Carnal Resonance Affect and Online Pornography Susanna Paasonen The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England6 Absolutely Disgusting: Shock Sites, Extremity, and the Forbidden Fruit market for pornography has ‘As discussed above at some lengt been fragmented as of online amateur port person's face), ATM, DV/DA, coprophil feces)—all porn niches previously backlash of a kind (Langman, and degradation go hand in snd nasty sort— extreme depic: the object of desire in acts (Kalha 2007a, 110) and 1 promises of "Nasty Glels Getting Down and ardcore!,” and “Amazing, bizare, nasty XXX!!! sment for Spunk Farm, an animal porn site. The "dirty," “sck,” and "degenerate” frames the site as208 Chapter 6 “amazing,” “bizarre,” and attractive in its extremity and associates the acts and taboo-defying case of sexual and text guarantees that the things depicted visually are also echoed and amplified through ‘means, creating a sense of hyperbolic nastiness. ‘The ad for Farm Gi rently run by the same company) deploys simi- larly hyperbolic eh Forbidden XXX hardcore ‘Banned in over St states. ‘You've never seen anything ike it "Nasty, desperate country gels who wil do anything for cock. The bigger the better! [NOTHING is too TABOO for these young sluts ‘THE MOST SHOCKING & UNBELIEVABLE SEX ACTS. ‘The female performers become Identified with taboo desires and acts ‘with no holds barred. This realm of unbridled “animal passions” posed with notions (both promises and threats) of censorship, illegality, and banning, These become guarantees ofthe transgressive, shocking, unbelievable nature of the acts featured, while also marking them as for- bidden frults of a kind. The nastiness and dirtiness advertized culminates ‘women are reduced to lengthy checklists of increasingly extreme acts that they will or will not do or have done to them.” Once the female perform- ‘ers become the locus of the disgusting, the nasty, and the excessive, it may (0 ask “How can they do er than to inquire after Absolutely Disgusting 209 ‘onto them are les about them than about a cluster of desires and affects we ‘manage to keep magnet them.” So when *we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone cr something to make to us and make possible for us" (Berlant 2006, 20). ‘What are, then, the nasty girls of porn performing as objects of desire? And ‘what kinds of desites and affects are magnetized to all this nastiness? ‘The dynamics of disgust give rise to relations between the performers, ‘the viewers, and the pornographic object that is pulled closer and pushed away—that Is kept at a distance and yet stubbornly comes close and gets under one’s skin. If the nasty and the filthy are used in porn as posit ity thing your sick brain can ims [As long as its imageries have the potential to upset at ‘can conserve some of Its transgressive and forbidden aur ial disgust and vexation, this aura would be considerably and effective. I suggest that nasty girls and extreme and bi phy make explicit the dynamics of interest and disgust that are central to the genre. ‘This chapter addresses the shame through a discussion o' ‘gain broad attention and ks with each other, invite new people to watch and react to them, ‘own reactions, circulate both the reaction videos and the origl- fideo link further, and comment on and discuss the videos in online play, “2 Girls 1 Cup" became famous in by Hervé Roy's romantic “Lover's Theme210 Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 “The seemingly innocent beginning of iss, Next, one of them defecates in 2 cup, and the other then vomits into the ‘mouth. In “Japanese Eel Absolutely Disgusting 2 fan Tomkins (1995b, 54) argues that * ‘been Linke his affect system a that any object can be at may evoke the ly hated and may now dare what he previously feared”; and one and the same thing can at the sam rent" (Spinoza 1992, 13) as a primary negat learns dis their investigations of phenomenologist Au and the embodied, is experienced by smé hy, sticky, excessive! bie22 chapter 6 and oozing objects represent both mort jc and biological) ‘tons, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Abject is what ‘encroaches the boundaries ofthe self ‘According to Bataille, dead bodles, excrement, and sexual acts deemed ingness and decay, acter: "The sexual channels are a as shameful and connect the anal orifice with them. St. August ppains to insist on the obscenity of the organs and function of reproduc- tion. ‘Inner faeces et urinam nascimur,’ he sald—'we are born between fae- and Miller's discussion on the "soup viscous, oozing, festering, scabby, disgusting, and murky: to any object and vice versa) and the fact that the videos have been pro- ‘duced as pornography (with the intention to arouse), their visual landscape is open to a range of affective dynamics beyond disgust. The videos bring the excessively ca resonance, bring forth something of the olfactory and the haptic. Sight and sound are the senses that involve most distance between the subject and the object or phenomenon perceived. They have also tended Absolutely Disgusting a to stand at the top of value hierarchies concerning the five senses. Since jon has dominated the sensory hierarchy, followed by hear whereas the ‘mediating pure, 1997, x, 132). Vision, the “highest” of the senses, is certainly central o por- ography, yet the genre fs very much concerned with mediating the more “pase” senses of touch, smell, and, to a smaller degree, ta senses serving “lower sensual pleasures’), In audiovisual pornography, the senses involving closer proximity to the sensed object (whether a human body, an else) are depicted and mediated through vision and senses” are rendered subservient to the “lower” ones tensities of pon. Although, cciates disgust with some tactile and olfactory queli- ties, he differs from Kolnal in not to its objects (even If he does assot of social norms, hierarchi ucts, Since igurative an bodily emissions, and rotting corpses but also to what is seen as morally ‘objectionable and hence disgusting and shameful (Cohen 2005, vil, x) ‘Viral videos seem to bring these two registers of disgust together by depict: (coprophilia, bestiality) ‘gente regulary identified as morally ve. ating and defecating are both connected to thé cycle of Ife and the sense of mortality. As the two ends ofthe alimentary system, the mouth ha the anus are itealy connected to one another (Miler 1997, 96. However, i, according to Miler, “the essence of lowness, of untouchability,” neither the anus nor feces can be eked or touched with the mouth, unless the person in question delights "truly in24 Chapter turning himself and the world upside down, taking his pleasure from total Andulgence in self-