-redneck scenario as a “male trucker” who
received a blowjob from a “transman” partner, then penetratred the partner
anally with a dildo on the carhood, only to finally reveal her true phallus
in the form of an amputated leg. De Genevieve as videographer explains the
collaboration process with participants:
I usually collaborate with the people that I am filming, and I ask them
ahead of time to carefully consider what they want to do in the session.
Very often, I just leave the scene up them, or they come up with a scenario
that we have discussed beforehand. I will add something to it or ask them to
do something slightly different. But, of course, I myself could never come
up with the variety of scenarios that they come up with. A lot of people I
shoot are young and into punk aesthetics. The environments they live in are
definitely not mainstream, and this becomes part of the ambience of a shoot.
Yesterday, I shot in a model's kitchen. It was a pretty chaotic environment
with dishes in the sink, food remnants on the countertops and floors, and
stuff all over the place. There was another shoot a couple months ago in a
room where I literally couldn't see the floor for the clothes, CDs,
magazines, over-flowing ashtrays, sex toys, pillows... But I find these
living spaces really fascinating because these are the places where people
really have sex. ” (DeGenevieve, 2003)
Www.ssspread.com also enabled social activities between members by having
them share email addresses, so that they would be able to contact each
other. The site contained links to pornographic stories in the “Story
Lounge” area. The “Articles and Interviews” area had interviews with sex
scholars and activists such as Shannon Bell and Annie Sprinkle. The members
also gave feedback to the weekly still-images by writing messages on a
messageboard.
In examining queer-produced porn, we encounter a central paradox
within the paradigm of amateur pornography: the same individuals who are
more skilled in entering complex networks and making deals with others, also
turn out to be the most successful “amateurs.” Porn amateurs are more likely
to be Mc Kenzie’s “performers,” body-ordinaries who enter or subvert porn
shoots as commercial entertainment, yet are less inclined to fake sexual
bonds with partners. Another historical example of such performative talent
would be Annabel Chong, a highly educated woman who agreed to make a
pioneering « gangbang » movie where she would be penetrated by three hundred
men in one day. At the time of her gangbang-preparations, Chong was a
student in anthropology at the University of Southern California. She wanted
to stage her act as an artist-pornographer aware of gender and sexual
politics, testing the limits of her desiring body while questioning
stereotypes of Asian female submissiveness. In the documentary Sex : The
Annabel Chong Story, Chong explains her work as an angry, yet deliberate,
gesture to counter sex-negative ideas circulating in higher education
classrooms. Chong intended to encourage other people to be more comfortable
and capable in sharing their sexual experiences.
Her USC teachers were accepting of her ideas, yet it was the commercial porn
producer John Bowen who materialized her dream, and then turned her act into
a commodity for a mostly male consumer market. Chong explains in the
documentary that she did not receive due profit from the movie, which sold
forty thousand copies during its first year of distribution. However, she
came to terms with the fact that she had been financially exploited, and
does not fully regret having joined forces with John Bowen. She explains in
another interview that she went home on the evening of the gangbang (which
had to be interrupted after 251 sessions because of physical damage) to
finish writing a paper for one of her college classes.
Important to the history of pride porn would be the efforts of web cam
pioneers such Ana Voogt of www.anacam.com <http://www.anacam.com/> and
Jennifer Ringley of www.jennicam.com <http://www.jennicam.com/> (closed
down in december 2003), whose web cams document everyday domestic activities
and include sexual scenes. Their sexual performances are integrated into the
grind of life and appear at irregular intervals, warranting feedback of
friends, fellow artists or consumer communities. Voogt and Ringley are in
command of their imaging process and may decide to turn consumer feedback
into pleasure and profit. This is different in a purely commercial web cam
site such as www.ratemenude.com <http://www.ratemenude.com/> , where male
and female models are paid by the company to upload pictures for consumers
who give feedback by rating pictures. The star’s pornographic ambitions here
may include settling a decent business contract with the company, yet there
is rarely mutual sex involved as stars perform and spectators masturbate.
In non-commercial gay web cam sites, the contract is different again, as the
sex consumers are also performers who participate in mutual masturbation
sessions that are shown on a split-screen computer window. The pornographic
exchange is free of third-hand control, yet the performances themselves are
reminiscent of commercial porn, focusing mostly on quick masturbation
sessions leading towards ejaculation and orgasm.
3. The Artist’s Sexual Awakening.
The gay web cam culture was recently explored by Asian artist Isaac Leung,
whose nickname “Oriental Whore” grew out of an art project “The
Impossibility of Having Sex with 500 Men in a Month: I’m an Oriental Whore.”
Raised in Hong Kong in a family of scientists and named after Isaac Newton,
Leung developed a “nerdy” identity from early age onwards. He further
cultivated performative sex research as an artist and student at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Leung is very articulate person who looks like a well-dressed dandy, his
appearance and ideas showing a real sense of wanting to speak to peripheral
society. He admits that his interest in dissecting cyber sex stems from
obsessive fantasizing about the perfect boy, and a dissatisfaction with his
actual sex life. Leung was introduced to cyber sex before he had any real
sex:
I started to experiment with web cams from a young age onwards. I was using
existing videoconference software such as Netmeeting, a very popular
software that splits your screen into two areas and has a chatbox at the
bottom of the screen. I would say that 90% of the people who use Netmeeting
are there to have sex. If you click on an icon, a person shows up on your
screen, which you can either “ignore” or “accept” for a sex session. But
right away you can see yourself and the other person on the screen and based
on that visual information, you can “accept” or “ignore” his identity. Then
you can also start chatting immediately or talk to each other through a
microphone.” (Leung 2003)
In his art piece “The Impossibility of Having Sex with 500 Men in One Month:
I am an Oriental Whore,” Leung wanted to analyze his web cam experience as a
gay Chinese man in the western world, his awareness of AIDS, his compulsive
sexual desires and, subsequently, his repression. He disguised himself as a
18-year old Japanese boy and worked daily to interact with gay cruisers
willing to “accept” his profile. He researched and categorized the cruisers
by nationality, age group, weight and other features. As he explains:
My research methodology worked as follows. I was masturbating and typing
with one hand and recording information with the other hand. I was hiding my
mouse yet opening another software for copying and pasting the images. I
asked everybody about their age, where they came from, their height and
their weight, their sexual orientation, and whether they were a “top” or
“bottom”. These physical features are crucial within the gay community as
cruisers are looking for nice bodies and muscular types. Of course there are
also people who are attracted to chubby guys but they are kind of
segregated.” (Leung 2003)
Leung’s website records the daily development of his sex binge and an
intricate struggle to carry through with the project to the very end. The
diary items in particular reveal a frustrated attempt at materializing an
artistic concept. The concept reads as follows: “The project documents the
collective experience of orgasm in virtual space. It creates a discourse of
sexual politics in the context of post-colonial and interracial sexual
relationship by showing my ‘oriental’ identity through my webcamera.” Leung
did not have a collective experience nor did he make the end. He did realize
his goals of researching ethnic profiles, and the extent to which
individuals were lying about their bodies: “People often lied about their
dick size, because they say at that it is at least nine inches long. That is
a real joke in the gay web cam community, as you can see with your own eyes
the discrepancy between the actual size and the advertised size.” (Leung
2003)
Other statistics in his research show that a majority of cruisers were
married or bi-sexual men, mostly white and between the age of 30 and 40.
Leung was emotionally disappointed to find out that so many men were older
and that they wanted to be a “daddy” type of personality. He was only rarely
meeting people in his own age group. Most men were from European countries
such as Holland, Belgium, Germany and Great-Britain. There were also older
men from Asian countries, with Hong Kong and Taiwan being the most prominent
ones.
Most of the chat room dialogue centered around a persuasion to show
genitals, ejaculation and cum. As Leung explains:
In a web cam, the first thing you show people is your genitals, which is
arguably the most private place that you have. It actually takes along time
for people to show their faces on a web cam, you have to actually push them
to show their faces. You have to make people comfortable in order to get
that result. But some people would get creative and show themselves sucking
a remote, or something … I was more interested in seeing the faces and the
facial expressions. I was interested in seeing the entire environment around
the body such as the bedroom. I was exploring a new kind of voyeurism and
exhibitionism.” (Leung 2003)
He writes in his journal how he started to find the experiment depressing,
as he did not find good connections with the participants. Even though he
had very successful sexual experiences, they were after all too ephemeral:
“In real life I have to work through stuff, dealing with my long-distance
relationship and sexual frustrations.” (Leung 2003) Even though he sobered
up about finding perfect boys within the web cam community, Leung continues
to want to make statements about his evolving sexual needs.
A parallel development to these web cams, would be amateur pornographers
screening their works in community centers or arthouse theaters, where the
audience is invited to watch and share responses. This development has
started to gain attention in the US mass media with TV and film critics
expressing both revulsion and propulsion towards this trend (Bisbee, 2002).
The pornographic scenes are thus transported from private video and web
activity to public screenings in theaters, where they once belonged.
In the Boston area, Kim Airs and the arthouse theater Coolidge Corner Cinema
have started to organize annual screenings of amateur porn movies. The
event, entitled You Oughta Be in Pictures, brings together home-made porn
movies and low-budget erotic movies. The producers are university students,
art-oriented or queer producers of porn, while the spectators are arthouse
consumers, gay/lesbian activists, and the good old voyeurs. The appeal of
the event lies exactly in the odd mixture of makers and viewers, the
untrained screen-performers and filmmakers, whose movies cause exhilirating
responses in the audience. Audiences in this screening are large and loud,
at times shouting out their reactions or laughing hysterically at how the
filmmakers conceive of sexual positions and camera angles. In some movies,
the scenes fail to be explicit or dynamic at all. For example, a female
masturbation scene shows a moving hand on a hidden vagina, where the
soundtrack consists of quiet and camera-shy moaning. This is “real” amateur
porn, a bundle of a person’s sexual actions and their representation,
approaching audiences to consider responses other than arousal and
masturbation.
As one man in the audience of the 2002 screening of You Oughta Be in
Pictures describes: “I have seen pornography before. I’ve seen quite a bit
of it. But this was unlike any of those experiences. I am not exactly sure
what is different about it. But the response that it generated made me feel
asexual.” (Syme, 2002) Another female respondent emphasizes the importance
of humor in the implicit communication between the filmmakers and the
viewers. As she writes: “But I think it was the humor part that I really
enjoyed. It allows you to step back from all the taboo-ness of sex. There is
a give and take in the sense that some filmmakers will poke fun at audience
response by deliberately putting extreme images on screen, while audience
members will at points poke fun at the filmmaker’s attempt at ‘sexiness’ at
certain intervals” (Yu 2002). Amateur porn does not always cater to physical
arousal or masturbation, but can trigger fulfilling reactions in audiences.
Therefore, the screening give amateur pornographers an opportunity to
interact with audiences and get immersed in changing feedback loops.
In 2003, the producers of the HBO’s program Real Sex decided to
cover the growing trend towards Boston amateur porn cinema in a special
entitled Porn 101:xxxtra Credit. A guiding idea in Porn 101: xxxtra Credit
is that the amateur pornographers manifest themselves as proud and educated
individuals with Ivy League and college degrees. They are shown as virgin
producers, yet in control over the process of making porn. The HBO film crew
followed the amateur pornographers during their film shoots, at times
supporting their efforts with technical tips and adequate film lighting.
Porn 101: xxxtra Credit shows short excerpts of the amateur movies, at times
adding a separate music track, and conducting short interviews with the
amateur filmmakers.
Who are these filmmakers? Mike is a guy with balloon fetish who stages an
orgy. The audience laughs sincerely at the end of Mike’s movie. The audience
giggles and roars throughout the next movie, Shotzee the Clown, featuring a
horny clown going out and having sex with a “doggie” girl. Next comes a
loving couple, Nicolette and Leo, who made a simple bedroom movie with a
security camera plugged into their TV-VCR. Nicolette believes that people
are not having good sex and she wants to show them what good sex is like.
I then noticed a very odd product, Tanya Bezreh’s spanking musical The
Naughty Garden, which tells a humorous and child-like fantasy tale of garden
flowers, a strawberry, a bee and a snail. During the audition, Tanya, as
“strawberry,” slips into the back room and gets spanked by the angry
stagehand. The movie goes on to show the spankings as a sexual awakening
leading to pleasure and orgasm. Who is amateur Tanya? A Boston-based artits
with a degree in English from Harvard University. As an artist, Bezreh first
ran a puppet theatre at Harvard University, and then helped develop
Brain-Opera (1996) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then moved
to New York City were she became a free-lance writer for Artbyte magazine
and contributed to new media exhibits for the Guggenheim museum and the
Museum of Sex.
Bezreh became a web-based exhibitionists with her award-winning website New
Century SchoolBook, a magazine about electronic art that turned into a
personal photo-diary and striptease. Later, she used the site to reflect on
her sexual growth and crafted a series of lessons to be learned in the
digital media environment. As she states:
Making my web pages (since 1998) was a compulsion and I was also mimicking
the e-commercial culture’s way of selling products. After a while, I flipped
it around and started to look back at my work and writing about how one can
learn from compulsions, and the mistakes one makes carrying them out. You
can click on each of the lessons and go back to the webpage that I was
developing at the time. For example, I was taking a lot of naked pictures of
myself, but I was too shy to put them on the site without painting blobby
clothes onto myself in Photoshop. So the lessons that link to those images
say things like, ‘You are a wimp about nudity’ and ‘You always take your
clothes off, but you never put it on the site.’ At some point I had to get
over the fear of showing my sexier work, because I was hiding a huge
percentage of my artwork. Doing the HBO thing was supposed to help break
down the wall.”
(Bezreh 2003)When Bezreh decided to make a short porn movie for Real Sex, entitled The
Naughty Garden, she was the producer and the talent of this movie. She
directed the movie, wrote the plot and also composed the music. There was no
money involved in making the movie, even though the HBO crew was following
her production team:
They showed up with a 15-person crew and shot us shooting our porn movie.
They were actually very friendly and helped us out in many ways. We used our
own cameras and they shot their movie in film. We shot about 5 minutes of
film and they ended up excerpting about a minute and a half of their
footage. They did rush us a little bit and try to make us come to the “sexy”
part a bit faster.” (Bezreh 2003)
Here the amateur pornographer grabs the opportunity to show her work for a
massive TV audience. The “deal” she negotiated with HBO was specific and
respectful of her work, the “love” contract consisted of her meeting a
person named Bruce, with whom she had a special chemistry and rapport so she
selected him to act as “cranky stagehand” and “master spanker” in her
movie. Amateur pornographers Tanya is an artists and everyday producer of
sex, living sex/love relationships and making porn using digital media
technologies and electronic networks.
Conclusion
In 1999, the Danish film company Zentropa Pictures opened “Puzzy Power” and
launched a “Pornouveau Manifesto.” The manifesto stipulates that movies must
be innovative and must turn people on. However, the portrayal of sex should
be “as real and true” as possible, yet should also show diverse forms of
energy and sensuality. Sex scenes should be integrated into cinematic
narratives and written for the enjoyment of both women and men. Hoping to
create positive and inspiring images of human sexuality, pornouveau
filmmakers try to make films that they themselves would like to watch. They
might not believe that films are better than experiencing real life sex, but
it should be a welcome addition to this experience.
Amateur pornographers are increasingly engaged in a collaborative producing
of porn using digital media and networks. They also assert their primal
sexual bodies as agents of lust and power negotiating or subverting media
regimes. Amateur pornographers have sexual bodies. What are the true
characteristic of these bodies? First of all, as was reported in a recent
New York Times article, “Women Tailor Sex Industry to Their Eyes,” more
women and queer producers are heading the newer sex sites and industries,
promoting better working conditions and the pornography of “body-ordinaries”
within decentralized sexual platforms. (Navarro, 2004) The producers of
peer-to-peer porn, pride porn and art porn have inherited the masculine
power structures and male fantasies inherent in porn, yet have been apt to
formulate everyday “performing” bodies as sexual ready and politically
astute entities.
This is perhaps the long-awaited schooling of pornography, its rapid
democratization, its return to more diversified expressions of
sexual-aesthetic lust. The aesthetic and social dimensions of our lust
patterns should be carefully observed, and analyzed as case-studies in a
reclaiming of porn, in relation to specific contracts between desiring
humans. Instead of applying universalizing theoretical concepts or outdated
obscenity standards, we can study these sexual performers and their acts of
communication. This trend is not yet common among scholars trained in
film/media criticism and theory, as it requires a willingness to abandon the
ivory tower of speculation, question boundaries between scholarship and
physicality, “play” vigorously with subjects who are informed agents of sex.
As McKenzie predicts at the end of Perform or Else: From Discipline or
Performance, there will be no “good schools” of performance to replace the
bad (crusty) ones. There are only packets of activism that acknoledge a need
to perform and be performed, as interactive technologies are rapidly
modifying the way we share knowledge and nurture the body. More abstract and
detached claims of academic criticism will all too be easily appropriated
and reversed by sex-negative ideology communities, and consequently, by
conservative nation-state governments, which globally have started to “push
and punish” porn through radical censorship and surveillance regimes.
We need to maintain ourselves, as pragmatic networkers of non-reproductive
sex, as “little” or “strange” body-packets swimming the high tides of
superpower politics, the expansionist corporate industries, warfare as
model of intercultural longing, and hopelessly outdated sex policies or
negligent attitudes as “cold” sexual education. The sexual revolution is
over. Yet we can be plainly social, we can develop reasonable acts of
seduction, amorously or with effort, within close communities and remote
peer networks. Clay Shirky foresees a need for acting as sensitive and
socially skilled beings as we enter wider networks and progressive models of
research/education: “…there are now file-sharing networks whose members
simply snail mail one another mountable drives of music. A critical factor
here is the social fabric -- as designers of secure networks know,
protecting the perimeter of a network only works if the people inside the
perimeter are trustworthy. New entrants can only be let into such a system
if they are somehow vetted or vouched for, and the existing members must
have something at stake in the behavior of the new arrivals.” (McKenzie,
2003) We are the new entrants to an existing and far-reaching porn culture,
our reflective and cooperative methods of analysis could be applied to the
body-ordinaries, as they themselves may re-enter our own body-packets.
Amateur pornography will be “our sex” or “our children’s sex” – our hunger
for knowledge and gratification, very soon.Works Cited
Bezreh, Tanya. Personal Interview with author. Unpublished Text. October 23,
2003.
Bezreh, Tanya. New Century Schoolbook [online]
http://www.newecneturyschoolbook.com <http://www.newecneturyschoolbook.com/>
[cited 7 november 2003].
Bisbee, Dana. “Real Candid Camera” Boston Herald. October 24, 2002.
Cloei, Nakkidnerds Mission Statement. [online]
http://www.nakkidnerds.com/mission.php [cited 7 november 2003].
DeGenevieve, Barbara. Personal interview with author. Unpublished Text.
October 9, 2002.
Hamamoto, Darrell Y, 1998. The Joy Fuck Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian
American Porno Practice. New Political Science 20, no. 3. A web-based
excerpt of this essay can be found at
http://www.mastersofthepillow.com/written.html [cited 30 october 2003]
Koontz, Linda. File-Sharing Programs: Child pornography Is Readily
Accessible Over Peer-to-Peer Networks. GAO-03-537T. March 13, 2003.
[online]
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs/pdf_inves/pdf_pornog_march_13_test_gao.
pdf [cited november 13, 2003]
Leung, Isaac. The Impossibility of Having Sex with 500 Men in One Month. I
am an oriental Whore[online] http://5sps.com/orientalwhore.html [ cited oct
22 2003]
Leung, Isaac. Personal Interview with author. Unpublished Text. October 8,
2002.
Lyotard, Francois. 1985. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,.McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance. New
York: Routledge.
Navarro, Mirey. Women Tailor Sex Industry to Their Eyes. The New York Times,
Febaruary 20, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/20/national/20FEM.htmlPornblogger [online] http://www.pornblography.com/daily_grind/ [cited
October 15, 2003]
Pornouveau Manifesto. Unpublished Text. Distributed by Zentropa Pictures
Puzzy Power. 2002.Real Sex: Porn 101: Exxxtra Credit. 2003. HBO Documentary Directed by Patti
Kaplan.
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. DVD. 1999. Produced and Directed by Lewis
Gough.
Shirky, Clay. “BackLash”! 5 April 2001 [online]
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/04/05/shirky.html [cited November 7,
2003]
Shirky, Clay, 2001. “PCs are the dark matter of the Internet.” [online]
<http://shirky.com/writings/dark_matter.html> [cited November 15, 2001]Shirky, Clay, 2002. “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing”
Published on the Networks, Economics, and Culture mailing list.
<shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html> [cited November 15, 2003]Shirky, Clay, 2003.”File-Sharing Goes Social” Published on the Networks,
Economics and Culture Mailing list
<shirky.com/writings/file-sharing_social.html>[cited February 26, 2004]
Www.ssspread.com Mission Statement. 2003. [online]
http:// www.ssspread.com /join/aboutus.html [cited November 3, 2003]
Syme, Ewen. Personal Interview with Author. Unpublished Text. January 6,
2002.
Van den Dries, Luke and Nele Decock. “Keep Out of Fiction: Nobody is
Watching” Janus 9, 2001.
Yu, Titi, Personal Interview with Author. Unpublished Text. January 7, 2002.
[1] <#_ftnref1> See for example the Pornblogger [online]
http://www.pornblography.com/daily_grind/ [cited October 15, 2003]
[2] <#_ftnref2> Shirky explains that home PCs can be seen as the “dark
matter” of the Internet as they constitute a vast amount of untapped
computing power. They are connected to the Internet’s central bureaus by the
millions, possessing lurking power as “second-class citizens”: “Slow CPU’s,
small disks, flakey Oss, slow and intermittent connections, no permanent IP
addresses – but with steady growth in hardware quality, connectivity, and
user base, the PCs at the edges of the network now represent an astonishing
and untapped pool of computing power.” (Shirky 2001)

_______________________________________________
http://freecooperation.org
conference, Buffalo, April 24-25, 2004
list archive: http://molodiez.org/ocs/mailinglist/archive.html