Panel: Pro-Am Pornography: New Economies of Sex Production and

Consumption
Feona Attwood, Simon Lindgren, Sharif Mowlabocus and Susanna
Paasonen
This panel draws on a cultural studies approach that aims to investigate online
pornographies as a set of cultural practices revealing new patterns of media and technology
use and shifts in the significance of sexual representation and practice across real and virtual
environments. These are located within a broader striptease culture (McNair, 2002) of
public and mediated intimacy where the significance of sex, communication technology and
media representation is shifting.
Like other branches of the entertainment industry, established forms of porn production
have faced a number of challenges in recent years; especially those related to the rise of the
amateur and to new forms of production, distribution and consumption in an era of Web
2.0 technologies. Amateur porn has proliferated, along with independent and alternative
porn genres and texts, as part of the broader emergence of user-generated content and of
participatory online cultures (see Jenkins, 2006); indeed it has been argued that some porn
producers have been way ahead of the game (Lehman, 2007:109) in this respect.
The production of independent and alternative pornographies with a countercultural or
queer bent (Magnet, 2007; Attwood, 2007; Levin Russo, 2007) has been of particular
interest in the context of ongoing debates about pornographys representation of sexuality
and gender. Associated with artistic, technological and political innovation, and sometimes
with the development of new porn aesthetics, ethics and business practices, these porn
forms have been seen by some as part of a reclaiming of porn culture and sex education
(Jacobs, 2007: 77). The emergence of younger, sophisticated producers and consumers may
also be understood as an aspect of what has been characterized as the pornification of
mainstream culture (Paasonen et al., 2007), and of a move towards new forms of smart sex
culture in which some forms of cultural production and consumption around sex shake off
their earlier sleazy connotations and appear as chic or hip.
Emerging forms of amateur and independent production have also been accompanied by a
shift in modes of porn distribution online, further challenging the existing commercial
structures within which much porn production has traditionally operated. In particular, the
growth of the pornographic tubes such as YouPorn and XTube, as platforms for hosting
and streaming both amateur and commercial material, has presented new opportunities and

risks for porn production and consumption. Elsewhere, sex bloggers, erotica writers and
porn communities have created new spaces for engaging with pornography.
These developments are part of the broader transformations in the economy and in culture
in which the relations between production and consumption, work and leisure, public and
private are being redrawn according to a paradigm of service work and flexible labour, of
recombinant families and isolable individuals, and of a sexual ethic in which commerce and
intimacy coexist (Bernstein, 2007: 173). The notion of the pro-am; a new social hybrid,
disrupting categories of work and leisure, and professional and amateur (Leadbeater &
Miller, 2004: 20) is interesting in this context, and helps to further locate new cultural
practices as part of the broader growth in forms of creative labour that foreground ways of
living and working which are flexible, autonomous, and individually fulfilling, but also highly
insecure (Ross, 2008; Gill & Pratt, 2008).
These practices have made possible the emergence of new economies of sex and new
relations of labour and leisure: smart sex professionals form networks linking together
artistic production, education and political activism; amateur performers negotiate the
freedom and control of 2.0 technologies; previously isolated porn fans congregate to discuss
the conventions and pleasures of their collections; and amateur writers and readers engage
in interactions which are both mutually arousing and culturally appreciative. The panel
focuses on the emergence of a pornographic pro-am culture that can be glimpsed in the
casual work performed by amateurs on tube sites, the articulation of viewer positions on
porn fan sites, the critical exchanges of writers on erotica sites, and the precarious erotic
labour of smart sex culture producers.

Get Paid for Showing Your Naughty Bits: amateur pornography and the
rhetoric of social media
Sharif Mowlabocus
The relationship between media technologies and sexual representation is both wellestablished and well-documented (McNair, 1996; OToole, 1999; Attwood, 2007; Hardy,
2008). Developments in communication technology (printing press, photography, cinema,
telephony, television, VHS, DVD, internet) run parallel with shifts in the production,
consumption, format and aesthetics of pornographic material. This relationship continues
today as technologies of social and participatory media are becoming utilized in the
manufacturing, distribution and accessing of sexually explicit objects. This paper considers
the (continuing) rise of online amateur pornography and critically engages with the politics of
what might best be termed porn 2.0. Focusing on issues of labour and subjectivity it
discusses the promise of a new pornographic economy, in which digital spaces provide for
the articulation of a diverse range of desires, tastes, bodies and practices. This economy is
marked by an increasing porosity between the established categories of consumer,
producer, performer and distributor and by the establishment of new ludic interstices
that allow amateur producers to play along the boundaries between such categories.
While acknowledging the political potential that this new economy offers users, the paper
utilizes the work of Graham (2000), Lazzarato (2001) and Cot & Pybus (2007) to temper
claims of pornographic emancipation and suggests that new forms of amateur pornography
are framed by older mechanisms of production and consumption. Through an examination
of XTube - a distribution site for amateur porn - the paper identifies the tension that exists
between the rhetoric of freedom, control and play found in many of the sites amateur
homepages and the capitalist imperative found elsewhere on the site, which urges amateurs
to become productive and efficient labourers by privileging the desires of their consumers
over and above their own. The paper concludes by identifying how and why questions of
agency and objectification must remain central to discussions of sexual representation, not
least in contexts where amateurs are being offered the freedom to engage in precarious
labour, through the rhetoric of Web 2.0.
Smart Sex Culture: the rise of the new porn professionals
Feona Attwood
In an interview with altporn director Eon McKai, Violet Blue (2007) documents the
emergence of a group of new porn professionals intellectuals, directors, performers and
bloggers who are younger, paler, decidedly less straight than the norm, at least as
represented by the circus of porn stereotypes at the AVN porn convention where Blue

and McKai met to talk. This new type of producer is cosmopolitan, real, and focused on the
production of smart sex culture for a young, sophisticated, media-savvy audience previously
neglected by mainstream porn producers. They are also characterized by a reflexivity that
marks them as thoughtful practitioners, indicating an overlap between critical, artistic, and
activist interventions in the production of sex media. The emergence of this group of
practitioners coincides both with the pornification of mainstream culture (see Paasonen et
al., 2007) and the development of participatory online cultures, challenging stereotypes of
porn production and performance, as well as established ideas about what porn and
professional signify.
This paper considers the emergence of new types of porn professionalism and examples of
new porn professionals in the context of debates about celebrities and ordinary people;
professionalism and amateurism, representation and real life. It examines the rise of smart
sex culture and the notion of sex as medium and explores their significance in relation to a
variety of cultural trends; a global growth in sex work, creative labour, pro-amateur
production, participatory cultures and the postmodernization of sex.
Widening the glory hole: the discourse of online porn fandom
Simon Lindgren
The traditional image of the porn consumer has been that of the perverted and shamed
loner. In pre-internet times such an image was probably adequate, and even today, when
pornographic materials are widely available online, it is still a qualified guess that most porn
consumption takes place in individualized and private situations. The porn audience, thus
described, becomes an archetype of late modern man; part of a global media and consumer
culture, yet detached and left to himself, blas and numb from visual overload, yet constantly
looking for new sensations. In this view of the user, pornography becomes an expression of
episodic sexuality and the will to sexual control - an urge that becomes increasingly
compulsive as traditional roles and structures are liquefied in late modernity.
But what happens to the audience when porn goes online? The anonymous masturbatory
onlooker certainly remains, but porn inevitably also reaches new audiences. The internet has
brought pornography closer to the mainstream of popular culture, and in so doing
connected it to audiences more like those of popular culture in general. The aim of this
paper is to analyze how porn fans collectively construct their viewer positions in the online
community, FreeOnes (http://board.freeones.com/). The discussion of empirical material
gathered from conversations on the FreeOnes bulletin board takes current research on

participatory culture and fandom as its point of departure when approaching how audience
members consume, use and integrate pornography in their everyday lives.
Good amateurs: erotica writing and notions of quality
Susanna Paasonen
This paper focuses on Literotica, a massive online archive of erotic stories archive
established in 1998, investigating the aesthetic and affective criteria of a good story at play
on the site. On Literotica, stories are evaluated through peer rating, competitions, feedback
and comments. Through analysis of (select) competition winners, all-time top rated stories,
most read stories, stories with low ratings, and author guides, as well as reader comments
and feedback, the paper addresses the collective creation of value as a process that involves
both notions of literary merit (in terms of style, grammar, vocabulary, character
construction or narrative) and affective appeal (the power of stories to move their readers).
In doing so, the paper bridges some of the current knowledge gaps concerning erotica
writing, criteria of quality and amateur production.
The erotic fiction available on Literotica, along with the feedback, interaction possibilities
and contests, provide a distinctive space for collaborative and collective negotiations over
value that are not in any direct way conditioned either by the principles of commercial
publishing or by the value and genre norms of literary critique. Carnal proximities with, and
sensuous pleasures derived from the stories are a central criterion of value that does not
foreclose considerations of language, style or grammar, but is intrinsically bound to them.
Rather than debilitating their value, the power of texts to move the reading bodies is an end
in itself. I argue that in this framework, the divisions of erotica and pornography are
ultimately blurred, and to a degree even irrelevant when defining a good story: readers may
be moved by the sexual tension gradually building up between the protagonists; by the
detailed depiction of sexual acts between characters only sketchily drawn; by gestures of
tenderness and affection; or by elaborate scenes of theatrical BDSM performance. In all
these cases, the affective dynamics involve experiences of arousal, fleshy pulsations, and
movements of desire as some of the intensity of the text attaches itself to the reading body.
As a community platform, Literotica renders such movements of desire articulate, hence
broadening the experience of reading into social negotiations over the meaning and value of
texts. These kinds of platforms open novel spaces for addressing the appeal and experiences
of the erotic and the pornographic: ones based on affective movement rather than
hierarchical judgment.

References
Attwood, Feona (2007) No Money Shot? Commerce, Pornography and New Sex Taste
Cultures, Sexualities 10(4): 441-456.
Bernstein, Elizabeth (2007) Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex.
Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Blue, Violet (2007) Eon McKais Altporn Liberation Army, SFGate, http://sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2007/02/08/violetblue.DTL, Accessed 10 May 2007.
Cot, Mark & Pybus, Jennifer (2007) Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0, Ephemera 7(1): 88106.
Gill, Rosalind & Pratt, Andy (2008) In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness
and Cultural Work, Theory, Culture & Society 25(7-8): 1-30.
Graham, Phil (2000) Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism, New
Media and Society 2(2): 131156.
Hardy, Simon (2008) The Pornography of Reality, Sexualities 11(1-2): 60-64.
Jacobs, Katrien (2007) Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics. Rowman & Littlefield.
Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
New York University Press.
Lazzarato, Maurizio (2001) Toward an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour, Makeworlds 1,
http://makeworlds.org/node/141. Accessed 27 March 2009.
Leadbeater, Charles & Miller, Paul (2004) The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing
Our Economy and Society. London: Demos.
Lehman, Peter (2007) You and Voyeurweb: Illustrating the Shifting Representation of the
Penis on the Internet with User-Generated Content, Cinema Journal 46(4): 108-116.
Magnet, Shoshana (2007) Feminist Sexualities, Race and the Internet: an Investigation of
Suicidegirls.com, New Media and Society 9(4): 577-602.
McNair, Brian (1996) Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture. London: Hodder
Arnold.
OToole, Laurence (1999) Pornotopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire. London: Serpents Tail.
Paasonen, Susanna et al. (2007) Pornification and the Education of Desire, in Susanna
Paasonen et al. (eds.) Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture. Oxford: Berg 2007: 1-20.
Ross, Andrew (2008) The New Geography of Work: Power to the Precarious?, Theory,
Culture & Society 25(7-8): 31-49.

Feona Attwood is a principal lecturer in Communication at Sheffield Hallam University,

UK. Her research focuses on controversial images, online sexualities and mediated intimacy.
Recent publications include articles in Sexualities, International Journal of Cultural Studies and
Journal of Gender Studies and book chapters on pornography, sexual agency and research
methods. She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009)
and porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography (2010).
Simon Lindgren is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ume University,
Sweden. His research interests include the sociology of culture, media studies, discourse
analysis, popular culture, semiotics, Web studies, and critical theory. His publications include
two textbooks within these fields, Populrkultur: Teorier, metoder och analyser (2005), and
Sociologi 2.0: Samhllsteori och samtidskultur (2007), as well as a number of articles in
international journals. He is currently leading two research projects about media discourses
on crime victims and online piracy.
Sharif Mowlabocus is a lecturer in Media and Digital Media and a member of the
research centre for Material Digital Culture at the University of Sussex, UK. His research
explores sexual representation and sexual subcultures, primarily within digital environments.
He has written on a variety of subjects including amateur pornography, dating/sex websites,
barebacking and cyber-cruising. His book Gaydar Culture is due to be published in 2010.
Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies,
University of Helsinki, Finland, where she is currently preparing a book on online
pornography, affect, and feminist methodology. She is the author of Figures of Fantasy:
Internet, Women and Cyberdiscourse (2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the
Internet: Agency & Identity (2002), Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (2007), and
the forthcoming Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. Susannas
research on pornography has appeared in Feminist Theory, European Journal of Cultural Studies
and the Velvet Light Trap.