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Digital Labour and the Fantasy of Amateur Online Pornography

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Digital Labour and the Fantasy of Amateur Online Pornography Porn Studies ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20 Doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography Bonnie Ruberg To cite this article: Bonnie Ruberg (2016) Doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography, Porn Studies, 3:2, 147-159, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2016.1184477 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1184477 Published online: 27 Jul 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprn20 Download by: [USC University of Southern California] Date: 28 July 2016, At: 11:23 PORN STUDIES, 2016 VOL. 3, NO. 2, 147–159 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1184477 Doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography Bonnie Ruberg Interactive Media and Games Division, University of Southern California, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY To date, scholars of digital labour have not turned sufficient Received 29 June 2015 attention to online sex work, which constitutes a sizeable portion Accepted 22 April 2016 of contemporary web-based labour. In particular, the rise of KEYWORDS unpaid amateur pornography, circulated through YouTube-style pornography; digital labour; tube sites, points toward an important shift in how adult content DIY porn; online porn; sex is being produced and distributed in digital spaces. This shift also work; digital cultures raises questions about the cultural narratives that surround sexual labour. This article explores the labour politics that underlie the unpaid work of do-it-yourself (DIY) porn performers who are populating highly lucrative tube sites with hundreds of thousands of amateur videos. In doing so, the article argues for understanding DIY porn in relation to the increasing popularity of other digital maker movements. As feminist scholars of digital media have noted, crowdsourcing platforms like Wikipedia are commonly idealized as empowering and democratizing, yet they often reinforce existing social biases and obfuscate conditions of difference. I assert here that a similar utopian fantasy operates around online amateur porn, which is frequently figured as ethically superior to pornography for which performers are paid. Recognizing the production of DIY porn as digital labour offers the opportunity to challenge this narrative and make the network of capitalist forces that drive free amateur online content once again visible. This also presents a valuable framework through which to critique the harmful misconception that sexual labour is superior if it is done for pleasure rather than for profit. Introduction Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 11:23 28 July 2016 At this very moment, thousands of amateur pornographers worldwide are shooting erotic home videos and uploading them to a multi-billion-dollar network of YouTube-style adult video-sharing websites, in exchange for little to no financial compensation. These do-it- yourself (DIY) porn-makers are using a variety of technological tools and techniques to film their videos. Some are keeping it simple, using the video functions on their smart- phones to record themselves masturbating or engaging in sex with a partner. Others are staging carefully constructed and elaborate scenes that borrow from the cinematic rhetoric of professional pornography. Of these many digital DIY porn-makers posting to websites like XTube or XVideos.com, some will only ever upload a handful of videos. CONTACT Bonnie Ruberg [email protected] © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 148 B. RUBERG Others shoot, edit, and upload videos daily. The motivations of these amateur pornogra- phers vary, whether they seek the thrill of public performance, the admiration of grateful viewers, or the satisfaction of expressing themselves sexually in a community that blurs the line between creators and consumers. It is safe to say, however, that most hope their videos will be widely viewed, positively reviewed, and broadly speaking valued by a subset of the millions of viewers who view videos on adult tube sites each day for free. Given the recent rise in unpaid amateur porn-making and its widespread circulation through for-profit online spaces, the question I ask here is this: amidst this seemingly capit- alism-free economy of adult content produced, hosted, streamed, and viewed at no cost, what is the role of digital labour? When no one is paying and no one seems to be getting paid, how do we identity the mechanisms of capitalism that nonetheless continue to underlie the internet’s wealth of free pornographic content? How might digital labour poli- tics, made visible through a discussion of DIY online porn, pull back the curtain on the illu- sion that the best way to ‘do it’–whether ‘it’ means producing pornography or simply having sex – is for free? Although many porn studies scholars have written about online pornography, the issue of sexual labour has gone ignored by the otherwise proliferating field of popular and aca- demic writing on web-based crowdsourcing, user-generated content, and digital DIY cul- tures. Despite this notable omission, digital sex workers represent a considerable segment of the twenty-first-century online workforce. Much like sex work more broadly, the work of those engaged in online sexual labour takes many forms. On webcam sites, models charge by the minute to perform for clients tuning in from across the globe. Many escorts adver- tise their ‘real-life’ services in online databases. Arguably the most widespread form of digital sexual labour does not come with a pay-cheque, however. The rise of tube sites has propelled internet pornography into an age of largely unpaid amateur content – a shift that echoes broader, more widely studied, and often too quickly lauded trends in digital media-making, as seen in the overwhelming success of sites like Wikipedia and YouTube. My goal here is to demonstrate that those who study digital DIY cultures miss an important piece of the digital labour question when they overlook online sex work. No study of the work of the technology (or technological culture more broadly) can be complete without a study of sex, one of its primary driving economic forces. Additionally, the critical engagement that digital scholars might bring to discussions of online sexual labour has the much-needed potential to meaningfully counteract the dominant cultural narratives that currently surround amateur online porn-making – most notably, the proble- matic fantasy of DIY porn as the product of a capitalism-free utopia. Unchecked, this think- Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 11:23 28 July 2016 ing runs the risk of obscuring the real labour conditions of digital sex workers and perpetuating many of the same harmful stigmas about financially-compensated sex work that porn scholars, performers, and activists have long worked to combat. The rise of DIY porn A middle-aged man sits back on a floral-print sofa and begins unbuttoning his pants. The setting is a suburban living room; the light in the room is yellow and diffuse, giving the footage, shot via iPhone in 2014, the grainy quality of a 1970s stag film. After pulling out his penis, the man stops to adjust the camera angle, his freckled hand reaching toward the phone. Satisfied with the adjustment, he returns to his task, stroking himself PORN STUDIES 149 for two minutes and 12 seconds before reaching orgasm, performing a cursory clean up, and waving to the camera in a cheerful sign-off to his viewers. Titled ‘Silver Daddy jerks off at home’, this video, along with 15 others like it by the same amateur pornographer, was uploaded to XTube.com. As of December 2015 it has been viewed 25,562 times. Hundreds of videos of this sort are uploaded each day in the amateur sections of tube sites like XTube (and its many sister sites), XVideos, Dino Tube, and TNAFlix, which offer free streaming videos of all kinds by the hundreds of thousands. According to Alexa, a web ana- lytics database, each of these sites sees millions of unique viewers every day (as of December 2015). In addition to the proliferation of professional porn clips available on these sites, they typically offer a robust collection of amateur videos. XTube alone offers nearly 75,000 ‘real amateur videos’, produced by unpaid DIY-ers and searchable by categories spanning a wide range of sexual acts, represented ages, and so forth. The homepages of these tube sites fittingly reflect the abundance contained in their expansive archives: they commonly feature row upon row of eye-catching video thumbnails, advertising seemingly endless hours of immediately accessible viewing. Site visitors can browse by hovering their cursors over the thumbnail images that stand in for each video. In response, the thumbnail will briefly animate; functioning like a preview that allows viewers to decide whether the clip is worth clicking for a closer look. In this way, the system, like a buffet of free samples, sim- ultaneously encourages wide-reaching consumption and fickleness. While some pro- fessional videos hosted on tube sites are available only behind pay walls, the vast majority of truly amateur videos (as opposed to those professional videos which use the narrative conceit that they were produced by amateurs) stream entirely free. For this reason, the cur- rency that viewers trade in, deciding to spend or to hold in reserve, is their time. Tube sites and the popularity of amateur online porn in particular have grown consider- ably in recent years. It has become an often-reported and often-repeated fact that the per- vasiveness of free online content has drastically shifted the business of the American pornography industry (Wallace 2011; Falzone 2013; Morris 2014).
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