In a Sea of Dicks: On the Limits of Porn

Starting with the contested figure of the dick pic, this chapter explores the meanings and boundaries of the notion of porn. Combining conceptual reflection with empirical inquiry, it asks how the users of Alaston Suomi, a Finnish sexual social media platform dedicated to naked self-shooting, discuss the prevalence of dick pics on the site, and how they deploy the notion of porn when discussing user-generated content. Within this interview material, dick pics emerge both as objects of appreciation and as markers of deficient aesthetic ambition and social awkwardness. Meanwhile, porn weaves in and out of how self-shooters make sense of their output and the platform’s functions in ways pointing out the term’s limitations when seeking to understand networked sexual exchanges. I suggest that, in a context in which nudity is weeded out from mainstream social media in a horizontal manner in the name of safety, yet in which forms of online sexual content continue to multiply, scholarly inquiry holding on to the marker of porn as descriptive of the things circulated risks posing normative classifications and losing touch with how this content is made sense of.