The Other Porn Addiction

The connection she describes is largely with a geographically dispersed group of men and women in similar “total power exchange relationships,” in which one person makes all the decisions. Among members of this community, padme is a brave explorer of alternative sexuality, a fellow practitioner of a distinct lifestyle. Keeping up the blog, though, requires her to maintain a wall around this compartment of her fragmented life. She doesn’t want her “real-life” friends to stumble across the blog, and yet she appreciates that the details it contains could allow her to be identified even by people who only know her casually. But she also believes that anyone visiting the site would be too embarrassed to expose her. As a result, only a few people in her daily life openly admit to knowing about Darkside. Much of her social existence happens online, in a state of partial anonymity.

“There are a lot of lurkers, a lot of return visitors,” padme says of her readers. “People are curious. They want to know what we’re doing next.” She feeds off that curiosity. As more and more readers started visiting the site, her posts became more frequent and she began to experiment with explicit videos and photos. In return, the community shored up her emotional life, responding to her outpourings with everything from e-cards to offers of assistance:

Thank you for all the comments and support during this last week. Southern Angel even did a lolcat just for me this week and it cheered me up a lot. I got a lot of e mails and e cards. I’m sorry I haven’t responded to them but I’ve been trying to recover from the surgery and not feeling too good…I want to be feeling better so I can start being more like a slave. Master’s been taking care of me and helping out a lot but I hate not having my structure. The chores list and rules help me to stay centered. I miss feeling like a slave.

Psychologist John Suler of Rider University in New Jersey has been researching what happens when our need to be noticed extends to the web. In his sprawling interactive text, The Psychology of Cyberspace, he explores such subjects as online disinhibition, cyberspace romance, and online addiction. Suler describes a pattern in which online communities exert influence over individuals and create a sense of disassociation from the greater community — the majority who are still inclined to punish you for behaviour you are increasingly unable to perceive as being outside the norm. Such social taboos are often hypocritical, but they are nevertheless influential. “Some people are considerably more disinhibited in online life,” he explains. “In real life, they have needs they can’t express, but online they have a vehicle and an environment where they can unleash, and they do it. It’s pretty well known in psychology that if you have anonymity you are going to do things you wouldn’t normally do.”

Suler describes online disinhibition as a process that begins with an awareness that anyone in the world can read the material being posted. “But then you start typing,” he says, “and you aren’t getting the feedback of face-to-face situations, so you don’t have that censoring process. You start delving into tangents that maybe should not be said.” Gradually, permission and encouragement arrive from whatever community has formed around your activities. “But with so many people [creating content online],” he says, “the odds are you’re going to have a limited audience. I see mostly like-minded people gathering together to reinforce their own ideas.”

The idea of online exposure predates the World Wide Web. In the early 1970s, for instance, the video artist Willoughby Sharp did a show for which he lived in a box in a gallery for 300 hours while transmitting his life to exterior monitors. Steve
Mann of Hamilton, Ontario, did live point-of-view broadcasting to the web from 1994 to ‘96 while earning his Ph.D. at mit. And in 1996, Jennifer Ringley started JenniCam, offering live access to everything that happened in her dorm room at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College, leading her to be branded both a porn star and — horrors — a performance artist.

Emmalene Pruden was still a child when Jennifer Ringley was making her mark. Today she’s twenty-one, married, and the mother of a three-year-old. She lives in Hamilton and has been posting videos about her life on YouTube since she was eighteen. She has shown herself preparing to go to the hospital to give birth, to get married, to start college, and to move out of her in-laws’ house and into her first apartment.

Emmalene, with her propensity for pink tops, and her braces only recently removed, could easily pass for fourteen. She’s bubbly and animated in front of the camera, often opening her videos with a hearty “Hi, YouTube!” Like padme, she started her online project out of loneliness. After her daughter, Alice, was born, she’d had to move out of her mom’s house to a completely different part of town. She found herself cut off from her friends: “I was sitting at home. I didn’t know anyone. Mike [her husband] was still at school, Alice was still a baby. So I just started watching people talk on YouTube.” (Echoes of JenniCam: when a radio interviewer asked Ringley why she continued with the webcam experiment in her new apartment after she graduated from college, she replied, “I felt lonely without the camera.”)

Emmalene’s videos aren’t explicitly sexual, but she admits to using sex appeal to grow her audience to more than a thousand followers. She flirts with viewers who comment on her videos, encouraging them, for instance, by filming her midriff and including “bellybutton” as a searchable tag. In one posting, she shows off her underwear; in another she wears a bikini (the latter was tagged as “adult content” — permissible, but just barely, according to the rules of Google-owned YouTube).

Six months after I first spoke with Emmalene, I noticed she was posting less and less frequently, in contrast to Felicity and padme. Emmalene’s only recent video was a cryptic monologue about being in a bad place and needing to get her life together. I wondered if she was having a different experience than the other women. Or had her interest simply waned?

We met for Taco Bell at Hamilton’s Lime Ridge Mall, where Emmalene told me she hadn’t necessarily lost her enthusiasm for self-exposure. Rather, real life had begun to intrude. She’d grown cautious after one viewer started obsessively insulting her every video, going so far as to call her daughter a “fetal parasite” before Emmalene had him banned from YouTube. Furthermore, her husband had become uncomfortable with how much strangers knew about their existence. She’d also begun working retail on the strip near the mall, and was reluctant to post about work.

We finished our lunch and sat in front of the mall fountain, watching Emmalene’s three-year-old throw pennies in the water and dance around. “I basically grew up on YouTube,” Emmalene says. Perhaps as a result of this familiarity, she comes across as particularly savvy about the limitations and potential consequences of her hobby. “A lot of people,” she reflects, “will say, ‘I know you. I’ve gotten to know you through your video blogs.’ But I think, ‘These people don’t really know me.’”

Our conversation tapers off. Emmalene pulls out her camera. “Hello, YouTube!” she says cheerily, pointing it at her face. Then it’s my turn. I introduce myself. After that, we ramble on, neither of us sure of the point of the video. “Well…okay…” Emmalene eventually says. The camera wavers between me, her, Alice dancing by the fountain, and passersby heading for the food court. Finally, mercifully, Emmalene blows a kiss into the lens and we fade to black.

British social theorist Nikolas Rose talks about the modern individual as an “entrepreneur of him- or herself” who is “to conduct his or her life, and that of his or her family, as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through considered acts of initiative, and through investments.” The modern individual, then, seeks relationships that are essentially “parasocial” — the term social scientists use to describe the one-sided relationships we have with celebrities, in which we know everything about them, but they don’t know we exist. Social networking scholar danah boyd has argued that this flow of detailed information is creating a new class of people in our lives — people we follow closely online and come to know intimately but voyeuristically, without any need for genuine interaction.

The parasocial relationships being formed by the millions of people whiling away lonely hours looking at pictures and videos online tend to become deeper and more compelling over time. This is in part because viewers can know far more about people like Emmalene and padme than they can about a generic, Photoshopped Playboy bunny who likes sunsets and poetry. This potential to know and see all without complication seems to be part of the allure of amateur erotica. With more consumers out there, and thus more feedback and attention, parasocial relationships in turn become increasingly compelling for those who find themselves being followed. “We got pretty addicted to it. We took huge risks,” says Felicity. “It can definitely be addictive,” agrees padme. “I’ve tried to cut back a bit. But you get to 1.6 million readers, and it’s really hard to just walk away from that. I can’t even go a few days and I want to blog.” Even Emmalene still feels the pull. “Every day,” she tells me, “I think about putting something up on YouTube.”

Felicity and her husband, for their part, have returned to their hobby since their brush with unwanted attention, though they now do so with more caution. They no longer show Felicity’s face, and they now post on Voyeurweb’s more explicit sister site, RedClouds, which has a much smaller viewer base, because it requires payment for access. The couple’s comeback post won them $2,000. One commenter succinctly captured the buzz on the site, writing simply, “Felicity is back!”