First, it begins the obvious work of taking the accumulated knowledge from HCI and applying it to sexual content, something directly called for by the workshop organizers, and a task long overdue. So it considers the fact that when browsing porn the users dominant hand is likely engaged in other business, and finding alternative ways of browsing (they suggest foot pedals and an interface that would respond to gross movements rather than fine motor control). My favorite consideration is for a system that could “clean up after itself and, if the user wishes, remove any incriminating traces of pornographic activity from the computer”. The parallel metaphor of cleaning up after oneself here is delightful.
I also love the fact that the authors (there were three, but only one came to present) consider the users sexual response. While I would worry about a reliance on the current models of sexual response, which leave much to be desired, it is still interesting to contemplate, as the authors of this paper do, the ways in which hardware and software might begin to monitor users sexual response while browsing porn, and respond in relation to the changing sexual response.
The final paper in the pornography panel was from Yevgenly Medynskly. The paper “Lies in the Interface” considers the simple question of why users are willing to tolerate deception from porn sites when they won’t in most other kinds of on line interactions. The paper outlines the practice of “skimming” which is a deceptive practice employed by TGP sites that redirect users to other TGP sites rather than to the content the link promises to send you to. Eugene makes several important points in his paper, including:
- Suggesting that the acceptance of deceptive practices points to the possibility that “the expectations, values, and purposes of users when they are browsing for free pornography differs from those when they are using other Internet sites.”
- He proposes several possibilities for the acceptance of deception, including the possibility that users feel guilty for seeing free porn (as they might for downloading “free” music) and so they take the deception as a part of their fate, and the possibility that people assume they’ll encounter deception when looking for “seedy” material like pornography. He writes:
“Just as an individual looking for entertainment in ‘the wrong part of town’ may overlook some amount of unseemliness in their surroundings, TGP users with a lowered sense of moral expectation may overlook the TGPs’ deceptiveness.”
My feeling is that there may be another psychological interaction at play here. Most people have heard stories in the media, or from friends, of someone “stumbling across” offensive pornography on line. Whether it is bestiality, implied underage sex, or violent pornography, our culture is full of urban legends of the evils of sex on line, and the ease with which one can see something one might not want to see. Whether the stories are true or not, they are narratives most browsers of free pornography have access to. And these narratives inform our emotional state while we browse.
It is possible that people browsing free pornography do so in an environment where they expect (and may be in a heightened state of expectant arousal) to be shocked or otherwise “moved” by the sexually explicit material they are looking at. This expectation of seeing something unexpected may fit very well with the experience of being deceived. As such the deception is not only accepted, it reinforces one element of why a user browses for free porn in the first place.
Discussion:
This panel generated a lot of discussion around constructions of both pornography and porn consumers. It was pointed out that the three panelists are all bio males (although no one used that term, and at the time I felt a bit of discomfort with the lack of gender consciousness happening in the room) and that in some ways this fact narrowed the discussion at hand. It is very true that all three papers focused on the most popular forms of mainstream on line pornography (mainstream straight porn made in the San Fernando valley). Some questions that were raised included:
- The difficulty in getting an accurate picture of the size of the porn industry and the volume of porn consumption on line.
- Where does so called alternative or feminist pornography fit into the picture articulated in these papers?
- Where are the women porn consumers? Are they being represented here?
- Can we/should we broaden our definitions of pornography for the purpose of study? One person gave the example of Harlequin romance as being a form of pornography.
