Tag Team: Keywords Revisited/Problematic Semantics

 Following on from my previous observations of online tags/keywords being used to classify non-pornographic works into a pornographic context, this post will be a brief sequel, incorporating the data analysis produced by Mazières et al* of intended pornographic content in its correct context. The paper is highly informative and begs further, deeper insight, as the writers themselves conclude, and despite being old (in Internet terms, published in 2014), I found some value in its analysis of tagging systems and terminology utilised for content involving marginalised and 'non-standard' bodies and types, as well as the fact that one of the two sites under query - Xhamster - employed me last year as a webcam performer.

Deep Tags presents visual and statistical analysis of the popularity, hierarchy, and intersection of keywords used to describe graphic video content. The importance of tagging systems is summed up early: "If we were to postulate that ‘words inform sexuality’ (Sigel 2000), our research explores the possibility that ‘porn tags inform pornography’." (p. 81). How tags are situated with regard to their connections to other tags (including common associations) is highlighted by their illustration of this point, using the tag for subjects who are differently-bodied from mainstream performers:

    "As an illustration, ‘midgets’ – a low-frequency category in XHamster – is present 10 times more than expected in all videos having the tag ‘funny’. This indicates a strong relation between these two categories and tells us that it is highly likely that midgets appear mainly to fulfil a ‘funny’ aspect of the scene. The fact that ‘midgets’ appears more with ‘blowjobs’ than with ‘funny’ is statistically expected and therefore ignored, while the relation between ‘midgets’ and ‘funny’ is unexpected and consequently highlighted in the network." (p. 87)

Being writers of a paper devoted to data-crunching, Mazières et al do not aim to draw conclusions on the motives or attitudes involved in persons producing, viewing, marketing or tagging this kind of content. It does, however, cast shadows over the utopian idea (of mine) that any inclusion has to be better than exclusion, through the basics of semantic association: going by these datasets, 'midgets' are expected to be 'funny' when users seek (or identify) video works as such. Let's put it another way, and say that on a hypothetical XXX-rated site, there was a common tendency for the tag 'fat' to be paired with 'gross' - and there are indeed adult-rated websites catering precisely to 'tasteless' or 'shock' content** - what does that tell an observer about the uploaders, the viewers, the taggers? Obese performers feature far more commonly in pornographic videos than midget performers (I sense the tag 'BBW' hadn't risen to its current prominence at the time of writing Deep Tags), and 'plus-size' lingerie and such like are now commonly visible on shopping sites, including eBay (and with corresponding plus-sized models). All this positive body-imaging, however, can be undone in the minds of viewers if there remains a tendency to view such bodies in a negative, rather than inclusive or empowering, light - a tendency given online currency by such negative behaviour and associations, reinforcing cultural stigmas and criticisms (the term BBW, I suspect, is designed to reflect a body-positive way of identifying the larger (female) performer, precisely because 'fat' is degrading, and 'obese' rather too technical. In other news, the category "ugly" is one I have noted appearing with some regularity on straight/heterosexual image hosting sites in recent years. "Porn tags informing pornography", indeed...). In the example of midgets quoted above, we may, in fact, discern a retrograde step back to the bad old days of freak shows and carnival (in the broadest, Bakhtinian sense), where 'little people' bring laughter simply by their very appearance. (And no, being white, tall and skinny doesn't mean I'm writing this from an elevated position of untouchable superiority over other body types: see here for very recent negative reactions to my own nude form).

The above illustration from Deep Tags' visualization of the network of inter-related tags on Xhamster shows a further problem: as the writers note, the only connecting node between the non-hetero/normative bodies in the above diagram is the tag 'bisexual', which goes on then to encompass men, gays, black gays, ladyboys and shemale - pretty much everything that doesn't refer to cisgender women, or men doing things with cisgender women. After all, the category of 'gay' is capable of interacting with a great many of the tags depicted in the network: men can have threesomes, blowjobs, appear in cartoons, be amateur, Asian, masturbate, be young, old, do POV, public, spanking, BDSM, etc. What the diagram clearly illustrates is the marginalization of the non-normative body and encounter (we expect that the midget and BBW performers are nonetheless ensconced in straight scenes or performances). The writers themselves summarize:

    "Among many other possible assertions, it is worth noting the strong separation of the cluster containing the tags ‘gay’ and ‘transsexual’ from all other parts of the network. Indeed, it is connected to the rest of the network only through the        tag ‘bisexual’, which constitutes a privileged bridge for any other co-occurrence.    The position of the gay cluster strongly reinforces a division between heterosexuality and homosexuality by isolating the latter (Sedgwick 1990). Halperin (1995, 44) states that ‘Heterosexuality defines itself without problematizing itself, it elevates itself as a privileged and unmarked term’, so what is ‘not heterosexual’ must be defined. It therefore acquires more semantic influence upon the repertoire of desires and fantasies available on pornographic platforms. This isolation of ‘gays’ calls for a more general analysis of cases where some categories or groups of categories become to some degree peripheral to the network and constitute niches."

The 'more general analysis' called for is, I hope, pending, in the hope of differentiating 'mainstream' from 'niche', 'kink' or 'perversion', and understanding the deeper issues therein. A common line I have noted on trans* profiles on adult dating sites and other online media is something along the lines of "I'm not your kink/dirty secret", in a clear attempt to empower the user beyond the still-marginalized status of the FtM, cross-dressed or non-binary body, and seek interactions with (presumably male) users who are able to view them as whole persons, not a fetishized manifestation of kinks and keywords. The writing of Dr. Angela Jones, especially the essay Cumming to a screen near you: Transmasculine and Non-binary people in the camming industry, will be informing the next phase of my research into the non-standard body in pornographic performance, with her research already touching upon some of the points and issues raised above. To sum up with a quote from Foucault, "'Words and things' is the entirely serious title of a problem" (in Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter).

*Namely Deep Tags: toward a quantitative analysis of online pornography

**To the extent that my web protection application OpenDNS has 'tasteless' as a category of site that can be blocked. And on my network, it always has been.

Let’s Play Tag: The Impossibility of Porn as Performance Art in the Mind of Someone Lusting

(Additional: This article was written before I found the essay on pornographic tagging, namely 'Deep Tags' by Antoine Mazières, Mathieu Trachman, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Baptiste Coulmont & Christophe Prieur - which will go on to inform further thoughts in this area. Another retrospectively relevant article is 'Microporn in the Digital Media Age' by Joseph Brennan, which examines the consumption of out-of-context clips from longer works.)

The risk of having any work that explicitly displays the human form being re-appropriated by viewers for more salacious ends is, of course, ever-present, as Linda Neade reminds us, quoting Lucy Lippard:

“A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult.” (Lippard, ‘Pains & Pleasures’, From the Center: 125). Nead herself adds: “Women who used their bodies in performance art could easily be reappropriated for the purposes of male sexual arousal” (Nead, ‘The Female Nude’, Routledge, 1992, p.67). Nowhere is this made clearer than on the public porn site which employed me in 2020, www.Xhamster.com, where uploaded clips of nude performance art, mainstream cinema and television works, ballet, and even grand opera may be found buried under a plethora of tags which reduce all these works to their barest (pun intended) essentials – the idea that any naked (or partially so) female body is fair game.

Whilst seeking to counter viewer expectations of what this genre of work ought to depict, a browse through the tags applied to images and videos on any porn site can and will reveal that almost anything can or will be somebody's fetish – and will be enthusiastically shared with others of the same mind. The fascination with these fine details and the need to collect them is not reserved purely for material intended only to titillate. Spend five minutes browsing films intended for adults (as distinct from 'adult films') listed on movie review site www.imdb.com and study the tags which users apply to films for relevant, or interesting, content. To take one example¹, the 2010 remake of the 1970s exploitation feature 'I Spit on Your Grave' – a film which portrays a vicious gang-rape, followed by the victim's equally brutal revenge – users have provided, among many others (200+ in fact), the following helpful index of salient features:

“female nudity”, “sexual humiliation”, “arms tied overhead”, “sodomy”, “forced to strip”, “public sex”, “outdoor sex”, “woman stripped from waist down”, “video voyeurism”, “clothes torn off”, “panty sniffing”, “shotgun sodomy”, “public nudity”, “gun in anus”, “female star appears nude” and “nipples visible through clothing”²,

almost all of which (barring the obvious violent tags) are themselves categories and tags on any standard porn website, rather than aspects of a mainstream Hollywood feature that went on to spawn two further sequels to date. To take a very different example on imdb, 'Schindler's List', we find the tags: 'female nudity', both 'male' and 'female' in 'full frontal nudity' and 'pubic hair', and 'bare breasts' – somewhat more detail, I feel, than is necessary in warning viewers to the presence of potentially adult material (where 'strong', moderate' or 'mild' classifications of sex, violence, nudity etc. generally suffices on DVD and Blu-Ray sleeves), as if the grim true-life theme was not more troubling. In a final example, the 1993 Robert Altman comedy/drama 'Short Cuts', the top of the list of 'most relevant' tags are almost exclusively pertaining to female nudity and sex:

 

Out of the top 38 “most relevant” tags for that film (accessed 9/10/21) – see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108122/keywords?ref_=tt_stry_kw – 30 of them refer specifically to fetishistic or sexual elements, many of which tags, again, are also very commonplace on pornographic media. My point is that when works of non-pornographic intent such as this (though possibly still informed by the dominant patriarchal gaze defined by Mulvey) can be regarded by some users in a pornographic context and appropriated as such, the rhizomatic nature and structure of the male gaze and its pornographizing function is made evident: 3 out of 4 visitors to the imdb.com page for 'Short Cuts' deemed the tag 'no panties' to be relevant to a film of 150 minutes running time, chronicling the daily lives of multiple characters and stories. An alien visitor to our world, attempting to analyse such data, would be inclined to draw the conclusions that 'real' pornography was non-existent in human society and could only be 'sneaked in' to otherwise serious, mainstream works. Or put another way: those few seconds of clips which can be viewed in that manner, have already cropped up on pornographic video websites, alongside mainstream action as well as installation works by Vanessa Beecroft tagged as ‘public female nudity’, and have probably motivated the viewers of those clips to pass on their enthusiasm via the imdb.com tagging system.

The conclusions we can draw from these examples is that as anything can be fetishized, so too can any material, even with innocent intention, be sexualized, and sought out as such – what I refer to now as the ‘pornographizing gaze’. While this may perhaps not be news, the extent of its pervasiveness may be surprising. Where this is relevant to my current line of questioning, is in the ability for a user’s gaze to ‘pornographize’ or acquire the form of another, for purely sexual purposes, whether or not that is the intention of the individual, or media, under scrutiny. I have never actually (yet) thrown a drink in anyone’s face for up-front asking me in a nightclub what kind of genitalia I have under my dress (finding fear of a rapidly escalating situation to be the greater part of valour), but in the world of porn all things are permitted (within legal and website limitations) and all bodies potentially desirable. Desirability cannot be measured or quantified: let’s recall the pre-internet pornographic niches of ‘older’, ‘larger’, ‘pregnant’, ‘Asian’, ‘black’, ‘cross-dressed’, ‘obese’, ‘midget’ etc. subjects which go back decades and were catered to in material which was often classified as ‘obscene’ in the US and the UK due – I can only suspect – entirely to its associations with the grotesque and therefore its place outwith the accepted hetero-normative body ideal. That online pornography is now helping to flatten those distinctions cannot be denied, even if still within something of a fetishistic framing – at least the performers and models can no longer feel so marginalised as having their bodies stamped as ‘obscenities’ by government hands, and those who sell the publications which paid them, prosecuted. The problems exist, as I have found out myself, when those persons who own those ‘alternative’ bodies expect to be treated as persons, outside of any fetishistic, pornographizing system of sexual classification – and by virtue of simply being what they are, are conflated with objects of desire and titillation in other contexts. If a movie depicting a gang-rape and revenge on the perpetrators can entice viewers seeking hints of bondage, public humiliation and aggressive sexual activity, then it is no wonder why people in public places find themselves continually cornered and expected to play the roles which have been, in the minds of the gazers, thrust upon them. I understand this involves a paradigm shift in male-centric thinking, and along with my previous post’s suggestion that people quit judging others by arbitrary physical or facial features, I am asking far too much of the majority of the world’s population who think and act in these ways. But we must find somewhere to start.

1^{Chosen precisely because of its troubling subject matter, sexual violence (though nowhere as intense or graphic as the 1979 original 'video nasty') and contemporary attitude to such issues.}

2^{Not all the violent content tagged thus is, of course, directed against the central female character, as her revenge on the male rapists is eye-watering, and other tags do refer to this – but the implication remains that users, irrespective of their motives, gender, sexuality or expectations, seemingly seek out, or wish to share, such very specific details of filmic content,} and that a large number of these focus on prurient minutiae.