Authors:
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Susanna Paasonen
Our first encounter with each other involved pleasure. It was on Susanna's part. She invited Jaz to her home and cooked such a memorable dinner that Jaz would often refer to it over the following years in their research into FoodCHI (food-computer-human interaction [1]). The discussion during dinner led to one of Susanna's research topics: sneakerporn—not the widely practiced online flaunting of special-edition footwear but rather a DIY porn category involving sexually explicit contact with sneakers [2]. There began our journey, one escapade of which is this column: We invite you on a quick visit to the kinky, leaky, and opaque space in between sexual intimacies and data.
Back in the 1970s, the cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams [3] described the introduction of telephone, radio, and television into 20th-century homes as "mobile privatisation," a mode of living at once home-centered and mobile in its technological attachments and connections to the outside world (relatedly, see Toyo Ito's Pao I and Pao II: https://socks-studio.com/2016/02/07/pao-dwellings-for-the-tokyo-nomad-woman-by-toyo-ito-1985-and-1989/). Such permeability, or leakiness, became increasingly manifest with widening access to the Internet, to the point that the spaces and devices of labor and leisure have long been blurred for many [4]. These include those for sexual and intimate connections, from phone sex to online dating and location-based hookup apps, and from porn viewing to camming, self-shooting, and sexting.
Yet nothing quite prepared us for the Covid-19 pandemic when much of sociality—and work—suddenly shifted online. During lockdowns, the use of social media soared. So did access to porn and sex sites, with OnlyFans trending as both content producers and audiences flocked to the platform. Alongside Zoom work meetings, Zoom sex parties gained traction, which came with the service warning that such events were against the company's terms of use for keeping users safe, at the same time that public health professionals were recommending these very uses were the safe and responsible thing to do.
Amid such lively emergences and contrasts we see (at least) two major things to consider here: the degree to which discussions of domesticity and the home, particularly in interaction design, dodge the issue and practices of sexuality, despite these being normatively confined precisely to such spaces, and the question of what we understand as or with sexual intimacy in networked environments.
First, let's take home. It has been an important theme in interaction design. From the smart home discourse to the more recently emerging interest in other-than-human domestic companions ranging from plants and animals to algorithmic creatures in parallel with the broader social and ecological crises, the understandings, experiences, and possibilities of intimacy and/at/with home are becoming more complicated. Yet, as Kristina Höök claims (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zohoISiOZmQ), when it comes to home, focus on automation persists in HCI design and research, while the much-needed attention to somaesthetics remains sidelined. Even in somaesthetic discussions, sexuality is rarely considered as crucial or a priority. Home feels almost devoid of sex, especially of sexual pleasures. No doubt there are people dreaming of precisely such a home, but there are many who do not. (Disclaimer: we don't.)
What is at stake when a sex technology records sessions of its use and shares the data in ways not only unclear but also unknown to the user?
Compared to the efforts around women's reproductive health in particular (e.g., period trackers), those around sexual pleasures and desires remain far less visible. But why? Lauren Berlant offered a convincing explanation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7X6j0af7Bo): "Sex and sexuality as normalized offshoots of pleasure are not seen as a resource for social transformation but a problem that wedges social reproduction. Having no movement public for amplifying their resonance or their effects, they are seen as ethical modalities falsely privatized as transactions between individuals."
Beyond the normal and normative, from the queer to kinky, interaction design has kept everything in between in the hot and stuffy closet of subversion. Now we must take the (hi) story of sexual technologies seriously, as Bo Ruberg [5] has in disavowing patriarchal fantasy portrayed as facts, starting with dames de voyage to seemingly straight yet palpably queer sex tech. Now we must take kink seriously, as R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell [6] have in their anthology of short fiction by the same name, and challenge the dominant culture of pathologizing, flattening, and simplifying kinky desires into shame, and instead call for the treatment of kink as a tool to make sense of our lives, among other exciting and genuine possibilities. Acknowledging and working with the banality, diversity, and importance of sexual pleasures will, at least and at last, help us understand and imagine interactions that take into account the richness of human lives.
Further, as Kwon and Greenwell suggest, we will do well to recognize "how the questions raised in intimate, kinky encounters—questions of power, agency, identity—can help us to interrogate and begin to re-script the larger cultural narratives that surround us…. [K]ink can also deepen and complicate urgent conversations around how consent is established, negotiated, and sometimes broken." The matter of consent is particularly resonant in the 21st century of mobile privatization, which has become crucially about permeability and leakiness of the uncanny sort, as smart devices demand to listen to our interactions as the prerequisite to their operability.
This takes us to the second question around our understanding of sexual intimacy in networked environments: For what is at stake when a sex technology records sessions of its use and shares the data in ways not only unclear but also unknown to the user? Tackling this question, and taking a cue from kink negotiations over consent, Jenny Sundén [7] argues that such leakiness calls for de-linking of intimacy from privacy—for understanding networked sexual play as "highly intimate and personal, but hardly private" so that sexuality itself can become framed "as a publicly accessible culture and as something which is sustained through collective practices (rather than a form of individual property)."
Returning to sneakerporn, the example that had so captivated Susanna's attention, resulted from networked sexual play of the vintage, Usenet kind, unfolding in an alt.sex. fetish group where users invited one another to imagine what such porn might look like, and to act out and share scenarios. This networked play was not necessarily of the intimate sort, yet collective and public within the confines of the group. The crafting of such publics of limited visibility is key to kink and queer cultures as sites of sexual sociability and play, relational spaces that are necessary for the sustenance of certain lives and to create new possibilities for change. Such spaces call us to pay attention to Sundén's [8] argument on the value of opacity in and for sexual lives: Sites of partial visibilities exist, importantly so, beyond what may be quantified through sensors and analytics algorithms. Specifically, such opaque spaces are where the full openness of sexual lives may not be desirable, or possible, but where there is no desire for the closet either.
 | The Sexinsitu project by Martyne Miller takes the form of a self-producing archive. The basic units are video recordings of physical reconstructions of particular sexual memories of the participants, performed solo, recalling the shared moments. The work provokes questions about the role and function of the body, mind, and memory in the process of experiencing pleasure, loving, and/or forming relationships, and about sex as a personal but not private matter. Its aim is to restore the social dimension of sexuality. The original image included in this column was replaced to meet the ACM content policy requirement. |
As data traces of our interactions, sexual and otherwise, leak and accumulate, such opacity is by no means easy for the users of devices and platforms to manage, let alone control. Opacity, as discussed by Sundén, connects with notions of privacy and safety where it is not sex or sexuality that is perceived as risky but rather disclosures extending beyond the sexual cultures and publics that one participates in. To thrive, these cultures need both physical spaces and networked connections mindful of the centrality of sexual pleasure for people's well-being and of design practices and use policies respectful of partial visibilities. This is where we end this escapade with you. What questions came up for you? What sideways are we not looking at or feeling? All of it, we encourage you to explore. Come.
References
1. Choi, J.H-j., Foth, M., and Hearn, G.N. Eat Cook Grow: Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions. MIT Press, Boston, 2014.
2. Paasonen, S. Disturbing, fleshy images: Close looking at pornography. In Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. M. Liljeström and S. Paasonen, eds. Routledge, London, 2010, 58–71.
3. Williams, R. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Routledge, London, 1975/1997.
4. Gregg, M. Work's Intimacy. Polity, Oxford, 2011.
5. Ruberg, B. Sex Dolls at Sea Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies. MIT Press, Boston, 2022.
6. Kwon, R.O. and Greenwell, G. Kink. Scribner UK, 2021.
7. Sundén, J. Play, secrecy and consent: Theorizing privacy breaches and sensitive data in the world of networked sex toys. Sexualities (2020). DOI:1363460720957578
8. Sundén, J. Tracing sexual otherness in Sweden: The opacity of online kink. Lambda Nordica. Forthcoming.
Authors
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is the director of the Care-full Design Lab, Vice-Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow, and associate professor in design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. [email protected]
Susanna Paasonen is a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland, and the author of NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media (MIT Press, 2019) and Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MIT Press, 2021). [email protected]
Copyright held by authors
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2023 ACM, Inc.
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