The Sexual Use of a Social Networking Site: The Case of Pup Twitter

This article examines how Twitter has been adopted and used by a sexual subculture in distinct ways. Drawing on interviews with 26 gay and bisexual men based in the UK who identify as ‘pups’, it demonstrates how a kinky sexual subculture exists on a social networking site in new and innovative ways, adapting various elements of Twitter to form a unique subculture that I call ‘Pup Twitter’. Engaging with debates about social trends related to sexuality, as well as contemporary understandings of social networking sites, the study documents how this subcultural sexual community, while predating Twitter, has adopted online methods to enhance communication, engagement, and even visibility. The intersection of sexuality and social networking sites is an area ripe for further study, and this article develops empirical and conceptual ways to examine this issue in the future.

Hook Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda

Summarizing the major findings of literature on hook up culture, we propose a new research agenda focusing on when and why this sexual subculture emerged. We explore a series of hypotheses to explain this sexual paradigm shift, including: college and university policies; the gender distribution of students; changes in the nature of alcohol use; access to and consumption of pornography; the increased sexual content of non-pornographic media; rising self-objectification and narcissism; new marriage norms; and perceptions of sexual risk. We then recommend new directions for research, emphasizing the need to explore structural and psychological as well as cultural factors, the role of discrete events alongside slowly-emerging social change, the need for intersectional research and studies of non-college-attending and post-college youth, and the benefits of longitudinal and cross-college designs.

Coming to Mind

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Pornography aims to capture and mediate some of the intensity and immediacy of sex. This is particularly manifest in the framework of gay bareback pornography that both documents a sexual subculture and caters to a particular porn audience. Structured as a dialogue between a bareback porn producer and a media studies scholar, the essay combines practice-based insights with more conventional scholarly argumentation in a discussion on the modality of pornography, as well as on the transformations that digital media technologies have inflicted in its production and consumption. The chapter addresses the visceral force of pornography while paying particular attention on the centrality of sound in the mediation of intensity.