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NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media
An exploration of how and why social media content is tagged as “not safe for work” and an argument against conflating sexual content with risk. The hashtag #NSFW (not safe for work) acts as both a warning and an invitation. NSFW tells users, “We dare you to click on this link! And by the way, don't do it until after work!” Unlike the specificity of movie and television advisories (“suggestive dialogue,” “sexual content”), NSFW signals, nonspecifically, sexually explicit content that ranges from nude selfies to pornography. NSFW looks at how and why social media content is tagged “not safe” and shows how this serves to conflate sexual content and risk. The authors argue that the notion of “unsafety” extends beyond the risk of losing one's job or being embarrassed at work to an unspecified sense of risk attached to sexually explicit media content and sexual communication in general.
The authors examine NSFW practices of tagging and flagging on a range of social media platforms; online pornography and its dependence on technology; user-generated NSFW content—in particular, the dick pic and associated issues of consent, desire, agency, and social power; the deployment of risqué humor in the workplace; and sexist and misogynist online harassment that functions as an enforcer of inequalities. They argue against the categorical effacement of sexual content by means of an all-purpose hashtag and urge us to shift considerations of safety from pictorial properties to issues of context and consent.
The authors examine NSFW practices of tagging and flagging on a range of social media platforms; online pornography and its dependence on technology; user-generated NSFW content—in particular, the dick pic and associated issues of consent, desire, agency, and social power; the deployment of risqué humor in the workplace; and sexist and misogynist online harassment that functions as an enforcer of inequalities. They argue against the categorical effacement of sexual content by means of an all-purpose hashtag and urge us to shift considerations of safety from pictorial properties to issues of context and consent.
- GenresNonfiction
232 pages, Hardcover
Published October 22, 2019
About the author
Susanna Paasonen
27 books1 followerSusanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku in Finland and the author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press).
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January 17, 2020#NSFW
Overt displays of sex, sexuality, and sexual organs are generally considered unsafe in the workplace, even in those where discussions of bodies and sexuality are normalized or crucial foci. In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G. S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with Papaverine. The drug, Professor Brindley argued, could be injected into the penis to produce an erection. In order to demonstrate the success of his procedure, Brindley had injected himself with Papaverine and attended his talk dressed in loose fitting jogging pants that illustrated its effects. However, the professor decided that having his erection covered by the jogging pants was not sufficient, and so he lowered them to his knees during the demonstration. As one audience member recalled,
[T]he mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, 'I'd like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence.' With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him. four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual method of demonstrating the results. (Klotz 2005, 956-957 )
One might think that a group of clinicians with interests in erectile dysfunction would not be disturbed by examining a penis, erect or other. Brindley apparently felt he was on safe ground and prefixed his demonstration by suggesting to his audience that no normal person would find giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. However, as the account illuminates, he clearly crossed a boundary, not just because the partners of clinicians were in the audience, but also because he exposed his own genitals in the flesh. Thankfully for Professor Brindley, it occurred before the ubiquity of digital cameras, smartphones, and social media platforms, so that no persistent visual record of his act remains or circulates.
Klotz, Laurence. 2005. "How (Not) to Communicate New Scientific Information: A Memoir of the Famous Brindley Lecture." British Journal of Urology International 96 (7): 956-957
Overt displays of sex, sexuality, and sexual organs are generally considered unsafe in the workplace, even in those where discussions of bodies and sexuality are normalized or crucial foci. In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G. S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with Papaverine. The drug, Professor Brindley argued, could be injected into the penis to produce an erection. In order to demonstrate the success of his procedure, Brindley had injected himself with Papaverine and attended his talk dressed in loose fitting jogging pants that illustrated its effects. However, the professor decided that having his erection covered by the jogging pants was not sufficient, and so he lowered them to his knees during the demonstration. As one audience member recalled,
[T]he mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, 'I'd like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence.' With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him. four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual method of demonstrating the results. (Klotz 2005, 956-957 )
One might think that a group of clinicians with interests in erectile dysfunction would not be disturbed by examining a penis, erect or other. Brindley apparently felt he was on safe ground and prefixed his demonstration by suggesting to his audience that no normal person would find giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. However, as the account illuminates, he clearly crossed a boundary, not just because the partners of clinicians were in the audience, but also because he exposed his own genitals in the flesh. Thankfully for Professor Brindley, it occurred before the ubiquity of digital cameras, smartphones, and social media platforms, so that no persistent visual record of his act remains or circulates.
Klotz, Laurence. 2005. "How (Not) to Communicate New Scientific Information: A Memoir of the Famous Brindley Lecture." British Journal of Urology International 96 (7): 956-957
March 7, 2021
Both really interesting, and oddly gappy - f'r ex, despite sections entitled 'sex, harassment and the workplace', and despite addressing gross-out pranks, fails to actually grapple with gross-out pranks as either heterosexual harassment or homophobic harassment in the workplace. Weird.
May 6, 2022
A great book which interrogates NSFW culture and how social media platforms increasingly have come to police "risky" content and behaviour, forms of policing that are often tied to cis and heteronormative practices which are both built into the code and executed by human moderators.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews