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

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.