Synopsis: The naked self

Abstract

Unlike text-based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in-depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a body, the experience of which acts back in an erotic "looking glass" affecting how the self conceives of the body. While in some cases the medium serves to create a "disembodied" context for interaction, as this study illustrates, it may also serve to fully embody. The obvious relationships among self, body, and social situation made evident in any form of sexual experience are largely unexplored in sociology, yet fully within the realm of interest and theoretical models of symbolic interaction.

Synopsis:

The naked self: Being a Body in Televideo Cybersex

Dennis D. Waskul


Dating back from 2002 you could say this study is quite old. It examines the relation between the body and the self in webcam sex participants. The text focusses only on people voluntary engaged in these sex-acts, and where there was no money involved. I felt while reading the text that is focuses much on chat roulette-like webcam sites. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any sources of on which website the researcher found their interviewee’s.

The study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject.

By viewing the body as an object through a digital lens, (sometimes even disconnecting the body completely from the self by not showing the face), the body can be seen as something different, something disembodied almost. This gives people participating in webcam-sex the opportunity view their body form a distance-like perspective and see their body being viewed and desired without the self intervening in this objectification.

“We may argue that the body is experienced as an object and made meaningful as a subject through the same processes and symbolic capacities by which we acquire a self.”

We have to acquire a self growing up by looking at how other see us. (MEAD 1934). In this text they argue that the same applies to the body. We are born into a body but not born with the capacity to understand that body as an object. — to see it as other might see it. It acquires meaning in a symbolic process that is no different from any other object. We need to view our body through others to understand it as a body.

At the same time the body is a special kind of object because embodiment connotes personification (Holstein and Gubrium 200:197).

Technologies of communication, especially interaction on the internet, make it increasingly possible to dislocate selfhood from the body, precariously situating and /or dislocating one or the other from the context of interaction.

The text talks about public nudity, but to me it’s not relevant. I don’t think public nudity (nude beaches etc) can be compared to a private / public cyberspace.

Later in the text they make a good point:

The internet creates a liminal world -> space, where the cybersex occurs. Webcam sex is done from home, a place, but the internet juxtaposes these “spaces” and “places”, and creates a natural environment for liminality; a place separate from one\s space where the ordinary norms of everyday life easily may be suspended.

This liminality, the dislocated and disembodied nature of computer-mediated communication (would we call it social media now?) make cybersex an experience that potentially expresses a sexuality separate from and transgressive of the person, the body, and everyday life. This makes it possible to explore and experiment with new forms and different forms of sexual play. In webcam sex there is not only the notion of watching but also of being watched. You are a performer and consumer at once. We are both voyeurs and exhibitionists. And it that sense there is a reciprocity, ‘gift exchange’. Like nude beaches, there is in webcam sex a ‘reciprocity of nude exposure” (douglas 1977:138). As Simmel (1950:392) points out, “once we received something good from another person… we are obliged ethically; we operate under a condition which, though neither social nor legal but moral, is still a coercion.” (Tokens for an performative sexual act in the case of Chaturbate, the ‘viewer’ only gets naked if that is an extra stimulant for them (and probably have to pay extra for this as well) the motivation of the girls are mostly money, not sexual.) But most of the people engaging in voluntary webcam sex It is the idea of people watching works as a turn on. “Just the act of removing one’s clothing can help strip away symbolic identity and work roles, allowing one to become merely a body, which is prerequisite for sexual pleasure.”(Baumeister 1991:38). By being naked, the body is objectified. The participants that the author has interviewed pointed out that is is not only for sexual benefit but that being viewed as a body also causes increasing appreciation for and assessment of their body.

“A person sheds normal abstract and multifaceted symbolic layers of selfhood with the clothing as she or she becomes a body to be seen.” Being naked on webcam reduces the self to the body. Selfhood is not only reduced to the body but is also made into an object; a naked sexual body to be looked at and commented on. The participants play with this experience of being the object/subject and gain much more than a sexual gratification. In everyday life it is almost impossible to reduce the self to the body in the same extend we do as in the online. This everyday life is something people are afraid of. Since masturbating online is seen as a ‘taboo’ people do a lot to hide their identity. A lot of people don’t show their faces. “A body without a face is a body without a self: it is “just another body”.” Since the face is the most identifiable feature of one’s body and self; it is the single human physiological feature that concretely conjoins the corporeal body with the self.

“At one level, being a body acts back unto the self in an erotic looking-glass process of ritual self-renewal. At another leve, when one presents oneself as a body with no self, everything that makes one sexy, desirable and interesting is stripped away, and having sex with a selfless body is not much different from having sex with any other object.” On sex webcam sites the idea of the sexual exchange, although there, is not equal. Women have more power than men, the more attractive they are, the more sexual power they may wield. This is mostly because there are less females then males in this online encounters, and thus they have more to choose from. “Like other aspects of televideo cybersex, this privilege and power comes at a cost, which, unfortunately ends up making televideo cybersex more like the everyday micrpolitics of sex than departure from them.

Conclusion

“In both text and webcam sex chat, the body is a virtual object of which one may only be a spectator.” That makes the people who show their body also spectators upon their own body, and they must see and respond to the images of their bodies and thus act toward, manage and interpret that image as others might. “Surely the body, unlike the self, is an empirical entity that can be observed, measured, and seen to exist in time and space independently from our own conscious awareness of it. But even so, what that body means is no more or less innately predetermined or any more or less socially shaped than any other object.”