I knew that for the final VRM project I wanted to work with the idea of user-generated porn as a space for digital storytelling, but I found myself stuck in trying to think through a form for that content to take. On the one hand, I’m interested in how sties like Tumblr and Twitter have become spaces for pornographic media sharing and archive curation. But, I wasnt interested in making anyone engage with media that makes them too uncomfortable and the use of those mediums would’ve been constructed heavily around visuals. So I instead found what I hope is a happy medium: my final “paper,” which I’ll instead call a project despite being text-heavy, is presented as an Xtube profile page.
You can find it here.
Visiting a porn site is obviously NSFW, but the profile page I’ve created includes only a few, non-graphic video thumbnails toward the botto. Otherwise it’s all text, both my own writing and a cataloguing of the self-descriptive terms/activities/desires that users have the option to choose from. I decided that, even if I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to make y’all engage with porn directly, I could still make you engage with the platform itself and see what the space looks like as a social networking tool.
The profile page I’ve created houses my writings in the available categories of self-description. My introduction come in the “general info” section. A discussion of the history of user engagement and a now-defunct profile comes in the “About my Partner” section. And my analysis of two recent user examples is available for reading in the “sexual interests” section. I highly recommend you visit the profile pages for the users, even if you’re uninterested in viewing the pornographic videos. Also, QualityCouple’s video is not pornographic and instead is a clean, informative video about their choice to leave the site.
I wanted this project to be informal and informative. I want visitors to the page to get a feel for what the potentials, positive and negative, are for using Xtube as a space for storytelling. In order to engage with my full text, a visitor must navigate the structure of the profile page. The videos I discuss are available for viewing in the “favorite videos” section of the page, so visitors have the option of viewing them if they so desire. I thought this was the best compromise, allowing y’all from the course a look into the site’s structuring—without bombarding you with the pornographic imagery that is obviously everywhere on this site.
My analysis mostly takes on two users who both utilize the platform to create content involving third party participants. biversbear is a user who has captured potent moments of intimacy on cam within a context of dirty kink and role-play. jayscock is a user who exploits homeless men in his area and puts that exploitation online for all to see. Both use their videos to tell stories of their sexual encounters, but they have starkly different relationships to “vulnerability” and notions of the “authentic.” I briefly discuss Zizek, quote Lorde and Warner.. But the text offered here is not completely academic. More than anything it’s an introduction to the tactics used in this space when users craft images and narratives that involve both themselves and their sexual partners.
For anyone uncomfortable clicking through, here’s a preview of what it looks like:
fact & folly 
The idea to set this up as a profile on a user generated site was a really creative way to present what you wanted to say.
Lots of really interesting themes going on here. The concept of public/private, and private space more specifically on the internet with respect to Xtube was really interesting to see played out in your writing. The different appropriations of the public as the private by biversbear and jayscock that you talk about were really complicated– I thought the Zizek citation was perfect for that. I’d come across some other stuff by him talking about the phenomenon of public sex in user generated porn being an extension of the private virtual into public– which is now the private virtual. He gives an example of a couple having sex in a train station, with people walking by who completely ignore it as if it were virtual space. Really interesting stuff. Especially when you start to overlay it with politics and ethics.
The contrast between jayscock and QualityCouple seems especially interesting when it comes to virtual space and public space. QualityCouple’s reasonings for leaving Xtube pertaining to their content getting highjacked was completely at odds with a more conservative reading of private space being something that has the potential to carry strong capitalist overtones. When thinking about jayscock stuff– he is almost the polar opposite, where he extending his own private space (literally his dick) into public space in a very capitalistic manner in order to exploit homeless men. You do a very good job in reading three examples as indicative of very different uses of the private in relation to capitalism. It made me think a lot about Zizek, but I think a Walter Benjamin citation regarding the therapeutic and hostile uses of technology would have been great as well.
Really creative.
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Josh: I think the idea to press your paper about the site into the site is fun, compelling, exciting, and fresh. I am afraid its current form, however, while wonderful, could be even more tight. That is to say you move from personal answers within the template to chunks of your paper within the template, but my guess is, with one more pass you could make this ONE effort, and not two parallel efforts. I think this would also work in the analysis, so that the paper proper sits in sections where it most makes sense, although you might need to change the paper proper to make this work. The question of pressing one form into another raises the specter of titillation, sexuality, censorship, ethics, and erotics in academia and academic writing (as does your intro above) and I’d imagine taking this on more directly would also improve the project (again, I see this as bifurcated or perhaps haunting the project, as it exists currently). Finally, I’d want you to think about what it means to take on two such aggregious examples of sexuality and ethics and representation in the paper proper, as opposed to thinking more about either your own practices or those of more regular users, but perhaps that is just another project: one I’d look forward to fully!
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