The conveyance by which we receive our pornographic images is as entwined with the experience as the actual content. Going to adult movie theatres in the '70s and '80s had a physical world that contextualized sitting in the dark watching a 40-foot projection of Seka's pussy with new meaning.
We were at the site of reception, and we had to go there to see that spectacle.
Nowadays there are petabytes of images of women opening up their legs to their cameras and streaming them online. They are alone, and they chat with us, allowing our good charm and anonymity to coax their panties down and their fingers in. The objective and unblinking eye of the webcam is complicit yet completely guileless in the capture and transmission of these forbidden and ubiquitous behaviors.
Anywhere. At play, relaxed, and wanting to connect. They are digital girls, fucking themselves in front of their computers, seemingly for us, but primarily and perhaps exclusively for their computers.
The visibility of the computer in the screen adds a narrative backstory to the spectacle. We see how it empowers the women to play. It becomes their partner. It is us by distant identification, yet it is not. It is that screen they're making love to. They don't even look at us or make eye contact.
In many ways the interaction with the computer/webcam has been placed as intentional mediation to create a fiction that motivates the expressive sexuality. A third-person interaction we are merely observing and not a participant in.
Ultimately the computer and the camera work keeps us comfortable that what we're seeing is real. The extra-textural traces of a moving camera, works spoken off-screen rather than to the screen, and editing devices remind us that the fantasy so carefully and deeply fabricated by the streaming images is only that - a created product.
This one-to-one interaction with a screen liberates us, for a moment, from that realization.
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