Photo by Flickr user flipzagging. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors passes along a request for submissions

Invitation to contribute to EVERYDAY PORNOGRAPHIES
Edited by Karen Boyle (University of Glasgow, Scotland)

In recent years, the boundary between the pornographic and the mainstream has been a recurrent concern in academic and popular writing about pornography.  At the same time, studies of unambiguously pornographic texts have veered away from commercial pornography for heterosexual men to consider alternative representations and there has been a methodological shift towards textual analyses of pornographic texts (and the mainstream texts that mimic them) in academic writing. As a result, some of the questions that characterised earlier academic engagements with pornography – questions about the politics of pornographies, their regulation, and production and consumption practices – have become marginalised.  Yet, there is something of a disconnect here between much of the academy and public debate, where, in a number of countries, there has been a shift towards thinking about the demand for commercial sexual exploitation more generally. This is also the context in which resistance to the mainstreaming of pornography has continued to flourish, including within a newly re-energised feminist anti-pornography movement. The time is therefore ripe for an academic collection that positions the textual study of pornography within a broader political frame in order to reconnect text, context and consumer. This is the central aim of this collection.

This is a collection about contemporary pornography (material made, bought and sold as such). It is a collection that emphasises the “typical” and, as such, is particularly interested in pornographies aimed at a heterosexual male audience.

Read the quote in context here.

Am I correct in understanding that the collection is intended to represent the trailing edge of commercial (a.k.a. “industrial”) pornography in order to distinguish it from emergent ones? If so this will be an extremely valuable reference. I’d be cautious, however, about excluding newer forms for two main reasons.

First, because the rise of not-for-producer-profit porn sites such as YouPorn.com raise questions within the context of standard industrially-produced-for-male-consumption porn. For instance unlike commercial, and therefore at least nominally regulated producers there appear to be at least some instances where uploaded clips depict genuine as opposed to contrived non-consensual sex. The majority of uploaded clips, however, appear to be largely imitations of industrial tropes. In either event, however, since the only money that accrues seems to be based on standard site advertising by the hosts, with no revenue going to the producers who upload the stuff (e.g. producer-identifying footage often appears to be edited out), there is no profit motive for the producers themselves.

On the other hand they may benefit from standards “web 2.0” style “social capital” recognition instead. The point being that since free upload/download sites are allegedly the internet’s largest on-line porn destinations (even though they’re very new) it would be rash to attempt to characterize, say, the cash economics of porn as a whole without taking that sort of thing into account.

One also might want to examine assumptions about the market for pornography given the surprising-even-to-me trend of perfectly ordinary people of all ages making and uploading their own pornography to free-upload sites. Characterizations of both producer’s and consumer’s preferences might need rebalancing in the face of that — compared to amateurs appearing online, who are industrial pornographers selecting for?

And I’m not speaking of this as an industry apologist. For instance without examining these questions one might not be able to discern whether these more mature, more normal formed men and women appearing in increasing (and increasingly anonymous) numbers are also trafficked. Furthermore, if they’re not trafficked then what is the impact on trafficking and coercing?

Is there a point at which the risk of trafficking/coersion exceeds the benefit, as the cost of volunteer content drops towards zero, or does it create even more draconian forms of coercion? And finally, if, as many people assert, participants in pornography who aren’t outright trafficked/coerced are still often perceived as driven by desperation. If so then what are the economic consequences to them if other, perhaps more middle class thrill-seekers and/or hobby-exhibitionists undercut economically-coerced/substance porn participants?

And finally, how popular are such “alternative” porn content compared to the still-prevalent industrial standards and what are the trends? I mention this because a) my strong impression of “mainstream” or industrial pornographers is that they’re astonishingly conservative in the sense of not being really amenable to change from their basic mafia-era/scarcity economic models and b) their customers don’t appear to be very loyal to that brand.

All this leaves aside various assertions that a lot of porn is becoming, if anything, more misogynistic (true); that while much of it is still made for men women appear to be purchasing and, especially, anonymously downloading, more of it (seems to be true); that given a chance porn customers or (since they seem increasingly less willing to pay for what they perceive as freely contributed content) mere porn consumers might prefer content that’s not consistent with typical mass-produced industrial content (unknown to me); that past appearance in sexualized or sexual content no longer seems as stigmatized and so more people are willing to appear voluntarily (possible but probably overstated); and finally, the ardent insistence that while porn-for-men continues to have very little agency for women in the content, agency among performers is increasing at rates similar to women’s participation in non-sexual athletic competition and performance from which they were once entirely excluded.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning from the proposed collection about the elements of the industry examined as, if nothing else, a benchmark and, one hopes, a high-water mark preceding its outright demise or total transformation.