‘Any performer you pick!’ Playful manifestations of porn spectatorship

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study of 18 porn spectators' selfreflective sexual narratives. It asks how porn spectatorship shapes one’s sexual self and how it connects to transformations in sexual desires, fantasies, and pleasures. Applying theorizations of play into thinking through the relationship between sexual norms and the uses of porn, the article further conceptualizes online porn as a toy – an object to play with and to use for pleasure. Also, it offers to frame porn spectatorship as a finite province of meaning, namely a sub reality and a particular realm of experience, and thus it sets out to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ecology of play at hand.