Teenage girls and the entanglement with online porn: a new feminist materialist perspective

abstract

Who knows what sexually explicit materials (SEM)/ porn could mean to teenage girls if we were encouraged to see it as an assemblage, full of intensities, rather than negative effects, and the breakdown of innocence? We answer this question by taking on the dominant narrative repeated in public that seeks to place young female sexuality ‘under erasure’ through the common denominator of sexual danger. Instead by drawing on new feminist materialist perspectives and through conversation with girls, we address what they can do by examining their experiences with SEM/ porn as they navigate an assemblage that seeks to silence their sexual becomings. We argue that girls’ sexual network connectivity and exploration of SEM/ porn through human and more-than-human elements, rather than based on sexual muteness speaks to the entanglement of their desire for knowing and learning ‘sexually’ while resisting gender oppressive structures. We destabilise the current danger narrative circulating in South Africa through a radical interpretation of what is possible to know about girls as they generate insights into their critical capacities even if these insights trouble our assumptions about what girls’ sexual agency should look like. In conclusion, we argue that new feminist material perspectives allow for understanding the entangled relations that are ignited when teenage girls are given the opportunity to discuss their online sexual explorations and the implications for addressing teenage girls as fully agentive sexual beings.

keywords:

• teenage girls
• sexually explicit materials
• porn
• new feminist materialism
• agency

Introduction

In 2019 the South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) released a discussion paper, entitled ‘Sexual Offences: Pornography and Children’ raising concerns about under 18-year olds’ unfettered online access to sexually explicit materials (SEM) and pornography(porn). Porn, as defined by the SALRC (2019) refers to sexually explicit images and videos that may or may not arouse erotic sexual feelings (SALRC 2019). Approximately, 51.2% of 9-17-year-old South Africans reported access to sexual images through the use of mobile devices, computers and laptops according to the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (Phyfer, Burton & Leoschut 2016). Given the ubiquity of SEM/ porn, the SALRC (2019) proposed changes to the law by recommending a default setting on all digital devices to block under 18-year-old’s access to SEM/ porn. This legislative initiative locates SEM/ porn as a corrupting and damaging force onto childhood. Childhood sexual innocence “serves as an alibi to fortify a fictitious divide between a world of sexual safety” (Fischel 2016, p. 212) (assumed to be guaranteed by the ‘block porn’ agenda) and sexual danger defined by exposure to SEM/ porn.

Assumptions about the negative effects of SEM/ porn are further refracted through gender and sexuality which is indexed by female sexual purity and passivity. In the South African context where too many girls are victims of predatory sexual practices, sexual violence, at risk to HIV and teenage pregnancy, young sexuality also registers female sexual vulnerability and danger (Karim & Baxter 2016; Shefer 2016). As Marais (2019), in this journal indicates, female sexuality is often unfairly represented, as weak and young girls in particular are rarely given the opportunity to provide their own accounts of their sexual experiences (Mitchell & Moletsane 2018) except when it concerns violence, inequalities and sexual suffering. Compelling arguments about the impressionable state of childhood, the concern about the premature awakening of young sexuality (Fox & Bale 2018) underlines the politics of banning, blocking and barring access to the illicit (Fischel 2016). The SALRC (2019) agenda to block porn thus defends female sexual innocence against online sexual risk while denying sexual agency but as we will show to detrimental effect.

In this article, we assert that the framing of girls within binary logics as passively imbibing the negative effects of SEM/ porn, is an impoverished account of how they feel, think and know sexually. Questioning the narrow assumption that links exposure to SEM/ porn as dangerous and harmful, we focus on teenage girls, aged between 14-18 years old as they make sense of their experiences with SEM/ porn. Digital affordances and mobile technologies have enabled new ways of experiencing gender and sexuality with some scholars suggesting that pornified cultures is ‘everywhere’ and a ‘new normal’ (Mulholland 2015; Spišák 2020). Access to a range of technological devices has resulted in new ways of mediating, negotiating and intervening in forms of expression around SEM/ porn. In this article we open up ways of thinking about girls’ interpretations, beyond risk, that far exceed what we currently know about their potential to make sense of SEM/ porn. As Ringrose and Harvey (2015) suggest, new mediated technologies bring human and more-than-human mediations together to form new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality.

We are particularly interested in what SEM/ porn can do, as a form of learning, exploration and especially the ways in which teenage girls challenge and shift norms around their passivity. Our aim is to make complex girls’ engagement with SEM/ porn, beyond risk and innocence, as a form of exploration and learning that it supports and the gender inequalities that materialise in their interpretations. As Artz (2012, p. 17), in this journal suggests, porn may be ‘educative’ although what that means for teenage girls remains understudied (Ramlagun 2012). By addressing girls’ own perspectives, we provide primary empirical evidence that can ground these debates about what is ‘educative’ while providing a first-hand account of girls’ own perspectives that can contribute to the recent policy initiatives in South Africa where young people’s own interpretations remain absent (SALRC 2019).

Taking a cue from new feminist materialism, the article facilitates a movement away from the binary representations of girls as innocent and always at risk. Girls’ engagement with SEM/ porn ruptures conventional notions around danger, while opening up spaces for thinking about girls as fully agentive and in contradistinction to the policy initiatives which infantilise their agency. By adopting a new feminist material frame, we show how girls’ entanglement with bodies, SEM, porn, technologies and things, allows for an understanding of girls’ subjectivity formation and agency as a posthuman ‘becoming’ that includes humans and more-than-human forms. In this regard, we explore girls’ material interactions in relation to television, magazines, movies and music videos, their sexual capacities and their resistance to female sexual objectification. We focus on how girls’ capacities are propelled, negotiated and intensified as they make sense of SEM/ porn which complexly involves bodies, materials, thoughts, feelings, ideas and gendered discourses.

More specifically, we assert that SEM and porn, contributes to bodily intensifications broadening understandings of girls’ agency, expanding what is possible to know while illustrating the myth of childhood sexual innocence. The restrictive policy agenda is actually a threat to what is possible to know about girl’s capacities to become other (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Our aim thus is to show how a new feminist materialist approach can reconsider girls’ relationship with SEM/ porn as a process of entanglement and becoming. Thus, we ask, ‘How do teenage girls’ becomings emerge in the intra-actions/ entanglements between humans and more-than-humans in their experiences with SEM and porn?

Theoretical framing

In this study we seek to reorganise the ways in which we can understand teenage girls’ engagement with SEM/ porn to address the complex entanglement between gender, bodies, materials, and relations. The entanglement that we examine is that of teenage girls and their interpretations of SEM/ porn, the experiences of their bodies and how these bodies are connected with both human and more-than-human forms. The body experiences and senses the world as sensory beings (Barad 2007). Girls’ sensing of SEM/ porn is an entanglement of things, objects, bodies and powers that surround them (Jagger 2015). As we will show, when teenage girls are given the opportunity to address SEM/ porn, they entangle print media, magazines, online music videos, bodies, body parts, gendered discourses, matter, thought, ideas, feelings within a broader assemblage through which they navigate gender and sexuality. Thus, this study is an entanglement of these multiple and complex relationalities:

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating (Barad 2007, p. ix).

Girls’ perspectives on SEM/ porn can only emerge as they entangle and ‘intra-act’ (Barad 2007). All bodies, things, objects and discourses are entangled entities and relational. These concepts around the body and entanglement are drawn from a new feminist materialist framework (Braidotti 2013; Coole & Frost 2010; Barad 2007; Deleuze & Guattari 1987). A new materialist framing is heterogeneous and complex. It is aligned with posthumanist and post-anthropocentric theoretical inquiries and shares a common goal of repositioning the human from the centre of analysis to include more-than-human forms in all matter − both somatic and material realities (Braidotti 2013). Material forces include physical, biological, psychological and socio-cultural fields (Braidotti, 2013). The value of this framing is that all matter is seen to be “materially embedded and embodied … relational and contingent rather than essentialist or absolute … and as supplying social theory with the means to re-immerse itself in a material world” (Fox & Alldred 2021, p. 3).

What is possible to know of teenage girls’ encounter with SEM/ porn, cannot be reduced to binaries as all meaning is co-constituted and emerges through an entanglement with matter (Barad 2007). The implication in this study is that things, objects, technology, bodies, people, ideas and thoughts, feelings are made up of matter which is seen as ‘vibrant’ (Bennett 2010). This means that when teenage girls make sense of SEM/ porn, they are at once embedded within a network of human and more-than-human actors. Matter is then explored for what it materialises, not as a pregiven fact but as entanglement with human and more-than-human processes. Matter is novel, it produces surprises and has capacity and agency (Barad 2007). Actions and events constantly occur and people are constantly participating in transformations (Fox & Bale 2018). Simply put, matter as an active force, is not fixed and there is no end point and therefore girls are always ‘becoming’. Matter is embedded within a network that it coproduces within an assemblage that enables, propels or can even impede social worlds, expressions and human experience.

Girls’ meanings are thus always in motion as they ‘become’ within assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). That is to say, that teenage girls’ agency is always emerging and unpredictable in relation to other things and bodies and around actions and events which constitute assemblages. Assemblages, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 6) indicate, comprise objects, ideas, thoughts, feelings, bodies, and expressions that come together not in hierarchical or binary ways but as “desiring-machines”. Inspired by this notion of assemblage, Fox and Alldred (2013, p. 769) coin the term “sexuality-assemblage”. They describe it as “an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies”.

Assemblages offer opportunities to expand to become different but they also constrain and limit opportunities (Fox & Bale 2018). Assemblages territorialise, deterritorialise and reterritorialise, and they set limits to what can be done. In other words, the assemblage is also malleable and provides possibilities for momentary ruptures and transformations − or as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest, they can deterritorialise. Territories are unstable, fluid elements of the assemblage and can be seen as affective flows which can both block and move ideas. Affects can flow in ways that reinforce and bring stability to the assemblage or territorialise but they can also destabilise and affect assemblages in ways that deterritorialise or create instabilities (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). For example, assemblages can view girls as victims of SEM/ porn within a cultural assemblage that reduces femininity to sexual vulnerability. This is constraining on teenage girls’ capacities.

As Fox and Alldred (2013) claim, sexuality-assemblages bring ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ fields together and establish the capacities of what bodies can do and feel. Relations within these assemblages are ever changing as they collide and come into contact with other things, bodies and matter. This collision can produce changes that are “physical, psychological, emotional or social” and as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, pp. 127-128) indicate these changes are referred to as affect. As Fox and Bale (2018, p. 396) claim “affect is the capacity to affect or be affected”. Affects are entangled relationally with other matter within an action or event. As such, teenage girls’ encounter with SEM/ porn has the capacity to affect and be affected (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, pp. 127-128).

Drawing on these ideas, scholars working with thickening young people’s experiences with gender and sexuality (Renold 2018; Ringrose & Harvey 2015; Fox & Bale 2018), suggest that sexualities emerge through intra-action involving the relational entanglement of ideas, bodies, materials and contexts. What this means for our study is that learning, devices, technology, things, ideas, objects, feelings, gender discourses are not separate entities. Rather, they constitute a materiality of entanglements. Girls are thus always entangled in dynamic, shifting and changing assemblages that are made of different entities and relationally produced (Fox & Bale 2018; Ringrose & Harvey 2015).

In the process of intra-acting, bodies, both human and more-than-human, assemble together to provide both possibilities, capacities and constraints. Capacities and possibilities refer here to the relationality of matter and things. Girls’ capacities are intra-actively produced and entangled which can be both productive and agentic as they make sense of SEM/ porn. This does not mean that girls can exert agency, instead their capacities and possibilities are premised by what they can do, how they affect and are affected as they intra-act within material-discursive processes. This understanding of possibility, capacity and agency suggests that girls and SEM/ porn are always entangled and these entanglements can generate productive ways of being and doing (Renold 2018). Thus, girls can become other and imagine new ways of being but they can also be contained by the patriarchal structures of power which shape what they can do and become.

This conceptual framing allows us to explore entanglements within a sexuality assemblage suggesting a fuller grasp of capacity and agency than what we currently are expected to believe of girls’ (and young people’s) encounters with SEM/ porn. The framing enables an understanding of relational materialities and how they affect girls’ experiences in becoming other and bring attention to the more-than-human forms that work on corporeal/ transcorporeal capacities and intensities.

Brief methodological details

In this article we draw from the qualitative component of a research project entitled, ‘Learning from the Learners: growing up as girls and boys and negotiating gender and sexuality inside and outside of school’. We are interested in girls’ (aged between 14 and 18 years of age) verbal segments of their experiences with SEM/ porn. The study comprised focus groups (n=9) with 30 girls and individual interviews (n=16) as well as participant generated drawings which facilitated their representation and discussion of SEM/ porn. The girls are located in two private schools in South Africa reflecting their high-income backgrounds facilitating access to a wide range of digital devices and online accessibility. For the group discussions the racial demographics are: black (12); white (12); coloured (3); Indian (3). Sixteen (16) individual interviews were conducted with 10 teenage girls. All share a common socio-economic positioning as part of the elite in the country where their school fees in 2021 is in excess of USD 14 000 per annum. Ethical clearance was granted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal. All parents provided informed consent on behalf of the participants. Participants also signed consent forms. All names and places have been replaced with pseudonyms and anonymity was guaranteed throughout the research process.

Girls were asked to talk about how they made sense of SEM/ porn and combined with the drawings, conversations were facilitated which allowed girls’ potentialities to emerge. The drawings enabled discussion, based on teenage girls as producers of knowledge. New feminist materialist theory suggests all matter and materials are active in the production of meaning (Coole & Frost 2010). Different kinds of materials can offer different capacities and possibilities for teenage girls to express sexuality. Drawings constitute material articulations of SEM/ porn, in ways that generate first-hand knowledge or knowing while doing. While we give attention to verbal material in this article, drawings also constitute an important part in materialising meaning as they can help to give life to social reality as they connect and intra-act with feelings, ideas, bodies, discourses, objects and things. In this regard all things, including drawings, intra-act with each other to constitute meanings of porn. Girls’ drawings are active elements of an assemblage that intra-actively connects with a range of socio-material-discursive processes.

In this article we show how the verbal data provides possibility for enacting sexuality-assemblages through which girls’ potential for becoming, based on their privileged status, and their agency is expressed (Ringrose & Harvey 2015). We follow a posthumanist approach where girls are not seen as separate bodies but are entangled within a complex assemblage where their ideas, thoughts and emotions, feelings are entwined with human and non-human forms, materialising capacities and possibilities (Ingram 2021). Other work in this project has focused on racialised representations of SEM/ porn (Bhana 2021). In this article we focus on girls’ navigation of SEM/ porn as they expand sexual learning and curiosities while objecting to the representational power that subjugates women.

A sexuality-learning assemblage

DSTV, ETV, Hello Magazines

Digital Satellite Television (DSTV), magazines, videos and music featured strongly as teenage girls’ entangled SEM/ porn, with things, objects, gendered discourses and innocence while anchoring their understandings within the everyday. DSTV monthly packages attract middle- and upper-income households in South Africa with costs ranging from USD 60 compared to the monthly child support grant for low income households which is approximately USD 30. In other words, the context of privilege provides specificity in relation to what is accessible, available and is entangled with what is possible to know. In these entangled becomings, sexual innocence becomes intelligible as well as the possibilities to deterritorialise the expectation of innocence:

… from about [age] five, there were magazines … with some SEM. I would hide it like in my room and look at it later under the mattress - well not under the mattress because my mother made the bed, but I would hide it … 

Interviewer: And where would you get the magazines from?

DSTV magazines, all those Hello magazines that my mom used to read just for entertainment. And then if she [mother] did leave them lying around, I would … look at them secretly and then bring them back. I thought oh, no it’s wrong and I will go to hell … so then the secrets continued up until 13. That’s when I stopped with it, when I started doing research [online] and say okay, I have to know more about this, you can’t just be living in ignorance … (Dayo − pseudonym, Individual Interview).

In Dayo’s experience we see her capacities intensified and sexual curiosity ignites a vibrancy in ways that change what we know of girls and SEM/ porn. Specifically, DSTV and Hello magazines (with SEM), the mattress, online technology produce specific capacities for Dayo within an assemblage that constrains girls’ knowledge of the sexual. And Dayo too uses these dominant forces to forge her own sense of self by fearing ‘hell’ as sexuality is seen in opposition to her religious upbringing. The concepts of entanglement, becoming, ‘sexuality-assemblage’, deterritorialisation thus enable thinking about her potential and productive capacities as complex and multiple. Evident here is the changing assemblage at age 5 where sexual knowledge is aligned with magazines, shifting at age 13 to online affordances which expand sexual capacities. This capacity however is mediated and intra-acts with the taboos around children’s sexual awareness and is tightly braided with negotiating adult power through secrecy. Dayo has the capacity to deterritorialise by opening up possibilities to know sexually by engaging with objects, things and materials through which her agency becomes apparent. Dayo exceeds the normative expectations around sexual innocence and makes visible her capacity even within an assemblage which monitors sexual conduct and through which it territorialises her capacity.

In thinking with new feminist materialist concepts, bodies, ideas about sexual innocence, objects and things come together in an entanglement. Reducing the divide between human and more-than-human elements, Dayo is able to resist “living” in a state of sexual ignorance. While new potentials exist for learning sexuality in relation to more-than-human elements, the sexuality-learning assemblage materialises adult-child power relations and the omnipotent presence of sexual innocence as we also see in a grade 12 group discussion where participants refer to the movie Love Actually:

G12 R7: … when I was little, I watched Love Actually. Like I secretly watched it but like I was told I couldn’t watch so I hid behind the couch and I watched it while my parents were watching it [giggles] … No, cos I was like why can’t I watch this? … And there was a scene … the sex doubles – have you seen it madam? … and they basically like pretend to have sex but it’s like so sexually explicit and I was just – I wasn’t traumatised, I was just confused. I have watched it since so now it’s like fine, I'm not really traumatised but I don’t know I remember I was like ‘wow’. I was quite young.

G12 R9: And then I like had a similar situation a few years … – this is like a weird setting, the whole family was in this house and all the children were in one TV [television] room and were changing the channel late at night and we get to this porn. And it was just, I don’t know like I remember it was all just this screeching it was like [demonstrates screaming] like who the hell is this … .

G12 R3: − it’s kind of something you just have to grow into as the years go by and just learn step by step, I think … 

G12 R4: Ja it’s like the first time I ever I was like at home and I was flicking through the channels and I saw like Etv [name of television channel] here … 

G12 Rs: [gasps] oh my gosh.

G12 R4: I literally – I, I went to my parents I said to them I feel really guilty, I just saw like a man and I saw a penis [giggles] … in grade two-ish. And that’s quite – young.

G12 Rs: That’s young … 

G12 R4: … In the background there were women, like naked women but at – in the front of the screen there was this male. But like it was the same like he had like eight … He had eight penises.

G12 Rs: [giggles] genuinely? … 

Movies, Etv, secrecy, sexual innocence, sex, noise, bodies and body parts (penis) all come together to create the sexuality-learning assemblage as the girls entangle their sexual confusions and curiosities within a complex network of relationalities and through which their capacities to think, feel and know are made visible. Various bodies and matter assemble through which teenage girls’ capacities materialise as they assert their agency. It is impossible to create a binary between the material world and the social world − materiality and relationality are affectively co-constituted and entangled (Barad 2007). Bodies and matter are relational and actioned within an assemblage. The girls above entangle age (and the need for the protection from SEM/ porn) with resistance as they challenge adult regulation of sexuality. They situate this experience within a cacophony of sounds (‘screaming’), guilt, shame, female bodies, nudity and humour (eight penises). Putting laughter and humour together with porn and sexuality is complex (Barnes 2012; Goldstein 2021). Humour and laughter can be used normatively to both objectify SEM/ porn as age-inappropriate while also creating a space to reveal its banality and transgressing what is deemed appropriate. Goldstein (2021, p. 5) suggests that a common orientation of teenage girls towards porn as a problematic object is produced and contested through a range of subject positions which include “learner”, “laugher”, and “critic” where the normative constructions of porn are uprooted through situating themselves as “unashamed viewers”. Thus, laughter can also defuse the discomfort experienced around the discussion about porn while enhancing solidarity and learning (Kolenz & Branfman 2019). What is salient are the ways in which the unfolding of sexuality occurs in the nexus of cultural taboos around sex and age, nudity and the ways in which SEM is tightly braided with guilt, shame and laughter. The girls both resist and reinforce these taboos. In this complex process, they both deterritorialise and territorialise as they make SEM/ porn intelligible.

Music Videos: Lilly Anne and Lady Gaga

In this section we address music videos discussed by the girls – two famous pop celebrities, Lilly Anne and Lady Gaga. The reference to popular culture, music videos and live streaming constituted an important area for learning sexuality. As Tyler and Quek (2016) note, when online visual media is ‘pornified’ popular culture is sexualised. This notion of pornification captures the normalisation of porn and its everyday ordinariness. In other words, sexual representations permeate all aspects of contemporary culture and music is no exception:

I am not a person who watches much pornography but I am quite exposed to SEM and music videos … when I'm watching it at first without thinking like “oh this is normal” but then after I start thinking about it I think “wait this shouldn’t be society’s’ norms”, specifically that Lilly Allen video. I know the song and it starts with a swear word. “So bitch”, she mentions about a bitch, “bitch like me” [sings a tune] and it’s quite ironic in the sense that she’s talking about how – well it’s not ironic – she’s talking about how inequality is there to stay so I wouldn’t think it’s ironic because then she’s talking about women and being inferior to men in the context about how these stereotypes and about society’s social standards like of western media social standards, still trap women but also she’s conforming to it in that sense so she’s portraying how … with certain sexual acts … in music videos where humping or like very sexually focused and portrays explicit sexual positions, certain sexual acts and also nudity and also it involves like two or more people performing a sexual act – … it’s just sexual in the sense that … Lilly Allen’s video, her video used words like pussy and then there was humping and other sexual acts, but there weren’t people actually performing sexual acts in there, but there was also quite a lot of innuendos … (Dayo − pseudonym, Individual Interview).

Like objects, music videos materialise gender inequalities and have affective potential. Music videos work as affective sexuality − assemblages that “materialize gender through digitized, networked relationalities” (Ringrose & Harvey 2015, p. 206). What this suggests is the entanglement of music media, online streaming, celebrity pop stars, bodies, words and gendered discourses provide potential to territorialise and deterritorialise. Dayo, deterritorialises sexual innocence, producing a new line of flight (Fox & Bale 2018; Ingram 2021) to show her capacities but draws attention to the territorialising capacity that produces normative gender relations − misogyny and female sexual objectification. The entanglement operates within a range of material effects and affective flows produced within a broader socio-cultural backdrop where female subordination is both made visible and condemned. This both limits girls’ becoming but in refusing the dominant gender stereotypes new becomings are also possible. Sexual agency thus emerges within a continual affective flow between music videos, the lyrics, bodies, gender and Dayo’s own narrative. In other words, all these elements assemble to produce affective capacities to engender a particular response.

Dayo points to the normalisation of online sexual representations but through reflection she questions the sexualisation of mainstream media. Dayo provides the example of the celebrity, Lilly Allen’s song, ‘Hard out here’ which includes words such as, “For a bitch it's hard (For a bitch, for a bitch)” in its lyrics. The music video portrays explicit sexualised visuals including sexual positions and acts (“humping”) and nudity. Weeks (2000, p. 163) suggests that sexuality is complex, it “pervades the air we breathe”, and “is complexly tied to many areas of social life: danger, sin, violence, disease, reproduction, relationships, marriage, erotic activities and of fantasy, intimacy, warmth, love and pleasure”. In this regard, Dayo entangles online music videos with identity, values and sexual practices and demonstrates the contradiction between the intention of the song and the visual images which serve to reproduce inequalities (Attwood, Smith & Barker 2018). Dayo provides a sophisticated analysis of the lyrics which direct attention to gender inequalities while the entire video is a reproduction of sexualisation and women’s inferior status. Music videos open up questions about SEM/ porn, sexuality and its connections with gender inequalities. Bodies do different things while entangling online music videos with broader social issues. Similarly, in the grade 9 focus group discussion the participant refers to Lady Gaga’s song, ‘Til it happens to you’ and addresses issues around rape and women’s vulnerability:

… and then it’s actually and then also I think it was that Lady Gaga music video ‘Til it happens to you’ − I watched that and I got really quite emotional because it talks about rape and it wasn’t that like sexually explicit but it’s just, it’s for me it like it hit me quite deep because it just happens so often … Like I know that there's huge debate in the US because apparently they are releasing statistics on rape cases and stuff that are apparently wrong and they are not as, they are not as high as they say it is but they are still pretty high but it’s still happens pretty often and there's a lot of people that are denying it that it doesn’t happen as often as you think it does … It might not be as often as one in every four girls, but still one in every ten (Respondent 2 − Discussion Group 9).

The discussion here challenges simple harm-based models discussed by the SALRC (2019) which are disconnected from teenage girls’ own realities through which their feminist orientations and critical capacities are intensified as they engage with issues around rape cultures. Lady Gaga’s music video, the intent to expose rape culture and women’s vulnerability is entangled with affective intensities through which rape is discussed and condemned. In other words, like Paasonen (2011), teenage girls situate online porn at the intersection of bodily experiences and the digital space of SEM/ porn raising contradictions, anomalies and thereby producing an understanding of SEM/ porn beyond a negative effects model. Music videos do play an important role in reproducing hyper-sexualisation − the female body as heterosexually desirable and desiring is reinforced but these are longstanding offline issues. Technology intensifies this gaze upon the female body while intensifying teenage girls’ agency, critique and objection to women’s subordination. The girls show that they are not passive and are highly aware of and literate with respect to feminist principles as they grappled with online porn and the complex process of growing up sexually.

Woman: A piece of furniture

When SEM/ porn ‘pops’, it is women’s bodies that are objectified and commodified (Gill 2008). The knowledge that SEM/ porn is associated with the female body suggests how bodies, ideas, and gendered discourses assemble to produce affective flows that register a “technology of sexiness” (Evans & Riley 2014) through which a heterosexual desirable female body is produced and critiqued:

There's certain body expectations and it’s because of how things are portrayed in porn, people expect like certain … to like certain things. Like men in general like women with big breasts or a big bum or things like that and women are objectified, I have noticed that a lot. Like in almost everything that I have very weird that have been shown, coz I get on very well with a lot of the boys and it’s sometimes they’ll be like hahahaha and I will be like oh what’s so funny and they show me a video and I'm like oh that is a man busy urinating on – why [giggles] you know – and it’s taken a while to really understand that women are really objectified in porn so I don’t know why anyone would find that attractive cos surely it’s supposed to be something that’s arousing but why would it be arousing if like the woman is being treated the same way people treat like a piece of furniture (Jade – pseudonym, Individual Interview).

Bodies, porn, gendered expectations, body parts (big bum and breasts), male sexual entitlements are entangled and intensify feelings, thoughts and ideas that Jade represents as unequal. Accordingly, Jade positions the sexuality-assemblage as territorialising and an aggregation of power with different and unequal forces on bodies (Fox & Bale 2018). These entanglements also intensify challenges and resistance with de-territorialising affects. It is the female body that is centred in the display of naked bodies and nudity (Naezer & Oosterhout 2020). It is female sexuality that is ubiquitous in SEM/ porn where women are positioned within a heterosexual gaze as ‘fuckable’ (Orenstein 2016). And why would that cause sexual arousal as questioned by Jade, suggesting a direct challenge to gender norms and female subordination. In particular by focusing on the female body, Jade, also brings attention to the what is possible to be and do in relation to becoming female. Given the overall offline-online context where gendered patterns subordinate women and girls, this may not be surprising but new potential emerges as Jade deterritorialises the enduring pattern which reinforces female subordination. The experience here is an entanglement of thoughts, ideas, emotions, bodies and gender and how they intra-act with others (both human and more-than-human forms). Additionally, the broader socio-cultural norms affect their experiences within an assemblage that both enables and restricts female capacity and potential in becoming others.

Conclusion

Taking a cue from new feminist materialism, the article facilitates a movement away from the binary representations of girls as innocent and without agency towards an affective, material and relational understanding of their experiences with SEM/ porn. In this framing, instead of seeing SEM/ porn as fixed on the side of danger, an understanding of the entanglements, intra-actions within a material-relational approach allows for a focus on what girls can do and the ‘becomings’ that are made possible when they connect with other bodies and things in propelling capacity and change (Jagger 2015).

Firstly, girls even at a young age are already invested in learning about sex and sexuality. They are not sexually innocent. Their capacities are engendered through human and more-than-human intra-actions and entanglements. Detached from the policy initiatives (SALRC 2019), the girls’ realities point to the ubiquity of SEM/ porn − in everyday pornified cultures in magazines, music videos, movies and through non-human technological forms. Girls have already made sense of these entanglements in vibrant and lively ways, at a much earlier age that shows their full agency. However, they do so strategically within a sexuality assemblage that wishes innocence upon them. Secondly, we have shown that far from being dupes of social media and SEM/ porn, girls’ capacities to think, feel and object to the limitation in becoming other are clear. They show avid interest in feminist principles and object vehemently to women’s position within SEM/ porn as a ‘piece of furniture’.

There is a need to revisit the policy initiatives that seek to unanimously block porn by framing young people as victims and at risk to SEM/ porn. A new materialist framing shows how far detached these initiatives are from the real lives of teenage girls. We need to unsettle the tired binaries that restrict young female sexuality on the side of danger and passivity while enabling SEM/ porn as an adult domain of life without the necessary reflection on what SEM/ porn can do. We have argued that the material-relational assemblage and affective becomings in relation to SEM/ porn are imbued with processes that limit the expression of childhood sexuality and confines girls to sexual innocence. But we have shown also how the same assemblage lends possibilities to be other. In this new line of flight, we have shown how teenage girls’ capacities emerge in/ through SEM/ porn as educative and their strong convictions against female sexual subordination.

For policy makers, the implication of this study is that SEM/ porn images and videos are everywhere and infuse girls’ everyday lives from a very young age. It is visible in objects, television, music, popular culture, things, movies, ideas, gendered discourses. Given the pervasiveness of SEM/ porn, the SALRC (2019) proposal to block minors’ access to SEM/ porn would imply blocking everyday life from young people. As such, the SALRC should revisit their definition of porn to embrace the everyday ordinariness through which girls themselves make meaning of SEM/ porn so that a more accurate policy assessment can be made. Policy needs to be responsive to SEM/ porn’s educative potential that may enhance girls’ capabilities to address what matters to them and promote gender equality.

Acknowledgement

This work is based on the research supported wholly by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number 98407).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deevia Bhana

DEEVIA BHANA is the DSI/NRF South African Research Chair in Gender and Childhood Sexuality at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her interests are in children/young people, gender, masculinities, sexuality, health, reproduction and schooling. Her new book, entitled Girls Negotiating Porn in South Africa, will be published by Routledge in 2022. Email: [email protected]

Shreya Nathwani

SHREYA NATHWANI is a student at the University of Cape Town majoring in Psychology and political science with strong interests in feminist principles. Email: [email protected]