The Myth of the Pornocopia: Understanding Porn Sites Through the Navigational Journeys of Consumers

Abstract

The internet meme “rule 34” posits that ‘if you can think of it, there is porn of it’. Such an understanding conceptualises the free streaming tube sites that present pornography as mythical “pornocopias”, providing the user with endless and varied content. Even if this assumption were true, pornography is not simply handed to the user, as it must be sought out using the navigational structures and tools provided by the sites. This thesis investigates the affordances and blockages of such navigational tools, exploring users’ experience and affective responses such as frustration. In addition to gathering data from the sites’ help forums and targeted ethnographic research, the main methodology this thesis utilises is an anonymous online survey completed by over 4000 respondents. While free streaming pornographic tube sites such as PornHub, XHamster, and XVideos are the most popular places to consume moving-image pornography, their features and dynamics have been largely unexamined within the field of porn studies. Additionally, while audience studies have done well to reveal porn users’ interpretations of pornographic texts, we know little of how users come to understand and interact with the sites in which they consume such content. In order to bridge this gap in the field, this thesis is both a platform study and an audience study, looking to the ways in which users interpret porn sites’ features of categorization, and how they utilise the sites’ tools in order to find desirable content. Among other findings, the thesis reveals that, while navigational malfunctions occur, users are often searching for things that are notably untaggable. Additionally, this thesis argues that, while porn sites indeed offer a range of genres and bodies in terms of content, these are often organised in ways that assume a straight male viewer, eschewing the desires of those outside this identity position.