A critical discussion of amateur webcam videos featuring women masturbating constructed for the purposes of Internet broadcast as inflections of sexuality, “pure cinema,” media representation and identity.
1.
http://xhamster.com/movies/5399/sexy_blonde_babe_masturbating_on_webcam.html An amateur points and shoots, enjoying herself to the point of forgetting there is a camera recording.
Porn is ubiquitous, especially with the facility of moving online now more than ever. [1] On the web, free video “tubes” modeled on YouTube’s interface and ease of use have taken the industry, offering millions of hours of content that was until 2005 a billion dollar industry. This new trend to get as much content out there, in the form of free video clips and even entire ripped DVDs and websites streaming online, along with human nature to get (or share) for free what might otherwise be obtained for money, has changed how we consume pornographic images, no longer ghettoized or restricted to the seedier parts of town. [2]
A fast growing subset is webcam videos – so called because they are created by the cameras hooked up to personal computers and installed in most laptops. This intimate audio-visual connection to your personal computer and the tools of everyday communication, and the realization of new virtual personal spaces in chats and f2f (“face to face”) communications made possible by digital telephony have meant a vast majority of these webcam communications and events (occurring often spontaneously on a cam) are recorded, and thousands of them find themselves online, particularly when the people are naked.
This is self-made porn made easy. The vast majority of the corpus (and that this study is interested in) isn’t professionally produced, although some of it is clearly created with higher or at least normalized production models and aesthetics (by porn standards). The overwhelming and somewhat problematized amount of the amateur “let’s try it” stuff is no small anomaly.
Everybody wants to get into the act and everyone can, regardless of their technological ability or glamorous “porn-star” looks or lack thereof. That’s part of the charm – the earthly democratic nature of it. With new technology in almost every laptop or portable USB-ready webcams available for under $30, anyone can film themselves while they sit on the computer and show off a little some lonely night or early morning. The process to upload is frictionless and depending upon the settings of the site you’re loading your clip to and your intent it’s for all practical purposes anonymous.
The clips, mostly one-offs and desperate horny evidence of exposed genitalia and masturbation as lurid display, manage to construct a self-organizing body of coherent surveillance-inflected “pure cinema” [3] /”verite” [4] reality content. Yet these clips, as a category, comprise a specific and cleanly delineated genre, with subgenres, that demonstrate rules of production and modes of address, narrative engagement strategies, and learned and potent signifiers that are well-honed and readable as if the most rigorous documentary filmmaker was behind the camera.
We should understand this is a self-replicating folksonomy for the most part that is generated through imitation – the democratic technological ability empowers amateurs to create content that mirrors professional content, which is reflected in the professional content in aesthetic rhymes of non-professional “authenticity.” Certain sites in particular are populated by clips fed from porn-production companies in contrast to those that position themselves as true amateur sites. [5] But a media-savvy consumer of images interiorizes an aesthetic and can recognize and ultimately favor certain attributes. The clips at the points of the reception, although anonymous and often without visible faces, are positioned for the receiver by codes that are embedded with intent, even if they are implemented subconsciously. Indeed they are most effective when they are perceived as accidental and recklessly employed.
The purpose of this discussion is to explore the visual ontology and signifiers of intent and reception in amateur masturbation videos. Professionally produced clips, often starring professional “models” with the intent of monetizing their shows in an online venue or agency with a per-minute rate or membership structure, have different standards of aestheticizing their clips and usually follow institutionalized (and standardizable) aesthetic behaviors and modes of production (based both on porn industry models and web content assumptions). Those standardizations will be discussed as they inflect and influence those here.
This discussion is made up primarily of examples to illustrate various textual elements, ontological tendencies inherent in production circumstances, and stylistic nuances. The nature of the category, a field of texts fragmented, anonymous and in many cases orphaned and appropriated by others, precludes rigorous investigative research into actual producer’s motives.
Nevertheless, trends manifest and emerge through study, and a corpus of practices emerge and influence each other.
Everyone is a filmmaker.
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1955832060 Single-angle camera work, flat lighting, identity hidden and an unglamorous body type all inflect a complete openness.
The set up is simple. You point a camera at yourself, naked, and masturbate in front of it while it records, for show as much as for pleasure (and the distinction can be deduced). After which you upload the video to one of many of the “tube” sites anonymously, getting a vicarious thrill out of having shown your intimate and naked personal behavior to potentially thousands of strangers with an implicit understanding that the clip can be replicated and reposted endlessly, out of your control. You’ve just fucked yourself in front of the whole world.
The predominance of the “self-shot” masturbation or “solo” clip genre is positioned specifically as produced by everyday auteurs as spontaneous display, for the most part one-person productions with a camera, established at the beginning of many clips often with the subject leaning out to reposition, as if just turning the camera on (and leaning in at the end to stop the recording). The clips are texturally visual evidence of spectacle, mediated solely by the subject in a mode of “pure cinema,” and any compositional flourishes or nuance to the mise-en-scene is subconscious and unconscious. Webcam masturbation videos are displays made public, digital artifacts of a forbidden “frenzy of the visible,” [6] and ideally without embellishments or obvious or normalized mediation.
They are autobiographical rather than mediated by another producer and, based on the mise-en-scene and apparent lack of pre-arrangement of extra-textural and subtextural details, are spontaneous and documentarian, working primarily as segments without narrative. In spite of their presumed (if constructed) amateur and non-professional status such cues readable in the “non-intentional” subtext suggest richer layers of evidence not explicitly part of the texts, and invites deeper reading and analysis.
It is worth pointing out that the vast majority (by a non-statistical survey over 75% on the main sites) of these visual “texts” are of teens, or say in the text surrounding they are, members of a new generation of web-savvy and tech-comfortable people, watching themselves (and captured) in a camera-centric view. Their subsequent masturbatory explorations can be inflected as adolescent curiosity, and many of these girls/subjects engage the camera in an absent gaze. The address, sometimes couched as part of an online “chat” or “my girlfriend shows for me” suggests a relaxed and not pre-meditated display and upload.
Furthermore, the engagement with the camera (and the absent /future spectator) by eye contact is generally interactive and the presence of the camera is acknowledged. A sub-genre of webcam videos concerns “hidden cam” narrative subtext and “accidental” voyeuristic events, which does not inflect the category under discussion here. They carry with them a suggestion of invaded privacy and unintentional display by the subject, a positioning that serves to fire different erotic impulses in the spectator, trading on the assertion that the subject’s sexuality (whether visual or behavioral) is not implicitly a direct address.
Hidden cam videos, however, like the webcam self-shot genre discussed here, are inflected with the POV (“point of view”) aesthetic, akin to many normative documentary stylizations that intrude on and create a “fourth wall” space by which to intrude in the narrative and construct a personal mode or avenue of address. I consider here the more direct face-to-face engagements with the invisible spectator and the willingness to openly confront that gaze reciprocally as an aggressive and interactive reclamation of normative, passive automatic cinema for personal and sexual ends.
While these clips function primarily as evidential documentations of sexual experiences, they are also assertions of sexual self-knowledge. In this context they document personal narratives and demonstrate how personal evidence can create personal identity without conscious intent.
2.
Mise-en-scene. Composition and Intent.
http://www.xvideos.com/video307264/webcam_super_sex_porn In the laundry room, she types, then strips, and masturbates with a hairbrush. The unrehearsed nature of the actress and the real-time playing out of the 28+ minutes of the clip suggests a true amateur, not a staged “model” event.
The clips are usually straight-forward, anonymous and without extensive subtext in their presentation (“Teen masturbates on webcam” often the nature of the explanations) and automated in that the camera runs unmanned and unmoving, allowed to record unmolested and objectively what is in front of it. It is a personal interaction with the technology between subject and the medium, and yet broadcast (in the original term; broadly and untargeted) “on the web,” certainly not private for long. The events depicted are passive, exhibitionistic and open purely to chance discovery, ultimately no more than visual texts encoded with semiotic textures that follow any number of aesthetic rules.
Pornography is a form, as all artistic expressions, of self realization, and the more personal and individualized it is, the more specific the expression. A filming of a personal masturbation (or “jill-off”) session may be codified as the most intimate and expressive performance art possible, private and physical, unfakeable in its vulnurable display and texture as event. Yet any visual object by nature of its having captured an event performed for a recording device, can not avoid the artifice by which it is manifested and questions the motives and modes of production and representation. We like to think we know “drug real from real real,” but the assumptions we have both before and during production of these texts and in the subsequent disseminations online inflect how we respond to these “autobiographical” and “true” texts.
http://xhamster.com/movies/301433/desi_girl_fingering_on_webcam_wearing_gstring.html Managed (or accidentally?) evocative mood lighting and an overly explicit camera angle construct urgency while conveying previous intent.
Exhibitionism is tied intimately to voyeurism, in that the positioning of the viewer (and in this case, the presumption of a “male” gaze, at least “heterosexual” one) is dependant upon the subject’s willingness to be observed. The behavior of the subject, here textualized as personal and intended, positions and facilitates the voyeuristic gaze as a safe and enabled manner, inviting the gaze and objectification. An important part of the voyeuristic thrill of seeing a webcam or self-shot video is the fact that the subject is not only not inadvertently presenting her charms but is intentionally exhibitionistic as well as technologically savvy enough to be able to broadcast the evidence/share the proof of audio-visual behavior/event. The subtextural resonance plays on and moves beyond the constructed “hidden cams” positioning by embracing a display that is intentional rather than accidental, a fixity of performance that is premeditated through awareness of it happening, while it is happening, and further providing the agency – uploading – to continue to allow the exposure and enjoyment by the future spectator to transpire.
The narratives are not surreptitious or hidden; they are not “stolen.” The genre of sexy dancing videos (for example on Youtube, which is a growing category often subject to take-downs that show provocative if chaste bikini fingering and “booty” shaking) straddle the line between culturally acceptable “found” erotic footage and out-and-out jerk-off material. (The standard level of expression in these videos is very much contextualized as youthful female teenagers flashing in a public forum and expressing an adolescent physical display just inside the limits of decency. They are seeped in a “look what I’m doing” transgressive dare that tests the legal boundaries and policy limits of the site as well as personal limits). Masturbation videos, coded as “authentic” and real, are quotidian by contrast, shocking and blunt visual engagements less political than personal. Their exhibitionistic display crosses any policy boundaries to create objective texts without agendas.
l
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1113772671 (also at http://www.keezmovies.com/video/my-coochie-deserves-some-pleasure-480238?utm_source=PBWeb&utm_medium=MGP&utm_campaign=PBWeb) Low camera angle, no foreplay, and rocking on a vibrator to orgasm in less than 3 minutes. She doesn’t even take off her shirt.
Importantly, masturbation clips are generally anonymous. The framing statistically favors if not overwhelmingly so on the lower half of the body. The face is out of frame and may even be obscured if it is in the frame – if not, it may be turned away.
http://xhamster.com/movies/290746/horny_housewife.html Everything about her is well presented and in full view… except her face.
The power of masturbation webcam clips is in their expression of outreach – a performative display that realizes real-time sexuality and an embrace of self-knowledge. They are not possibly fictional in the sense that the demonstrated physical display is their text. The masks or signifiers that obscure the details of an identity also allow the subjects to be more open and unencumbered by social roles. Social restrictions are less inhibited when your identity is not at stake.
http://xhamster.com/movies/228699/jewels_impressive_multiple_orgasms.html After sitting down, she keeps her head tipped back through the whole clip to avoid actual identification. Yet she is as open as possible in a room which is curiously unadorned. Its lack of distractions is a distraction in itself, calling attention to the setting’s austerity. Note cable hook-ups. [7]
http://www.empflix.com/view.php?id=40577 This secret has been obscured after the fact, with a smearing effect that is, strangely and perhaps problematically, not a 100% distracting buzzkill.
And:
http://www.fux.com/video/4652/pointing-the-camera-to-my-pussy-i-stated-masturbating-infornt-of-the-web-cam-for A more inelegant blocking of the subject’s face, and blatantly more erotic. Technology crudely but effectively asserts its presence as well as being implemented.
The visual power of explicit pornographic events is the carrier of a self-sexualizing assertion by the subjects in an anonymous venue both protected and ubiquitous. The category’s status as devalued and unmediated, and therefore “artless”, objects restricts serious study of their sociological attributes or the phenomenological assumptions of transgressive modes of conduct that convey identity through their use as evidence. I suggest and assert they are unique cultural texts in which signs of meaning are implicit, intended, received and exploited.
Signs.
A certain population of these videos display shaved pussies, a visual attribute of many porn stars since the aluminum age of porn-on-video (1990 – present), and probably adopted in imitation of the models the subjects are replicating in their own self-shot porn. The masturbatory events depicted generally do not have a slow or long buildup to the heart of the masturbations, generally beginning quickly in a gesture that suggests the subject knows what they intend to do right away. Exceptions include those whose nature is a “captured” extended video-chat. Toys are prominently used, including personal dildos, vibrating eggs, and any number of large rubber vibrators. (This comprises an empirical body of evidence in itself.) Bottles and vegetables are not uncommon, and over a dozen can easily be found with hairbrush handles in use. [8]
http://www.xvideos.com/video310091/sexy_girl_masturbates_with_a_hair_brush
…and…
http://www.xvideos.com/video260012/masturbation_with_her_hairbrush
Most of the hairbrush clips feature teens, suggesting lack of resources, spontaneity and urgency (and perhaps lack of imagination. Whatever works; the more kinky and odd objects and practices invariably feature ”mature” and more experienced subjects).
An ontological and compositional decision that encodes the visual experience is whether the full body or just close-ups of the genitals is visible, the so-called “genital event” as element or sole focus.
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/amateur-plays-with-pussy-on-her-webcam-131609.html On a towel, all content with no superfluous production values. At least the lighting’s good.
The suggestion of these close-up jill-offs is of a horny and spontaneous display without elaborate staging, an exhibitionistic revealing of the personal masturbatory event in its most quotidian detail, just a open-legged flashing look-at-my-pussy dynamic text. Other times the horniness of the performer seems to get the best of the subject. There can be displayed a frenzied masturbatory urgency that creates a frission of passion and erotic lack of control when captured clearly and without artifice (and is much enhanced with sounds of breathing, moaning and sloppy wet splashing captured as well.) The limiting camera viewpoint, often too close, is a visual compromise that aids anonymity (no body parts or even body type easily visible) and attempts to capture or recreate the intense sexual focused concentration.
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/tight-teen-plays-with-her-pussy-140954.html On a hill or rockpile, this hiker set up a camera on a nearby rock creating context by virtue of the location. Yet the focus is on the genital event.
In the above example, we hear the wind as it blows which also seems to gently move the camera/webcam/laptop back and forth (we assume her spasms aren’t rocking the rocks beneath her). This wilderness subtext resonates on the thrill of outdoor exhibitionism, being close to nature (and feeling sexual surrounded by open spaces) and an increased awareness of discovery in what could be a public location. (The porn-star tattoo, however, subconsciously suggests this could be a clip-for-hire from a professional model, or at least one aware of the accoutrements to be added to her skin when less clothed.)
The subject in this clip picks up the camera near the end and holds it closer to herself, in an acknowledgement of increased intensity or at least to convey such. Such an intrusion changes the performance from purely objective and documentarian to a mediated and (self-) inflected document, positioning our subject as interactive interrogator and commentator.
Transgressions.
The following starts with a tight close-up of her riding and jerking with a bottle of beer. She reaches down and adjusts the camera merely to show it more to the camera:
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=68bf8c61dc165b5b10d7 Intense close-ups and moaning in the b.g. that is convincing in itself, before she moves the camera up to show her face.
Yet, by the end in the last 2 minutes, the shot dissolves/wipes to a static shot of her face as she opens the bottle and lustily takes a drink. (The static camera suggests she is alone with this display – yet the dissolve suggests a higher level of editing – and mediation – took place before posting). She lets the beer spill on her tits and then reaches forward then she pulls camera down to show her pussy as she pours more on herself then puts the open bottle inside her again. Beer spills on the tile floor. The wider angle gives us context, a view of her face and enjoyment of the filmed event, and her home environment. The close and inhibited camera work has relaxed and pulled back to show our subject in process, in the performance and the enjoyment of her masturbatory play, the ultimate transgression, that of identity.
http://xhamster.com/movies/349653/masturbation….html Out of doors. Context is all.
Setting up on a picnic blanket, the subject films herself, looking furtively back and forth every so often. Yet her legs remain wide open, she pees on the blanket near the end and zooms in (with a hand-held remote) to show us a closer and presumably intense view of her pussy. The effect of her mediation within this found nature clip is unnecessary as we see enough and has the effect of a reiteration of standardized modes of cinematic display (a more gynecological close-up of genitals) the subject may have felt were missing. [9]
The presence of the remote and the subject’s acute awareness of the camera’s gaze, particularly in relation to the possible existence of other spectators around her, brings up issues of placement, both physically and in terms of ontological positioning, in relation to the technological facility demonstrated by some subjects. This inflection will be discussed below.
http://www.xvideos.com/video320856/chubby_amateur_piss_her_pants She wets her pants, takes them off, sits in the piss, then pees again on the floor and rubs herself with her wet panties.
A clip that involves peeing. These transgressions are not to shock so much as to assert an identity. Significantly these examples show the face (in the first instance, finally). These are assertions of sexual and personal behavior, potentially socially stigmatized and generally private. These are signed statements of who these people are and how they act, presented as evidence… and how they fuck themselves.
Stages. Anonymous bed spaces.
Settings out of the ordinary also reveal unspoken motivations and backstories, often inflecting and resonating in subconscious and powerful ways. Webcam videos captured in unusual or unexpected places suggest a more exhibitionistic or daredevil attitude beyond mere exhibitionism, and reveals a willingness to experiment.
This paper is for the most part not interested in professional webcam or live-cam set-ups, most of which are attempts to part viewers with cash (usually on a per-minute rate) to watch a professional or semi professional masturbate in a controlled and more mediated and commercialized setting. The motivation for these are situated differently than anonymous videos of exhibitionism. These “live cam” links are advertised on the sidebars of the tube sites (which is how they monetize their server space, through display ads and click-throughs, an invitation towards true interactivity the passive viewing of clips don’t quite offer). They involve continuous real-time and financial involvement and are ephemeral one-time happenings, a different kind of erotic engagement.
Upward of 50% or more of the webcam videos are online have been captured digitally by these streams (on Pornhubpersonals.com, cam4free.com, and Smutcam.com for example) or were placed there specifically for spectators (and potential future users) to find, a kind of free advertising which the numerous and ubiquitous banners and watermarks suggest. This category, not amateur or spontaneous, are often signified by the visual presence, often foregrounded, of computer keyboards and mikes and other technological tools that create an environment of engagement and agency.
http://www.xvideos.com/video296497/webcam_chick_fingering_in_webcam A professional, verifying that she types her answers to your questions as you watch, a reminder of the immediacy of the experience and the carriers/technological methods of connection.
The presence of keyboards and webcams and other technological components of conducting the conversation contextualizes the behavior of the subjects/models (these live-cam girls are referred to as “models” by the sites but are often referred to colloquially as “camwhores” ) as connected and responsive, an emphasis of the face-to-face/screen-to-screen transactional relationship happening and possible. Indeed the spectator is viewing the event on his/her own computer screen with a keyboard in front of him. Most of these videos take place in non-descript bedroom sets with neutral or pastel colors, even lighting, flat walls behind a bedboard, and without any unnecessary personal clutter.
These are literally staged sets in which a webcam is set up for a for-pay performance.
The initial camera angle invariably includes the girl facing her keyboard (often wireless) with her legs open, and she may also have a remote that controls the camera’s angle and zoom (which is demonstrated later in the deeper events of the “show”). Some girls even wear a hands-free headpiece so they can talk back to the audience. The mise-en-scene includes watching the girls type their responses in real time on their computers as they masturbate in front of you. The models come across no more than as efficient operators, ready to take your call.
The settings reveal intent as well. Setting is context, and the surroundings that narrativize the reasons and motivations (presumed or suggested) for being naked and masturbating in public/online says as much about the heat and sexual erotic level as the mere visual display. The difference between a composition as this:
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/hot-masturbating-172159.html Webcam girl, talking, buzzing, and typing off-screen.
and this:
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/sexy-amateur-plays-on-webcam-172578.html Webcam girl, fingering and watching herself off-screen.
…demonstrates the many visual cues in what could otherwise be considered very similar compositions. The top example is positioned as a professional ready to do business by playing the role of site of visual pleasure and offering a forbidden spectacle (and receptacle of your credits), posed tightly but not too tight, with a non-obtrusive background and soft lighting, keyboard just out of view.
The bottom example is positioned as an amateur more interested in a one-way self-directed display, and while similar in composition the cropping is awkward and therefore creates a visual imbalance that may contribute to an anxiety or urgency to the proceedings. Any pleasure derived comes from her having exposed herself to strangers unknown and unknowable as much as the spectator’s enjoyment of the raw content of her broadcast. The quality of the lighting alone suggests a less pre-meditative engagement with the camera and masturbation and the slightly distracting details of the drawers and clutter on top also give the bottom example a spontaneous and amateur inflection (as well as a personalized one) while the top example ultimately feels industrialized and sterile.
Yet, in this example:
http://www.hardsextube.com/plug/120042/EXTREMELY-HORNY-WEBCAM-SQUIRT-GIRL-!/ Display of talents, and location of further wonders.
…the awkward framing as well as the harsh lighting is only a constructed ontological ruse as the model’s username and online location of her shows (further codified by the title’s use of the phrase “webcam girl”) is flashed at intervals throughout the clip. Indeed it has become a produced advertisement, regardless of whether or not this model actually appears at the site, under that name.
The fact that the professional webcam streams show the subject/model clearly and in full (if tightly cropped) view also displays a lack of personal risk in terms of being exposed socially by the behavior displayed. It’s almost as if the masturbatory behavior doesn’t really reveal “them” to a high enough degree to take pains to withhold their identity.
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/girl-masturbates-to-orgasm-134052.html In a darkened room without subtext or awareness of the camera, the artifice becomes the text.
An inflection worth mentioning occurs often on the IFeelMyself site (at ifeelmyself.com; also of interest is their sister site, ishotmyself.com) in which amateurs masturbate for the camera and are posted and are captured in natural and “comfortable” environments. While the girls receive financial remuneration it purports to allow “real girls” to be real in front of a camera with a minimum of mediation and fuss. The settings are domestic and the camera remains extremely passive, with only one or two set-ups per masturbatory event and let to run. The minimalist setting without true spontaneity attempts to hide its own construction, mimicing the “invisible construction” prevalent in Hollywood films.
Yet its non-intrusiveness to a fault creates a mediation by absence. The rooms are often darkened to focus on the genital event on display, and ends up constructing a flavor of produced and protected narrative master viewpoint in spite of its attempt to be uninflected. Their ontological “authenticity” is mitigated by the fact that they are produced with similar production values, the models are posed similarly in what can only be describe as a medium-close angle, showing a full-body shot with a minimum of distractions around or behind her and given the same narrative space in which to perform – using an unhurried running camera, unobtrusively static but close, well-liet and revealing point-of-view, and an embracing of a natural and uninflected (if sometimes indirect (to the laptop in view rather than to the camera we are viewing) address of the unseen gaze.
http://www.xtube.com/play_re.php?v=MbdU9_S432_ Performing a show for the web, she strips as she types, watching herself on the computer clearly foregrounded. Based on the framing and the fact that this actress has appeared in a handful of like-composed clips, this is likely produced as part of a regular “model” event, rather than a display of actual sexual exhibitionistic behavior captured.
3.
Cameras and Lenses. I Like It When You Watch.
The hiker-on-the-rocks clip above brings up a point – the idea of the subject’s awareness of the camera and how that is conveyed and engaged in (and to what aggressive level, whether it’s passive eye contact or actually picking up and adjusting the POV). These videos are specifically different in ontological text than “hidden camera” videos or voyeuristically positioned examples which trade specifically on the fact that the subject does not know she is being watched and recorded. Unlike this secret/ borderline illegal subtext (often nuanced with a retaliatory tinge in the titling (see RevengeTV.com, and GFRevenge.org, etc.)), the webcams are self-filmed (or purport to be) and are self-reflexive and self-aware, and create a space between subject and voyeur that is constructed and dependent upon the mode of recording and manner of address.
Technology therefore plays a role, and is often explicitly part of the mise-en-scene, visible and in use.
http://www.xvideos.com/video184436/web_cam_vibe_orgasm The camera as 3rd person. This clip displays the domestic workspace of the performer (who also seems to have a wedding ring), including computer table and glass of wine. At the beginning of the clip another person walks past behind her, as if busy with other chores.
The setting and behavior of the webcam recording is embraced. It creates its own mise-en-scene by having the action framed specifically for it. The presence of technological equipment which facilitates the display (and its recording) comes part and parcel with these videos; there is clearly a behavior having to do with computers, internet, webcams, ease of upload and the mode of presentation is suggested by default.
http://www.xhamster.com/movies/361610/dirty_talk_in_black_boots.html The subject talks dirty to you (in French) and addresses the camera with constant 1st-person eye contact.
The woman here frames her genital event, including lighting and legs outlined by black boots, explicitly for the camera and addresses us as she plays with herself with eye contact, unemcumbered point-of-view and verbal address. No presumption of accidental photography, no accidental voyeuristic inflection, and no unintended invasion of privacy complicates the text.
This example also exploits the subject looking often and seductively into the camera. She engages not only the camera but the gaze of the viewer – us – explicitly and confrontationally.
Problematically and seductively she is also on the phone, complicating the normalized patterns of narrative address. Who’s the listener and how do we fit into this discourse, both included and excluded?
http://www.xhamster.com/movies/235919/real_orgasm_on_the_phone.html Multi-tasking.
The phone serves almost as a prop, presumably as a personification for the spectator that the subject addresses as well with words and eyes as she masturbates for the camera, positioned with intent. The clips suggests we are a part of a phone-sex session but the subject is not listening or speaking so much as holding it to her head in a pose. The non-literal aspect of the clip (here with no sound) may open up the resonance to viewers who may produce their own soundtrack, fantasizing they are the one on the other end of the line and masturbate in private (and silence) as the female partner does for them as well … although she occasionally breaks the fourth wall and glances at the camera (and at us). These furtive glances serve to include us as a 3rd character in her masturbatory menage a trois and to be complicit in a cheating and exhibitionistic relationship that is implicit implication of voyeuristic eavesdropping.
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=17086760 A professional “camwhore,” or someone positioned as such, with laptop, remote and watermark. She zooms in half-way through the clip in an otherwise static, single and distant camera angle.
This example is more explicit in the mode in which the subject addresses her audience, but conflates two technological avenues by implied duplication. The “amateur” framing is certainly standardized, a flatly lit shot from low taking in the whole bed from a distance in which the subject takes off her pants and begins to play with herself. Her laptop computer is visible and open on the bed behind her and as she masturbates for it. The presumption is textualized that it is the device for which her masturbatory event is being performed, not the objective POV seen here.
Yet while the computer viewer may be the primary intended spectator and she is performing for that webcam, it is not the sole case and late in the clip she uses a remote to zoom the camera (in webcam affect) and afford us, spectators of which she makes eye contact with as well and at that moment, a better view.
The argument could be made that the laptop computer between her legs is not the technological device so much as her sexual partner. Likewise here:
http://www.xvideohost.com/video.php?id=ca5439db5b5b3c408b2449043d37b5f2d9633c82 Displaying her nudity to the camera for our benefit, but masturbating for her computer for it’s.
The subject strips in front of the main camera, the initial camera angle in the clip belly-button level and lower, hiding her face in standard ontological practice. But then she retires to the bed and begins performing for the laptop, seemingly changing spectators… or performing for a duality of them, one within the other’s narrative frame, a kind of meta-narrative self-reflection of representation.
http://www.submityourflicks.com/videos/12190/going-deep.html and http://www.submityourflicks.com/videos/12178/shana-on-cam.html Teasing her men. A camera filming a camera filming a subject. And just to make sure you get the point the time-code and footage counter remains visible.
SubmitYourFlicks.com is a site that hosts a much higher percentage of amateur videos than others. Unlike most other, the rhetoric of the titles and tags on the clips is inflected more personalized, preferring such 1st-person verbiage as “My Masturbation” or “My Wife Shows” rather than the more common and generic 3rd-person “Blonde Masturbation” or “Horny Wife Shows”.
Here the subject is filming herself as she films herself. Not only does she show the webcam recording her for the Internet (a view we see from a farther perspective and are not privvy to, although our view is encoded as more “complete,” and we sense we have a benefit not only of seeing her naked genital performance but her interaction with the technology to make it manifest) but she handles the cam as well, a sensual/tactile seizing of the device by which her sexuality is made public.
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1814917430 Her own camera operator. She’s a rocker, and a milf, and someone’s “teengf.” And maybe a goth girl.
The model adjusts the camera when she reclines on the couch and gets to masturbation after dancing and stripping in the beginning. (Of note, in spite of “milfuploads.com” watermark, a sharpie-written “teengf.com” seems to have been written above her left thigh and the rocker [10]/leather jacket /goth necklace and wedding ring also transmit a conflicting and potentially problemitizing set of cues that (perhaps) intentionally deepen as well as confuse resonances and responses.)
The daylight from a window off to the side is a typical marker of housewife/early morning clip texts. [11] Clutter prevails in the b.g. and her interest in the camera angle and our view of her is foregrounded by her attitude towards us.
http://www.pornoxo.com/videos/18426/filming-own-pussy-masturbation.html We follow her and her camera into the bathroom and she gives us her best personal view.
A 8-minute clip that features the subject showing herself in the mirror filming herself with a camera who then enters a small bathroom and puts it up to her pussy as she masturbates in extreme close-up. Then she puts it on the ground to spread for the spectator. This self-mediation affords us a more contextualized view of her whole body, the entire time the subject explicitly in control of what we see and when.
Likewise:
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/tight-teen-plays-for-the-camera-142436.html She doesn’t want you to miss a thing.
The subject alternately points the camera right at her genitals, and points her genitals right at the camera, in a frenzied display and often adjusts the camera as she adjusts herself to focus the point of interest as she sits, stands, types (on a keyboard offscreen), turns around, dances, etc. We see her face only fleetingly during the movements from one position to the other. She even opens the blinds at one point to let in more light. Drunk.
Who Let You In?
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=63ee131e1246da0955bd Webcam behavior documented, for a reward.
Here the subject displays her “work/play” space for a camera man who not only walks around and talks with her but who’s invited to let his cock be sucked, which she does early in the clip (in standard POV-style visual fashion shot from “above”) before turning back to her device and continuing. The observer is part of the text as well as the facilitator of the clip. The contextualization of her postures with and against the webcam and computer create a larger space for fantasy, because of presence of a documentary videographer who participates in a narrative that the presumed spectators, watching the actual webcam show (which we again are not privvy to), have less information about. [12]
Our text is another (unknown) person’s subtext.
http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/amazing-babe-tabitha-masturbating-and-fuck-her-small-pussy-with-big-toy-on-garden-169256.html Open display covered by all angles by a mobile cameraman who remains silent and invisible.
The benefit to masturbation clips covered by cameramen are the more revealing and framed/posed/beautified angles and postures. The visual pleasures of seeing all the good parts more easily is somewhat negatively mitigated by the fact that money is changing hands, during production and (they hope) during later specatorial consumptions. The relatively simple “Alsangels” watermark marks the clip above as professional and possibly having been uploaded to YouJizz.com intentionally for the purposes of advertising.
Each tube site seems to have different aesthetic identities and corporate/professional producer partners who tend to be present and represented, based probably on traffic and demographic and taste of the visitors.
http://www.xvideos.com/video142928/young_teen_fucks_herself Too good to be true?
What may otherwise be a straightforward self-shot event reveals itself as staged as the camera adjusts, ever so slightly 3 or 4 times through the running time. These slight adjustments, not motivated by the subject (who barely changes her posture, and certainly isn’t talking to her partner behind the camera either to suggest a two-way interaction), reveal a presence in the room that is disruptive and unnecessary for the attempted text.
http://xhamster.com/movies/32216/filming_mommy_in_the_van.html Being watched, a mom/amateur in an RV masturbates, then is interrupted by the voyeur who must see in person.
The clip, ostensively about a mom masturbating in van (actually an RV) alone, actually starts with the spectator watching her on a computer screen and masturbating to the images of her enjoying herself in a 5-second shot. After a series of “impossible” shots within the van (angles change and the camera moves, although “no one” is there with her), the camera (and cameraman) advances and finds her still in there, legs open, and he pulls his dick out on camera – which she barely notices.
Her reverie is positioned as personal and private. She eventually gives him a blowjob. Both suggestion of webam/observation/ hidden cam/ and finally a POV camera aesthetic confuses and suggests ultimately more narrative fiction modes of address than a sincere attempt at a powerful authentic example.
My Husband is Watching.
A subset of the genre establishes not only that the display is being filmed by another (rather than a true self-shot, autobiographical clip) but the identity of the recorder, usually the husband or boyfriend. The discourse surrounding these texts often include invitational elements, as if to offer the wife’s behavior for view. These, while not formally part of this discussion here, foreground both the fact that the behavior is for our enjoyment and provides the agency by which we are allowed to do so. The husband or significant other is the one exposing and displaying his wife, and it serves as a form of sexual engagement with her, a voyeuristic and cuckolding element.
A further subset of the “spectator-in-the-room” clip is that in which the husband, explicitly, watches the wife fuck someone else. These tend to be wife swinging or fucking a neighbor or black guy, often tagged as “while hubby films” in a powerful kind of gaze engagement, codifying the mediation and narrative text as a personal spectacle of a forbidden social transgression as well as social humiliation. The added technological upload online (or broadcast) of the event adds a subtextural pleasure of sadomasochistic frission to the voyeurism. The “hubby films” are not relevant here but they have and do contribute to the subtext employed in narrative strategies implemented by webcam videos, particularly those featuring older/housewife-positioned models (the aesthetic and ontological dynamics inherent in self-shot videos by husband-and-wife couples is the topic of a future paper). “Hubby films” also insist in establishing the presence of the observer, often in conflicting, problematizing, and eroticising manners.
In our example below, the wife masturbates (coded by the title) and the cameraman/husband reaches into the frame in the last third to help place the dildo and display her ass for the lens.
http://xhamster.com/movies/77382/my_wife_masturbate_big_dildo.html (also at http://www.xhamster.com/movies/515828/table_dildo_fuck.html) Husband aids the wife in her home-video masturbation display for the Internet.
Of note is the anonymity the wife afforded her by her mask seen at the beginning of the clip, allowing her to show her full body and face without (too much) fear of being recognized, and should be considered a problematic signifier of the power and transgressive nature of anonymity on the web and how much power it gives the people displaying and the people watching. The masks, a relatively uncommon attribute of solo masturbation videos (though much more prevalent in couples amateur tapes), actually inflect identity within an a-social environment in which to self-sexualize, with all flaws and no preconceptions beyond those constructed before the camera. It is in an important way a construct a new or other identity by broadcasting of intense explicit detail in relative social and cultural absence.
4.
Bored Housewives and Lonely Teens. Self-sexualizing.
Where the masturbatory events take place and how it is contextualized, by titles, lengths, or address to the camera, injects meanings across the spectrum beyond what is inherent in the raw content.
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=782081999 Early morning jill-off for the camera before chores.
A domestic backstory, such as the one above, in which the time, place, and relationship status is clearly foregrounded, gives a power to the woman’s (with ring and housewife-style haircut) display, along with the sun streaking through venetian blinds off-screen in what is an early morning position.
http://xhamster.com/movies/342947/home_made._nasty_wife_masturbates_for_all_viewers.html Bad lighting, a hairy pussy, small tits and her favorite toys. A truthful genital event. [13]
Many of these “bored housewife” clips are invitations to enjoy a display from a woman who is less classically glamorous in the porn-star sense, and the production values (or more properly, lack thereof) can embrace authenticity and an almost desperate desire to be nasty and exhibitionist in normalized and everyday settings.
http://www.fux.com/video/4986/ex-wife-what-do-you-think-of-this-do-you-want-more What starts out as a strip tease gets increasingly closer and more explicit.
The titles suggesting that more display is either forthcoming or available is an open invitation to enjoy and continue the sexual engagement by other means, by either finding more of “her” clips or chatting online through some service, something neither of the clips here (above and below) offer (but is possible through the links in the sidebars). These two clips are not textualized as from professional models or as “samples” for camwhore services, and in fact the framing is almost intentionally awkward (and static) in both. Both start or end with the subject leaning out at the beginning having just turned on the camera or leaning in at the end to turn it off. Their static cameras and open displays seem amateur and sincere, particularly with the wedding rings, a detail that is never accidental.
http://www.fux.com/video/5078/if-you-like-it-there-is-more Explicit if awkward camera placement for explicit display. Her tits, smallish, aren’t part of the program.
Such self-mediation is an empowerment, for the subject as well as the receptive viewer who may visually enjoy the sensual pleasures of such empowerment.
d
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1744315931&utm_source=AlexZ&utm_medium=MGP&utm_campaign=AlexZ An intentional framing and posing, with a bright light source, probably a window, yet she doesn’t engage with the camera and barely makes eye contact.
The subject in the above example, titled simply “Relaxing In My Chair,” positions herself with voyeuristic intent as a site of domestic and comforting naturalism, with a hairy pussy and cluttered surroundings, and minimal visual engagement with the camera suggesting a typical masturbatory performance captured neither artificially nor reluctantly.
The context created by the subjects’ poses, willingness to finger themselves and open up their legs, and how close the camera is positioned, reveal varying levels of comfort with a display beyond the explicit detail of the genital event. The context surrounding the event constructs intent as well as identity.
Where Have I Seen You Before?
Where the clips end up is less reliable, as they duplicate and propagate promiscuously without input from the makers but by users. Who ends up putting what up where reveals the demographic taste of those who visit, use, and are reliant upon the specific level of discourse and interaction on their personal favorite sites.
PornHub.com and YouJizz.com generally host more of the professional clips with a representative sampling of the common amateur stuff. Xhamster.com has much more amateur-inflected and self-uploaded material as well as a wide selection of other clips including professional and camgirl/camwhore captures, while Spankwire.com very much the same with some foreign material as well, including some full-length (often older) films. YouPorn.com has a less deep variety, overpoweringly professional, and all seem to duplicate a good portion of the familiar stuff. Yuvutu.com, Xtube.com and SubmitYourFlicks.com have some amateur material not easily found anywhere else.
A self sexualizing.
Bored teenagers experimenting with the interactive nature of the internet as well as their own bodies is a common meme in the clips. As seen on many amateur teen sites, the visage of a beautiful, lithe (often shaved) teenager smiling into a webcam and slowly stripping suggests a social and normalized innocent behavioral rite of passage.
Stickam, the live videochat site, is popular among teenagers in part because many up-and-coming bands post concert feeds and fan-based chats there, and hundreds of streams have been captured there without the subjects knowing. The watermark and other username accoutrements of Stickam are coded as badges of authentic teen masturbatory practice.
http://www.xvideos.com/video322507/hot_webcam From a chaste chatroom-close-up to leaning back and stripping and masturbating, this Stickam sample displays youthful exploration for an audience.
Live streaming chats, often identifiable by subjects typing on a keyboard (often out of frame, under the camera view) and a blueish light on their faces, are captured and reposted – although it was supposed to be a live only event/video live chat. The watermarks, often visible and important signifiers of provenance, create the suggestion of supplying an illicit access meaning as well. When they are allowed to play out in excessive real time (as in http://www.xhamster.com/movies/215769/webcam_teenie_masturbates_in_bedroom.html (72 minutes!, and which also includes a hairbrush), http://www.xvideos.com/video286656/girl_fingering_her_wet_pussy (34 minutes, and which also includes a hairbrush), http://xhamster.com/movies/12623/lets_all_cool_down_with_a_queried_webcamchat.html (47 minutes), http://video2.xtube.com/watch.php?v_user_id=tukmote75&idx=5&v=vxykN-S238-&cl=cTKZw-S238-&from=&ver=3&ccaa=1&qid=&qidx=&qnum=&preview_flag= (55 minutes)) they acquire a status as insistent reality rather than performance (as “real” as those may be) that is practically mummified. [14] These real-time examples have a quotidian boredom stream-of-consciousness factor that can be like watching paint dry, except that the thought processes are not telegraphed up front, but formulate as the moment-by-moment display unfolds.
http://www.submityourflicks.com/videos/23202/laptop-webcam.html No one will ever see this.
Real-Time and Future Time. When the Spectator?
Such sites as msn.com, Yahoo’s chat and camfrog.com allow and facilitate live video chat, which often ends up with naked people trying to impress one another. Besides the random chatroulette spectacle more sensational than social, such sites as pornhubpersonals and meetcam offer the specific facility and purpose to allow you to meet and expose yourself to anonymous users worldwide (when you’re not partaking in the online camwhore streams). Whether or not the streams are captured and posted is a risk you take.
User “iwnt2watchUjerk” (a delicious invitation in itself), on Pornhubpersonals.com, April 2010. A live performance, streamed and not captured or duplicated. At least, no evidence has appeared yet.
The users on such personal chat sites invariably spend long periods of time on them, often loosening up and exposing themselves only when the mood takes them and sometimes after numerous attempts by other users to engage, flirt with, chat and coax the subjects. The ratio of males to females is always out of balance. In any time sampled on pornhubpersonals.com, for example, there will be upward of 900 males (most with their pants down and hard cocks being massaged) while seldom more than 50 women (only a handful showing their attributes, the vast majority staring into their webcam, sometimes with their top off or cleavage provocatively displayed. It’s hard to tell how many are really looking for companionship, how many will eventually masturbate for their cameras, and how many are soliciting for other for-pay services that will be consummated elsewhere online.
The powerful presumption is that the webcam chats are immediate and interactive, and of a moment; personal performance art surrounded by circumstance, audience and intent to engage or excite. They are not texts to be rendered or duplicated, and certainly not primarily to be archived.
The final positioning and conflict within self-shot masturbation texts is their inherent embodying of a lustful and spontaneous capture of a sensual and fleeting moment, contrasted with an infinitely hypermodern iterative accessibility. We as spectators enjoy the anonymous and forbidden displays and decode intent, subtext and personal histories not only into the circumstances of their production but the reasons behind the event as captured. These personal, hidden and transgressive motivations electrify and eroticize the behavior on display, often exploring morally murky waters we ourselves might wish to wade into. The thousands of subjects conflate personal expression and a newly modern virtual community of open and shameless sharing, or perversely, a community that internalizes and puts the shameful expression on display. They embody a new frictionless aesthetic of the body as carrier of identity online and narratize our desires through digital streaming.
I hope I have gone towards demonstrating that the field of material, still open to discovery, has infinite nuances. The following example from giggidy.com originally apparently but also hosted by hardsextube.com is straight and to the point:
http://www.free-vidz.com/video/109489/Fast-Webcam-Orgasm.html A slightly pudgy girl strips off and gets right down to the jilling.
The subtext is non-existent; there are no frills as she types then takes off her clothes to demonstrate an abandonment of normative productive aesthetics for a new standard, that embraces and celebrates the fact that it’s nothing special… and that makes it more so.
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1812203392 A 23+ minute clip situates the subject, the technology and the setting promising the allure of authenticity and completeness.
This clip, it turns out with pornstar Krystal Jordan, isn’t really the “real” thing. But she demonstrates what can’t be faked, a camera between her legs as she opens up and fingers herself until she’s so wet the strings of female cum can be seen to be running off her fingers. The camera stays still until she picks it up again and jams a vibrator in her pussy in full view.
The intent may be to have this clip on her official site and have users pay for access, but in the process she gets herself off, she cums, and we see it slowly and finally happen – in “real” time. And the entire event is filmed, we know, by the subject who fucked herself for us in full view. Paid for or not, that’s fucking hot.
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=678865194 A more authentic example of self-mediation.
[1] As reported here as early as 2003: <http://www.esecurityplanet.com/trends/article.php/3083001/Porn-Pages-Reach-260-Million.htm>.
[2] Trends reported concerning “free” content and how it steers usage… or not, here: <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/07/turns-out-por-1/>, and <http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=2858>.
[3] A definition of “pure cinema” and philosophical presumptions can be found here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_cinema>.
[4] A definition of “cinema verite” and its historical precedents can be found here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cin%C3%A9ma_v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9>.
[5] YouPorn.com and Pornotube.com’s liberal examples of amateur content are belied by the fact that they are often only 2 minutes long, suggesting that they’re trailers rather than a complete clip/event, which upon investigation is the case.
[6] A term and concept popularized by Linda Williams, 1999. “Hard Core”: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible.’” Berkeley: University of California Press. http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Core-Pleasure-Visible-Expanded/dp/0520219430.
[7] The subject, identified as “Jewels,” appears in a couple other clips, all suggestively hiding her identity – barely – and her standing or displaying her whole body as she masturbates for a camera with sunlight streaming in from the side, cunvulsing with a bucking jerk that gets me hard and leaking precum every time. See, most productively, http://xhamster.com/movies/190229/jewels_fucks_herself_soooo_well.html and http://xhamster.com/movies/76517/jewels_gush.html (and for completists, http://xhamster.com/movies/277277/jewels_pleasures_herself.html and what appears to be an initial entry, if only that she has not yet been identified: http://www.xhamster.com/movies/127137/my_cousin_cum_for_you.html).
[8] Including, notably but not exhaustively (and I add to this list as I find them), http://www.spankwire.com/teen-with-her-brush/video212172/, http://www.xhamster.com/movies/357176/sexy_solo_teen.html (standard webcam aesthetic, with self-shot still camera), http://www.xhamster.com/movies/146847/french_cam_girl_60.html (I guess you can tell she’s French because she has hair on her pussy), http://www.slutload.com/watch/2bgiUyAd04d/Hairbush-Masturbating.html (an apparently legitimate Stickam capture),http://www.mofosex.com/videos/23501/Emo-Cam-Chick-2.html (another authentic teen capture), http://www.keezmovies.com/video/don-t-have-a-dildo-use-a-hairbrush-610641 (another probably authentic webcam – and check out her panties around her ankles for the entire clip), http://www.xhamster.com/movies/336893/cute_girl.html (clearly amateur simply because the quality of the image is so bad, but content trumps quality sometimes), http://www.xhamster.com/movies/347962/hairbrush.html (she takes 11 minutes out of a 22 minute clip to get to the brush – nice buildup), http://www.xhamster.com/movies/211340/fran_inserting_a_hairbrush_for_the_first_time.html (her name isn’t really Fran), http://www.tube8.com/amateur/fucking-myself-with-my-brush/191949 (self-shot in tight close-up), http://www.xvideos.com/video198941/rhea_solo (also shot in tight close-up), http://www.xvideos.com/video410207/teen_with_brush (also tight close-up), http://www.xvideos.com/video234907/tight_teen_girl_with_hairbrush, http://www.xvideos.com/video243129/asian_girl_masturbates, http://www.xvideos.com/video367243/redhead_and_her_brush (a stickam web capture that clocks in at 99 minutes), http://xhamster.com/movies/215769/webcam_teenie_masturbates_in_bedroom.html (a 72-minute longform), and http://fuq.com/cgi-bin/atx/out.cgi?s=100&c=1&l=sid:77;iid:1;gid:1353815;kwid:5636;pos:353&u=/movies/135/1353815/teen-squirts-mastributing-with-hair-brush/.
[9] This subject, up to recently considered a one-off amateur, has recently appeared again, here: http://xhamster.com/movies/374289/masturbation.html. (And outdoors again – she seems to like it with the wind between her legs.)
A search for the term “tommelbommel” (almost literally “busty german bitch”) on xhamster brings up 3 other clips with this model (including the http://www.xhamster.com/movies/392367/busty_german_bitch.html, which reveals the unmanned camera on a tripod in the b.g. by which one of the angles seen (intercut with the male’s handheld work) is captured). All have an amateur/stationary camera aesthetic and if she’s not yet a professional she seems on the way. (She’s here too, in a “BBW Pussy Pumping” demonstration.)
[10] Another, shorter version of this clip (eliding the first 3 minutes) can be found and is called “Rocker” (http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1728614456).
[11] As seen particularly in (often housewife-inflected) clips as http://xhamster.com/movies/196385/self_filmed_masturbator_multiple_orgasms_and_squirts.html, http://www.spankwire.com/Mom-Dildos-Her-Pussy-On-Webcam/video118271/, http://xhamster.com/movies/345835/horny_girl_masturbates.html, http://xhamster.com/movies/260978/horny_teen_masturbating_pussy_and_ass.html, http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1744315931, and http://www.jizzhut.com/videos/horny-milf-home-video-140806.html.
[12] Along these lines and with explicit webcam contextualization, although the “filmographer” becomes part of the text by entering into the picture as well, is “Attention Whore Loves To Be Seen” (at http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=363419498) – the subject masturbates for a webcam on the couch in front of her between her legs, while watching the image on the laptop on the coffee table. The entire scene is filmed by a specator, placing the text within its own framework which is extended when he enters (the camera now stationary, truly positoned as a self-shot “anonymous” and automatic video) and is blown by the subject, then bends her over and fingers her, both their eyes and attention on the webcam image on the laptop from the cam now atop the frame.
[13] The appearance of the same model, here (at http://www.xvideos.com/video83843/horny_housewife_masturbating_with_dildo, a longer version with her wearing a shirt, and http://www.xvideos.com/video120645/horny_housewife_fucking_her_pussy_with_black_dildo, with a handheld camera following her antics) is compelling evidence that she was not the only one in the room the entire evening, and that more content was created in that hotel visit.
[14] See the discussion of how video changes how we cognate the indexical nature of “cinematic” motion, particularly in relation to Bazin’s original conceptions, in Rosen, Philip. 2001. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
