“Dress Porn Definitely Does It for Me”: Femininities, Digital Wedding Porn, and Pleasure and Danger

Abstract TwoStatesBride describes “ring porn” in an online wedding forum as “contemporary, but still feminine, and i LOVE the contrasting metals.” TwoStatesBride identifies a style that modifies normative femininity. I analyze wedding forum participants’ employment of the term “porn,” with its traditional association with danger and masculine viewing, to share pleasures in feminine “wedding porn” depictions. These brides constitute “good” erotica as different than concerns about male partners watching pornography. Brides’ public posts about pleasure, danger, representations, and porn reenact a version of the US “Sex Wars.” I employ feminist analysis, humanities forms of close reading, and internet studies to argue that when wedding forum participants associate their practices with “porn” and intimately engage brides, they offer some intervention into traditional conceptions of wedding femininity. Such practices may seem to consistently support norms, but these brides’ use of digital technologies correlates weddings with shared pleasures and dangers rather than heterosexual coupling.