Thoughts on Online Corporeality, and Erogenous Fragmentation

 

The body is of course objectified in webcam porn (as in any other form of that medium), but it is also fragmented, and can be mirrored in a bio-sexual feedback loop upon the viewer’s own corporeality. Following my experiences in online sex work throughout 2020, I have begun to reflect upon how I have been perceived - 'read' - by viewers over that time.
    Emphasis on the ass is frequent which, when shown, ideally in a rear view, bent over, tends to solicit very positive responses, usually quite generic, of how deep, rough or otherwise the viewer would like to penetrate it. (This is the one area I usually had to fake, having medical conditions in that specific location, and therefore any real anal activity is anathema to me). As discussed previously in the post on taxonomies and naming, a protean morphing/splicing of the anus and vagina tended to be revealed in perceptions of that specific site: á la ‘Deep Throat’ (wherein the clitoris is relocated to throat*), we find the vagina/pussy relocated to (and assimilated within) the anus – the more familiar, less troubling/complicated orifice that is, again, familiar to the male viewer, and can be discussed and fantasised upon without fear or confusion, allowing the ‘phallic female’ performer to present the fantasy of femininity without possessing the biological femaleness:

    The tits are occasionally commented upon; rarely as secondary feminine signifiers, but more in terms of the erogenous potential beneath the bra (the nipples), which viewers often request to see being played with, exposed, etc. When I inform viewers that the “tits ain't real”, most don't care whether pectorals or mammaries lie beneath. The plasticity of the body is enhanced as the user’s desires seek to be made manifest in a willing performer. I've had even a few viewers who actually encouraged me to play with the ‘breasts’ (weighted bags inside a pocket bra, giving a very realistic ‘bounce’) in the way cisfemale performers often do, though this was not common: the erogenous zone of the nipples being of much more interest, though I rarely showed these (for two reasons: I almost never shave around them, expecting them always to be covered by the bra – and also because removal of the bra, I feel, renders me more vulnerable, less feminine, and therefore closer to gendered masculinity rather than the ambiguous, but feminized, figure I prefer to project). It was not surprising to learn that not even the presence of the chest hair could diminish the enthusiasm of those who asked, suggesting that either certain aspects of masculinity can be easily ‘tuned out’ with sufficient accompanying stimulus, or else many viewers who claim ‘straight’ status are somewhat more bisexual than they may admit. If the former, then the fragmentation/reduction of the body into a number of component zones of interest becomes self-evident: while in online adult dating, shaved/smooth pubic areas are often flagged as essential (often for all genders), it seems that the presence of pubic hair in the merely visual medium is less problematic, having no tangible/physical concern for the viewer. Though my own is never shaved, I received very little negative feedback in this regard online, despite the clear preferences of many for the hairless equivalent.
    More generally the body is reduced to the one part which is shared by both performer (in my case) and male viewer -  namely the phallus, whether mine, or theirs (what they're doing with it, how I make theirs feel, inviting me to watch them showing off theirs, and what they would like to do with theirs in terms of my body, if they had the chance). Or requesting that I do this or that specific action with mine – whether simply showing it (up close to the camera was a common desire) and often displaying great interest in its size (or perhaps how it compared to their own). In this way the phallus becomes the shared axis by which performer and viewer relate directly to each other's experience and sensation.
    Yet I also found this somewhat alienating, given that I rarely started a video chat session in any state approaching sexual excitement – a fact which often led to disappointment when I explained I wasn’t able to trigger an instant response upon demand. Conversation and the building of a scene/relationship/interest, two-way sharing of mutual interests, are what tended to get me more readily aroused, when I could sense that there would be some form of ‘audience feedback’ for what I was doing, a discussion which, I hoped, would signal approval and encouragement to continue. Simply being on show in front of any number, of mute voyeurs is of no interest to me whatsoever. Consider the cliché of the bored stripper wandering around her pole, glaring sulkily out at the bunch of equally bored men in the club or bar around her: in a live, unscripted arena, audience participation and feedback is essential. Of course, dollar bills (in the live version) or tokens (in the online environment) is the greatest form of feedback, though with it usually comes the understanding of some reciprocation – to take the current performativity to the next level, lose some clothing, or otherwise show appreciation to the tipper. My hard limit was always “No tip, no strip”, an attitude which wasn’t always appreciated – but certainly helped to kick out the timewasters.

*As an aside, feminist writer and artist Laura Kipnis discusses corporeal fantasy in an entertaining review of 'Inside Deep Throat' here. Her discussion of straight porn being a medium which "creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender...a world in which men and women were sexually alike" (L. Kipnis, 'Bound & Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America', Durham NC., Duke UP, 1999, p. 200) is a cornerstone of my own investigations and experience to date, and will be revisited in future.

Naming Names: Taxonomies of Ownership, or, Why You Need to Call Me That

During my six months of online adult webcam work with Xhamster.com in 2020, I learned many things about myself, but also some about other people. First and foremost was the variable lens through which I was viewed by visitors, clients and fans – a lens which adjusted according not only to the viewer’s perception of me in general, but sometimes also seemingly according to their mood, or intensity of feeling. This may not be in itself surprising – anyone who has ever been in any kind of relationship knows that partners call each other by various titles, names and appellations depending upon circumstances. My experience, however – through presenting specifically as a “trans¹” Xhamster performer – allowed me to directly experience the full range of perceptions to my own self, and the names by which I was addressed directly, which in turn revealed much about their own mindsets, sexuality and attitudes. Names and titles I have been given, according to my screenshots and notes, include:

“sexy babe”, “slutty little bitch”, “beauty”, “bitchboi”, “sissy”, “sissy faggot”, “sissy boi”, “my queen”, “man”, “hot bitch”, “mistress”, “adorable princess”, “naughty bedroom girl”, “beautiful princess”, “girlfriend”, “goddess”, “my slut”, “my whore”, “cougar” and “my² woman”. 

The broad range of terms is revealing enough, from excessively honorific to downright degrading, if not offensive, outside of their borderline acceptability in such a context. To name is to define – it is also, in the field of relationships, to define status, whether ownership, mastery, subservience or appreciation, but it also reveals the viewer/client’s reading of the performer as subject, as well as object: despite my 100% male anatomy, and the public knowledge that my appearance of breasts was entirely false, many still insisted on referring to me by purely female/feminine terms, even traditional terms of endearment, including sometimes going as far as to define me as their “girlfriend” and express desires to show me off in public, take me out socially and merely enjoy my presence³. 

The ratio of fantasy:reality in such statements is neither here nor there – what matters is the recurring tendency to interpret the subject in their own terms (those who did not read me approvingly, as not their ‘type’ or whatever, presumably wouldn’t hang around long enough to do so), and to reinforce that interpretation through language itself – through the naming process, which also cuts both ways (I had men desire me to call them “Daddy”, an affectation I’m uncomfortable with, irrespective of the fact that for that fantasy to risk being true, they would need to be pushing 70 years old. My very first paying client, from Israel, wanted to call me “Mommy”. Others, “Auntie”. One black American client insisted I refer to him by the ‘n’ word, which I was totally unwilling to do at first, both for personal reasons as well as those relating to the website’s terms of service, but eventually conceded - under protest -  with “Whatever works for you, man. You are paying after all...”).

In the Biblical ‘Genesis’, God’s naming of Adam and Eve denotes an act affiliated to creation. In our lives, we name children, animals, and even inanimate objects to enforce our personality, our hopes or desires, upon those recipients of names. What I took from the vast range of names I was called through this experience was that the perception of a person like me, despite being grounded in a specific aesthetic and a certain mindset, is capable of being ‘read’ and defined in myriad ways; my peculiarities, disposition and attitude often already formed and defined in the minds of Others – assumptions which are usually dashed, when I reveal no interest in buying into their roleplaying games, master/slave fancies or expectations of what kind of treatment, acts or scenes even interest me.

While I could handle the degrading feminine terms (being – perhaps disappointingly – almost expectant of such), I had more problems with terms like “boi”, “sissy” and “faggot”, for their homophobic overtones, even if the users were not intending to be offensive. It also disarmed me, I felt, in the sense that it stripped my facade down to mere biological reality – any pretence of “femininity” or occupation in the grey area between the gender poles removed and my status diminished to being just a guy with make-up on, being hustled by other guys out on a virtual cruising session or looking for a ‘quick fix’. I appreciate there’s a good deal of theoretical analysis that could be drawn out of the linguistic elements of this, but I would need to delve deeper into Derrida et al. This is perhaps a line of future enquiry.

1 Xhamster’s ‘trans’ category is a catch-all for anything not traditionally cis male or cis female. A hairy man in some lingerie would be as admissible in this category as a fully transitioned person. I always presented as fully ‘femme’ as possible, though with varying degrees of femininity – anywhere from butch biker bitch to film noir femme fatale, usually depending on mood.

 2 The possessive was a regular occurrence, not just in the more degrading terms. The need to own, to master, to have sole jurisdiction, seems to be writ large upon male thinking generally – even in the public chatroom, where others would routinely enter and converse with me, one could observe the power dynamics at work between other visitors.

3 Hard to tell if this was some form of psychological deflection, to frame me purely in feminine – hence, heterosexual – terms in order to allay lingering fears of latent queerness on the part of these users, who often identified themselves assuredly as “married”, “straight”, “just curious about trans”, etc. Other interesting variable taxonomies referred to my sexual areas, which could be defined as either wholly male, wholly female, or various hybridized portmanteau terms. In the course of this I learned a whole new anatomical lexicon: ‘pussyass’, ‘bitchcock’, ‘boipussy’, ‘manpussy’, ‘shecock’, suggesting that trans and ambiguous persons are indeed viewed as possessing ‘other’ (Othered?) forms of genitalia – again, the elaborate linguistic chicanery allowing displacement of the underlying reality that they are being turned on by what still is essentially, and biologically, a man, with the identical anatomy to themselves.

Where have all the opinions gone..?

 As discussed recently with my first supervisor, I've already encountered one of the potential stumbling blocks in this line of research: we cannot force people to react, or interact, with a work, or with anybody else. Hoping to rekindle the kind of debates and discussions on gendered aesthetics I used to have on Deviantart.com when I was a member there 2007-2017, I rejoined a month ago and posted the three images comprising the '3 Questioning Cartoons' series. Despite several hundred hits apiece, zero comments and a few likes each (which I would more than happily trade for actual feedback) are all that have been received to date.

I later posted a photographic pinup work from the first semester of my MFAAH and discovered that even the trolls now no longer have the courage of their own convictions:

Whilst getting into fiery debates about self-image, gender identity and trans rights isn't my best idea of a good time, part of the point of this research is to understand why people insist upon thinking a specific way, and the fact they continue to do so is why this research exists at all. It occurs to me that 'comment culture' and feedback have become deprecated in recent years thanks to other social media and forms of interaction, where all that matters is a single 'like' or 'dislike' click, and number of 'hits'. That, and the tendency for many to explode with fury at the slightest provocation, the mindset which sees any form of response (that is not 100% cuddly-positive) as beyond offensive and a flagrant breach of their human rights, and it's no wonder that some just choose to not enter that arena in the first place. But being in the arena, one expects to be met with furious tigers and big guys swinging swords, not tumbleweeds and distant, unanswered cat-calls.

I must be one of the few artists or internet users around who longs for the days when people just posted whatever the hell they felt like saying...all in the interests of research, of course.

The Beginning: The Proposal

Starting at the beginning: the revised, abbreviated, and fairly rough proposal which was accepted by my supervisory team in autumn 2021, and which frames all the work, research, thinking and tangents which follow.
Title: Towards an Ontology of Gendered Aesthetics: Surveying Topologies of Self and Other in Performance, Society and Media

Description: A practice-led exploration, analysis and critique of the non-binary body in representation, in private reality and being, and in the public consciousness

Research Questions:
Why do some symbols persist universally in human collective consciousness (e.g. the hermaphrodite being, myths of gender-swapping beings/heroes, shamanistic bi-gendered ambiguity) and are yet ridiculed, challenged and suppressed in society and culture?
What constitutes an “acceptable” depiction of a non-standard body – is there such a thing? In what contexts?
Why can ‘niche’ areas like stage performance in an arts context and pornography seem less exclusionary of the Other in gender identity than the general public sphere?

Influenced by trans writer Juliet Jacques’ call for an écriture trans-féminine (after Cixous, see http://julietjacques.com), I hope to explore areas of experience and inner vs outer perception: for example in sexual contexts (e.g online interactions), and in general perceptions – a return to my ‘phiz/phys’ (physiognomy/physicality correspondence/duality) and how the Sartrian ‘look’ of the Other builds (or destroys) the inner sense of selfhood, creating a very real ‘hell’ that is ‘other people’ for those of non-cis gender. My own recent experience in online sex work (documented privately at some length last autumn) may shed some light on the darker (i.e., less illuminated, often ignored/stigmatised) side of non-cis/het being and lived experiences, responses, and interactions. This field of investigation helps to respond to 2 of my initial research questions:

1. What constitutes an “acceptable” depiction of a non-standard body – is there such a thing? In what contexts?
2. Why can ‘niche’ areas like stage performance in an arts context and pornography seem less exclusionary of the Other in gender identity than the general public sphere?

Trans discussions of sexual experiences may be accused of paraphiliac undertones (e.g. autogynephilia¹, fetishized cross-dressing, auto-erotic narcissism) but this must not bar the genuine lived experiences of others from being regarded on the same level as cis/het or gay/lesbian expressions of queer sex, attraction, and problems (attitudes, prejudices) encountered therein. A key text here: Julia Serano, Whipping Girl.

As recent MFAAH work has covered much mythologically-inspired practice, I’ll use the myth/collective unconscious aspect as a starting point, through references to hermaphroditism/bisexuality (cf. Juliet Mitchell, Feminism & Psychoanaysis).
Reiterating the flattening of high/low socio-cultural dichotomies (cf. Takeshi Murakami’s ‘Superflat’ theory) and interrogating those same existing structures (cf. Foucault, Stallybrass & White writing after Bakhtin on the grotesque body and carnivalesque – also Linda Neade, The Female Nude) - exploring the rhizomatic forms of such structures and where these structures break down (or don’t), and where fetishized constructions and judgement values are applied in a specific non-cis context (whilst acknowledging limited work already exploring, for example, non-fetishized attraction in males to transwomen – see Evangelista, 2020). As I already have a documentary body of work from these experiences, I’ve (tentatively) begun a series of photographic pieces echoing both the artist-as-sculpture concepts of Bruce McLean (‘Nice Style’ pose band, ‘Pose Works for Plinth’) and the fetishistic sculptures of Allen Jones (‘Women as Furniture’) in which I respond directly to the gaze of viewers, conversations, demands and comments received during my 5 months of online wor in 2020². Hence, the performativity of trans selfhood and how performance constructs the self through the reactions gained from others in a certain symbiosis (expectation→ reaction → fulfilment). Another key text: Laura Mulvey, Visual & Other Pleasures.

Returning to the phiz/phys concept of perceived gender aesthetics, what constitutes gendered (usually arbitrary/essentialist) human features and body parts? Hence, drawings/renderings of ‘difficult’ (ambiguous) comic-book style portraits and subjects as a response to the 2018 Comicsgate debacle, and negativity directed against my own works in this field over the years: thus, a challenge to fixed positions of ‘gendered faces and bodies’, and exploration of the narrow field of cis/het male expectation with regard to the aesthetics of female characters and representation (as well as trans/NB characters³). This may then move into public anonymized surveying.

A starting point for possible research outcome: Penthesilea (film), Mulvey & Woollen, 1974.

1 Admittedly a controversial term, which warrants further analysis as my work hopes to cover not only the trans/NB person as perceived by the Other, but also how such persons perceive themselves, and behave/display themselves as a result of this inner perception (as well seeing Self as Other).
2 From an ethical and data collecting point of view, such statements and attitudes may have limited value – one issue raised against the Stanford ‘gay face’ study was that it utilised image data pulled from adult dating sites. The best use of these messages might be the informing of art practice rather than as ‘hard’ data or research, given the circumstances in which most of them were created – although they do present a spectrum of attitude and perception towards the author in a specific anonymised, social context, from a broad cross-section of male viewers – wherein, the intersection of race, nationality/culture, language, and even income became apparent.
3 Traditionally, female readers are far happier with androgynous figures than males – hence the great popularity of Japanese anime and manga among queer and female fans and creators.