Sex in the Digital Age

Paul G Nixon, Isabel Düsterhöft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315446226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Shifts in societal development resulting from economic and technological advancements have had an impact upon the development of human sexuality and behaviour, and with the expansion of developments such as the Internet and associated technologies, it is likely that further societal shifts will ensue. This book recognises the importance of new digital spaces for discourses surrounding sexuality, examining issues such as pornography; sex education and health; LGBTQ sexualities; polysexuality or polyamory; abstention; sexual abuse and violence; erotic online literature; sex therapy; teledildonics; sex and gaming; online dating; celebrity porn; young people and sexual media; and sexting and sextainment, all of which are prominently affected by the use of digital media.

With case studies drawn from the US, the UK and Europe, Sex in the Digital Age engages in discussion about the changing acceptance of sex in the 21st century and part played in that by digital media, and considers the future of sex and sexuality in an increasingly digital age. It will therefore appear to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender and sexuality, new technologies and media and cultural studies.

1 The affective and affectless bodies of monster toon porn

Susanna Paasonen

Monster (car)toon porn is a genre of three dimensional (3D) computer-generated pornography that focuses on depictions of sexual encounters of the impossible and improbable kind. In monster toon porn, demons, zombies and hulk-like creatures copulate with elves, Hollywood starlet look-alikes and female game characters, huge bodies penetrate tiny ones and human-like bodies sprout novel sexual organs. Broadly building on the combined traditions of Western cartoon porn, Japanese hentai and ero-manga (pornographic anime and comics) and machinima (3D videos generated in real time with game engines and, increasingly, with the aid of additional software), monster toon porn is often classified as hentai, independent of its factual geographical origins. Its imageries are characteristically fantastic and excessive in their displays of spectacularly incompatible bodies engaging in penetrative sex, in its scenarios of control and submission and in its displays of lust and disgust seemingly knowing no bounds. These images and videos originate from the efforts of amateur fans, commercial studios and crowdfunded non-profit enterprises alike.

This chapter explores monster toon porn in terms of both its irregular embodiments and their uncanny lack of affect, and considers how these nonhuman displays of sexualised and gendered dynamics of control connect to game culture. These considerations are tied in with a discussion on the specificities of digitally generated and distributed pornography in terms of media technology, labour and ethics. Specific focus will be given to the oeuvre of Studio FOW who specialise in crowdfunded Source Filmmaker (SFM) hentai monster videos set in game worlds.

The hyperboles of animated porn

The histories of modern pornography preceding photographic technologies hark back to the traditions of erotic literary fiction and the visual arts spanning engravings, graphic prints, drawings and paintings. In addition to attempting to sexually arouse their audiences, these have equally aimed at amusement through the means of exaggeration, mockery and excess. Some visual pornography – as in the format of paintings – was produced for the exclusive private amusement of wealthy male clientele whereas prints were in much broader circulation, especially after the introduction of inexpensive printing presses in the late 18th century. In visual pornography, penises, vaginas and various other body parts have set off on adventures, detached themselves from bodies, floated about, changed shape and copulated creatively for a number of centuries. In the early 20th century, this visual tradition expanded to sexually explicit comics, such as the 1930s Tijuana Bibles featuring pornographic variations of popular mainstream comic strips and celebrities (see Adelman, 1997; Pilcher, 2008; also Uidhir and Pratt, 2012). In animated film – an emergent art form characterised by visual simplification, surface, rhythm and repetition (Klein, 1998) – graphic pornography met the possibilities of moving image. Film scholar Constance Penley (2004, p. 318) identifies ribald humour, wanton penises, “hyperbolically exaggerated body parts and wildly impossible sexual positions” ubiquitous in these comics as equally standard elements of early animated pornographic film.

Among these, Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, made in 1928–1929 and attributed to the production studio Climax Fables, was one of the very first. In the six-minute film, Eveready Harton’s expansive penis escapes his body, hides behind rocks, functions as a third leg, gets attacked by a plate-sized crab louse during penetration, gets stuck in a man’s anus, bends, is hurt by cacti and, in the film’s happy end, gets licked by a cow. The film is rife with puns, bodily metamorphoses and hyperbolic body parts while the boundaries of the animate and the inanimate, human and animal, are in constant flux. As Jose B. Capino (2004, p. 59) points out,

just as animals, plants and humans communicate and play with each other in mainstream animation, so also do the figures in animated pornography speak the same language of polysexual desire and perform more sexual roles than conventional human morality can tolerate.

In the German, undated Super 8 film loop most likely dating back to the late early 1970s, titled Schwänzel und Gretel (also known in English as Dickzel and Gretel and Hans and Gretel in the Magic Forest), trees and roofs of houses sprout human-like sexual organs, penises grow from the ground and people, squirrels, owls and pigs all engage in continuous orgies (also Capino, 2004, p. 57). This pornographic fantasyland is one of hyperbolic, excessive and even compulsive sexuality where ejaculate oozes from unsuspected outlets and lubricates the narrative action. The film is part of a broader cycle of German animated porn revisiting classic cartoons, from the Western adventures of Puffalo Bill to Robert Keller und Dieter Hahn where Max and Moritz play out some of their more adult tricks, Rammel der Hase featuring an amply endowed Bugs Bunny of sorts and Schneeflittchen und die 7 Zwerge where Snow White engages in group sex with the seven dwarfs and shoots pickles from her vagina. All these cartoons aim to titillate through their sexual explicitness but much more centrally to entertain through their surprising twists and turns, metamorphosing bodies and unequivocally smutty forms of humour.

Animated porn has since taken virtually endless shapes and forms, from parody versions of popular children’s animation gone wild to fan-made machinima created out of The Sims and the 3D, high-resolution bodies approximating photorealistic aesthetics and representing the higher end in terms of production value. Alongside these, all kinds of pornographic comics and still images abound in resolutions high and low, in genres more and much less mainstream and in aesthetics ranging from the cartoonish to the photorealistic. Digital image manipulation and animation tools have grown increasingly accessible. At the same time, all kinds of pornographic animations are more readily available than ever on online video sharing platforms. These aggregate or tube sites enable the uploading, and hence the public archiving, of clips that were previously in much narrower circulation through screenings, Video Home Systems (VHS) and Digital Versatile Discs (DVD) compilations. The “affective processing of digital artifacts” (Gehl, 2011, p. 1230) on tube sites gives rise to heterogeneous archives of varying copyright statuses. Individual clips are detached from their original contexts of production and distribution, titled, described and tagged as users see fit (Gehl, 2009, pp. 46–47). This regularly results in an efficient erosion and loss of metadata, production data included. The titles of films may be missing or replaced with others while there is generally little information available on when the films were made, where and by whom. Given the diverse routes of circulation that online content takes across tube sites, paywall protected services and torrent platforms, the origins of individual clips can be hard to track.

In the horizontal space of tube archives, both those specialising in animated pornography and those catering to virtually all tastes, one may move from Pokémon hentai featuring some of Pikachu’s more raunchy moments to porn variations of Family Guy, Simpsons and Futurama. In these, family members get it on with one another and the boundaries of species, as well as those of humans and machines, are overcome with gusto. Some tube sites feature all kinds of cartoon porn whereas others focus more exclusively on hentai, itself tagged under categories such as schoolgirls, tentacles, goblins, furries, futanari (inter-gender pornography where primary sexual characteristics of different genders are played with) and those familiar from other realms of pornography, such as ‘anal’, ‘Bondage and Disciple, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism’ (BDSM), ‘blowjob’ or ‘gangbang’.

Rich and empty in affect

McLelland (2005) points out that in Japanese the term hentai refers only to sexual materials deemed unusual, extreme or abnormal. At the same time, Japanese pornographic anime more broadly involves narratives tied in with “the fantastic, the occult, or science fiction” and regularly privileges “the female body in pain” in scenes of sexual torture and mutilation (Napier, 2005, p. 64). This also applies to ‘eroge’, hentai computer games with their perennial – and perennially controversial – themes of incest and sexual violence that have grown part of global gaming cultures (Martinez and Manolovitz, 2010). For while some eroge remains relatively softcore, other releases veer firmly towards guro – that which Urban Dictionary defines as “grotesque pornography” involving “diarrhoea (sic) scat, necrophilia, amputee sex, skull-fucking and violent rape” (www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=guro; for a contemporary portfolio of eroge, see http://www.lewdgamer.com/).

Despite referring to sexual depictions of the more extraordinary and unlikely kind, in the Japanese context, hentai does not have a pejorative connotation similar to that of abnormality and perversion in Western scientia sexualis (McLelland, 2005; cf. Foucault, 1990; Foucault 2003). While hentai was considered too extreme or plain bizarre for Western pornographic DVD markets of the 1990s, it quickly gained ubiquitous recognisability on online platforms, followed by broad, multi-platform distribution (see Dahlqvist and Vigilant, 2004). Ortega-Bena (2009, p. 20) defines hentai through characteristics such as “substandard animation, ample dwelling on unconventional erotic practices, a fixation on rape and non-consensual sexual violence, and often preposterous scenarios”, but also associates it with the grotesque and carnivalesque features of Japanese erotic fiction that veer towards the bizarre while making use of humour.

Building on the tradition of shunga, erotic woodblock prints, which peaked during the Edo period (1603–1868), hentai richly features many of its themes, such as “Massive genitalia, ingenious sexual aids, couplings of all kinds, a wide array of fetishes, bizarre viewpoints, physical anomalies, bawdy comedy, and satirical vignettes” (Ortega-Bena, 2009, p. 20). The influences of shunga remain evident in hentai, from exaggerated physical characteristics to humour and elaborate scenarios of tentacle rape (see Buckland, 2010; Gerstle and Clark, 2013; Kazutaka, 2013; Napier, 2005, p. 21; Screech, 2009). The uses of tentacles and other non-human phallic shapes owes partly to Japanese legislation banning the showing of genitalia without pixelation (see Hambleton, 2015; Napier, 2005, p. 79). The landscape of monster toon porn is populated by tentacle monsters owing to Hokusai’s classic woodcut, The Pearl Diver (also known as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, 1814), as well as a vast range of giant worm-like creatures, demons, centaurs, elves, ogres, dragons, zombies and amalgamations of humans and bugs. The genre can be identified as post-human in a range of ways: due to its nonhuman and hybrid protagonists that often metamorphose from one shape to another, its computer-generated origins resulting from algorithmic functions and its affectless bodies engaging in mechanical sexual acts.

Like hentai, monster toons are rife with “demonic phallus incarnate”: namely demonic characters that are “preternaturally huge, covered with rippling muscles, and inevitably equipped with an enormous penis (and often with phallic tentacles as well)” (Napier, 2005, pp. 65, 79). Be these monsters, insects, spiders, fish, slugs, extra-terrestrial creatures or demons, narrative action focuses firmly on vaginal, oral and anal penetrative sex that climaxes in money shots. Monsters of all kinds sport highly anthropomorphic penises, semen flows freely from all kinds of bodies and anthropomorphic female characters grow pregnant with bugs and demons alike.

The landscapes of action are mostly dungeons and simplified forests – spaces routinely featured in the games on which machinima builds – or other abstract spaces void of any excessive detail, let alone markers of everyday life. The sexual scenarios are overwhelmingly ones of domination and submission, often of the non-consensual sort. With the exception of futanari, it is generally the female bodies – young, fit, beautiful and firmly human-like as they tend to be – that are pushed to their boundaries of physical endurance by the sheer size of the penises, tentacles or objects inserted in their orifices. Monsters three times the size of elves slip excessively sized penises into mouths and vaginas while female bodies bend, flex and accommodate.

A search for ‘monster toon’ on Pornhub, the world’s leading porn aggregate site, identifies five to six minute clips with titles such as ‘Giant Monsters Take Hot Chick’ and ‘Monster Sex on Space Station’. In these, sex acts consist of the same motions repeated over and over again, accompanied by the same facial expressions and sounds, or the lack thereof. It is also more generally noteworthy that the bodies of monster toon porn move back and forth in their penetrative acts with notably little variation in gesture or motion. In sum, despite the unlimited possibilities that animation affords in imagining characters engaging in acts impossible for actual human bodies to accomplish, or even survive, the fantastic scenes of monster toon porn are recurrently tied up with highly predictable ways of imagining both sexual scenarios and gendered power dynamics. On the one hand, these scenarios are markedly affective in their visceral attention to (more or less fantastic) bodily detail and in the dynamics of disgust, amusement and sexual arousal that they aim to evoke. On the other hand, the monsters and their more or less human partners are regularly affectless in their animated, machinic bodily movements.

In terms of aesthetics, monster toon porn can be rather roughly divided into two main modes, namely high-resolution still images and cartoons aiming at full photorealism in the impossible bodies they depict and machinima videos of much lower technical execution. In both instances, female characters tend to resemble the Realdoll brand of sex dolls in their plastic, ultra-feminine human likeness and functional purpose alike. In still images, the details of bodies are carefully crafted towards a paradoxical sense of verisimilitude, from the pores of the skin to the gradations of the soft, hard and the liquid. The bodies of videos, for the most part, remain much more sketch-like. As is the case with Realdolls, the animated characters’ facial expressions tend to be vacuous. Their verbal output remains limited to the repetitive loops of grunts, sighs, squeals and whimpers that are largely detached from the motion of bodies, mouths and faces. Like elsewhere in animated pornographic film, human voice is both an extension and displacement of the animated body (Capino, 2004, p. 64) that creates as much distance as it yields grains of proximity.

According to Ortega-Bena, hentai follows the more general trend of emotional inexpression, a visual blankness of sorts, in Japanese arts and film. There is little explicit or outward expression of emotion and animated bodies tend to be equally impassive. All this results in layers of spectacle and excess, blankness and inexpression that are deployed in conveying the markedly fantastic and out-of-the-ordinary (Ortega-Bena, 2009, pp. 20–21). Ortega-Bena (2009, p. 27) sees the bodies of hentai as constantly moving “between dichotomies of male, female; potent, impotent; demonic, human; oppressive, submissive; possessive, possessed; attacker, attacked; sadist, masochist”. Although these categories are “ultimately fluid, can be shuffled around and are combined in a variety of ways” (Ortega-Bena, 2009, p. 27), in the realm of monster toon porn – independent of the centrality of nonhuman sexual partners – the positions of the submissive and the dominant tend to be clearly cut in gendered terms. While the boundaries of species are routinely crossed, bodies metamorphose from one form to another and novel incarnations are common, gendered lines of control remain much more tenacious and consistent.

Extending the game

3D monster toon porn largely builds on the expressive possibilities of machinima, both in its simpler game-engine based variations and those created with the aid of additional software, such as SFM, which encompasses a broad, and stylistically heterogeneous scene of amateur film practice. Independent of the specific forms it takes, machinima filmmaking is centrally derivative: “audiences look forward to familiar game locations, quests, items, and game-generated characters being reinterpreted by machinima filmmakers” (Falkenstein, 2011, p. 87). In other words, machinima involves a resampling and reimagining of game characters and events, and this is also where a central part of its attraction lies. To a degree, the practice of machinima resembles puppetry, of bending characters into new positions, scenes and motions (cf. Hancock, 2011, p. 32). In the sexually explicit extensions of in-game events, female characters, from Lara Croft to the female cast of Final F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The affective and affectless bodies of monster toon porn
• 2 Participatory porn culture: feminist positions and oppositions in the internet pornosphere
• 3 Young people and sexual media
• 4 Sex education in the digital age
• 5 Love at our fingertips: exploring the design implications of mobile dating technologies
• 6 Sexting
• 7 “Nude selfies til I die” – making of ‘sexy’ in selfies
• 8 Nothing to hide: selfies, sex and the visibility dilemma in trans male online cultures
• 9 Supporting one another: nonbinary community building on Tumblr
• 10 ‘Cake is better than sex’ – AVEN and asexuality
• 11 Gay men and the internet: unlimited possibility, lived reality
• 12 Two-faced racism in gay online sex: preference in the frontstage or racism in the backstage?
• 13 Representing bisexuality in the digital age
• 14 Exploring polyamory online: ethics, relationships and understanding
• 15 Becoming BDSM in an online environment
• 16 Negotiations of identity, pleasure and health in women’s online sex work advertisements
• 17 Gaming and sex
• 18 Hell yes!!!!!: playing away, teledildonics and the future of sex
• Index