Desire and the improvisation of pleasure
Gary W. Dowsett
In this chapter, I want to present two scenarios of bodies-in-sex, which each reveal something about how we do sex, how we understand it and how we are changing it.1 ‘Bodies-in-sex’ is a term I coined years ago to capture the contribution of embodied (physical, emotional) experience in the social character of sexuality. It aims to register distance from both the empirical cul de sac of essentialism (nature, the natural, instinct, drive) and the discursive perils of social constructionism that simply read the social on the body but could not entertain the body’s presence in sexuality (Dowsett 1996).
The first scenario comes from a public domain website devoted to ‘Yaoi’, originally a Japanese publishing genre, also known as ‘Boys’ Love’, which includes novels, fantasy, short stories and illustrations produced mostly by young women for their peers (McClelland 2000). Yaoi focuses on romantic, emotional and sexual relationships between young men but is marketed primarily to women. The second scenario comes from a second public domain website I am calling MyCam4U, which specialises in real time online chat and webcam video exchange that primarily concerns sexual activity and display:
Yaoi and sexual imaginary
‘Please’, Narsus breathed as his bones turned to liquid fire and he melted into that kiss. Then, those strong, callused fingers brushed over one nipple the same moment Darun’s lips dipped to lap at his neck, and Narsus’ faint surprise that Darun was the sexual aggressor disintegrated as his desire rose to new levels … The warm candlelight besides Narsus’ bed brought the slender, yet well-muscled figure of his love into sharp relief. Goddess, he was so beautiful, but … The trousers Narsus still wore marred the sleek lines of his body, and suddenly Darun wanted, needed, to see more. He drew Narsus close once more, found then loosened the drawstring of the offending garment. As the pants slid down and pooled at Narsus’ feet, Darun’s breath caught.
‘So beautiful …’ He trailed off, awed, excited beyond reason by the unmistakable evidence of Narsus’ desire. His lover’s penis was fully erect, was long, slender, just as elegant as the rest of him, and was lovelier than anything Darun had ever seen. Irresistibly drawn, Darun reached out to touch, then hesitated just before he made contact … Narsus opened Darun’s belt by touch, then quickly unfastened his lover’s trousers. He knelt, following the motion of his hands as he slid the pants down over Darun’s slim hips. Finally freed from the restricting cloth, Darun’s erection bobbed gently in time to his lover’s gasping breaths, so tantalisingly close to his mouth.2
Spanking the monkey
‘Showerboi’ takes his time. They are patient, almost reverential, and will come with him at his pace. He stands in the centre of the bathroom clothed in tight jeans and a crisp, white T-shirt. Slowly, he gets everything ready: the soap, face cloth, back brush, shampoo, clean towel, returning to stand for a minute or two in the centre of the room, the centre of the frame, to entice and attract more before starting this Saturday morning ritual, and then stops to re-arrange the camera at a slightly lower angle.
CAPS start to scream off the screen at him – ‘YEH BABY’, ‘THAT’S HOT’, ‘GO 4 IT Showerboi’. He returns to the centre of the room, the centre of the frame. The tight T-shirt reveals his gym-toned chest really well. His pecs preen and his biceps bulge under the short sleeves. He turns to adjust the towel on the rail, showing off his back and butt to advantage. The screen screams again: ‘Sweet man, take it off’, ‘Let me massage those delts’, ‘Lose the T, Showerboi – NOW’. He returns to the centre of the room, the centre of the frame. He undoes his jeans fly buttons and opens the V-shaped space to reveal pristine white Y-fronts with a ‘2 (x)ist’ waist band, with just a hint of a ‘treasure trail’. It’s a nice shot; he can see that in his monitor.
The chat is coming fast, maybe thirty punters on board now. ‘Showerboi’ removes the T-shirt and lowers the Y-fronts in one carefully rehearsed move, but turns his back on the camera at the same time – just to tease a little more – to turn on the shower, moving the clear glass screen and making sure that not too much steam will frost the glass. Turning to his waiting fans, he stands naked, looking gorgeous, he knows, and watches the gasps, smileys and other emoticons and terms he could not repeat to his grandmother surge up the screen, with phone numbers, email addresses, Yahoo IM handles. And then he smiles at himself in the mirror, pleased with the response again, a moment of pleasuretaking unseen by the audience for the frame stops at his chin.
He enters the shower and for the next 15 minutes ‘Showerboi’ slowly and gently washes every part of his body for them all to see. The chat is frenzied; they plead with him; they ‘SCREAM’ at each other; they string statements of desire; they signal ecstasy and orgasm. He starts to masturbate but is in no rush. He knows he has the chat room to himself; the others with cam shows have moved to other rooms and left ‘Showerboi’ to his climax – and he does, ejaculating on the shower screen for the panting fans.
It is hard to imagine these two scenarios without the technology that supports them. The Yaoi narrative may not seem very different from the kind of tales found in the heterosexually focused ‘bodice rippers’ that make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers (such as Mills and Boon) from women readers worldwide. Yet, even if these Yaoi websites have their forebears in print, these electronic sites now allow a rapid sharing of stories and pictures, and inter alia interactive storytelling with each contributor adding to the tale in turn, weaving fantasy and favourite characters between contributors’ imaginations and desires. Yaoi and its sexual imaginary are truly breathtaking in its emotional depth, its beauty and its erotic range. While ‘bodice ripper’ stories elaborate the sexual desires and fantasies, and maybe real experiences, of the women who read and write them, those in Yaoi reside in the imagination and desires of young women who have not experienced such sex acts. Few, I suspect, have even witnessed sex between men. Maybe some have seen versions available in pornography or oblique enactments in films like Brokeback Mountain; but really feeling what men have in wonderful, close, sexy and fulfilling encounters – no! Yet, these young women do know something about how the bodies of young men engage each other. After all, erections may not be all that unfamiliar. Kissing is kissing after all. (Is it?) Maybe some of these women have experienced anal penetration so it might not be unknown either (if without the uniquely male sensation of the overstimulated prostate). But an arousal experience at the hands of another man, with all that this entails physically, emotionally, culturally and symbolically – it is textural and textual – no! For these young women, this can only be imagined.
On MyCam4U, we see something equally originative. With the arrival of webcam technology and its widespread use on such sites, the previous anonymity of internet chat is no longer inevitable. Before webcams, chat users could be anyone they wanted to be and respondents might never really know who was chatting with them. Male? Female? Or even transgender? Gay? Straight? Bisexual? How old? What race or ethnicity? Part of the beauty of this moment in cyberspace was (and still is for those who do not use webcams themselves) that users actually do not know the attributes of the persons with whom they are chatting. Indeed, the ‘real’ identity of chat users can actually be unknowable; the very impossibility of knowing whom users are engaging with and what their real sexual interests are remains part of the allure in chat rooms and cybersex. Straight women can be men and seduce other women (who might also be men); gay men can be women and explore that all time sexual fantasy that no man is really straight after all – and succeed. Everyone can be young and beautiful. In the privacy of one’s own room, one can be seduced, masturbate with a complete stranger doing the same somewhere else, sequenced via keyboard text, and still never be certain who or what anyone is. More importantly, one might not want to know – the very characteristics that we sex researchers think choreograph sex are significant in their absence. In a sense, these social categories and conventions serve no purpose and our ‘independent variables’ are rendered nonsense.
This is not just a cyber-variety of that well-documented identity/practice dissonance evident in the majority of recent behavioural studies of sex the world over, largely generated by the HIV pandemic. Cybersex challenges the very divisibility of identity and practice that sex research has relied on to explain its paradoxical behavioural findings. The internet destabilises the very concept of identity as we have come to utilise it in relation to sexuality, as a category of certainty and difference. The sexual choreography available to users in cyberspace suggests that in the absence of verifiable bodies, identity is only useful in sexuality as an act of endless creation, as performance. As a relatively recent construct in understanding sexuality, identity may become redundant faster than we think.
This scene from MyCam4U exemplifies another more recent shift in the choreography of sex. At the moment of Showerboi’s performance, there were over 2500 people chatting in over 25 chat rooms, which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were 173 live webcams showing at that moment, with a handful of women but mostly men, often stripping or naked, some displaying erections, many masturbating before their cameras and for the audiences they were pulling in the chat room. There was the odd sex toy employed here and there, some crossdressing, the occasional couple (both same and opposite sex), and now and then people having sex, full intercourse both anal and vaginal. There were some real ‘personalities’, such as ‘TigerWoodie’ who auto-fellated his nine-inch penis, and a few who were exercising or cleaning their houses nude – it was not all riveting and arousing. The chat was racy but was not only about sex. However, there was, apparently, a lot of ejaculating occurring. If this indicates anything about how often men ‘cum’ then, thinking on a global scale at any given moment … ah, I’ll let you do the sums.
I have no detailed knowledge on how MyCam4U works technically, but there are also voice chat rooms, email options, preview possibilities and so on. Neither do I know who owns it, how it came into being or how long it has been going. I have no idea how unique it is or how ubiquitous such web sites have become. A ‘Google’ search on ‘live webcams’ at the moment of writing revealed thousands of similar sites. They seemed mostly commercial sites. Many were not sex related, but frequent pop-ups and banners revealed the extent to which things sexual dominate the domain. There is, however, very little commercial marketing on MyCam4U. This site is clearly for amateurs, and Showerboi is just another guy, albeit a good-looking one, doing his thing. He is not a sex industry entertainer, stripper, pole dancer or sex worker as we might usually classify these; he showers and ejaculates for his own audience once a week, a part of his own pleasure and for theirs. That is his gift, his thrill, his desire, offered to others for free in ritual orgasm.
The sexed body is less ambiguous here. There is something incontrovertibly male about Showerboi. The camera cannot lie, at least not easily. Neither Showerboi nor TigerWoodie for that matter confuses. They are men. They reveal men’s bodies. They display unambiguous erections. They ejaculate. Similarly, the women offer breasts and/or labia to view. The few transgender folk declare it, from what I could tell. Distinction here on gender lines requires little help – nudity is a great clarifier. Sexual ‘orientation’, however, is another issue. Distinctions are made primarily (but not only) between gay and straight. It seems to be a ‘boy thing’ too. The women rarely bother with such declarations; maybe they have little need of them and that in itself is interesting. Most straight men add ‘str8’ as a caption; some gay men add ‘gay’. There is clearly a ‘gay’ chat room, understood to be so by everyone, and it is also the busiest. But other rooms are not so clearly non-gay either. There is a considerable degree of banter between gay and non-gay people. Gay men like to play with the ‘str8’ men, sometimes pretending to be women, enticing them to do more, show more; sometimes they get found out. The straight men know it, or some do, and enjoy the game; some get cross and occasionally there is explicit homophobia. Often the women conspire to get men to reveal more information or flesh if they are hesitant. It is a different game these women play: wily, yet explicitly self-pleasuring in their voyeurism and as ambitious in exercising influence.
There is also considerable boundary crossing: straight men praised by gay men for their bodies, humour, erections or ejaculations often say ‘thank you’. There is some cachet for straight men here, some recognition of being a passive yet phallic object of an erotic gaze from both women and men. There is recognition shared with other men, gay and straight, of the obvious pleasure in masculine arousal – a kind of a ‘polity of the penis’. Indeed, Showerboi never declares himself one thing or another and enjoys everyone’s attention. The blurring of boundaries certainly occurs with declaredly bisexual men or within that rapidly enlarging sexual category ‘bi-curious’, but that is not adequate as an underlying explanation. An incident with TigerWoodie serves to show how these distinctions are made and tested, and what purpose they serve. After a self-fellation session, TigerWoodie, who acknowledged warmly the men who watch him while declaring himself definitively straight, was asked if he had sucked any other penises. He answered, ‘No, only my own because I’m not gay’.
Even with gender distinctions clearly marked by visible bodies, and sexual arousal and satisfaction so clearly linked to men’s ejaculation (the women declare they enjoy this too), the boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual are hard to maintain. They have to be worked at constantly or they collapse. An erect, ejaculating penis has no sexual orientation in this domain; sexual action cannot rely on definitive object choice for definition, or as control; pleasures offered by MyCam4U must recognise and accept many sexual interests. Any assertion of sexual orientation dissolves in the act of granting the machine the distribution of attraction and satisfaction.
On the Yaoi sites and in MyCam4U and its like, the process of self-definition, the construction of identity, practice, meaning and experience is amplified, indeed generated, by using multiplying computer categories, and this reveals much about sexual cultures in transition. On the Yaoi sites, the young women are exploring sex through improvisation on their own shared fantasies, for the bodies of the young men they write about (and as illustrated Yaoi stories testify) are highly romanticised and feminised – they are beautiful, lithe young men, even pretty. Yet, these young men’s bodies experience desire strongly and with determination. There is always a dominant one and anal penetration is always ecstatic and wildly ejaculatory. His receptive partner succumbs/surrenders to sex; virginity is lost/given to the other. As these young women write and improvise on each other’s contributions, they raise the sexual stakes, moving beyond salacity to art, mapping their own sexual desires and envisaging futures beyond the accepted boundaries of their own lives. For in Yaoi desire cannot shame, in part because these stories are written anonymously, in a sense hidden from the other young women and behind their characters, but also because these adventures cannot be completely owned. They remain vicarious, and that is its own pleasure.
For MyCam4U users, the site not only offers the speed of instant communication available on Yaoi, but also the possibility of a definitive presence. Where anonymity might once have provided camouflage and facilitated fantasy in pre-cam chat, now identification and exposure has increasingly become the etiquette. Indeed, the machine itself fosters and encourages a new sexual adventure, one lived within the lives of others, one where shamelessness is foregrounded and the sexual is valued and validated. The choices offered by the machines and their sites, as they become more sophisticated and complex, inspire adventure. A good example is the not-soold dichotomy between ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ in gay parlance: top being the penetrative partner and bottom being the penetrated. These terms top and bottom derive from SM, but have become more common in the last 20 years than their antecedents pitcher/catcher, active/passive, butch/bitch. Given the dominance of heteronormative notions of sex as penetration, and of sex ‘roles’ as clearly demarked by gender as penetrator (male) and penetrated (female), this current usage is not surprising. However, those endless HIV behavioural surveys of gay men in many countries have revealed that this hard and fast division is not so hard or fast in practice, and the category ‘versatile’ has been added to gay men’s taxonomy to allow for those who enjoy both modes in sexual intercourse. This is a great help in choreographing threesomes.
However, on websites such as MyCam4U and similar chat sites, this modal preference has been enlarged to five categories recently to accommodate more specificity and variability in men’s interests: there is now ‘bottom’, ‘versatile bottom’, ‘versatile’, ‘versatile top’ and ‘top’. Recently, ‘fully top’ has been added to the list for added certainty. Faced with these choices, one is encouraged not to limit one’s sexual potential. Other such possibilities have multiplied on these sites as well. The sites offer possibilities of defining and refining the sexual self in ways previously unavailable. In the binary code that underpins computing, one is or one is not. Click on a pull-down menu and choose: male, female, transgender, transsexual, transvestite, intersex. Identify as gay, str8, bisexual, bi-curious, queer, questioning. Offer oral sex, kissing, anal sex, toys, SM, watersports. Seek like interests in underwear, Speedos, uniforms, rubber, leather, lycra. Mark the choices as ‘like’, ‘don’t like’, ‘undecided’, ‘want to try’. Choose a handle (site nickname) that indicates preferences: dirtybttmboi, satin_doll, evil_angel. Post a picture clothed, naked, from the neck down, profiling erections or orifices opened to view. Add a short video intro: strip, dance, sing, ejaculate, penetrate. It is not just the presence of the camera that has smashed through the wall of shame that surrounds desire. Now one can perform, entice, embody desire and claim it as one’s own: put one’s whole body, face and all, there declaring oneself phallic, desiring, desirable to whoever wants to watch, and do so unashamedly.
The ever increasing specification of categories of desire or pleasure, and the computation of them to find an audience or sex partners (on- or offline) or enhance one’s singular pleasures, constitute a remarkable shift in inciting desire rather than merely representing it. As one is invited to improvise, sexuality’s traditional binary categories begin to dissolve in the face of the democracy of a machine that is without prejudice or conscience. There is a fragmenting of hetero/homo ‘orientation’ into more specified, yet fluid categories of desire, more defined choreographies, declared exclusivities and finer gradings that are potentially less firmly ‘fixed’. Rather than new forms of ‘sexual identity’ tied to old cartographies of desire, these shifts might best be framed as an emerging cultures or as a performative ethics of sex. They represent something new, something shifting within sexuality. Foucault captured this years ago when he wrote:
Sexuality is something we ourselves create – it’s our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not fatality [i.e. not inevitable]; it’s a new possibility for creative life.
(Foucault 1998: 138)
The internet as we now know it was not available when Foucault said this, but he does get it right; the only things missing from his formulation are the machines with their programmers and their software. More than ever, it is these that increasingly choreograph the ‘deployment of sexuality’ and invite improvisation in our pleasuring; they are the daemons with which we increasingly dance.
1 Thanks to Duane Duncan, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Melbourne, for research assistance.
2 The site from which this extract was drawn originally seems to have disappeared, so cannot be referenced here. But there are many similar sites: just Google ‘Yaoi’.
Dowsett, G. W. (1996) Practicing Desire: Homosexual Sex in the Era of AIDS, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1998) Essential Work of Foucault, Volume 1 (trans. R. Hurley), in Heiner, B. T. (2003) ‘The Passions of Michel Foucault’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14(1): 42–3.
McClelland, M. (2000) ‘No Climax, No Point, No Meaning? Japanese Women’s Boy-love Sites on the Internet’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24 (3): 274–91.