This paper proposes a media-archaeological exploration of early digital desire, focusing on the experiences of teenage girls and femme-identifying youth in the early 2000s Italian context. Situated against the patriarchal and hypersexualized media landscape of Berlusconi-era Italy, it examines how the domestic bedroom became a site for the rehearsal of intimacy through opensource chatrooms, social platforms, and early online gaming environments. By tracing the intersections of libidinal curiosity, cybernetics, and digital architecture, the study foregrounds how early online spaces enabled experimentation with desire, gender, and pleasure beyond the constraints of heteronormative, reproductive, and familial scripts. Drawing on autotheoretical reflection and dialogical memory-work with former users of Habbo Hotel, the essay investigates the ambivalent nature of these proto-immersive platforms: offering both refuge and risk, enabling playful, disembodied erotic exploration while potentially advancing patriarchal abstractions of femininity. By attending to these early experiences as historically and politically charged archives of deviation, fantasy, and technosexual relationality, the paper contributes to understanding the emergence of post-internet erotics and the complex inheritance of intergenerational sexual hauntologies.
This article aims to explore webcamming – a digital activity in which many individuals have begun using webcams for live sex performances – a sector that offers spectators the opportunity to interact in real-time. The study examines how digital self-representations transition from “seductive models of meaning communication” (Soro 2021), with a particular focus on the capitalization of intimacy, the new criteria of self-exposure in digitalized environments, and how bodies are perceived and evaluated. The paper seeks to present an additional monetizable configuration of identity that tends toward a networked self, analyzing cam sites and paid platforms in relation to case studies from the worlds of cinema and contemporary art. This scenario has also influenced contemporary relationships, now increasingly based on a “contractual relationship” (Benasayag and Schmit 2018), shaping a society that, by virtue of its hypervisibility, is defined as “pornographic” (Han 2014). All of this is facilitated by the ubiquity enabled by new media devices, which operate in an ongoing “on” mode, as summarized by the slogan 24/7 (Crary 2015). The smartphone, in this context, becomes the prosthesis of desire that ensures continuity between body, image, and commodity.
This introduction frames virtual sex as a crucial site for rethinking the relation between pornography, immersion, and environmental images. Starting from the fictional “Cybersex” device imagined in Architectural Design in 1969, it traces a genealogy of technological fantasies centred on multisensoriality, immediacy, reproducibility, and erotic presence at a distance. The text then considers how VR, AI, haptic systems, teledildonics, webcamming, video games, and early online platforms reconfigure pornographic experience by transforming images into environments and bodies into interfaces. Presenting the contributions included in the issue, the introduction outlines how virtual sex opens questions concerning spectatorship, embodiment, gender, agency, monetization, synthetic erotics, and the historical formation of pornographic imaginaries.
Although pornographic photographs can reveal the impact of the photographic medium on sexuality and its imaginaries, they have barely been considered as sources or themes in historical research. Considering the context of late 19th-century and early 20th-century Italy, this article explores photography’s central role in disseminating pornographic material, its close link to shaping the definition of pornography itself, and its impact on redefining sexual imaginaries. The first part of the article provides an overview of the history of the Italian debate on pornography and the political responses to this phenomenon. It focuses particularly on the role of photography in these events and in shaping this context. Between the late 19th century and the years of the Great War, in fact, pornography became a serious topic of public debate in Italy and many other European countries. Many associations and politicians participated in anti-pornography movements while photography and postcards became the most popular and accessible medium for sharing images. The second part of the article explores pornographic imagery widely represented in photographs, particularly that depicting lesbianism and zoophilia. It compares this imagery with that found in other cultural productions dealing with sexuality, such as literature, visual arts, and scientific publications circulating in Italy. This article is based on archival sources, including police reports on pornographic materials, journal articles, and moralistic and scientific writings published in Italy during the analyzed decades.
This paper proposes a feminist analysis of VR pornography focusing on POV as its most recurrent stylistic model. To grasp the aesthetic complexity of POV porn, the analysis shows the diffraction of this subgenre from traditional audiovisual 2D technology through virtual reality, claiming that media discontinuity can be matched by some continuity of theoretical issues within a feminist framework. The first part of the analysis argues for the inadequacy of feminist readings crossed by reverberations of the Mulveyan theory of the male gaze, thus clearing the field for a different feminist canon able to shift theory beyond the binary opposition of an active subject facing passive objects of vision. The second part examines content and formal features of POV porn by focusing on the affective encounters between the organic and inorganic bodies of users, images and technologies within a neo-materialist framework. Finally, the paper highlights some relevant issues related to the effects of POV in VR porn that could constitute productive theoretical avenues for a feminist understanding of the aesthetic dynamics ongoing between human subjectivities, environmental images and VR material devices.
