From Exceptionality to Mundanity: Exploring the Everyday Particularity of Porn Spectatorship

Abstract

Pornography scholarship is often dominated by discourses surrounding its alleged risks to viewers. Approaching sex and porn through the lens of ‘play’ rather than ‘drama’, this article concentrates on the everyday particularity of porn viewing, where media-related practices/technologies afford possibilities between porn users and digital objects. Drawing upon focus groups/interviews with 17 young adult porn viewers (18–25 years) based in western Sydney, this research illustrates the routinised and experimental, immersive and affective, experiences pornography provides. Far from the ‘sexually corrupt’ discourses that dominate, the participants identified playful affordances—boredom, distraction, curiosity, fun, exploration/experimentation, relaxation, stress relief and pleasure—informing their everyday affective engagements with pornography. There is greater need to listen to young adults’ everyday experiences with pornography and to examine the multiplicity of porn use. Moving from ‘texts and effects’ to ‘experiences’, and from ‘drama’ to ‘play’, identifies more nuanced and capacious elements to porn spectatorship unfettered by dominant moral panics.

Introduction

Research and discussions of pornography often centralise around grand debates surrounding its existence, meanings, operations and effects (Sullivan and McKee, 2015). Scholarship generally either celebrates or condemns the existence of pornography, engages in textual readings to unearth porn's meaning, investigates the industries within which it is created, or additionally, investigates what kinds of effects (in behaviour) it has on its audiences (Sullivan and McKee, 2015). Against this backdrop, and amidst these large-scale and often intractable debates, it is noteworthy that very little research examines the everyday, often mundane, particularity of porn viewing practices. The internet now exists as the main platform for pornographic access, and porn viewing is often conducted privately and operates as an immersive experience involving searching, scrolling, clicking, waiting, tab-switching, pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding, and other common digital media-related practices overlayed with interest, boredom, distraction, excitement and titillation (Paasonen, 2011, 2021). Rather than focusing on these functions and experiences, researchers, users and activists are often instead drawn to broader arguments relating to porn's existence, harms, dangers, meanings, and messages (Smith and Attwood, 2014). This article, in deliberate contrast, focuses on the benign rather than the malign, the everyday rather than the exceptional, to consider the ways in which porn users immersively and affectively engage with pornography as a common (sometimes daily) digital media-related practice (Hobart, 2010). This methodological practice avoids the totalising grand narratives that often dominate pornography debates, and instead seeks to identify alternative, equally valid, yet under-explored lines of inquiry. Our simple question is as follows: what is it that porn users do and experience with pornography affectively beyond the ‘literal’ and ‘self-evident’ (Paasonen, 2007)?

This article seeks to answer this question by drawing upon focus group and interview data collected in 2022 with young adults between 18 and 25 years old. The research project explored young adults’ experiences and understandings of pornography, and this article focuses on the granular routines and improvisations that constitute their porn viewing practices. Most pornographic consumption research focuses on ‘texts and effects’ – that is, exploring what porn consumption does to attitudes and behaviours. This approach is often couched within anti-porn or ‘risk’ frameworks (Attwood, 2002; McKee et al., 2022), and young people (adults and children) more generally are often positioned as ‘risky’ and/or ‘at risk’: ‘as dangerous either to themselves or their surroundings’ (Bengtsson and Ravn, 2018: 1; Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014; Turnbull and Spence, 2011). This is often evident in technopanics surrounding digital media uses, where risk frameworks are centred that create presumed relationships between media, risk and (inevitable) harm (Hanckel, in-press; Hanckel and Collin, 2024). These dominant discourses often foreground research on porn, youth and risk, and point to the sexualisation (or ‘pornification’) of culture and youths (Mulholland, 2015; Tsaliki, 2016). This article, in contrast, explores and emphasises the role of pleasure, experimentation, and play that situate pornographic consumption.

Pleasure, experimentation and play are often central to our sexual lives (Bem and Paasonen, 2023; Califia, 2000; Paasonen, 2018), yet they are routinely minimised, particularly in academic circles where such topics are viewed as trivial or outright ‘non-academic’ (Bem and Paasonen, 2023). We take Berlant (2008) and Paasonen’s (2018) invitation to think about sex through ‘play’ rather than ‘drama’, noting that the continued elision of the fun, playful, banal, mundane, pleasurable, formulaic and experimental nature of our sexual lives further marginalises them as serious scholarly concerns, even as they feature centrally to our everyday lives (McKee, 2016). Despite the supremacy of ‘texts and effects’ logics, this article emphasises the centrality of play as an end in itself, and in so doing, de-emphasises the place of grander debates and instead takes seriously the granular acts, rituals, improvisations, and affects that make, re-make, and sometimes un-make the sexual self (Bem and Paasonen, 2023).

This article also contributes to discussions regarding media-related practices and how technologies (re)shape people's experiences of the world as they enable or constrain online and offline activity (Ash, 2012; Hine, 2015). Understanding ‘media-related practices’ as including the presences and absences of media use and their functioning and interanimation (Hobart, 2010), we draw upon the concept of ‘affordances’ to consider the possibilities un/available between porn users and their digital objects (Davis and Chouinard, 2017). Davis and Chouinard (2017: 241) define ‘affordances’ as the ‘range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon, structurally situated subjects’. We resonate particularly with Nagy and Neff’s (2015) notion of ‘imagined affordances’, which illustrate the ways in which people are afforded many different things from the same digital objects. As the results will show, the multitude of porn sites, online and offline contexts, young adults’ understandings of technology, and their desires and affects come together to produce multiple practices of fun and play that are unencumbered by prevailing doom and gloom discourses and arguments. Understanding the internet as a ‘culturally embedded phenomenon’ where ‘online activities acquire meaning and significance in so far as they are interpreted within other online and offline contexts’ (Hine, 2015: 192), this article illustrates the ways that young adult porn users navigate pornography affectively through a range of online and offline affordances.

In what follows, we start by contextualising the study's backdrop, wherein online pornography is widely accessible, popular and (simultaneously) socially effaced. Noting both the predictable and transgressive aspects of pornography, the stigma attached to sex and porn more generally, and the limitations of ‘texts and effects’ models, we turn from ‘drama’ to ‘play’ to consider the online and offline affordances made un/available to porn users. Conceptualising ‘play’ as a range of pleasures, shifts and ruptures that overlay sexual (dis)tastes and routines and improvisations (Paasonen, 2018), we examine how play operates as an affordance of pornographic engagements in our study. ‘Play’ can be conceptualised broadly to include a range of interanimating affects, such as pleasure and boredom, that attend to a more comprehensive understanding of sex/uality that recognises its variability, ambiguity and contradiction (Paasonen, 2018). As the results demonstrate, the participants’ desires and affects come together to produce practices and experiences of play—such as boredom, distraction, curiosity, fun, exploration and experimentation, relaxation, stress relief, and pleasure – that are unfettered by ‘drama’. Each of the participants foreground the everydayness of pornography viewing within the banal, mundane, experimental and routine. Amidst the broader circulating discourses surrounding pornography and its use, we conclude by suggesting that there is a greater need to meaningfully listen to young adults’ everyday experiences and to consider the capaciousness of ‘play’ as a category that attends to porn's myriad affordances and affects.

Theoretical background and existing literature: Porn, media, affordances and play

It is often said that the internet exists as it does today – as accessible and expanded – because of porn (Sullivan and McKee, 2015). Whether this is correct or not (and it is probably not), it is still the case that the internet is full of porn, with pornography websites often featuring in the most visited websites globally, and hundreds of millions of people viewing porn every day (Paasonen, 2011; Sullivan and McKee, 2015). Despite porn's popularity, it is simultaneously subjected to regulation, policing, and panic and seen as an abject, marginal, and illegitimate sociocultural phenomena (Paasonen, 2011). Porn's contradictory status as both being wildly popular and socially effaced subjects it to contested and often contradictory debates (Tembo, 2021).

Defining porn

Kipnis (1999: 64) aptly observes that defining pornography is ‘one big headache’. Most scholars attempting such a task often turn to Justice Potter Stewart's famous aphorism – ‘I know it when I see it’ – yet ultimately conclude that the phrase, while appealing because it illustrates the ways that texts ‘move’ the body, is ultimately unhelpful because of its limiting and opaque conclusions (McKee et al., 2022; Schaschek, 2014; Sullivan and McKee, 2015; Williams, 1989). What people consider as pornography is not the same, as Kipnis (1999: 64) notes: ‘[o]ne person's pornography is another person's erotica, and one person's erotica can cause someone else to lose her lunch’. In recent times, porn is generally understood as ‘the graphic depiction of sexually explicit acts’ made ‘primarily for the sexual pleasure of the audience member’ (Sullivan and McKee, 2015: 4). Just as pornography is popular and effaced, it is also both predictable and transgressive.

Pornography is constrained in that it produces generic and repetitive material in a generally similar form and shape (Schaschek, 2014). Pornography repeatedly presents the same plots, scenarios, themes, settings, formulas, figures, practices, acts, shots, framings, angles, phrases, expressions and affects. In doing so, it operates in a similar way to what Dean (2009: 5), in their research in a differing context, has called a ‘compulsive repetition of the same’. Each of these practices and representations are constrained by what the camera can visibilise for the viewer and each scene typically demonstrates the excitement – plateau – orgasm model often alleged to comprise (all) sexual activity (Schaschek, 2014). At the same time, pornography is noted for its transgression because it foregrounds sexual differences, hierarchises and metricises categories, accentuates and dramatises characteristics, and sexualises sexual differences, categories, and characteristics (Keilty, 2018). Kipnis (1999) notes that pornography deliberately sits on the edges of culture and its key rule is transgression; porn's ‘greatest pleasure is to locate each and every one of society's taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties and systematically transgress them, one by one’ (p. 164). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that pornography so often gets itself into trouble, and particularly when sex is subjected to a range of moral panics (Halperin, 2017; Mulholland, 2013).

While pornography has been understood differently across history, current debates construct it as a problem, and particularly in an Australian context where this study is located. Public debates concerning pornography in Australia are often dominated by anti-porn activists, politicians, conservative commentators and academics who do not ordinarily specialise in pornography, as well as anti-porn perspectives, which are often prioritised by the media (McKee et al., 2022). Public controversies often provoke law-and-order and popular punitive responses, and pornography is often responsibilised (or scapegoated) for a range of social ills, and routinely conflated with violence (McKee et al., 2022). Young people (adults and children) are particularly subjected to a range of attacks in the current moment; for example, the federal government in late 2024 announced their plan to ban people under 16 years of age from social media (Orlando 2024), while the Northern Territory lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10 (Bowles, 2024) – further reinforcing the idea this population is (already) risky and/or at-risk. The proliferation of digital technologies, Australian conservatism, sex-negativity, and the stigmatisation and regulation of younger populations produces taken-for-granted attitudes regarding porn's harms and dangers (McKee et al., 2008).

Academic research is also dominated by anti-porn perspectives, where contemporary research largely focuses on its potential negative effects (McKee et al., 2022; Stardust et al., 2024). Media effects studies seek to prove causal or correlational relationships between porn consumption and negative behaviours or attitudes (Healy-Cullen et al., 2022; McKee et al., 2022). This research has been heavily critiqued for assuming, at face value, that pornography is damaging and harmful (Healy-Cullen et al., 2022; McKee et al., 2022). Healy-Cullen et al. (2022) and McKee et al. (2022) argue that such approaches take uncritical harm-based perspectives that remove context and agency (also see Gauntlett, 1998, for weaknesses of the media effects model more generally). Recent research is starting to provide context-sensitive research in this area that attends to the specificities of people's engagements with porn, and it may be that moving from ‘effects’ to ‘affordances’ helps capture broader dimensions to porn viewing practices.

Porn and the affordances of play

Conventionally understood as including ‘possibilities for action’ (Evans et al., 2017: 36), ‘affordances’ has emerged as a popular concept that seeks to understand the encounters and relationships that are enabled and/or constrained between people and digital objects (Hanckel et al., 2019). Davis and Chouinard (2017) propose understanding affordances through mechanisms and conditions, where the former includes the ways that digital objects can ‘request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse’ particular actions and activities, while the latter includes considerations of the ways that subjects come into contact with such mechanisms (p. 242, italics in original). Moving from effect to affordance, we are interested in the affective encounters afforded between porn viewers (subject) and internet pornography (digital object). Nagy and Neff’s (2015: 5) notion of ‘imagined affordances’ is particularly instructive as it illustrates the affordances that emerge ‘between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers’. Pornography's social perception is influenced by dominant discourses and practices that shape, enable or constrain subjects’ encounters. An individual's interaction with internet pornography is shaped by ‘cultural and institutional legitimacy’ (Davis and Chouinard, 2017: 246), and in a climate in which pornography is constructed in polarising ways, it is striking that the participants identified and conceptualised ‘play’ as one of the many affordances that pornography provides.

The concept of ‘play’ holds an ambiguous status within sexuality studies. While play remains central to many people's erotic lives, it often occupies a taken-for-granted and background place in scholarship, and its complexities remain relatively under-explored (Bem and Paasonen, 2023). Bem and Paasonen (2023: 810) suggest play involves a ‘set of autotelic practices that do not necessarily serve any external or instrumental aims and purposes’, where the ‘enchantment of the activity’ serves as an end in itself. Paasonen (2018) observes the interpenetrations between ‘sex’ and ‘play’, where both terms describe activities associated with experimentation, intensity, sensation, experience, curiosity and possibility. Understanding sex through ‘play’ helps attend to the ways that sexual interests develop across time and space. Importantly, sexual play is complex and not necessarily fun or pleasurable; as Paasonen (2018: 2) observes, ‘there is more to play and pleasure in the realm of sexuality than joyful and casual lightness’. Sexual play can feel like work and labour; it can feel boring, unpleasant, confusing, bland or laborious, it can contain elements of surprise, accident, liberation, and exploration, and carries with it – like all other social practices – the risk of trauma (Bem and Paasonen, 2023). Understanding sexual practices, such as pornography viewing, through the prism of ‘play’ does not undermine issues of power, violence or vulnerability; rather, conceptualising sex through ‘play’ foregrounds the significance of pleasure in all its complexities and recognises the exploratory and experimental nature of our sexual selves (Bem and Paasonen, 2023). Internet pornography, as we show, afforded playful experiences and affective states to the young adults in our study, and learning from their insights illustrates the everyday particularity of porn viewing as a common routine, improvised and an experimental digital media-related set of practices.

Methods and analysis

The results in this article come from a broader project in which we sought to explore young adult's experiences and understandings of online pornography. The project received ethics approval from Western Sydney University Human Ethics Committee in December 2021. Participants were recruited to the project survey ¹ through advertising flyers, which were placed physically around the university campuses, uploaded online on popular student social media pages, and on learning sites the students use. ² Thirty current and recently active porn viewers (all university students between 18 and 25 years) participated in either a focus group or one-to-one interview. Purposive focus group selection, rather than random or convenience grouping, was used to invite the pool of diverse participants into a focus group (Matsuno et al., 2024). Four of the nine focus groups were limited to women and queer, or queer more broadly. The remaining five focus groups were limited to participants who self-identified as cis-gender and heterosexual, with the participants separated by gender. The project team felt it was important to have some focus groups that consisted only of queer or only of cisgender women to increase participants’ sense of comfortability, safety, and openness in sharing their experiences. While focus groups may not ostensibly seem like an ideal method when exploring ‘sensitive’ topics, our research indicates the participant's openness to share their experiences in a topic that is otherwise socially effaced (Samardzic et al. 2024).

The focus groups and interviews each lasted around 1 hour in duration and were conducted between March and October 2022. The focus groups/interviews were semi-structured in nature and the participants – identified with pseudonyms throughout – were invited to share their experiences and understandings of pornography, including their viewing habits, likes and dislikes, and overall thoughts and feelings regarding porn. Participants were shown data from ‘Pornhub Insights’, which presented aggregate viewing habits that they were asked to reflect upon, and the participants were also asked to share their own experiences, such as why, when and where they watch pornography, the types of pornography they watch, and their feelings and attitudes towards pornography based on their experiences (a reflective/methodological paper based on this is currently in-development). From the overall dataset, this article draws upon 17 participants’ experiences, and this includes 8 heterosexual people (5 men and 3 women) and 9 queer-identified people (3 bisexual women, 1 gay man, 1 bisexual man, 1 queer woman, 1 nonbinary bisexual, 1 nonbinary gay person and 1 woman questioning their sexuality).

The focus groups and interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim and de-identified before the data were uploaded to NVivo 12 for analysis. The dataset was analysed following Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2019, 2021) six-step approach to thematic analysis, which includes data familiarisation, generation of initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing and refining themes, naming and defining themes, and finally, producing the research output. Each stage of the analysis was cross-checked by the authors to ensure integrity, and the development of codes and themes emerged iteratively through immersive engagement with the data that involved thinking, reflecting, speculating and de/stabilising relations (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Various research findings emerged, such as concerns with pornography as well as matters of representation and distribution, some of which are published or forthcoming (see Thorneycroft et al., 2024; Thorneycroft et al., 2024). The focus of this article is the everyday particularity of porn viewing and the functions and affordances available to the participants. The first part of the findings provides context to the participants’ engagements with porn, and the second part focuses on the playful affordances – boredom, distraction, curiosity, fun, exploration and experimentation, relaxation, stress relief, and pleasure – that inform their everyday affective engagements with pornography.

Results and discussion

Porn viewing as a digital media-related practice

The participants’ porn viewing practices were spectacular in their mundanity. While considerable (public) debate festers regarding porn's harms, dangers, extremities and addictions, it is noteworthy that the participants approach porn viewing as a relatively common and routinised – and mostly unproblematic – way of achieving pleasure, filling boredom or distraction, relieving stress and finding titillation. Will (heterosexual man), for example, explains the routinised and sleep-enabling qualities of porn: ‘it's kind of implemented in your night routine. You’re having a shower, you brush your teeth, you masturbate [to porn], and then go to sleep’. While there were exceptions, the participants generally watched pornography on their smartphones, tablets, or laptops 2-to-3 times per week for around 10-to-15 minutes. Most participants watched porn while they were alone, while a few noted they occasionally watched it with their friends or partners. Most people watched porn at night before bed (as Will notes above) and they reported using sites that aggregate porn content or social media (e.g. ‘Pornhub’ and ‘X’). Viewing habits were mediated by broader life circumstances including their daily stresses, busyness and availability, as well as their sexual appetite.

The participants explored all different types of pornography according to the different themes, categories, genres, sexualities, practices and settings. Many participants preferred a particular ‘type’ of pornography – whether that be amateur or professional, sexual position, performer, set-up and so on. However, they also enjoyed exploring different types of pornography for exploration and titillation. Despite the sensationalism often attached to pornography, the participants regularly noted pornography's use of predictability and repetition (Kipnis, 1999; Schaschek, 2014), as indicated by Frank (heterosexual man), who noted porn's formulaic nature:

If it's professional, there’ll be some weird storyline and then there’ll be a section where they’re doing oral sex and then there’ll be a section where they’re fingering, all that stuff. I usually skip that and I just get straight into the sex, because that's what I’m there for. And then there's different positions and I preference missionary, I preference doggy style. So I’ll just skip to these parts. I end up only watching for maybe 5 to 10 minutes, because when you’re self-pleasuring, it doesn’t really take so long.

Aware of the ‘compulsive repetition of the same’ (Dean, 2009: 5) the participants generally found comfort in the regularities and reproduced them in their own viewing practices; where porn is highly serialised and repetitive, the participants often mirror these repetitive routines – searching, scrolling, viewing and so on – into their viewing practices. In doing so they highlighted an awareness of common platform functions and features, enabling them to quickly search, review and determine what to engage with, and ‘skip’ to those aspects that they want to see, often sustaining the temporal rhythms of consumption. Further, the participants all demonstrated sophisticated porn literacy skills where they were familiar with porn's rules and principles, knew the differences between reality and fantasy, were politically invested in gender equality and representation, and noted porn's ‘unrealistic’ dimensions (Byron et al., 2021; Dawson, Gabhainn and MacNeela, 2020). For many of the participants, porn viewing represented a ‘game-like’ and playful mode of interaction – suffused with searching and watching pornography through searching, scrolling, tab-switching, and exploring – that overlay many different (routinised and experimental) feelings and functions that they were aware of and knew how to use.

Affective affordances: All sorts of play

Pornography holds such a stigmatised status in our cultural imaginary that academic and public debates often speculate about the types of people that consume pornography and the effects it has on their attitudes and behaviours regarding relationships, crime, violence and other social proscriptions (McKee, 2018). ³ Against this backdrop, porn consumers have been relatively silenced or ‘othered’ (McKee, 2018). Pringle (2011: 127) offers one example of this framing, arguing that porn consumer experiences and perspectives should not be considered: ‘after all, we do not consult racists in formulating laws against hate speech on the basis that they are involved and know a lot about racism’. Such positions, as McKee (2018: 387) argues, sets up porn consumers as something to be ‘seen but not heard’, and in so doing can obfuscate, make invisible and sustain stigmas against porn and its uses/users. There are of course exceptions to the rule, such as in psychological literature, but much of this involves quantitative approaches that do not ascertain experiential or explanatory accounts. These studies often involve participants who do not ordinarily watch pornography, are situated within predetermined questions and metrics surrounding pornography's harmfulness, homogenises pornography, often confuses correlation with causation and/or are often couched within heteronormative logics that automatically construct non-heteronormative practices and ideals as problematic (McKee, 2018; McKee et al., 2022). In doing so such work can (and has) made invisible the ways porn is used and made sense of in everyday spaces, particularly by young adults.

Increasingly though the story is changing, as consumer voices are increasingly heard, and the participants in our study articulated many reasons and feelings that motivate porn viewing that sit outside of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ paradigms. For our participants, feelings of boredom, distraction, curiosity, fun, exploration and experimentation, relaxation, stress relief, and pleasure were afforded through their porn viewing practices, and help account for the ways in which porn viewers use and make sense of pornography as a form of digital media-related practice. The accounts that emerge from these participants are far from the ‘sexually damaged’ figure that is often constructed in moral/technopanics and suggests that pornography viewing may be a much more banal practice than is otherwise often alleged (Albury, 2014).

Boredom and distraction

Take Beatriz (heterosexual woman), for example, who accounted for her porn viewing practices due to boredom. Beatriz explains: ‘sometimes it's because I’m bored and I don't have anything else to do. And it's like, I’m alone, it's like, “why not?”, kind of thing’. Paasonen (2021: 101) notes that boredom is generally conceived ‘as an affective desert of flatness, nothingness, blandness and blah’, and pornography for Beatriz and others can fill a sense of emptiness. Ajay (heterosexual man) and Linh (heterosexual woman) concurred, with the former suggesting porn viewing occurs ‘when we have nothing to do’ and ‘if our mind is empty’, and the latter suggesting themselves and others ‘tend to do the thing that's on their body [masturbate] because they have nothing else to do and it's [genitalia and pornography] right there’. Boredom involves the halting of liveliness, speed, and temporality, and bored people may be hoping for shifts in their affective state, which pornography can offer (Paasonen, 2021). Boredom can make people uncomfortable and stuck, and pornography can undo such affective flatness (Paasonen, 2021).

Boredom and bored people can also be in search of distraction, and for some participants, pornography can provide the fix to the mundanity of their presence. While distraction is often framed as a negative trait (someone not ‘on task’), it also stands that not everything can be ‘fun’ – such as doing (home)work – and phenomena like pornography can ‘grab’ and ‘pull’ subjects in multiple directions (Paasonen, 2021). Olivia (bisexual woman) describes using pornography as a distraction ‘if I’m procrastinating something academic’, like study or homework. Distraction can operate as a form of pleasure to escape the uncomfortable status quo. The sexual body can also distract us and move us closer to pornography; as Zuri (heterosexual woman) explains, she can see something sexual on social media, and after a few clicks following one thing to the next, ‘then next thing you know, I’m on porn’, situating the ways that porn can (un)intentionally enter into digital media-related practices. Indeed, there are multiple things that can create arousal and pornography can satisfy and enhance such interests and impulses as technology affords pleasure in new and different ways.

Being curious

Curiosity can also stimulate pornography use. Research has commented on the relationship between curiosity and pornography, wherein people may use pornography to explore their own sexual identity (Attwood et al., 2018; Cho, 2015). The participants in this research, however, foregrounded the ways in which they were curious for curiosity's sake. Patrick (bisexual man) and Nell (bisexual nonbinary) were both curious about the variety of pornography available, with the latter suggesting, ‘I’m very aware of the fact that I watch a lot of porn, [and watching] things that I would never, ever do or I would enjoy or that are so whimsical and “out there” that I couldn't partake in them, like futanari, for example’. For these participants, pornography affords bodily and corporeal expression and experimentation, and they are interested in exploring what (real and/or fictional) bodies can and cannot do. Jean (woman and questioning) also observed that she knew some trans people in her private life that did not avow their sexualities, and watching trans pornography helped consolidate (and celebrate) her own beliefs about trans sexuality:

I know a few trans people that are not comfortable with that kind of level of intimacy. So seeing that there are some trans people that are and also are willing to show how that works for them specifically, it's more interesting to me. So it's how it is for me really. Most of the time, the porn that I consume doesn’t stimulate me, it just intrigues and inspires me.

For Jean, pornography was in this instance not viewed ‘primarily for the sexual pleasure of the audience member’ (Sullivan and McKee, 2015: 4), but instead, as a site with which to explore and celebrate trans sexual subjectivity. The participants also described the relationship between curiosity and porn as a temporal process, where for many it inspired their viewing when they were younger, but they were much less curious through its exposure as they got older.

Porn as fun

For many, pornography was fun. Some participants recounted sharing pornography within their friendship circles as a form of playful fun. Some people watched pornography with their friends or shared it virtually via text messages and social media. Nell (bisexual nonbinary) recalls watching pornography with a friend:

I remember one time I put on Kim Kardashian's sex tape ⁴ as a joke with a close friend and we just laughed, but we didn’t watch it. We just watched the beginning of it and I had a good laugh and then just moved on.

Others exchanged videos virtually with each other, such as Jean (woman and questioning) who shares porn with a friend ‘just for funnies’, while Shashi (nonbinary and gay) likewise notes sharing porn functions for ‘entertainment purpose[s]’. There was a sense in which pornography was not shared because of its sexual appeal but because of its extreme or comedic value, and that participants were testing the waters with their friends to see what they thought about particular practices and representations. This can occur together, as friends watch physically in the same space, or such sharing is afforded through features that enable copying/pasting and sharing across platforms using private messaging features, for instance, to explore such porn content within friendships. As Patrick (bisexual man) explains:

it wouldn’t be something that was like, ‘this really got my rocks off, you should have a look at it’. It would be something just kind of disgusting or just a little bit fucked. Almost like a joke. It wouldn’t be anything serious or anything like that.

The participants are describing ‘shock porn’, which refers to pornography that is deliberately intended to drive states of surprise, shock, amusement, disgust and/or embarrassment (Jones, 2010; Paasonen, 2017). Shock porn involves bodies and acts that deviate from social norms, and it may be that through their engagements with the abject, the participants seek to re-assert their normality, establish trust, connection and understanding with their friends, and affectively register a range of intensities such as disgust or amusement (Jones, 2010; Paasonen, 2017). It may be that pornography provides productive possibilities for belonging, connection, identity-formation and friendships between young adults (Hanckel et al., 2019). The participants distinguish between reality and fantasy and orientate themselves toward porn for many forms of exploration and experimentation (Barker, 2014).

Exploration and experimentation

Exploration and experimentation were central to many participants’ porn spectatorship. Jean (woman and questioning) enjoys watching pornography because of its wide and varied nature: ‘it's nice to see that there's so much different content in pornography’. Here Jean talks to the possibilities afforded by platforms for being able to access diverse forms of porn, enabled through search and tagging tools they all understood how to use. Watching pornography for Jean also involves a ‘guilty pleasure type thing’ because of sex's otherwise often private nature. She explains:

It's so intimate and knowing that people put themselves out there for others to see, it's like this, maybe I shouldn’t be seeing this, but I will. It feeds into my interest in taboo topics, even if they’re not inherently taboo, if that makes sense.

Watching porn for Jean is a guilty pleasure because it publicises ostensibly ‘private’ behaviour (Kipnis, 1999). For Rocco (gay man), viewing pornography is ‘pretty much a way to essentially see how things happen if I can't essentially have that in my own personal relationships’. Seeing different or non-normative practices feeds sexual excitement, titillates and inspires renewed sexual interest, as well as enables space for exploration (Albury, 2014; Keilty, 2018; Paasonen, 2011). As Will (heterosexual man) said, pornography enables and affords space to ‘explore your sexuality, explore what you’re into, [and] what you’re not into’. He added: ‘I don't think porn is just something to get you off. But it's also something you can explore. You can see what you like, [and] you can see what you want to try in the bedroom’. Attwood et al. (2018: 3747), in their project which included younger age groups (under 18s and 18–25 years), found that engaging with pornography was a means to reflect ‘upon their readiness for sex, what they might like to engage in, with whom, how and what might be ethical considerations for themselves and prospective partners’. Attwood et al. (2018) found their participants used pornography as a means to learn and to avoid the potential for ‘risky’, ‘stupid’, or ‘reckless’ sexual encounters. It may also be that young adults use pornography to compensate for ‘insufficient’ sexual opportunities with others, or to learn about sex in place of inadequate sex education, and such exposure affords forms of exploration and experimentation with sexual (dis)likes, possibilities, and desires (Albury, 2014; Attwood, 2005; Barker, 2014). Our findings show some practices are clearly demarcated by gender, in relation to young men most prominently discussing the connection between pornography viewing and (possible and future) exploration and experimentation.

Porn as relaxing and relief

Pornography can also be instrumental in affording viewers opportunities to relax, sleep or relieve stress (Attwood et al., 2018). Qian (heterosexual man) explains matter-of-factly: ‘porn doesn't have much meaning to me besides it being a stress reliever and a way to go to sleep’. The results under this category were highly gendered, with Qian, Omar (heterosexual man), Frank (heterosexual man) and Ajay (heterosexual man) all agreeing that porn provided relaxing and stress relieving qualities. It has often been argued that porn serves the (presumed straight) male viewer and these participants may derive particular pleasure through its authorial intentions (Williams, 1989; Paasonen et al., 2021). However, it was not just men in our sample who framed it this way; women also reported using pornography to aid stress, suggesting that viewers can approach pornography from a range of different identifications, and with varying uses in mind (Paasonen et al., 2021). Camilla (queer woman), for example, stated that ‘8 out of 10 times’ she uses porn for ‘stress relief mainly’. Olivia (bisexual woman) similarly noted porn's use as a stress reliever: ‘I would say if I’m more stressed, I would watch it a lot more, or if I’m procrastinating something academic, I probably use it as a distraction’. This latter observation again observes the dynamic nature of pornography viewing, where multiple affordances – stress, procrastination and distraction, for example – overlap and assemble when engaging with porn. That stress relief is important is insightful. Youth studies researchers have documented the rapid changes and uncertainty many young adults face, creating contexts of stress. Moore et al. (2021) for instance have noted the ways young adults currently face contexts of rapid change and intersecting crises, which includes the ongoing effects of COVID-19, precarity, casualisation and housing affordability, which exacerbate and extend existing inequalities. The current moment is another iteration of multiple crises and (techno)panics that continue to routinely constitute young adults as (already) risky and/or at-risk (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014; Mulholland, 2013), and point to the historical and contemporary social unease regarding young adults experiencing and doing sexuality online (Korkmazer et al., 2020). That is, porn as a distraction to study or stress relief is situated within broader stresses of everyday life for young adults.

‘…for a dopamine hit’: porn for pleasure

Finally, many of the participants watched pornography for the simple pleasure the experience brought to them. Rocco (gay man), for example, noted the immediate rush and enjoyment porn viewing brought him: ‘the reason why I watch [porn] is pretty much just for a dopamine hit, that it makes me feel good for a bit’. Frank (heterosexual man) also noted that pleasure was central to his porn viewing, where ‘if there was no pleasure aspect to it, I wouldn't watch it’, further noting that porn exists ‘as a tool for my own self-pleasure’. Crystal (bisexual woman), Patrick (bisexual man), Kay (bisexual woman), Zuri (heterosexual woman) and Nell (bisexual nonbinary) all agreed. Much like other affordances, pleasure, for its own sake, attends to states of affective flatness and offers intensities and ecstasies. The proposition that pornography affords pleasure is arguably anxiety-inducing for a sex-negative culture. Young people and adults forms of ‘leisure’ – such as skateboarding, or in our case, pornography viewing – are increasingly pathologised as deviant, and such pathologisation restricts agency (Winlow, 2019; Smith and Raymen, 2018). The increasing stigmatisation (and surveillance) of leisure renders large swathes of social practices problematic, including pornography. Clearly there is a need for more complex and varied accounts, and specifically to meaningfully listen to and make sense of young peoples and young adults experiences of such forms of leisure (Howard et al., in-press). Suffice to say, where pleasure and leisure need not be conceptualised negatively, and where conditions of possibility exist, boredom, distraction, curiosity, fun, exploration and experimentation, relaxation, stress relief, and pleasure are all sides of the same coin – and pornography provides the necessary affective stimuli to enhance, alter or attend to these affective states. Situations (e.g., work and isolation) come together with emotions (e.g., boredom) in a socio-technological way that afford possibilities to find, search, explore, experience and play with porn.

Conclusion

Pornography is heavily stigmatised and alleged to be the product of all sorts of social dangers (Sullivan and McKee, 2015), exacerbated for young adults, who are already situated as already and always ‘risky’ and/or ‘at-risk’ (Turnbull and Spence, 2011). It is so heavily stigmatised that pornography is regularly scapegoated for all sorts of problems and often invoked to ‘express many kinds of intense revulsion’ (Rubin, 2011: 272; Hester, 2014). The young adults accounts are at odds with the prevailing public narrative, as they recounted experiences and practices that were much more banal, mundane, and playful than what dominant narratives allege and account for. Far from the sexually corrupt or dangerous, the participants spoke of the playful, incidental, experimental and the mundane affordances that inform their pornography viewing. Pornography is of course an easy target – it is ‘low culture’ and often transgressive – but this scapegoating not only overplays the significance of pornography, but it also fails to recognise the contexts in which young adults make use of porn as part of their daily digital media-related practices. Specifically, our findings suggest there is a need to take some of the ‘hot air’ and hysteria out of the debate and take more seriously the lived experiences of the people who watch it.

After all, the participants in our study approached pornography from a less hyperbolic angle than might be expected, and they illustrate the ways that digital media-related practices afford many affective possibilities. The participants negotiate online and offline circumstances and spaces, using the digital functions available to them to consume porn that affords boredom, relief, distraction, curiosity, fun, exploration and experimentation, relaxation, stress relief, and pleasure – and these also serve as ends in themselves. Paasonen et al. (2015: 1) argue that the ‘fluctuating and altering dynamics of affect give shape to online connections and disconnections’, and online pornography, as our findings have shown, provides many playful avenues within which their affective states can be satisfied. There is much more to sex and porn than ‘drama’ and focusing on ‘play’ broadens the possibilities afforded to young adults by digital objects.

Amidst the contemporary controversies regarding young people and pornography, the findings in our study might appear particularly quaint. Far from the ‘sexually damaged’ discourses that dominate, our findings suggest that there need not be any functional goal beyond the enchantment, fun and fantasy by engagements of pornography viewing itself, where a range of everyday affects are afforded as ends in themselves. ‘Drama’ can certainly feature in people's porn viewing, but other playful, banal, and mundane activities interpenetrate the practice, and such activities can provide many different affective states that do not lead anywhere other than as things in themselves. There is more to porn use than drama, and focusing on drama alone elides the many other playful states that envelope porn use. Our participants showed us that moving from ‘texts and effects’ to ‘experiences’, and from ‘drama’ to ‘play’, identifies more nuanced and capacious elements of porn spectatorship that are unfettered by dominant moral panics.