“There are two very important things in the world: one is sex, the other I don’t remember.” With this statement, American film director Woody Allen once summarized the order of priorities of contemporary Western culture. Porn cinema has upheld this premise since its earliest stages. When the cinematograph was just being invented in the late 19th century, filmmakers experimented with recording everyday situations: trains leaving, people walking, a starting point for the development of the genre of voyeurism.
It took decades for cinema to become a major industry with a well-oiled production machine and established genre classifications. Yet today, among the traces of its beginnings, we can trace films showing men and women having sex: the prehistory of what came to be classified as pornographic cinema. Most of these films were plot-driven and others occurred naturally, with the “performers” unaware that they were being watched. It is this second situation that can be described as voyeurism, a popular genre in the global porn industry that is growing in popularity by the day. And we can take 24/7 live voyeur cameras as one of the (best) examples of how this unique genre attracts so many viewers every day.
Understanding Pornography
“Porn” is an abbreviation of the term pornography; its colloquial usage refers to any material, image, and/or discourse that depicts sexual acts with the intention of arousing erotic excitement in the recipient. This subgenre, proposed by an industry that experienced exponential growth worldwide, especially in the US and Europe since the 1970s, is currently being emulated by a huge explosion of new agents that act as both producers and consumers: amateur pornographers.
Unlike the film industry in general, which has long been considered and analyzed by various social science disciplines, porn tends to receive less attention. As such, “pornography has historically been characterized by ongoing conflicts with respect to social or religious morality”. Due to its “immoral” nature in the dominant culture, but also its “minor” place in the cultural industry, there has been little reflection on the subject. On the other hand, although censorship is being destroyed in many parts of the world and is in crisis in others, empirical sociological studies of its production, circulation or use are scarce.
Changes in the way global pornography is produced, circulated, and consumed
Within the framework of this “paradigm shift”, there have been several changes in the way audiovisual pornography is produced, circulated, and consumed around the world, which are a consequence of the new context that has emerged in recent years. These are linked to the technological revolution in communication, on the one hand, and cultural changes in sexuality, on the other. Both processes are framed within a new individualism that intervenes and carries out specific social practices. This dimension strongly influences the course of local pornography, at all stages of its production.
The global pornography industry symbolized by phenomenal works, but with promising new exponents, is conditioned by the increasing participation of users in the stages of production and circulation. Voyeurism proposes a new model of porn-making, blurring the boundaries between the roles of producer, director, actor, and consumer; questioning the industrial model that at the beginning of the new millennium was already established in a dominant position in what we call the “subfield” of porn cinema.
Autonomy and sexuality
Within the field of social science, the study of the production, circulation, and consumption of pornography is an area that has only recently been explored. The reason may be the moral issues that intervene and deepen the invisibility of this segment of cultural production, which we consider relevant to explain the universe of cultural practices, beliefs, and consumption that intervene in various ways in the construction of everyday social practices.
Studying the cultural production of pornography therefore means moving away from moral discussions about legalizing or censoring pornography from a radical standpoint, even from the boundaries that define what is considered obscene. Instead, this production will be considered a manifestation of complex contemporary social processes, in which social subjectivities embody the transformations that occur as a result of cultural changes in the fields of sexuality and communication.
Spotlight on voyeurism
We understand pornography as a cultural practice, inseparable from processes of mediating and spectacularizing intimacy. The pornographic practices we highlight here, especially voyeurism associated with users becoming producers and distributors, principally reflect contemporary transformations. However, they also reflect broader processes related to the transformation of individualism following the advent of new technologies.
Parallel to these transformations, the marginalization of pornography studies has been reversed, not only in the “central” regions of academia but also in these latitudes. As a general approach to the issue of pornography, the first issue of the British journal Porn Studies was published in 2014, whose work problematizes pornography from an approach that combines gender issues and cultural studies. The institutionalization of the subject matter encapsulated in this periodical has already taken place in British academia, thanks to the work of Feona Attwood (2004, 2005), who examines pornography use and transformation in contemporary sexuality.
Attwood revisits pornography as a cultural practice, focusing on existing subgenres to analyze the dimensions of performance, community and subculture, power relations around gender, and the cultural changes resulting from its dissemination in the context of liberalization. The same happened in the United States with a series of publications such as Porn Studies by Linda Williams (2004) and Why Internet Porn Matters by Margaret Grebowicz (2013). From a perspective that revives the work of Judith Butler and Jean Baudrillard, Grebowicz argues that the emergence of online pornography changes its social significance by democratizing access on a large scale. From a perspective similar to that of the French philosopher, Grebowicz examines how, with the increasing visibility of pornography, obscenity is transformed from “invisible” to “too visible”. In turn, Linda Williams’ book goes beyond feminist anti-pornography discussions to consider pornography as part of the sexual culture of the United States in terms of the spectacularization of everyday life.
In Latin America, particularly in Brazil, several works have appeared in recent years that study pornography from different perspectives. Anthropologist María Elvira Díaz Benítez specializes in the study of Brazil’s mainstream pornography industry, reflecting on how pornographic images are constructed and how it promotes a discourse that imposes normality and transgression based on a particular conception of sexuality.
The democratization of pornography
Any Internet user with a body, a computer, a video camera or webcam, an Internet connection, and a bank account can create their own porn page and access the sex industry market. We can all consider the production of amateur pornography that proliferates from the process of self-spectacularization. According to this idea, all social relations are mediated by the spectacular as a commodity: a social economy of images that objectify a spectacle-centered worldview. However, this idea can be nuanced to reflect contemporary processes.
On the one hand, there is a real “explosion of creativity”, a product of the democratization of technology, the globalization of interactivity thanks to the lower costs and possibilities offered by the Internet, and which is expressed in the proliferation of free cultural content that turns consumers into producers. On the other hand, and in relation to those authors who speak of a new paradigm, this creativity is instrumentalized and capitalized by the market: cultural production generated from the periphery, i.e. outside the large modern cultural industries, is transformed into a new commodity that feeds current capitalism, forming a diverse and heterogeneous cultural market, in which the main players do not disappear.
Want to explore modern adult content trends? Check out for the latest insights and live experiences!