Abstract

For the past ten years, media researchers have focused on online erotica and cybersex, the possibilities of sexual self-expression, experimentation and play online (‘e-rotics’ and ‘cyborgasms’), while relatively little attention has been paid on the massive and highly profitable field of online pornography. Online porn, varying from live shows to webcams, videos, photo and text galleries, is increasingly part of everyday Internet use, finding its way to inboxes as html spam, and forming the most popular search words on the WWW. There is little doubt that pornography is both affective and effective, but there is less agreement over its meanings and implication. Porn relies on ‘gut reactions’ in terms of arousal as well as disgust, and these reactions are inseparable from the workings of gender, class and race. This presentation, basing on analysis of 366 html porn spam messages, argues for the need to consider porn both in terms representation and affect in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the meanings of, and reactions towards pornography.

• Susanna Paasonen is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Turku, and docent of media culture at University of Tampere. She has authored and edited several books on Internet research, popular culture and women’s studies, including Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency & Identity, 2002 (co-edited with Mia Consalvo), and the forthcoming Figures of Fantasy: Women, Internet and Cyber discourse (Peter Lang). Her current research focuses on issues of location in studies of the Internet.

Full text (PDF) p. 102-107