Pornography and Seriality

The Culture of Producing Pleasure

S. Schaschek

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349472864, 9781137363121
• eBook ISBN: 9781137359384
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Repetition and seriality are inherent in pornography and is constitutive for its functionality as a film genre, an industry, and an area of gender studies. By linking the styles of the genre to processes of serial production, consumption, and discussion, Schaschek questions the dominant assumptions about pornography and the stability of the genre.

Episode 1

Seductive Seriality

The Genre of Pornography and Its Affective Structure

Pornography fails as a genre if it does not arouse the body.

—Linda Williams, “Second Thoughts on Hard Core”

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”1 This famous comment on pornography, uttered by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, summarizes to date the two main difficulties facing anyone who critically engages with pornography. In his concluding statement of the Jacobellis v. Ohio case, in which the justice defended a movie against censorship, Stewart refers at once to the difficulty of defining the pornographic genre and to the difficulty of talking about films that obviously arouse the viewer.

Although today’s discourse about pornography tends to be less cryptic than in Stewart’s era, it is worth considering the ambiguous knowledge the justice invokes here. The idea of knowledge in the first part of the quote indicates the problem of finding stable categories to describe a pornographic film. What is subsumed under the single term pornography turns out, at second glance, to be an uncontainable array of sexual representations diversifying into ever-smaller subgenres, appearing in all media, and incorporating a considerable amount of contradiction. The second part of the quote implies a different kind of knowledge, one that is less bound to rational categories and where understanding cannot be separated from feeling. Here, Stewart hints at the arousal that comes from “seeing it.”

Stewart clearly ranks these two kinds of knowledge. He dismisses the first kind, the definitional one, as a category of little use. Nominal classification, he seems to be saying, is doomed to fail, as is ultimately all category work. By foregrounding instead the arousing kind of knowledge, Stewart indirectly proposes an approach to pornography that takes into account the affective experiences of watching pornographic films. In other words, he suggests that the conceptualization of sexual arousal (or other experiences that pornography possibly produces) might be more apt for an understanding of these films than more traditional forms of signification.

Mixed Categories, Mixed Feelings

This episode links the two kinds of knowledge—the definitional and the experiential—to seriality. Seriality is, I argue, in great parts responsible for both difficulties Stewart expressed in his statement. First, there is the problem of classification. Classification is essentially marked by decisions to include and exclude something according to criteria of similarity and variation, and therefore reveals the organizing function of seriality. Stewart’s confession that he would not be able to define the material he was asked to judge points to a similar difficulty faced by genre theorists in their attempt to “genrify” (Altman 1999, 70) certain films. It is true that pornography’s repeated plots, figures, settings, or aesthetics affirm pornography’s status as a genre. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that pornography embraces the organizing function of genrification by creating ever-new subgenres and by carefully sorting sexual preferences, bodies, ages, races, and power relations into clearly recognizable categories. In this sense, pornography can be said to eroticize taxonomic systemization.

At the same time, these features endlessly vary while new criteria are added. Moreover, pornography aims for the transgression of these criteria, as can be seen in interracial or intergenerational sexual encounters. This variability (which is the other side of the genre’s seriality) condemns pornography, like all film genres, to always be temporary. Pornography also changes when it appears in different media or when it is perceived in a particular context. Such a dynamic perception of the pornographic genre—one that foregrounds the importance of seriality, I argue—challenges the assumption that pornography remains the same throughout its spatiotemporal remediations and that it can ever be properly defined.

The second problem indicated by Stewart is that of the affective experience of pornography. He is convinced that he will know pornography when he sees it, probably meaning that he will be aroused when he sees it. His comment points to the limits of rationally making sense of pornography and instead indicates the importance of making sense through bodily perception. This corresponds with Richard Dyer’s conceptualization of pornography as a genre rooted in bodily affect (Dyer 1985, 121) and with what Finnish media critic Susanna Paasonen has recently termed “carnal resonance” (Paasonen 2011). Stewart’s assumption reveals that he expects pornography to work in a particular way. This slightly defies his claim that he does not know what pornography is. In fact, he seems to have a precise idea of what might happen while also admitting that he will find out only when he watches a pornographic film. The role of expectation in pornography is also inextricably tied to seriality. In fact, pornography relies on a system that nurtures sexual excitement and anticipation and that can only be explained when considering the seriality of the genre. Umberto Eco argues that the function of seriality in genres is precisely that it “gives the public the sensation of knowing ahead of time that which it does not yet know and will know only at the moment” (1990, 90).

The elusive character of sexual excitement, which constitutes a great part of pornography’s “meaning” but is so hard to frame, confronts film critics with a range of questions. When it comes to pornography, textual readings for instance appear little productive. Pornography’s in-your-face aesthetics and binary power structures make it difficult to see anything besides the typical heterosexual patterns of pleasure (this, as we will see in Episode 5, equally goes for nonheterosexual pornography). On the other hand, what has rarely been analyzed is the “seductive” power of pornography—its ability to direct the viewer’s attention; to “arouse her to meaning”; to make pornography legible. Besides problematizing these traditional neglects, I want to propose a perspective that understands the pornographic experience as one that draws on the modes of expectation and predictability—qualities that are infused with seriality.

In other words, in this episode, I look at pornography as a genre. This means that I situate pornography within the genre system (as opposed to other genres, but also with respect to its countless subgenres). As I will show, pornography at once fits in and does not fit in with genre theory. Genre theory, for example, upholds some major binary distinctions. Critics tend to privilege narrative over spectacle, change over repetition, causality over accident, and rationality over affect (Gledhill 2000, 231). As a consequence, in the past, pornography was not only approached from a highly biased theoretical framework; it was also banned to the periphery of the genre system. By emphasizing the seriality of the pornographic genre and of its recent online versions, I offer a way to question these binary categories. Rather than falling into the two traps that make genres so difficult to conceptualize—one being the taxonomic trap, the other being the affective trap—I suggest that the perspective of seriality helps frame pornography as a dynamic and visceral phenomenon. In short, I ask what role seriality plays in pornography’s powerful “seduction” of the viewer.

The structure of this episode roughly follows the duality of Stewart’s quote and is divided into two parts. The first part engages with what I call the taxonomic pleasure in pornography. I base my argument on YouPorn, one of the most popular user-generated adult film websites worldwide and an exemplary case of so-called You-media. In April 2013, the “straight” version of YouPorn (there is also a gay equivalent called YouPornGay) listed 64 subcategories, thus offering a microcosm of pornographic diversification. The videos downloadable on YouPorn show the features of digital seriality. Their structure is formulaic, and the portrayal of binary gender relations is only the strongest effect of this. The clips are episodic and their categorization is determined by a dynamic system of tags, rating options, and other community features. I will show that these particular online taxonomies, or “folksonomies,” as Axel Bruns (2008) refers to them, play an important role in the pleasure the user gains from this website.

The second part of the episode engages with Stewart’s claim that he could feel the genre of pornography. I ask what it is that arouses the viewer and show that this is often due to a kind of seductive seriality: a range of filmic instruments such as camera work, scripts, and dialogue that incites the viewer’s arousal, disgust, boredom, or alienation. This part constructs seriality as a feedback mode that operates through expectation and predictability. By close-reading two clips from YouPorn, I offer a perception of pornography similar to the experiential model proposed by Vivian Sobchack, in which “‘on the rebound’ from screen—and without a reflective thought—I will reflexively turn toward my own carnal, sensual, and sensible being” (2004, 76–77). Many of these feelings draw on random memories, expectations, and predictions that are highly subjective and can only be understood when readings of pornography take into account the serial structure of the films.

Genre Trouble: Taxonomic Pleasure and Pain in YouPorn

For a long time, I wondered which film or video clip might be best for beginning my discussion of seriality in pornography. The video should be an ideal representative of the phenomenon; I imagined there to be a little bit of everything that triggers people’s concerns about pornography: sexism, racism, heterosexual binaries, and many other problematic power structures that pornography expresses through maximally visible sexual action: structures meant to turn the viewer on. My goal was to show that the repetition and exaggeration of these structures were at the very heart of pornography—that its binary structure was part of pornography’s appeal, part of the seductive effect it has on the viewer.

I browsed the YouPorn website for a clip that portrayed sex between a very young woman and a strikingly older man, because I wanted to stress pornography’s obsession with youth and its juxtaposing of bodily difference—its fantasy of breaking social taboos. Then I came across the many clips featuring so-called MILFs: figures of women in their forties. So there went my perfect example! I could have described one of the many scenes YouPorn “recommended” to me: an interracial gang bang scene; a lesbian encounter; sex with blondes, brunettes, or redheads; “creampies” (insemination), “cumshots” (external ejaculation), or “cunnilingus”; “vintage” or “webcam” quality presentation. All these videos would have had the same problem: They display similar, yet highly specialized variations of sexually explicit material. In fact, for every pornographic cliché, there seem to be various counterclichés.

The problem is not that an example of my idea of generic and predictable pornography does not exist. There are countless websites about the “young woman/old man” fetish; YouPorn lists four categories playing on this preference, including the categories “MILF,” “mature,” “teen,” and “Young/Old.” The problem was that I was faced with the impossibility of framing something as large and diverse as pornography without approaching it with selective attention—that is, by suggesting that my findings, which are based on a specific set of examples, can be applied to the phenomenon as a whole.

Framing the Serial

The difficulties I was experiencing are at the very heart of talking about pornography as a genre. Film genres are products of categorization; they categorize films according to a variety of repetitive criteria, including plots, figures, settings, themes, or affects, and are in turn brought about by these films. In fact, genres are not simply the sum of the films they include; they are also, practically, the effect of these films. Jason Mittell refers to genres as cultural categories, as they “exist only through the creation, circulation, and reception of texts within cultural contexts” (2001, 8). They are also predominantly marked by processes of seriality—that is, by repetition and variation. But given that genres repeat, pornography seems to make a particularly excessive case in terms of quantity and quality of both repetition and variation. Camera work, sexual positions, and characters resemble one another to the point that the scenarios become not only predictable but possibly exchangeable. At the same time, pornography does not cease to split into a growing array of subcategories as random and diverse as “anal,” “amateur,” or “Asian,” each accentuating certain variations on the repetitive formulas of sexual practices, narrative style, or fetishized identity. Pornography, I claim, can thus only be approached with an awareness of the paradoxical phenomena of seriality. Seriality, in short, urges us to define pornography, and its digital reverberations, as a “plural category, one that might be contingent as a point of reference, but which is also internally split” (Paasonen 2010, 74).

This paradoxical relationship can be observed on the YouPorn website, which it is at the same time aesthetically limited and broad in its presentation of subgenres. YouPorn, launched in 2006 and modeled on YouTube, is a typical example of Web 2.0 pornographic culture with its file-sharing and rating options. Users can upload clips from existing pornographic films or their own amateur products. In May 2013, YouPorn ranked ninety-eighth on Alexa’s list of most trafficked websites worldwide (twenty-seventh in Germany), which makes it one of the most popular websites on the Internet alongside other free-contents websites such as RedTube, PornHub, or XTube.

Websites like YouPorn conceivably increase the difficulties critics always face when defining pornography as a genre. Before YouPorn existed, video stores—and later, digital databanks—contained the gross of pornographic works available to viewers. At least to some degree, the classic fetish themes have reemerged in online porn while the feature-length film or movie-theater atmosphere has resorted to pornographic festivals. Given that pornography was never easy to frame in any stable categories, the file-sharing and cross-tagging culture no longer allows for any consistent fetish as it might have been preserved in the “special interest” section of video stores. Instead, categories are constantly mixed or even “hacked” while tubes promise viewers faster access to imageries of their choice (Paasonen 2011, 70). As Sharif Mowlabocus notes about user-generated categories, “Interestingly, this mode of categorization is being exploited by users to increase the viewing of their videos and images. Users regularly include unrelated tags in order to generate more interest in their material. Although this can be frustrating for browsers, such taxonomic ‘hacking’ demonstrates the ‘open’ nature of this 2.0 phenomenon, allowing users to reorganize content according to their own criteria” (Mowlabocus 2010, 86). Let’s look at the way YouPorn organizes the videos into infinitely expanding subcategories. First, there are various levels that preorganize the videos. Apart from the 64 content-based categories, there is a rating system (users can choose from a tab called “Rated Best,” where videos are placed according to other users’ preferences) and a recommendation tool (an algorithm considers each user’s own preferences). In addition to this, there is a “search” tool that finds videos by keywords corresponding to the “tags” that users can mark when uploading their own videos. In sum, there is a variety of tools that contribute to the taxonomy of YouPorn and which, as I will show, are part of the site’s serial appearance. The “scattershot imagery” (van Doorn 2010, 421) works to tease the viewer’s desire.

The problem of classification is at the heart of genre theory, as indicated in the term genre itself. Etymologically, genre derives from the Latin word genus, which points to the semantic field of “decent,” “family,” or “type.” In theories of high art, classic genres distinguished between the epic, lyric, and dramatic mode. Film studies mostly use the French term genre, which is also the French word for “gender.” In film theory, a genre is a corpus of films in which unity is attributed to “consistent patterns in thematic content, iconography and narrative structure” (Doane 1987, 34).

While acknowledging the importance of genres for film as both a medium and a discipline, genre critics like Rick Altman, Christine Gledhill, and Linda Williams have repeatedly pointed to the problem of taxonomy underlying genre theories. Their main concern is that if genres aim to categorize films and their audiences, industries, and cultural work, they always do so by way of inclusion and exclusion. In “The Law of Genre,” Derrida puts the problem as follows:

As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: “Do,” “Do not” says “genre,” the word “genre,” the figure, the voice, or the law of genre. And this can be said of genre in all genres, be it a question of a generic or a general determination of what one calls “nature” or physis (for example, a biological genre in the sense of gender, or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general) . . . Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity. (1980, 56–57)

For this reason, film genres always raise questions of which films belong to them and where their limits are. This task is essentially paradoxical because, as Andrew Tudor rightly notes, in order to identify a film as belonging to a particular genre, the critic needs to be familiar with the features of the genre. But to know the features of a genre, the critic needs to refer to the films constituting that genre (qtd. in Gledhill 2000, 232). In the pornographic subgenre system of YouPorn, it is particularly difficult to say what distinguishes, for example, “mainstream” movies from fetishistic niche products. Further, pornography generally defies the binary structure of normal and abnormal by presenting every desire as a “dirty perversion.”2

These limitations, however, hardly influence the fact that pornography needs taxonomic structures in order to eroticize them. First and most unsurprisingly, YouPorn structures gender. A quick glance at the homepage of the site makes clear that YouPorn structures femininity and masculinity by way of two major strategies: (1) maximal visibility of female bodies and (2) what appears to be a male perspective. The majority of hyperlink frames show women lying on their backs, their legs spread, their genitals facing the camera. Some images further accentuate the demand of maximal visibility by showing women’s pulled-back hair, spread buttocks and labia, and open mouths. Few frames show male-coded bodies, and if they do, the only...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Foreplay
• Episode 1. Seductive Seriality: The Genre of Pornography and Its Affective Structure
• Episode 2. Sex Machines: Or, The Fantasy of Bodily Efficiency
• Episode 3. The State of Open Being: Polyamorous Films and the Female Porn Star
• Episode 4. A Thousand Little Deaths: Episodes and “Traumatized Narratives”
• Episode 5. Nostalgia: Strategies of Imitation in Queer Pornography
• The Final Episode
• Bibliography