"May the Patron Saint of Nudes always smile upon you": Katrin Tiidenberg on Pleasure, Pain and Politics

Interview - Hanna C. Nes

On Thursday, November 16th at HumSam, IMK’s Screen Cultures and Katrin Tiidenberg (Professor of Participatory Culture at Tallinn University and Professor II at IMK) hosted a talk: Pleasure, Pain and Politics - Let’s Talk About Sex On Social Media. Based on findings from her book Sex & Social Media (co-written by Emily van der Nagel), Tiidenberg discussed how social media platforms both afford certain behaviour and moderate us.

Slides + Photo Credit: Katrin Tiidenberg. Edited by Hanna C. Nes

As a certified Hinge expert and generally inquisitive person with a tendency to overshare on the internet, I was excited to learn more about her research. What struck me about Tiidenberg’s talk was how often we tend to forget, or place aside, pleasure when discussing sex and sexuality. “Pleasure is situational, subjective, multi-directional and multi-dimensional,” said Tiidenberg. “What is pleasurable to me, might not be pleasurable to you. What is pleasurable in one situation, may not be pleasurable in another.” She then presented a list of the many types of pleasure we can derive from sex and sexuality: be they arousal, finding a community to engage in, fantasy, or self confidence (to name but a few - the list is long!). These sources are not limited to being in the moment, as Tiidenberg emphasized that “pleasure is cyclical”, from anticipation to its recounting.

“It is quite unsurprising that social media has become part of people’s sex lives,” Tiidenberg said at the beginning of her presentation. “Platforms structure our sociality,” allowing us to navigate a greater world of sexual choice and expression. Remember the good old years of scrolling on Tumblr, a stream of artsy porn as far as the eye could see? Or FetLife, a social media site for finding fellow fetish enthusiasts? However, despite these supposed freedoms, social media platforms each have strict regulations in regards to sexual behaviour and even sexual identity. As human beings whose identities extend to the digital realm, what are we entitled to through sexual citizenship? What are our sexual rights and how does the internet and its various platforms play in it? “Sex on/with social media sits in a historically overburdened and political trifecta of anxieties with leads to specific moral panics that shape the social media ecosystem through legislation,” Tiidenberg mentioned.

In an age where hookup apps are the norm and nudes are a way of life, there’s a continuous dissonance between technology built for sexual encounters and an idea of sexuality being deviant. Tiidenberg stressed the influence that platforms such as Instagram can have in distorting and amplifying cultural norms while also creating moral panics, as the “concentration of power [is in] the hands of a few platform companies.” Take for example, FOSTA/SESTA, (the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act), which came into effect in 2018. FOSTA/SESTA purported to protect victims of sex trafficking, but in doing so also made it incredibly difficult for sex workers to conduct their business online (advertise their services, vet clients for safety, etc). This has led to a lot of surveillance and silencing of sex workers in digital spaces, resulting in FOSTA/SESTA receiving plenty of criticism for having a hand in impeding free speech online and making sex work more dangerous (it also led to Craigslist closing its personals section). In a time where we’re seeing a lot of sexual freedom but growing conservatism, how do we navigate the treacherous digital waters?

Katrin Tiidenberg speaking. Photo: Hanna C. Nes / PRESSET.

I had the chance to sit down with Katrin and ask her a bit more about her work.

You wrote that “Silicon Valley’s contradictory take on sex is confusing enough. Nudes are normal but also more evil than any other content?” Could you expand on that?

- I think on the one hand that if we look at apps they sell us or want us to use (dating apps, photo editing apps), it’s clear that segments of the tech industry are very well aware that people like sex and that sexual self-expression is part of our everyday life. But then there’s this fairly disingenuous pretense, especially around social media, that it’s not, that it continues to be something really abnormal or wrong or something that only really pervy people do, that you should be ashamed of. And therefore social media should be cleansed of sexual expression. And yes, content moderation at the scale of 2.9 billion people is objectively an impossible task, I’m not uncompassionate towards the difficulties there. But we are definitely capable of better than what we see happening now. It’s really easy to hide behind it and say that we must reduce everything down to the lowest common denominator so that no one will be offended. But how come this same argument of somebody being offended is not utilized around content moderation about racism, or some of the forms of discrimination. How come free speech is non-negotiable - but sexual citizenship is? Why is my sexual expression not covered by free speech?

You have a section where you talk about how we’re being pushed to segment our identities, yet we’re seeing more supposed freedom on apps to engage in this kind of behaviour?

- This is a complicated issue, because people are multifaceted and our identities are multifaceted. We have identity theory from long before the internet that points to this. Take for example: Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life from 1956 where he talks about the fact that emotionally intelligent people are capable of selecting what facet of themselves to present to others based on the kind of audiences and appropriate context and situation. I think it’s good when social media allows faceted self-presentation, but it’s important that the facets aren’t formally separated from each other when people choose to blur those boundaries. We know from existing research that there have been spaces that are permissive of sexual expression but not only meant for that (not a porn site, hookup app, etc). Something like how Tumblr used to be. People are there to do a multitude of things, but sex is also part of it. This type of a social setting yields a different, rich, empowering and healthy form of relating to other people and the world. It allows learning to be more tolerant in an organic way. We want the internet to allow for segmentation or faceted self-expression, but we also want to make sure that sex isn’t always the thing that is bracketed out as the secret, hidden facet, only allowed in seedy, ghettoized apps and platforms not used for anything else interesting.

In 2018, Tumblr had a porn ban. Last year, they are now allowing nudity again but not sexually explicit material?

- They made the rules less exclusionary but it’s extremely difficult to revive a thing you killed. In terms of fandom, it’s still a relevant platform. For queer, trans and activism cultures, I can imagine a fruitful overlap there, so maybe.

Coming to Oslo, what’s been your take on the attitudes here? I think Scandinavia has a reputation for being frank yet repressed. I’m wondering what your observations have been.

- Yesterday, an article came out called “Vanilla Normies and Fellow Pervs” which I wrote with Susanna Paasonen, Jenny Sundén and Maria Vihlman which is part of the Rethinking Sexualities Project. We’re actually writing a book for MIT press based on that project, it focuses on the role and cultural functions of the periphery in terms of regionality and platforms, within sexual cultures. So, we’re looking at Swedish, Finnish and Estonian sexual platforms and this exact thing came up. So we saw this concentric and overlapping boundary work in how people explained their own and other peoples sexuality and aligned or contrasted it to enjoyable sex and liberated sex and it relied on this narrative of Nordic no-nonsense approach to nudity and sex, and some explicit boundary making between the Nordic and the Puritan American way, both in terms of people’s practices and in terms of platform governance. And then on the flipside, there is an equally strong narrative of Nordic repression or introversion, an idea of strategic modesty because these are all very small countries. So the costs of being different can be experienced or perceived as being quite hight. So while I don’t have data on Norway, I would speculate that there might be similar patterns here.

What were some things that really stuck with you from the research you did for the book?

- This one I brought all the Tumblr research into, which was 6 or 7 years of ethnographic research which very rarely happens. I can’t really claim a stroke of genius there, I just got lucky with my research participants and they allowed me to keep coming back to it. The community was so vibrant. It’s very rare for digital work, and any kind of research, to have 6 or 7 years of observations and interviews with people. That’s a long time, and allows you access to observing how people’s sex lives, relationship statuses, health, relationship to their bodies to change. Having now done a bunch of different projects, this will always be my special project. The level of security in your interpretations that this long term engagement gives you is a sweet thing for a scholar. The types of conversations you get to have and the things people trust you with. You get to talk to men about sending dick pics. It’s a culturally fraught practice and normally they would say “I wouldn’t do that”. But I had these trusting relationships where I could ask if they’d ever sent one without asking. At first, they’d say “no” and then would say “well…I have interpreted prior consent and desire to receive one as consent to receive another one at a later time.” That helps you start asking questions about image based sexual abuse and figuring out what’s really happening here. It’s not about the image, it’s not about the dick. It’s about power, aggression and violence.

What are the exciting emerging parts of this field that you really encourage people to dig into as it necessitates more conversation?

- I’m really interested in people’s workarounds, both in terms of circumventing moderation but also these new genres, like edgeballing and Instagram “fitness” videos that are clearly intended and interpreted as sexual, but in a form that circumvents deplatforming. People’s creativity in finding a way is one thing. But the other aspect is to ask what this does to our interpretations of what is sexy? Another topic is related to generative AI, and I’d like us to not get stuck on deep fake porn as there isn’t much to debate there. But I have a side project where I’m interviewing content creators who use generative AI tools. There’s one who was an OnlyFans model who is really sick now so she can’t pose for pictures anymore. So she makes erotic synthetic content of herself, voluntarily puts her face on these naked bodies that are synthetic. I find that a really promising question to keep exploring. Another project that I just did with Zach McDowell where we published an article on the National Center for Sexual Exploitation, which used to be called Morality and Media and before that, it was Operation Yorkville, which is this conservative lobbying group in the US. For 60 years, they’ve been fighting to “combat obscenity” in American public life. They’ve always targeted media and media intermediaries, but by taking this longer analytical lens, you realize that they have been a key player in internet governance. That conversations about deplatforming sex do not have to start at FOSTA/SESTA in 2018, but 60 years ago.

If you’re interested in further work on sex and digital culture, check out  #NSFW (by Susanna Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett, and Ben Light) and sexpositivesocialmedia.org