In a quest to find authenticity and inspiration in the bottomless offerings of online porn I encountered an increasingly interesting and engaging aesthetic in the “amateur” “self-shot” webcam videos proliferating. I put quotes around “amateur” and “self-shot” because often in spite of advertised promises those turn out not entirely to be the case.
You'd think that hardcore porn would be "authentic" enough with its endless "proof" of real-time real-people events. Yet the subtext around those uncheatable images are an art and an artifice to themselves.
I’ve talked a bit academically in my Aesthetics of Mediation posts (visible by searching the "mediation" tag along the right there*), trying to document and analyze the nuances of the form, for the most part I’m guessing unintentional but adopted as formulaic tropes by users/producers. Not through study or intent but through mimicry and positive feedback loop for what simply works.
I love watching the folks pointing the camera at themselves and performing for me – an anonymous future viewer. Me and unknown thousands more.
I focus more on the solo acts. Women looking into the camera or their webcam window on their computers. Looking at themselves and then pulling aside their sweatpants and panties and spreading their lips to show us how they play with themselves. Less interesting to me this month are the webcam or tripod-shot events in which someone fucks their girlfriend and then uploads it on xhamster. Or better, follows their wife around in a hotel room with a Panasonic while their wife gets fucked by a strange black man they met through Craigslist. Nor am I considering here the “hidden cam” genre, which is also voyeuristic but not a subset so much as an offshoot of disembodied male gaze theory. (Another academic treatise for another time.)
These have their own power, certainly, and in the right mood they get me there. Let us consider the webcam video in which the subject looks at you as they expose their …personal habits.
Unlike produced porn, which have some sort of set-up (whether or not it’s as simple as a gonzo “these women have big asses” shot in a living room in the valley, or a slightly more developed “pizza guy needs to get paid”), the true amateur webcam video looks out to the viewer. Rather than setting up a narrative in which we can “believe” a fantasy playing out, it simply depicts someone being sexual.
She (or he) jerks off. Slowly or with an object. They display themselves, legs open, in their kitchen or bedroom, making eye contact without presupposition that it is anything else than what it is. And the address – the eye contact – the open camera – the filming and posting – seals a new agreement between the subject and the viewer.
She is doing it for you.
Rather than being a closed narrative loop, with a beginning, middle and end, (in spite of what peaks, valleys and climaxes may be experienced) the webcam event invites and insists on the viewer, you, me, to participate. At least conceptually. The display, not artfully posed in narrative repose but intrusive and explicit, opens the diagetic space to a void of meaning in which the only requirement is that a viewer be watching. It is not a “hidden cam” in which the subject does not do what they do – masturbate – without knowledge of their act as performance. This is specifically one, but in true unmediated documentarian style, without director or crew. It breaks with aesthetic narrative tropes that construct closed and limited worldviews we only observe without feeling participatory, except perhaps through classical empathy. (“She was lonely so she blew the neighbor. Wish I was her neighbor.” “Nice ass.”)
Instead, these clips are “amateurs” who are not getting paid to display themselves (we don’t think. The more we believe this the more we are turned on by a sensed (I discuss the clues of authenticity in other posts) authenticity.) nor are they “creating“ content for paysites.
These are people masturbating. Masturbating in public. Documenting it for strangers they don’t know for a future period of time they have no control over.
In this context, these clips, stripped of narrative closure as they are, elicit our response primarily as privileged viewer. They turn the narrative mask of meaning back on us, exposing and playing out forbidden events while refusing to provide meaning through context, and therefore keeping open our unresolved narrative expectations so that our viewership becomes the reason for the event. She’s doing it for me to watch.
This forces us to engage, intellectually and emotionally, in a mode that exploits our cognitive discomfort and interrogates our participation in watching.
And we engage physically as well, and pull out our cocks, and masturbate right back.
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* Some of the videos I'm discovering that were previously uploaded are "not currently available. Please try again later". Google/Blogger changed their video upload plug-in in 2009 to a more Youtube-centric design and these may need to be reupped.
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