Spanked For The Camera
I have been accused, once or twice, with overthinking my spanking porn. There might even be some justice in the accusation! I just can’t help being fascinated by the semiotics of the stuff. For example, take this simple little scene below. I think it says an awful lot about performance and gaze. When we make a spanking scene for a camera, one that can record, transmit, and broadcast, even sometimes when we don’t know or intend that, who is the performance truly for?
What do you think is happening in the scene above? I see a young woman with an assured sexual agency, performing a spanking cams show in what she thought to be the privacy of her own bedroom. She has a simple-but-adequate sex toy (in this case, a portable automatic caning machine) and a fellow on the other end of her feed who is hugely enjoying her self-spanking performance. For the appreciation of his gaze, she’s gone to considerable lengths to redden her own ass and share the ass-reddening process on camera. But her shocked face and the shadow from her doorway suggests that she’s not so happy at all to be seen in real life by whoever it is that just burst through her door. And yet the camera mediates — potentially — the gazes of numerous strangers. Even if her camera-boyfriend is an intended virtual audience of just one, which we don’t know for sure, it’s not easy to reconcile her simultaneous joy-of-performance and shock-of-privacy-invaded. And in that tension, we get interesting art.
My next example entirely flips that script. In the artwork above, the caning is emphatically a public performance, perhaps unwilling. Our heroine is fully naked, on some sort of institutional stage, surrounded by uniformly-dressed watchers. Everyone can see; being seen to be punished is, presumably, part of the punishment. So, for what purpose is the prominently-placed camera? Is it for broadcast to the scornful gaze of the entire world? Is it for the gaze of history, the ultimate “this goes on your permanent record?” The presence of the camera makes these scenes more interesting. It raises questions. People may scoff at the notion of porn-as-art, but the questions remain.
Faster takes now. Above, a seemingly private spanking. But the camera records her rapidly-reddening ass. For blackmail? His trophy and momento? We’d like to know. There’s a whole story in the answers to these questions.
Below, he’s recording the blank canvas of her unspanked ass. Is he making a before-and-after video for his collection? I’d bet he is:
No camera in sight at all for this next one. But the handprint, I’d argue, is performative. It’s to be be seen. Unless we have a live audience, then, I’d say the handprint was put there for the camera’s lens to record. But with whom will the images be shared? The camera is an observer but not a viewer. Again, questions.
No spanking — yet — in the final example. But an avid audience, eager to record what they are about see. Are these phone videos for the men to use for private (ahem) reflection? Or will this performance be circulated among all the bros? Questions. Stories untold. The unexplained camera is such a powerful plot device!
Image credits, top to bottom: The interrupted spanking-machine camshow is by Cat Cubed. The filmed public caning exhibition is by Huaca. The camcorder-filmed ass-reddening is by Natsumi Hajime.
The filming of the about-to-be-spanked bottom is by Nonomura Hideki. The aroused woman with the sharply-defined spanking handprint is by Harris Hero. And the avid phonecamming of an explicit ass-and-pussy-show is by Ushisuke.
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