Conference PaperPDF Available

Distant reading intimate encounters: a big data approach to online erotica

Authors:

Figures

No caption available
… 
Content may be subject to copyright.
Distant reading intimate encounters:
a big data approach to online erotica
Dr Alon Lischinsky and Dr Kat Gupta
Oxford Brookes University, UK
alischinsky@brookes.ac.uk || kat@mixosaurus.co.uk
@alischinsky || @mixosaurus
Why pornography?
“Prolonged consumption of pornography distorts
perceptions of sexuality […] breeds discontent with the
physical appearance and the sexual performance of
intimate partners [and] increases men's propensity for
committing rape.”
Zillmann (1986:26–7)
“Pornography […] portrays stereotypical views of women
as passive."
Rosen & Christman (1997:210)
Why pornography?
“Pornography is valuable. It sends out messages of comfort
and rebellion. It says: Lust is not evil. The body is not hateful.
Physical pleasure is a joyful thing and should not be hidden
or denied.”
Califia (2000:52)
“One of the most common informal sources of sexual
information was pornography in its various forms.
Pornography was usually described as one of the only
resources available.”
Kubicek et al. (2010:250)
Why written pornography?
“The visceral energies directed ‘at’ pornography
by social forces concentrate on its visual
aspects […] While pornographic books and
magazines are also mass-produced and
consumed, they are less visible as targets of
critique or analysis because the prevailing figure
for pornographic consumption lies so squarely in
the enthralled spectatorship of the eye.”
Wicke (1995:75)
Current research into pornography
Historical, literary and aesthetic
perspectives on the development of genres
Gay, lesbian and queer pornography
Transgressive pornography (c.f. Porn
Studies (2017) special edition on gonzo
porn)
Literotica
Free site aimed at amateur writers
Largely image-free
Stories are submitted through a form or
email and are reviewed before posting
Process takes 3-7 days
Authors choose the category most suitable for
their story
Discourse
Discourse as reflecting/constructing a
social reality
This gets complicated with pornography
Discourse
Discourse as reflecting/constructing a social reality
This gets complicated with pornography
Complex relationship between imagined acts, what
may be fantasised about but not actually wanted in
real life, the writer and reader's sexual experience,
the role of acting, socially salient sex acts…
Fantasy and reality
Awareness of legal restrictions and
realities
Does not allow stories involving bestiality,
mutilation, snuff and underage sexual
encounters
Fantasy and reality
Awareness of legal restrictions and
realities
Does not allow stories involving bestiality,
mutilation, snuff and underage sexual
encounters
Stories obviously based in fantasy
Encounters with werewolves, vampires,
demons and aliens
Fantasy and reality
Awareness of legal restrictions and realities
Does not allow stories involving bestiality,
mutilation, snuff and underage sexual encounters
Stories obviously based in fantasy
Encounters with werewolves, vampires, demons
and aliens
Unrealistic depictions of sex
Literotica corpus
31 genres
anal, BDSM, celebrities, chain stories, erotic
couplings, erotic horror, exhibitionist & voyeur,
fetish, first time, gay male, group sex, how to,
humor & satire, illustrated, incest/taboo, interracial
love, lesbian sex, letters & transcripts, loving wives,
mature, mind control, non-erotic,
nonconsent/reluctance, nonhuman, novels &
novellas, reviews & essays, romance, sci-fi &
fantasy, text with audio, toys & masturbation,
transsexuals & crossdressers
Literotica corpus
31 genres
Top 1000 stories for each genre (incl.
multi-chaptered stories)
1,385,891,072 tokens
Keywords
By genre
Reference corpora
BNC
All of literotica
Top 50 (or fewer) keywords
Keywords
Potentially 1,550 unique keywords
Reference corpus No. unique keywords
 
 
Literotica genres and BNC-written
Number of
genres
No. of
keywords
Keywords
  
    !"
" ##$%&#&&#
#%!
' ( )%## 
*  ##&+&&%!
'  """ %%# #

* ( % ###  ! !&,
##!!!
' (  )%" %%%%
###" !+
" -&&&,
###!!!#
!!!#
 # 
"%%####!" 
+&%% 
&&&&# + 
+ %#+! 
!"!"!!+
Literotica genres and BNC-written
Number of
genres
No. of
keywords
Keywords
  I
    !"
" ##$%&#&&she
#%!
' ( )%## 
*  ##&+&&%!
'  """ %%# #

* ( % ###  ! !&,
##!!!
' (  )%" %%%%
###" !+
" -&&&,
###!!!#
!!!#
 # 
"%%#he##!" 
+&%% 
&&&&# + 
+ %#+! 
!"!"!!+
Pronouns
Pronouns
Transitive uses of fuck take female
patients almost three times as frequently
as male ones
A majority of the instances of transitive
fuck with female agents corresponds to
uses of insertable sex toys
Lischinsky (2017)
Literotica genres & Literotica-all
Number of genres Number of keywords
31 1 (user error?)
5-9 83
2-4 419
1 612
metadiscourse
metadiscourse
How to and Reviews & Essays
Characterised by words about writing, reading
and characterisation e.g. characters, readers,
stories, writer
Overlaps with the genre of Letters &
Transcripts due to use of second person
pronouns and direct address (your, yourself)
non-porn components
non-porn components
Celebrities, Chain stories, Erotic horror,
Fantasy, Non-erotic, Nonhuman, Romance
Characterised by greater attention to setting,
description and (sometimes) fighting
Supernatural elements (demon, wolf, vampire)
Historical fantasy (castle, forest, lord,
princess)
distinctiveness
distinctiveness
Anal and Toys & masturbation
Limited overlap with each other (beads,
jelly) but for the most part, do not have
shared keywords
Describing sex acts that do not involve
other people and/or non-PIV sex
control and power(?)
control & power(?)
BDSM, Exhibitionist, Fetish, Nonconsent-
Reluctance, Transsexual-Crossdressers
BDSM, Exhibitionist and Fetish: humiliation,
humiliated
BDSM and Nonconsent-Reluctance: cuffs, gag,
restraints, wrists, tied
BDSM and Fetish: bondage, obey, spank
Fetish and Transsexual-Crossdressers: heeled,
latex, panty
control & power(?)
Some spurious connections e.g. sir is
shared by Letters & Transcripts and
BDSM
signalling power and/or distance?
What comes next…
Written pornography is not homogenous
What comes next…
Written pornography is not homogenous
Attention to stylistic detail and
distinctiveness
wolves
scary wolves…
wolves
scary wolves… …or sexy wolves?
What comes next…
Written pornography is not homogenous
Attention to stylistic detail and distinctiveness
Do the same categories emerge with
unsupervised categorisation?
MDA
Cluster analysis
Topic modelling
References
Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J. L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast
unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical
Mechanisms. 2008.
Califia, P. (2000). Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (2nd ed.) San
Francisco: Cleis.
Kubicek, K., Beyer, G., Iverson, E., Kipke, M. (2010). In the Dark: Young
Men’s Stories of Sexual Initiation in the Absence of Relevant Sexual Health
Information. Health Education & Behavior, 37(2), pp. 243-263.
Lischinsky, A. (2017). Doing the naughty or having it done to you? Agent roles
in erotic writing. Porn Studies
Rosen, D. & Christman, J. (1997). Toward a New Model of Sexuality. In:
Soble, K. (Ed). Sex, Love and Friendship (pp. 199-214). Amsterdam: Rodopi
Zillmann, D. (1986) Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography. Paper
written for the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography and Public
Health. Arlington, VA.
... Compete is a company that provides site statistics; during the past years, Literotica had between 2.6 and 3.1 million unique visitors. It is one of the oldest and biggest erotic literature sources online comprising approximately 1.25 billion words [24]. ...
Article
Due to the growth of Internet, it has not only become the medium for getting information, it has also become a platform for communicating. Social Network Service (SNS) is one of the main platform where Internet users can communicate by distributing, sharing of information and knowledge. Chatting has become a popular communication medium for Internet users whereby users can communicate directly and privately with each other. However, due to the privacy of chat rooms or chatting mediums, the content of chat logs is not monitored and not filtered. Thus, easing cyber predators preying on their preys. Cyber groomers are one of cyber predators who prey on children or minors to satisfy their sexual desire. Workforce expertise that involve in intelligence gathering always deals with difficulty as the complexity of crime increases, human errors and time constraints. Hence, it is difficult to prevent undesired content, such as grooming conversation, in chat logs. An investigation on two term weighting schemes on two datasets are used to improve the content-based classification techniques. This study aims to improve the content-based classification accuracy on chat logs by comparing two term weighting schemes in classifying grooming contents. Two term weighting schemes namely Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency – Inverse Class Space Density Frequency (TF.IDF.ICSdF) and Fuzzy Rough Feature Selection (FRFS) are used as feature selection process in filtering chat logs. The performance of these techniques were examined via datasets, and the accuracy of their result was measured by Support Vector Machine (SVM). TF.IDF.ICSdF and FRFS are judged based on accuracy, precision, recall and F score measurement.
Article
Full-text available
A growing body of research has investigated the effectiveness of abstinence-only sexual education. There remains a dearth of research on the relevant sexual health information available to young men who have sex with men (YMSM). Drawing on a mixed-methods study with 526 YMSM, this study explores how and where YMSM receive relevant information on sexual health/behavior. Findings indicate that information related to gay men's sexuality is not readily available from family, friends, or schools. At initiation of anal intercourse, respondents generally had limited information about HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In some cases, this resulted in the perception that activities such as unprotected sex were "low risk." Many mentioned they first learned about anal sex during their sexual debut, describing painful and/or unpleasant experiences. Some relied on older/more experienced partners, the Internet, and pornography for information. Findings are discussed in relation to how providers can help YMSM build solid foundations of sexual education to protect them from STI and HIV infection.
Article
Full-text available
We propose a simple method to extract the community structure of large networks. Our method is a heuristic method that is based on modularity optimization. It is shown to outperform all other known community detection methods in terms of computation time. Moreover, the quality of the communities detected is very good, as measured by the so-called modularity. This is shown first by identifying language communities in a Belgian mobile phone network of 2 million customers and by analysing a web graph of 118 million nodes and more than one billion links. The accuracy of our algorithm is also verified on ad hoc modular networks.
Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex
  • P Califia
• Califia, P. (2000). Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (2 nd ed.) San Francisco: Cleis.
Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography. Paper written for the Surgeon General
  • A Lischinsky
  • D Rosen
  • J Christman
• Lischinsky, A. (2017). Doing the naughty or having it done to you? Agent roles in erotic writing. Porn Studies • Rosen, D. & Christman, J. (1997). Toward a New Model of Sexuality. In: Soble, K. (Ed). Sex, Love and Friendship (pp. 199-214). Amsterdam: Rodopi • Zillmann, D. (1986) Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography. Paper written for the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography and Public Health. Arlington, VA.