You and Voyeurweb: Illustrating the Shifting Representation of the Penis on the Internet with User-Generated Content
When Time magazine named you, the reader, as person of the year in 2006, it generated a great deal of attention. The cover of the issue featured a mirror that showed the reader his/her face reflected back at him/her. The idea behind the surprising choice of person of the year and the unusual cover design regarded the soaring popularity of user-generated content Internet sites like YouTube where contributors post videos they submit. The Internet was being transformed by you —the common person—as opposed to those professionals who had previously controlled the media.
On user-generated sites, as the name implies, the public uploads content (be it video, photography, written material, etc.), whereas in traditional publishing, exhibiting, screening, and Internet arrangements, the professionals choose and control the content. Thus, this is more than an ordinary change; it is a shift in power relations between the professionals and the users. CNN cablecast a one hour special on the process of choosing the Time person of the year during which an editor remarked that this was the precise year for this choice: last year would have been too soon and next year too late. And while there is no denying the importance of the phenomenal success and impact of YouTube in 2006, the claim is not only exaggerated but also misleading in several ways.
I for one am no prophet, but I have not only seen this coming but have argued for some time in relation to my work on the sexual representation of the male body both in my classes on sexuality in the media and in related publications such as my [End Page 108] essay A Dirty Little Secret : Why Teach and Study Pornography? that what is now commonly called user-generated content Internet Web sites have significantly impacted the representation of the penis, among other aspects of male sexuality and the male body.1 In this brief, rhetorical essay I can do little more than demonstrate the issues. This is part of an ongoing research project that continues the work I began (before the advent of the Internet) in Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body2 involving dozens and dozens of images from Voyeurweb, discussed below. All of these images significantly challenge dominant representations of the penis, some in their representation of the male body alone, some in combination with women; some in private spaces such as bedrooms and some in public places such as beaches or special gatherings and events. Drawing upon this research, Susan Hunt and I argue in a forthcoming book Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: How Movies are Ruining Your Love Life that the combined impact of these new categories of representation and the frequency with which images are posted within them is profound.3
I have long been interested in the intersection of pornography and technology. The impact of literary pornography was initially limited to the literate upper and middle classes. But with the invention of photography and cheap methods of printing and distributing photographs by the late nineteenth century, the modern notion of pornography arrived. And it has never left. The wider audience prompted a particular hysteria that pornography was no longer produced just for those who presumably can handle it (due to wealth, education, and privilege) and can pay for it in a manner that does not threaten the social fabric. Photography could be cheaply distributed and enjoyed by the unwashed, illiterate masses. And thus began the fear that porn could and would be the ruin of us all.
But there is another equally important point about the conjunction of pornography and technology. Throughout the twentieth century, pornographers have been innovators whenever appropriate new technology has appeared, and pornography has been a major economic driving force in introducing new technologies into the home consumer market (e.g...
