Cam Modeling and “Future Making love”
Emily Witt’s (2016) book Future Sex chronicles her search for intimate self-realization as a fresh Yorker in her early 30s migrating to tech-centered SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA. The book is situated both in interviews and personal experiences, stringing vignettes together into chapters with topics including polyamory, Orgasmic Deep breathing, Internet porn, and Burning up Man. In this review, I emphasize her section on sex camming.
But first, I will start with a wide overview. A major theme in the book is the type of existential angst that comes from having too many https://www.x-webcamslive.com/en/girls/ choices. Witt seems daunted by her sexual freedom as a millennial—the unlimited range of intimate partners and methods—first made possible by the intimate trend, and then by the web. She (p. 12) explains:
What if love failed us? Intimate freedom acquired now extended to people who never wanted to get rid of the old institutions, except to the extent of displaying solidarity with friends who do. I hadn’t sought a lot choice for myself, so when I came across myself with total intimate freedom, I used to be unhappy.
Witt spent her early adult life attempting to find long lasting love—and possibly even marriage—viewing this as a getaway from the routine of causal intimate arrangements, sometimes punctuated by intervals of monogamy, that has up until now defined her intimate life. But Witt’s wishes conflict with the world she inhabits, as Millennial intimate norms privilege freedom over security in interactions. She (pp.11-2) describes why security remains desired, even as the Internet opens a lot more opportunities:
The growth of sexuality beyond marriage experienced brought new reasons to trust the traditional controls, reasons such as HIV, enough time limitations of fertility, the delicacy of feelings. Even as I resolved for freedom as an interim condition, I prepared for my monogamous future. My sense of rightness, following the failed tests of previous generations, was like the reconstructions of a baroque nationwide monument that was ruined by a bomb but another kind of freedom had showed up: a blinking cursor in clear space.
In questioning these new passionate configurations where freedom prevails, Witt echos what social theorists Anthony Giddens and the past due Zygmunt Bauman respectively explain as “pure relationships” and “liquid love.” Both authors suggest that the perfect of unconditional dedication has been supplanted by continuous negotiation and the criterion of mutual benefit. And, even in coupling, personality remains central.
Lacking a secure, committed romantic relationship in the old mildew, Witt sets out to explore the probability of fulfillment (or, at least, self-knowledge) in less conventional situations. As works out, it is within the section on “Live Webcams” that Witt does the most theoretical work to explain why seeking diverse experiences—the task of the publication—might assist in her quest for sexual self-realization. Specifically, she points for an essay in the reserve Time Square Red, Times Square Blue by the gay African-American writer Samuel D. Delany about enough time he spent having anonymous sex in porno theaters. Witt (p. 126) summarizes the article:
Delany described the advantages of his vast experience in informal sex. The concert halls had served as laboratories where he had learned to discern the nuances and spectrum of his sexual desire… His observations about sexual attraction regularly disproved regular notions of beauty and ugliness. (He discovered, among other proclivities, that he had something for Burly Irish-American men, including two who acquired hairlips.)
She quotes Delany who suggests we should “learn to find our own way of having sex sexy” and concludes:
I don’t see how this can be accomplished without a statistically significant variety of partners… However supportive, the response of a single partner just cannot do that. This is a quintessentially public process…
Unlike Delany, Witt (p. 204) mostly lands back again where she began, finding monogamy rewarding but now embracing a perfect of dedication as short-term:
I hope that married partnership would stop to be observed as a totalizing end point and instead become something more moderate, perhaps am institutional basis for distributed endeavors such as increasing children or making art.
But this return to a somewhat conventional notion of romance demonstrates to be the most interesting facet of the reserve. Witt’s thinking about the freedom and variety of experience available to the present generation seems to evolve. Rather than seeing the nearly infinite selection of sexual opportunities as daunting, Witt ends up seeing it as an opportunity to test until one finds confidence and feels affirmed in their own wishes. She (p. 204) says:
I found that… mostly I needed to live in a global with a wider selection of intimate identities. I hoped the primacy and legitimacy of an individual intimate model would continue to erode as it has, with increasing acceleration, in the past fifty years.
Though she does not condition it so explicitly, I’d claim that Witt has uncovered an interesting dialectic between freedom and security. Though freedom to explore may aid us in discovering what we should find sexually desirable, exploration may, paradoxically, lead to security in one’s founded sexual desires, when new experience continually prove less gratifying and therefore reaffirm the appropriateness of these desires.
And, while final chapter wonders off a little, I think the desirability of embracing this stress between freedom and security is the clear (if unstated) conclusion of the book.
Following this theme of sexual exploration as a system of self-realization, I now want to turn to the question of what camming shows Witt about her own sexuality (and what we can find out about camming along the way). Witt (p. 114) represents her experiences with the popular camsite Chaturbate:
I first noticed Chaturbate and the many other live-sex-cam sites available online as porn… as the technical advancement of peep show booths and telephone sex lines. Like those, that they had a performer and they had a voyeur… Then I spent additional time on the webpage.
As she dives deeper in to the site, Witt decides that the resemblances she noticed between cam sites and other types of sex work/performance were only superficial. The diversity and interactivity of cam sites arranged them apart.
Chaturbate was full of serendipity… the feeling of clicking on through the 18+ disclaimer in to the opening matrix was the one of turning on MTV in the mid-1990s, when music videos played most of the day and kept viewers captive in the anticipation of the favorite performer or a fresh discovery. Or maybe, to reach further back in its history, it recalled the sooner times of the Internet—the web of strangers rather than “friends.”
Witt’s decision to approach her subject matter through the lens of her own desire—as explained in the first section of this review—shows both interesting and problematic in this chapter.
What makes Witt’s strategy interesting is that, in bypassing the favorite rooms that she largely finds uninteresting, she will take us to the margins of the sites, looking for the unforeseen. This includes an Icelandic woman who strips wearing a rubber equine mask and fedora. Inside a passage representative of her snarky but appreciative style, Witt explains (pp. 112-3):
maybe it was the house that she is at or her hi-def camera or a general feature of the Icelandic people but even faceless she gleamed with the well-being that emanates wherever per-capita usage of fish oils is high and people reap the benefits of socialized healthcare.
Witt also details a college-age women who talked about books and made $1,500 doing a 24 hour marathon that featured much talking, some nudity, no sex. A 3rd female suspended herself from a hook made of ice. And another woman held nude sex ed conversations.
Going for a cue from one of her interviewees, Witt describes the intended use of site—one or two performers broadcasting to numerous viewers in each room—as “mass intimacy.” But, the most interesting area of the chapter was Witt’s exploration into a culture that has emerged around using Chaturbate to help unpaid, private, 1-on-1 sex.
Assisted by two performers that she interviewed, she “multiperved” or “audio-Skyped with one another while sifting through videos online” (p. 124). Together, logged to browse the countless pages of men loading but being viewed by no-one. She describes (pp. 124-5):
not even the most popular men, instead hitting through to the next and third pages for the real amateurs, the forest of men in desk seats… It turned out that they waited there for a reason… so that they will find somebody who will cam-to-cam with them…
Witt (and her manuals) come across a man she finds somewhat attractive, and she chats with him. The man quickly invites her to carefully turn her cam on. She obliges and creates a password-protected room so only he can easily see her. While Witt does not seem to find the encounter particularly satisfying, she (p. 125) does offer some insight into the value others find in the knowledge:
here, where expectations resided in the opportunity of an electric encounter between two people, tokens mattered significantly less. If, on its landing page, Chaturbate was thousands of men watching a few women, a couple pages in, the numbers changed to one or two people using Chaturbate to communicate privately with another person.
Witt’s experience highlights an extremely interesting case of technology being used against the grain. It really is a rougish activity for users to seek non-transactional personal or sexual encounters on sites whose revenue come from audiences purchasing tokens. While these sites afford such activity and don’t prohibit it, they don’t plan or explicitly condone it either. It is, perhaps, for this reason absence control that sites likes Chaturbate remind Witt of the earlier Web.
While Witt’s study of the margins of camming sites is disclosing, she also, probably, fails to symbolize most of what is going on these sites and is even somewhat dismissive of the more popular performers. Because she focuses on her desires as a thirty-something NYC article writer, Witt sometimes shows a hipster bias, where, if something isn’t strange or edgy, it’s not seen as deserving attention.
Witt is also not a joiner. Her desire to test as part her own search for sexual self-realization, drives her visit many places; but, for the most part, Witt will identify or feel a feeling of owed with the people she satisfies. She appears to participate only far away, observing others as topics as much as romantic relationships. Witt (p. 172) identifies her own relationship to a sex party she attends, stating “I was still thinking of myself as only a visitor, or rather neither here nor there, someone undertaking an abstract inquiry however, not yet with true intention.” This distancing is valuable insofar as it brings with it a degree of objectivity (most other things written about Orgasmic Mediation, for example, sound like marketing duplicate); however, it does mean she’s struggling to offer an insider perspective through her personal narratives.
What’s lacking in the section on camming—credited to some mixture of her hipster bias and lack of personal experience—is an examination of the many proportions of creative labor that goes into producing night time the most normative-appearing shows. Experienced Witt attempted modeling herself, this might be readily obvious. The seeming ease with which models embody normative wishes is area of the work—part of the performance of authenticity.
A most troubling minute is when she uncritically relays one of her interviewee’s characterization of the top performers as “zombie hot girls” (p. 124). This privileging of the weird in porn feeds a kind of whorearchy, where certain forms of sex work/practice are denigrated as a way of validating others.
Witt certainly is not consciously anti-sex work. In the last chapter, in fact, she offers a great deal of praise for the artistry women porn directors and producers, and she spends a substantial time questioning her own values formed by mainstream feminism and considering more inclusive feminisms that embrace sex employees and porn as a medium. And, quite insightfully, she argues very much fetish porn is a response or response to new taboos set up by anti-porn feminists.
Nevertheless, Witt will not seem to extend the interest and regard she’s for women-directed studio room porn to the women-directed performances of popular cam models. I’m certain they have unique insights and exciting stories to tell.
Regardless of these few criticisms, Witt gets one key thing right: The continuing future of sex cannot be reduced to a tale of technological development but must be recognized in terms of changing patterns of human associations. She (p. 210) concludes “America had a great deal of respect for the future of items, and less interest in the foreseeable future of human agreements.” Because of this alone, Future Sex probably deserves more attention.
