The Rise of Voyeurism: What You Should Know!

The demand for transparency is one of the most obsessive demands today. In economics, politics, morality, food, and sex, an event is considered contemporary if it has a condition of transparency. Wagyu beef offers the assurance that the meat is completely tender and liquid in the mouth. But in other human and sexual meats, the rapid rise of pornography, on and off the Internet, is undoubtedly related to the interest in what is exposed, the panopticon, the fully revealed. From Big Brother to the Glass House in Chile, from Foster’s transparent work for the City of London to Patrick Berger’s UEFA pavilion in Nyon, everything is transparent. Pornography is a sign of our times, in one sense or another moral or ideological, economic or worldly.

The world claims to be a naked body, and democracy will be like the State in full light. How can we be surprised by the rise of traditional or non-traditional pornography?

Thanks to the Internet

On the Internet, thanks to webcams, anyone can film themselves yawning in their armchair, like an insomniac. The network of computers offers what can be called authentic voyeur experiences in real-time.

Webcams transmit one’s intimacy to others and exchange it for the intimacy of others like webcams. Within the Internet, intimacy is exchanged as one of the most attractive factors of interpersonal communication. But beyond this intimacy, one might think there is still room for further penetration.

In the rooms and bathrooms of luxury hotels, both in New York and other major cities, cameras have been found recording intimate scenes that are sold to voyeurs or shared on the Internet. It is estimated that there are more than 150,000 such pages on the Internet. Voyeurism and spying on the intimacy of others correspond to the rise of pornography.

Voyeurism, aggravated by the need to explore every crevice, has been amplified by the rise of attention generated by reality shows and their various variants, which are linked to a morbid curiosity to observe the secret lives of others and, at the same time, as a sign of the contemporary. A contemporary era that marks the end of 400 years of the idea of privacy and the triumph of immediate information.

Feminism through porn?

A strange feminism that does not condemn the emergence of graceful and sexy images of women in the mass media, but instead revels in their nude display as a powerful banner. Longstanding feminists have always opposed the pornographic genre, but in the 1980s, pornographic film production companies led by women, with films written and directed by them, emerged. Their movies had more storylines and more psychological content than those made by men and for men. Ninety-nine percent of porn films are still in the hands of men, but female participation is now increasing, and the idea of porn is also becoming more mystical.

Filmmakers like David Cronenberg and John Waters have hired porn actresses as protagonists of some of their films, always with the idea that, in the not-too-distant future, the boundaries separating the real from the fake in erotic and cinematic matters will blur.

Porn cinema was born in brothels to excite male clients. These movies were called Smokers. Modern pornographic cinema emerged in the 1970s when the film industry opted for harder and bolder films like Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange to compete with television. From this period also came pornographic films such as Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones, which despite being shown on the specialty circuit, nonetheless gained tremendous box office receipts due to their novelty.

In the 1980s, more elaborate scripts emerged, and today, spectacle porn dominates, consistent with special effects-driven blockbusters. In fact, many film experts defend pornography as a genre, similar to thrillers, cowboy movies, or musicals.

There is no need to pay much attention to this issue, at this point when everything is already sexual in nature. Publishing of erotic books increased by 324% between 1990 and 1996, while the overall number of books published grew by 83% (Books in Print Topic Guide 1997). In the US too, in 2000, while on the one hand books aimed at affirming monogamy were appearing, on the other hand, the production of pornographic novels increased. There was no discrepancy between the two trends. In fact, one of the volumes in the first group was titled Hot Monogamy, which shows where this was going.

Towards the more natural and unimaginable

In a beautiful way, but clearly in line with the trend, in recent years news programs have been tested in Eastern Europe with male and female announcers taking off their clothes while reading the news. Weather forecasters on TV Nova in the Czech Republic start their late-night show naked, then change into clothes that match the weather they are broadcasting. In Russia, the anchor of a major news program, The Naked Truth, conducts near-nude interviews while the weather girl does a striptease. The wave of pornography on television, in movie theaters, in magazines, in video games, in art galleries, on pink phones, and in other places corresponds to the spectacular demand for pornography on the Internet. On the other hand, voyeurism has taken pornography in a different direction, a direction that is more natural and what it is.

The decline of porn magazines, whose circulation has dropped by more than half, is precisely due to the fact that intense excitement has been transferred to the computer, which is so hot that it can melt its mechanisms. Of course, thanks to what Americans call the three A’s: anonymity, access, and affordability, in the last five years not only the way pornography is produced and distributed has radically changed, but also the type of audience that consumes it.

Al Cooper, a psychologist at Stanford University who specializes in cybersex, even speaks of a “second sexual revolution” because the Internet has helped many people overcome old puritanical inhibitions and become if they wish, regular consumers of erotic material. On the Internet, users have formed dozens of international discussion groups where they talk about sex, uncover cases of pedophilia and bestiality, and exchange pornographic texts and images. A 1995 study by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh stated that ‘pornography is the most widespread recreational application on the Internet.’ Pornography is, without a doubt, an everyday spectacle on the Internet and it seems to be getting more ‘pervasive’ thanks to an increased interest in voyeurism.

Thanks for reading and if you’re curious about high-quality voyeur content, head over to voyeur-house.tv!