How popular porn sites turn users into employees.
It’s possible that the major porn streaming services provide a valuable public service by allowing users to access all they want to see without charging a fee. However, the business model for these free pornography platforms has been detrimental to the firms that produce pornography and has resulted in decreased wages and conditions for the employees at such companies.
Not only is it harmful to the people who are performing or working in the sex industry, but it is also harmful to the audience.
It is not porn in and of itself that causes many people to struggle with their connection to it; rather, it is the way that capitalism has organized both it and our wants that is to blame.
Pornographic websites transform visitors into paying customers.
Throughout the course of human history, engaging in the sexual behavior of watching porn meant engaging in a sexual activity that was completely outside of the rules of how a decent capitalist subject should behave.
If we were wanking, we weren’t working, and we certainly weren’t engaging in any type of sexual activity that might potentially result in a child (i.e. penis in vagina sex).
On the other hand, behavior that was formerly considered excessive, offensive, subversive, and radical is today considered productive labor. Maybe not to your job, but definitely to pornographic websites.
In her book titled “Bodies of Work: The Labour of Sex in the Digital Age,” the respected scholar Dr. Rebecca Saunders writes the following, which is an excerpt from her work:
“Digital pornography becomes the means by which capital continues to extract value from the sexual body, now not through strict judicial and religious discipline, but through the consummately pleasurable and voluntary activity of watching porn.”
Because porn is a component of the attention economy, just visiting a website that streams pornographic content allows us to generate value for the businesses that run the platform; in this context, “to gaze” is synonymous with “to labor.”
Dozens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of us do: pornographic websites are among the most frequently viewed websites on the internet.
If we continue to search, we will ultimately produce greater value for them. This implies that they take advantage of our limited attention span by surrounding us with an immersive and confusing maze of windows, clips, categories, tags, keywords, enticements, and advertisements.
The platforms that host it get the vast majority of this value, if not all of it. The individuals we could be looking at don’t get much of it at all. The majority of this is distributed among just two businesses in the pornographic industry: Mindgeek and WGCZ holdings.
“Porn is a component of the attention economy, which means that just by being on a website that streams pornographic content, we are producing value for the businesses who operate the platform.”
The platforms that broadcast pornography want us to continue working for them by clicking and looking, and they want us to continue coming back for more. Since the success of their business model is contingent on our ability to generate value for them, they could care less whether or not we are having a good time.
The only thing pornographic websites want from you is your attention and clicks.
The number of clicks that users make on porn streaming websites is what matters to these businesses, not the fact that users enjoy themselves or get insight into their sexualities.
This indicates that free pornographic websites are required to operate in a manner that leaves users unhappy as a necessary component of their business model.
They count on our clicking on a few different things and then leaving with the thought, “Was there anything else that might have been sexier?” as their primary strategy.
“Should I make a trip back for anything in particular?” Or the nagging feeling that we haven’t discovered “the thing” that we are truly looking for despite our best efforts.
Porn platforms (whether they do this knowingly or not) tap into this concept that we are missing and seeking for, what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would call the “objet a,” or the object cause of desire.
This is true regardless of whether the platforms do this intentionally or not. In their book titled Event Horizon, authors Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen, who are both academics, provide a clear and concise explanation of this concept.
“Throughout their life, the Subject [the person who watches porn] has the feeling that something is missing or that something is not quite right. Often unintentionally, they strive to fill this emptiness via certain dreams and activities…”
Of course, the websites that stream porn also want people to buy porn, which isn’t necessarily a problem because we should pay for the porn that we watch. However, this is something that users should be aware of. The problem is that all they care about is having customers for the porn they produce. Both Mindgeek and WGCZ Holdings, the two firms that operate the majority of the pornographic video-sharing websites on the internet, also own a significant portion of the pornographic industry. This carries the danger of establishing an anticompetitive market, which will result in the disappearance of small independent businesses. But even if you bypass the barrier, you’ll still get the same immersive, baffling, and apparently endless assortment of porn, which presents even more opportunities for object a. Opportunities for us to experience lack and a sense that “the real porn clip” is still out there, waiting to be discovered, and that it will be the “porn clip to beat all porn clips.”
This sensation of lack may not always be a negative thing, as scholar and author Alfie Bown revealed to me in a podcast that I recorded with him about his book Dream Lovers, the Gamification of Relationships, which I did along with him.
The act of wanting something is constructive and may open the door to the potential of connection as well as the transformation into something else. However, if wishes are organized into categories, labeled with headlines, and datafied, the platform may wind up territorializing those desires.
The sex viewer with a split screen
The wants that we are made aware of and the satisfaction of which we actively pursue are thus broken down into millions upon millions of data points.
After that, the proprietors of the tube sites put this information to use in the capacity of market research to determine the kind of material their studios should produce.
We provide the algorithms with data in the hope that they will provide us with a coded representation of what it is that we want.
The concept of a “individual” is one that was proposed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. If our wants exist exclusively on these platforms, we may have a feeling of ourselves as a “individuals.” In his book, Alfie does a wonderful job of summing this up:
“The concept of the “individual” refers to a person not just as a collection of data but also as a coherent identity that can only proceed along preset routes, similar to the way that computational devices may…
The concept of the “individual” refers to an experience of oneself in which one is urged to start again and reorganize oneself on a regular basis in a manner that is rupturing or broken.” This is a very speculative topic, but for anybody who had a sexually compulsive relationship, it most likely sounds quite familiar.
“Instead of looking, we are urged to glance, scan the limitless pages to see if there’s another object source of want,” the author writes. “This will allow us to see whether there is another object cause of desire.”
The platforms are not the least bit interested in our want to desire or in how our desires may be useful in any manner. Neither of these things even registers on their radar.
They want us to click and look at various things again and over again. We are urged to look rather than gaze, to quickly scan the limitless pages in order to determine whether or not there is another thing that sparks our interest.
There is always something else that we may be looking at in the background. Their role is to divert our attention, to have an effect on us, and to ensure that we continue to click.
On the other hand, we either have to go back to work or go to bed (in order to get up for work). While looking at porn, we could try to click more quickly, advance the video more quickly, or skip from one scene to the next so that we can eventually quit looking at porn. We want everything to be put back to its original state.
It’s possible that we’re just looking for a scene that satisfies our needs so that we can put the porn away without having to worry about reaching a satisfying climax or finding a good place to start.
What options do we have in this situation?
Aside from the possibility of having to pay for pornographic content that we see, we should perhaps also consider where and from whom we purchase pornographic content. It is possible that we might consider purchasing porn from indie studios or producers as an alternative to purchasing it from the large pornographic firms that are the owners of the tube sites.
There is a distinction to be made between commercial activity and capitalism, which is an economic system in which profits are saved and invested to amass wealth (where profits are divided between the workers and invested in more and better products).
Pornographers like A Four Chambered Heart do an excellent job of providing extremely clear and open information on their working conditions and procedures.
If we continue to visit the tube sites, we have to give some thought to reducing the amount of food and drink that we take in. It is possible that we may get disoriented among all of these bewildering window displays.
The question now is, what can we do to subtly bring to our attention the fact that we are present? What is it that we are able to see about our bodies at that precise moment? Is this really something that we desire at this very moment?
Do we have enough time to take it all in and savor it? If this were sexual activity with a partner, do you think it would be acceptable? To what degree are we being agreeable with ourselves?
Porn is categorized according to who is in the material and what sexual activities they are doing, however the things that we may find sexual may not fall into any of those categories. Perhaps it was the way that they gazed at each other at that moment. Or anything someone said?
Maybe it was the manner that they kissed each other? Perhaps the manner it was recorded, the pace, or the amount of light that was present?
Perform an experiment in which you view the exact same scenario over and over again. Could we take it easy for a moment and look at it from a different angle? What exactly do we see each time we blink our eyes?
What exactly are we hearing? Do any of the performers seem to have qualities that we recognize in ourselves? What forms of athleticism are included in the performances that are being given? Are we in the same room as them right now? What may we want to do if we were? How did we get there?
How are we all familiar with one another? What comes next is a mystery. What else? How do our memories of a scene change after we have seen it? Do you think we’ll remember it later in the day?
If we take the time to learn how pornographic platforms function—and how they function on us—we just may be able to have a more aware connection with whatever pornographic content we choose to consume.
Being able to slow down and pay careful attention to both ourselves and the talent and hard work of the actors in the scenes we watch may be of assistance to us in discovering new ways of desire that may not only be more moral but also more joyful.
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