Article

Men and Masculinities

2015, Vol. 18(2) 159-175
ª The Author(s) 2015
Visual Hetero- Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
masculinities Online: DOI: 10.1177/1097184X15584909
jmm.sagepub.com

Beyond Binaries and

Sexual Normativities in
Camera Chat Forums

Rob Cover1

Abstract
This article presents a critical account of heterosexual men’s online sex webcam
performances in terms of the capacity for challenging or disrupting hetero-
normativity and opening the field for the representation of a greater range of
heterosexualities. Using a narrative analysis of selected examples of heterosexual
performances on visual sex sites, it is argued that a deeply felt attachment to
heterosexual identity coexists in complex, critical, and potentially disruptive ways
with a contemporary, online approach to diverse, individualized sexual practices.
Investigating examples of male performers who articulate an avowed heterosexual
identity but perform acts for a gay male spectatorship and engage in practices
such as self-penetration that are discursively marked by nonheterosexuality, this
article explores the potential for the productive disruption of normative views of
masculine heterosexuality without the need to resort to a free-floating argument
for sexual fluidity. It is argued that, while heteronormativity is disrupted in such
sites, masculinity has the capacity to reincorporate nonheterosexual behaviors
and acts.

1
School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia

Corresponding Author:
Rob Cover, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Stirling Highway, Crawley,
Western Australia 6009, Australia.
Email: rob.cover@uwa.edu.au

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

160 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

Keywords
heterosexuality, masculinity, queer theory, digital interactivity, sexual coherence

Introduction
While the hetero/homo binary upholds both heterosexual and lesbian/gay identities,
contemporary liberal-humanist society continues a disavowal of alternative, non–
gender-based and complex sexualities, attractions, and desires. Where heteronorma-
tivity and ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ are increasingly questioned, a persistent
‘‘ownership’’ of non-heteronormativity is claimed by lesbian/gay cultural discourse
by disavowing that non-heteronormativity can be anything but lesbian or gay same-
sex sexuality. In theorizing alternatives to the dominant hetero/homo binary that
maintains narrow, essentialist, and innate perceptions of both heterosexuality and
homosexuality as normative monoliths, there are a number of alternatives that
emerge from recent intellectual discourse. These include queer-inspired arguments
for sexual fluidity as well as practices that may not necessarily undo masculine het-
erosexuality as a deeply felt identity that is authentic and real to those who perform it
and maintain attachment to it. The latter case opens opportunities to explore the
ways in which some sites of sexual and gender practice may be marked by—rather
than obscure—the distinction between a sexual preference for a particular gender
(men desiring women) and practices that are not always clearly heterosexual.
This is to take up the imperative to develop alternative, non-monolithic, and
heterodox views of masculine heterosexuality beyond simplistic and highly pro-
blematic depictions of heterosexuality as either mundane or hazardous in contrast
to its supposed homosexual other (Beasley, Brook, and Holmes 2012, 56). Within
contemporary theoretical critique of sexualities, all sexual identity is historical,
culturally constituted in codes and norms, and is performative in Judith Butler’s
sense that our understanding of bodies, sexualities, and desires are produced by
‘‘the regulatory practices of gender coherence’’ in line with the social compulsion
to perform an intelligible and unified subjectivity that lends the illusion it is driven
by an inner identity essence (Butler 1990, 24–25). This does not, however, fore-
close on the fact that there are lived performances and practices of heterosexuality
that disrupt its overall coherence without dismissing heterosexual identity alto-
gether, and thereby extend the possibility for a broader set of understandings of
sexuality as complicated, diverse, and sometimes illogical. One site in which can
be found disruptions between masculine heterosexuality and the sexual practices
of those who claim that identity is in online sexual performance for spectators
using camming sites. Digital technology has helped in several ways to enable—
or at least reveal—some of the ways in which masculine heterosexuality is disjunct
from heteronormativity. The phenomenon of chat room camming, in which het-
erosexual men (typically alone in the private space of the home) perform sexually
on camera for other men—including gay men—opens the possibility of a

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 161

heterosexuality that is practiced through gay spectatorship and/or through under-

taking acts such as self-penetration which are more traditionally and stereotypi-
cally associated with gay male sexuality.
Online camming performers may undertake acts coded as queer, yet maintain an
attachment to heterosexuality as authentic, if not necessarily normative. What such
sites introduce is a form of sexual fluidity which does not rely on a liberal or cele-
brationist strand of queer theoretical and post-structuralist thinking that writes fluid-
ity as the wholesale dissolution of all boundaries, categories, or identities (much as
that might be a valuable ethical outcome). Rather, it can be understood as presenting
a form of fluidity that allows for a certain kind of ‘‘play’’ around the fringes of what
masculine heterosexuality might mean, and how it might be articulated otherwise. If
the challenge is to find, develop, encourage, or foster ways in which masculinity and
masculine men can articulate gender and sexuality beyond heteronormativity, and if
that challenge involves new, alternative, and heterodoxical approaches such as
demonstrating that masculine opposite-sex desire, attraction, and sexual experience
can be just as non-heteronormative as gay male sexuality, then there is benefit in
investigating how masculine sexuality is expressed in online camming forums in
ways which challenge heteronormative assumptions about sexuality, but do not
necessarily undo masculinity or adopt more ‘‘feminine’’ ways of doing sex.
This article focuses on the possibilities for disjuncture between masculine hetero-
sexual identity and practice in examples drawn from an online sexual camming site
used by both gay and straight men and women (and others) known as Chaturbate.
The site, as the name indicates, frames sexual online performance through a combi-
nation of user chat room textual engagement, and typically a sole performer or
‘‘cammer’’ who engages in sexual behavior such as masturbation for an audience
of spectators who, likewise, might utilize the experience for personal sexual gratifi-
cation. I do not propose to present a systematic survey of all camming, textual chat,
and user profiles on the site in order to determine ratios of narrow or secure hetero-
sexual performance in contrast with more complex or fluid heterosexual perfor-
mance, which would be impossible, given the hundreds of users at any one time.
Rather, I am interested here in presenting a narrative analysis of a small number
of examples that demonstrate the disjuncture between heterosexual identity and
practice, allowing a reflection on the ways in which the disruption of heterosexual
masculinity might be theorized otherwise through paying attention to digital com-
munication’s role in ‘‘making public’’ practices that ordinarily might be more pri-
vate but unspoken in public discourse on sexuality.
I begin with a brief overview of Chaturbate as an example of Web 2.0 online
interactive engagement in a sexual context, followed by an investigation of exam-
ples of (1) heterosexual men openly courting gay male spectatorship of their perfor-
mance as a form of sexual exhibitionist pleasure and (2) heterosexual masculine
practices of performing sexual acts that are more ordinarily associated with gay male
practices, such as self-penetration. I end with a discussion of the ways in which
thinking about disruptive practices that do not necessarily undo the attachments to

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

162 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

heterosexuality but expand their potential at the fringes might allow for a more pro-
ductive theorization of sexual identity.

Sexual Performance Online

Chaturbate (http://chaturbate.com/) is an online site which allows people to narrow-
cast webcams from private home or workplaces to a broad, international audience. It
operates similarly to other, better-known adult websites, such as Adam4Adam
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam4Adam), by serving at the interface between
online dating, exhibitionist camming, real-time textual chat, and making recorded
videos and images available, sometimes for a fee. Users have an individual profile
by which they describe themselves, gender, age, sexual interests, and other biogra-
phical material, although most users are there either to perform on camera for a
broader audience or to view the cameras of performers. It differs from real-time por-
nographic video sites in that users are not normally paid pornographic actors, they
narrowcast from their private homes, and the system of payment, if any is received,
is markedly distinct from the payment for professional pornographic labor (Albury
2009, 651). Such tipping sites thus complicate the distinction between professional
pornography and amateur erotic video distribution online.
Many users perform online because the act of exhibitionist solo or coupled sexual
display is pleasurable—it may be exhibitionist in tone or involve mutual camming
between two users that is available for view by a broader audience. However, the
website makes available a mechanism for payment: viewers can use a credit card
to purchase tokens which can then be paid to cammers as ‘‘tips’’ (not unlike tipping
a performer in a strip club), as payment in advance for fulfilling a request (a cammer
will masturbate, e.g., or engage in fellatio with a partner, or display a body part in
exchange for a specified number of tokens), or to join a private showing (whereby
a cammer will perform a specific act for a larger sum and the narrowcast of that act
will be available only to those users who have paid the specified amount). Tokens
are valued at five cents (US currency) per token, so a tip of 100 tokens involves a
viewer making a US$5 payment. Those users who are seeking to raise money and,
in some cases, earn a living, therefore aim to maximize the number of tokens
received by pleasing the audience of viewers, meeting particular requests, or enga-
ging in both sexual performance and friendly chat. Not unsurprisingly, this results in
a ‘‘star system’’ in which particular cammers, typically younger men and women,
are able to charge more for their performances.
Importantly, seeking funds on Chaturbate and similar sites is a form of crowd-
sourcing. Coined in 2006 in Wired magazine, the term crowdsourcing describes a
web-era business model by which a user or group harness the creative solutions,
labor, funding, or other resources through a distributed network of individuals
accessed online through digital communication (Brabham 2008, 77). In the context
of online sexual display camming, funds are earned through the crowdsourcing prin-
ciple whereby a low, market-driven cost for particular acts of sexual expression

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 163

encourages a larger number of viewers, allowing the activity to be worthwhile for

the cammer and relatively low-cost for most users. Arranged as a tipping system
(except in the case of private cam rooms), a payment is voluntary, and others can
watch the same activities for free. The development of a supportive community
around many cammers, then, results in a mutual, collective, and networked ‘‘encour-
agement’’ to pay. Nevertheless, cammers still need to please their viewers, particu-
larly given there may be hundreds of other alternative cammers on that one site
alone. That can involve cammers being required to perform acts or display parts
of their bodies in ways outside of their normal, everyday sexual experience. This
is not to suggest that all users are there for payment, of course, as many cammers
engage sexually online simply for the pleasure of it.
Users of Chaturbate set up an account and, when online, menus of webcams are
displayed, divided into page categories of male, female, couple, transsexual, and
group shows. Whether the performer is heterosexual, homosexual, or otherwise is
not a profile category in itself, but may be indicated in the personal details on the
cammer’s page. For each user, the profile page displayed directly below the
streamed image provides details of age, their own gender, and the gender of those
they are ‘‘interested in,’’ which may include ‘‘Men, Women, Transsexuals, or Cou-
ples.’’ Within that process, then, an indication of sexuality and sexual identity needs
to be interpreted by making sense of the gender configurations.
Not all users, of course, state an interest in a gender that might be the gender of
those with whom they would have face-to-face bodily sexual contact. Rather, any-
one who is going to tip or pay to view will be welcome, regardless of gender or sex-
ual orientation of the cammer. In that context, an avowedly heterosexual man may
welcome a viewing by a gay man who is willing to pay, as well as his textual chat,
erotic demands, tips, and tokens. Although camming does not involve physical con-
tact, this is much the same as straight men who participate in gay pornography with
other men (gay for pay) which often stages masculinity through verbal and physical
roughness, despite the fact it involves engaging sexually with other men in the thea-
trics of nonheterosexual sex—effectively queering both straight masculinity and the
genre of gay pornography (Tortorici 2008, 201–4). Indeed, ‘‘gay for pay’’ sexual
behavior by heterosexual men is not new. According to Steven Zeeland (1996),
many U.S.’ marines since at least the 1980s have been involved in pornography that
records them sexually engaged with other men, often other marines—pornographic
production companies are keen to use their über-fit, toned, masculine bodies while
they themselves are interested in the payments that supplement their low military
salaries. Such performances are, at once, both a queering of heterosexuality but a
reestablishment of masculinity, actively separating sexual desire from gender per-
formance, appealing in many ways to that subjugated discursive representation of
sexuality which Halberstam (2011, 155–56) has referred to as the ‘‘Masculinist Gay
Movement’’ which flourished in continental Europe (particularly Germany) in the
1920s and 1930s whereby homosexual engagement is seen as the performance of
hypermasculinity and by which all forms of femininity and effeminacy in men are

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

164 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

disavowed, regardless of whether they are expressed through heterosexual or homo-

sexual desire. Indeed, in his interviews with Marines, Zeeland uncovered the view
that nonheterosexual sex can be a ‘‘manly test of endurance.’’ More recently,
Anderson and colleagues have analyzed athletes’ comments on same-sex kissing
during and after sporting events which, while not perceived as a sexual act, were
understood by the athletes as forms of masculine bonding but were available to be
read sexually (Anderson, Adams, and Rivers 2012). In the case of Chaturbate and
other similar sites, the same framework is at play, in which fit young masculine and
heterosexual men are interested in earning funds by performing sexually on camera
in ways which appeal to a gay male spectator. Effectively, such behaviors upset the
link between identity and what bodies are ‘‘capable of,’’ including the capability for
practicing forms of gay desire from a heterosexual identity standpoint, thereby open-
ing up fields of possibility.
In masculine heterosexual cammers who are performing in sites in which there is
substantial gay male participation, through a digital-interactive chat room and cam-
ming format that was arguably adopted earlier by gay men, and in the context of per-
formances that may or may not be for pay, we witness forms of experimentation—
with bodies and with spectatorship—which permits representable nonheterosexual
acts among heterosexuals without falling under the category of what has been
described as the one-time rule of homosexuality, in which any nonheterosexual slip-
page renders the subject’s sexual orientation as gay (Anderson 2008; Kimmel 1996).
These slippages are not, however, the same as articulations of fluid sexual experi-
mentation related to youthful curiosity prior to settling into a more secure,
gender-related sexual orientation (McKnight 1997, 51). Rather, this is evidence of
a sustained practice that is neither casual nor one-off experimentation with behaviors
that sit in the interstices between heterosexual and homosexual. In several ways, it is
the outcome of shifts in discourses of sexuality away from binary-based sexual iden-
tities that ground identity in consistency of behavior toward an adjustment—albeit
not wholesale disavowal—of that relationship such that non-heteronormative plea-
sures and behaviors need not be seen as logically shackled to masculine identity,
which is able to maintain its own coherence while acknowledging the possibility
of gradients of different sexualities and erotics on scales of pleasures and values.
This can include the pleasures, benefits of value a cammer might gain by appealing
to a gay audience or by performing sexual acts that appear to be more ‘‘edgy’’ than
other straight cammers.
Sexuality in this context is articulated as domestic and private, rather than framed
by participation in public minority communities yet, through confessional activities,
the private of sexuality becomes available for public consumption—literally in the
case of cammers engaging in sexual acts in the private home that permit viewing
from public sites, a crossing between the private-domestic and the public that is
endemic to communications technologies since television (Williams 1990) and that
finds its contemporary fruition in online interactive engagement (Cover 2006). Thus,
rather than experimentation, new possibilities for framing sexuality are seen in

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 165

heterosexual men’s use of webcams filtered through broader sociocultural shifts in

public/private distinctions and the development of a framework for making diverse
sexual practices thinkable and representable within existing gender identities. This
can include the possibility of heterosexual pleasures in nonheterosexual behaviors
and practices, rather than the more stereotypically perceived elements of disgust
or shame over nonheterosexual ‘‘evidence.’’

Spectatorship, Exhibition, and the Visuality of Queer

Heterosexualities
There are two ways in which the practices of heterosexual men camming in (some-
what) nonheterosexual ways enable the expression of challenges to heterosexual
normativity and narrow perceptions of heterosexual identity as solely depending
on the coherent and continued performance of heterosexual conduct—first, exhibi-
tion to nonheterosexual viewers as a sexual practice and, second, self-penetration as
a gay sexual event perceived as being adopted by heterosexual men. One of the inter-
esting elements that emerges from sexually explicit real-time camming sites such as
Chaturbate is the substantial number of heterosexual men who will perform sexually
for other men without demanding payment or expecting tips. While there are some
users who will be emphatic about their heterosexuality and will insist that the only
viewers are women, with statements such as ‘‘im [sic] into girls only’’ (given in bio-
graphical notes in their user profiles), and will even use Chaturbate’s functionality in
preventing male-identified users from accessing their page, this absolute refusal of
the possibility of nonheterosexual spectatorship is rare. For many other masculine
heterosexual cammers, there is not only appeal to the finance that comes with non-
heterosexual viewers’ tips, but an appeal to the pleasure of being viewed by viewers
of any gender while engaged in solo sexual performance. For example, it is not
uncommon to find profile biographical statements such as the following from a
nineteen-year-old cammer in the United States: ‘‘I am a straight, white, 19-year-
old male. I just like people to watch me, male, female, anyone! Tip if you feel like
it but it isn’t required. Feel free to talk to me, I like that the most.’’ Practices of sex-
ual exhibition, here, are available to anyone and pleasure is derived by engaging in
sexual performance, spectatorship, and chat with a person of any gender, while
retaining a declared straight identity.
One cammer states in the ‘‘About Me’’ section of his profile page’s biographical
notes, ‘‘I am straight, just an FYI, but I don’t mind if you guys watch. But I won’t
ever do anything with a dude, it’s just not my style. I love women. So if you’re a
woman PM [private message] me! The more you tip, the more stuff I’ll do.’’ Here,
a cammer is not only asserting his heterosexuality, but also actively inviting a non-
heterosexual form of spectatorship. Significantly, his disavowal of homosexuality as
a physical, in person performance is made, on the one hand, through an assertion of
sexual identity (I am straight) but also points to both straightness and queerness not
merely as identities but as ‘‘style.’’ One way of actively reading this statement, then,

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

166 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

is to understand that while sexual identities are sometimes deeply held and meaning-
ful, the user draws on the broadening of a social understanding of identity as the
‘‘stylised repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity’’
(Butler 1990, 140–41), always unstable and in flux. While, at core, he is happy to
articulate himself as straight, his straightness does not depend on the pure, coherent,
linear repetition of heterosexual sexual practice, for he is open to nonheterosexual
sexual spectatorship in a way which ‘‘acts against,’’ as I’ll discuss further subse-
quently, the regimentary formation of the hetero/homo binary.
Another male user describes himself this way: ‘‘Straight guy that does not mind
an audience. May consider phone or C2C [cam to cam], maybe even meets (girls or
couples, any age).’’ While he ‘‘does not mind’’ nonheterosexual spectatorship and
pleasing a (potentially) gay male audience, his physical preferences are for women
or couples in which a woman is involved. The distinction here, then, is not around
straightness or non-straightness, but around online and off-line sexualities. While
any distinction between online and off-line is not as simple as being understood
through cognate binaries of digital versus physical or virtual versus real, the ways
in which this user makes sense of an element of fluidity of his sexual expression,
behavior, and practice is through an online style (nonheterosexual spectatorship) and
an off-line style (predominantly heterosexual bodily engagement). Face-to-face
meetings between bodies are the sites for a restrictive heterosexual practice, but the
online site of camming is marked by an engagement with an audience that includes,
or may be dominated by, gay men. This is sexual performance for erotic pleasure,
differentiating the desire of heterosexual physical contact in a ‘‘real-life’’ scenario
from nonheterosexual spectatorial contact in an online, camera environment. The
distinction between real-life and virtual online performance is, of course, more com-
plex (Cover 2004, 119–21), thereby indicating the ways in which desires to perform
sexually are not easily separable into the physical and the visual. However, what
requires investigation is the way in which heterosexual men willingly overcome het-
eronormative masculine expectations that, traditionally and stereotypically, involve
disavowal of gay men as participants and viewers, in order to gain their own plea-
sure. This is not to suggest that all forms of gazing upon the sexualized body of the
other constitutes erotic gazing, despite a general shift toward understanding the
spectatorship of naked bodies in the context of sexual viewing (Cover 2003). New
technologies encourage, as Creed (2003, 126) has pointed out, new and more fluid
forms of gazing, in which both the relationship and the disjuncture between the gazer
and the performer allows identity to be put into flux.
Likewise, online camming allows a gaze that is not separable from sexual spec-
tatorship, and in the case of sites such as Chaturbate it is explicitly gazing that is sex-
ualized. While cammers are operating in a context of exhibition and gazing different
from that of the plaintiffs on the film set, as it is arguably more voluntary and occur-
ring in the private space of the home rather than a scene crowded by film crew, it can
also be said that the channeling through the digital medium of Web 2.0 online com-
munication of the context of nudity, sexual exhibition, sexual performance, and

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 167

being gazed upon by a nonheterosexual male audience with whom one would not
engage sexually in person has established new ways in which heterosexual mascu-
linity is performed without necessarily undoing heterosexual masculinity. Online
communication here establishes a frame in which being naked and performing sexu-
ality for a specifically gay sexual gaze permits a fluidity in which particular sexual
identity positions may be adopted in the context being consumed (Buchbinder 1997,
115). The spectator positions the masculine heterosexual performer as something
other than heterosexual through that gaze, but the fact that this is differentiated from
non-online performance also permits the persistent specter of re-heterosexualization
of the performer.
In an amusing yet poignant biographical statement, one nineteen-year-old user
from Colombia, who speaks predominantly Spanish, gave an English-language
translation of his ‘‘About Me’’ statement as: ‘‘I’m straight and love women but I
do not mind talking to people and make the passing fancy.’’ While the ‘‘passing
fancy’’ an anomaly of translation, it is, much like a biographical statement from
another cammer which reads ‘‘I’m not gay, I just think gay sex,’’ points to the fra-
gility of heterosexuality as a secure, dominant, natural, or essentially described iden-
tity, but to the always-present potential for its failure, in passing, in thought, in fancy.

Heterosexualizing Stereotypes: Avoiding the Ass

In addition to the spectatorial blurring of heterosexual masculinity through willful
engagement with a nonheterosexual audience, there are a number of examples of
straight-articulating men who, while likewise cementing their heterosexual mascu-
line desires through textual chat and a profile declaration, actively perform and
receive pleasure from sexual acts ordinarily associated with gay men, including
self-conducted anal penetration with dildos and other sex toys. While heterosexual
men stimulating the anal region of the body is not in any way new, the performance
of such acts on sites such as Chaturbate indicate a broader acceptance of a reposi-
tioning of the body areas in ways which, again, destabilize the distinction between
heterosexual and homosexual without reducing the ‘‘felt authenticity’’ of masculine
heterosexual identity. A narrow, traditional, stereotypical understanding of
twentieth-century masculinity is predicated on a homophobia that is grounded in
an inviolability of the heterosexual, a refusal of penetration (Kimmel 1996). As
David Buchbinder (1994, 60) argued in respect to 1990s depictions of masculinity:

The male homosexual is a man who allows his body to be penetrated by another man. In
this, the gay man permits that which the discourse of masculinity absolutely forbids—
the disruption of the integrity and inviolability of the male body—and so challenges the
authority and power of that discourse. In his betrayal of the dominant codes of mascu-
linity, the homosexual man proposes a range of other possible codes, which in turn
threaten to destabilise the discourse. The effect, inevitably, is to make men in general
feel uneasy and threatened.

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

168 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

Over the past twenty years, in line with a marginal but meaningful realignment of
sexuality toward the representation of more diverse practices, and through the dis-
seminatory potential of online media that presents the private sphere of sexual prac-
tice in a public realm, the absolute ‘‘forbiddenness’’ of penetration is softened, such
that the challenge to masculinity is no longer built solely on the practices of gay men
but the online practices of heterosexual masculinity.
One Australian cammer, who is twenty-three years of age, declares his straight-
ness by presenting his sex as male and his ‘‘interested in’’ category as women, but
provides pictures on his profile page of his (favorite) dildo, in addition to performing
with it on-screen in ways which are difficult to distinguish from gay pornography
solo performances. Similarly, a young man, aged twenty-four from North Carolina,
is well known among the community of Chaturbate viewers as married to a woman.
He discusses his marriage and his wife openly on camera, asserts that he is straight
and interested in women on his profile page but is a particular attraction on the site
for his active self-penetration with a range of toys (many of which have been bought
for him by his online, tipping admirers). One of his regular viewers stated in a textual
chat ‘‘thanks to you hundreds of sr8 [straight] guys are experimenting with ass play’’
and ‘‘you are a trailblazer for str8 [straight] ass play.’’ Arguably, there is also a
fetishization of the perception of a straight man ‘‘doing gay things,’’ as is also seen
in an entire genre of pornographic representation, the plots of which focus on straight
athletes, hazing scenarios (Anderson, McCormack, and Lee 2011) and other slip-
pages across the hetero/homo binary whereby the slippage itself is the site of eroti-
cization. Nevertheless, self-penetration by heterosexual men has, on occasion,
baffled some viewers both men and women, straight and queer, with one viewer
questioning ‘‘so wait your [sic] not gay but you like stuff in your butt?’’ Another,
on viewing his self-penetration with a toy stated, ‘‘wait ur married to a woman!
whattt . . . ’’ Others are more encouraging about the productive possibilities of
experimenting in ways which effectively ‘‘heterosexualize’’ the anus: ‘‘All straight
guy [sic] should be as open as you’’ or even nonchalant: ‘‘whatever floats your boat
bro. you are beasting that thing lol.’’ While this is only a very small selection of com-
ments from viewers on a single viewing, they indicate that, on the one hand, there is
an appreciation of the capacity of this media to allow a heterosexual young man to
undertake an activity that is—stereotypically—articulated as a gay one without
being accused of being gay (or closeted) and, on the other hand, to point to the sur-
prise, resistance, incredulity of those who had never before conceived that sexual
stimulation of a man’s anal region could be possible by men who were not gay. The
bafflement, amazement, support, and refusal of different viewers making comments
indicates a broad uncertainty over the distinction between the hetero/homo binary,
the codes of heteronormative masculinity, and the representability of diverse and
sometimes individualized sexual practices.
Self-penetration, and a refocusing (literally) of the camera away from the penis to
the anus, while simultaneously declaring heterosexual desire as the preferred sexual
practice of the performer, presents a challenge to phallocentrism that, at its most

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 169

base level, articulates masculinity through phallic penetration of the other, and a het-
erosexual masculinity predicated on an inviolability. The masculine heterosexual
body is refigured through alternative erotics, such that we witness a partial-
undoing of the fixation of eros on genitalia as given in Marcusean strands of
Freudian philosophy (Marcuse 1969; Altman 1971, 81–83), overcoming an unima-
ginative and reductive understanding of sexuality as physical contact between gen-
dered bodies: an element of the reduction of libidinal zones of the body to binary
sexed notions of genitalia. Instead, it presents the possibility of sexual representation
of a polymorphous re-eroticization across nongenital body parts (Grosz 1994, 139),
or at least a step toward it.
While the stereotype that heterosexual masculinity is built on penetration of the
other and, concomitantly, violent opposition to being anally penetrated as a marker
of lost masculinity, these articulations of straight heterosexual masculinities that
involve seeking, demonstrating and performing pleasure through anal penetration
are notable for two reasons. First, they undo the myth that anal penetration invokes
pleasure only for essentially constructed, identity-fixed homosexual men but indi-
cate that for many (and, of course, not all) heterosexual men, being penetrated is
a desirable sexual act, one that not only occurs but occurs under the watchful online
spectatorship of men and women, straight and queer. If self-penetration by straight
men is to be a transgression, it is not necessarily one which needs to be seen as
undoing heterosexuality—either as the subject’s identity (i.e., making him some-
thing other than heterosexual, making him queer) or as a category of sexual identity
(not by any means essentialist but an identity that has genuine, deeply felt meaning
and attachment). That is, self-penetration does not ‘‘indicate’’ an underlying homo-
eroticism, nor does it articulate a subjugated ‘‘truth’’ that everyone was always fluid
to begin with, and would embrace that fluidity given a chance. It does not need to
acknowledge the constructedness of heterosexuality, which from a queer theory per-
spective is taken as given, but it does disarticulate heterosexual identity as a sexu-
ality of meaning from certain practices, body parts, and desires to do things or not
to do things with those body parts. In that respect, it ‘‘rescues’’ anal pleasures from
being exteriorized from heterosexuality and from being viewed as justifiable only if
one’s sexual identity is other than straight.
As importantly, the framework that Chaturbate camming provides for thinking
about heterosexual masculinity is one which helps to disaggregate heterosexuality
from stereotypes that circulate in public discourse in order to make it monolithic,
closed, normative, and regimented by a linkage of identity to (restricted) practices.
Stereotypes operate by linking an image or an identity with a set of prescribed beha-
viors, attributes, desires, and ways of thinking and being. As a linguistic tool that
solidifies attitudes toward an identity or group—or a singular representative of that
identity group—stereotypes operate as through pervasiveness and iterativity of the
links they claim, and can be thought of as an element of what Chantal Mouffe refers
to as ‘‘nodal points’’—linguistic functions which prevent the slippage of meaning
from a culturally accepted supposition of normativity (Mouffe 1995, 34).

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

170 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

Challenging those nodal points through pointing to their experiential fallibility

remains necessary in order to open the field of possibility for a greater legitimacy
of non-harmful sexual practices and reduced vulnerability of those who do not prac-
tice sexual normativity.
What is striking about the Chaturbate performances described here is that they
provide an opportunity not to point to the fragility of masculine heterosexuality as
an identity (as fragile as it may be in its constructedness), but to the stereotype that,
in public discourse, links heterosexual masculinity with a supposed desire not to be
penetrated, not to self-penetrate; the behavioral disavowal of the anal region as an
area of libidinal pleasure and erotic sensation; the attribute that heterosexual men
(wrongly) believe the anus is the field of pleasure only for effeminate gay men who
sacrifice their masculinity for an unintelligible pleasure. Within this framework, the
linkage between heterosexual masculinity and those beliefs and practices is critiqued
by those performances, permitting a variation of heterosexuality to emerge. The cul-
tural knowledge of the ‘‘core’’ of the identity does not change—sexual attraction to
women—but the ways in which that identity is reinforced through disavowal does
shift, even if only marginally. This movement in normative identity has potential
to be politically productive as a more effective alternative to the opposition. In the
case, here, it might be said to be a more effective alternative of undoing the mechan-
isms that make masculine heterosexuality normative than simply indicating outright
alternatives of gender-based desire or pointing to heterosexuality’s constructedness
and leaving it at that.

Beyond Binaries: Queer Heterosexualities

While it is the case that homosexuality is, in an identity-based or orientation-
governed framework, reductively and problematically presented as the only alter-
native or challenge to masculine heteronormativity, another realm that requires
disruption is the notion that emerges through the hetero/homo binary that all
sexuality and sexual pleasure is, at its most discernible and lowest-common-
denominator, predicated on a trajectory of desire from gendered subject to another
gendered object, either heterosexual or homosexual, regardless of the relative toler-
ability of these two positions. What the practices of camming shows up is that there
is more productive form of fluidity at the edges of both of those positions, that pres-
ent fissures in coherence around the normativities of sexuality regimented into desire
for a gendered object first, and fetishistic preferences only second. If an ethical goal
is to make heterosexuality a relatively harmful event by pointing to the fissures in its
own internal coherence and thereby opening up alternative, diverse possibilities for
sexual legitimacy, then examining how the regimentation of sexuality into gendered
trajectories can be undone is imperative.
One of the available ways in which to make sense of the capacity to challenge
heterosexual practice through the fissures in identity coherence opened by Chatur-
bate cammer’s disarticulation of heterosexual identity from practices that eschew

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 171

homosexual spectatorship or penetrative sexual performance, may be through refigur-

ing concepts of queer sexual fluidity. This is queer in the sense of post-structuralist
approaches to gender and sexuality (as distinct from a gay-affirmative ‘‘studies’’
approach that challenges the dominance of normative masculine heterosexuality but
fails ultimately to undo the cultural frameworks through which it retains its normative
separation from a broader and more fluid range of practices). I am referring here to the
strand of queer theory that actively interrogates ‘‘normativities and orthodoxies’’ by
examining the forms by which sexual subjectivities are produced and articulated with-
out necessarily ‘‘obliterating [all] boundaries’’ (Oswin 2008, 92).
Since the application of post-structuralist ‘‘queer theory’’ to the fields of sexuality
and gender, it has been well represented that sexuality is not a fixed, essentialist cate-
gory of identity, but is instead organized through matrices of performativity and
materialization. There is no foundational reason why sexuality should be shackled
to gendered objects-of-attraction, that there are ways to think about, critique, and
perform erotic desire that are different from the contemporary cultural imperative
of sexual beings dichotomized as heterosexual and homosexual. Drawing on
Michel Foucault’s (1990) History of Sexuality, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggested
that the heterosexual/homosexual binary was historical, mythical, and without
‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘essentialist’’ foundation (Sedgwick 1990). In contrast with what
is often understood as the nineteenth-century proliferation of sexuality-based iden-
tities, the western twentieth-century understanding of sexuality has been reduced
to a categorization of sexual species as either heterosexual or homosexual, always
and only directing desire toward a gendered object.
Despite the persistent force of the hetero/homo binary as a disciplinary practice
that produces and normalizes discrete masculinities as heterosexual and homosex-
ual, and as a biopolitical category of power that asks subjects to view place them-
selves on a normative curve in proximity to norms of sexual identity such as fixity,
innateness, continuity, consistency, and subject coherence, gender, and sexual
identities are increasingly being experienced as complicated and fluid (Cover
2012). While essentialist notions of sexual identity, fixity, and coherence are prod-
ucts of the nineteenth century, examples of alternatives, externalities, and blurring
of heterosexuality and homosexuality can be found across the twentieth century.
Michael Warner (1999, 18) noted that, ‘‘People know more about the messiness
and variety of sex than they allow themselves to admit in public,’’ indicating the
fact that certain public discourses strictly align masculinity with heterosexuality,
heterosexual practices, the emphatic refusal, and sometimes disgust in relation
to the possibility of erotic behaviors associated with same-sex attracted persons
such as anal penetration (Halberstam 2011, 67). However, it is the twenty-first cen-
tury and the Web 2.0 environment of interactive visual representation online, real-
time video communication, and the emergence of new forms of creative engage-
ment through digital expression (Cover 2006) that the messiness of sexual identity,
the fluidity of sexual articulation, and the disjuncture between identity and practice
becomes accessible, shifting from the private sphere into the more public realm of

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

172 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

online engagement. Such fluidity and complexity of sexual expression have been
noted as producing a challenge to dominant regimes built on upholding traditional
boundaries of a binary sexual identity (Harvey 2012, 326). For Barbara Creed
(2003, 55), much of the challenge produced through fluidity is inspired by a sense
of sexuality framed by personal autonomy rather than moral codes, but simultane-
ously emerges from a postmodernization of sexual cultures that demystifies domi-
nant master discourses of sex that are made legitimate through family, religion,
patriarchal, and naturalizing discourses. If digital-interactive communication is,
itself, produced within a late capitalist postmodernizing culture, then it becomes
the natural site through which a ‘‘real’’ fluidity of sexual identity and expression
is witnessed.
To point to the potential of fluidity is not, however, to argue that the best
approach to de-normativizing heterosexual masculinity is to impose fluidity on all
sexualities, which may not necessarily be the case. More research is needed, then,
on how heterosexual men who perform online in nonheterosexual ways (through
either availability for gay spectatorship or self-penetration or both) actually perceive
of their behaviors, experiences, desires, and performances as fluid. Fluidity, here,
may prove to be as much a myth as the rigidity and essentialism of the hetero/homo
binary (Oswin 2008, 92). In several respects, we might instead argue that the phe-
nomenon of heterosexual men performing nonheterosexual practices online indi-
cates an overlaying of twenty-first century practices of more fluid sexual
performance and sexual consumption over nineteenth century regimes of sexual
identity, with the two existing in an uneasy relationship, through which new narra-
tives are produced in online chat in order to ensure a coherence in their coexistence.
The Chaturbate examples discussed earlier would indicate the messiness of sexual
activity does, in several ways, permit a modified continuation of sexual identities
that emerge from the hetero/homo binary and continue to have real meaning and
attachment for many subjects, but a simultaneous blurring at the edges by undoing
the link between (hetero/homo) sexuality and supposed (hetero/homo) sexual acts in
regard to both desired audience and the extent to which sexuality is spread beyond
genitalia to a broader re-libidinalization of the body.

Conclusion: Resilience in Anti-heteronormative Fluidity

It remains to be asked if the challenge to masculine heteronormativity that such dis-
ruptions to coherent identity produced in online camming practices has broader
social significance and benefits in a cultural regime in which sexual nonnormativity
is, at times, a factor in making vulnerable of those without the discursive resources to
articulate and live a sexually complicated life (Cover 2012). Indeed, there may well
be benefits in not only the intellectual deconstruction of the hetero/homo binary and
the role it plays in upholding masculine heteronorms, but in pointing to evidence
such as that found in Chaturbate that undo innate heterosexualities and homo-
sexualities as distinct sexual orientations, allowing identity to remain but in

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 173

non-monolithic, heterodoxical forms. This is not just to challenge identities but to

make them challengeable in ways which cannot necessarily be known in advance.
Resilience for, particularly, young men against being made vulnerable by the cul-
tural demand for hetero/homo distinctiveness and fixed connections of identity and
practice, may well produce the kind of necessary challenge to heteronormativity in
ways that permit masculine heterosexuality to be maintained as a preference or a
practice but not an exclusive one; in ways which allow a person to articulate sexual
desires without being governed by the regimentary restraints of binary sexual iden-
tity. In discussing vulnerable nonheterosexual youth, Ritch Savin-Williams (2005,
21) noted that resilience may be produced by the disappearance of the gay adoles-
cent, whereby ‘‘teens who have same-gendered sex and desires won’t vanish. But
they will not need to identify as gay.’’ Yet perhaps the overall vanishing of sexual
identities need not be the only path away from the regimentations of sexual iden-
tity, behavior, and orientation that uphold heteronormative masculinity. As Judith
Butler (1999, 16) has pointed out, there is no throwing off the shackles of the regi-
mentary normalizational identities that emerged in the nineteenth century in order
to return to an earlier, premodern framework of (mythical and nostalgic) free plea-
sures, and certainly to conceive of a vanishing of extant identities risks an imper-
ious invisibilization of sexualities that many have and will hold as legitimate and
meaningful. Rather, the point here is to focus on the dissolution not of masculine
heterosexuality but of normativity, and the cultural, discursive, and experiential
mechanisms that make heteronormativity possible. If, by pointing to the real, lived
experiences of heterosexual men who perform explicitly for nonheterosexual spec-
tatorship as a sexual act in itself, and who engage in sexual play with their own
bodies that represents gay sexual expression, then it becomes possible to perceive
of wider shifts and fluidities that de-normalize heterosexuality without relying
solely on homosexuality as an oppositional alternative and without delegitimizing
heterosexual masculinity as identity, orientation, preference, practice, or desire.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.

References
Albury, Kath. 2009. ‘‘Reading Porn Reparatively.’’ Sexualities 12:647–53.
Altman, Dennis. 1971. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. 2nd ed. New York: New
York University Press.

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

174 Men and Masculinities 18(2)

Anderson, Eric. 2008. ‘‘‘Being Masculine Is Not about Who You Sleep with . . . ’: Heterosex-
ual Athletes Contesting Masculinity and the One-time Rule of Homosexuality.’’ Sex Roles
58:104–15.
Anderson, Eric, Adi Adams, and Ian Rivers. 2012. ‘‘‘I Kiss Them Because I Love Them’: The
Emergence of Heterosexual Men Kissing in British Institutes of Education.’’ Archives of
Sexual Behavior 41:421–30.
Anderson, Eric, Mark McCorrmack, and Harry Lee. 2011. ‘‘Male Team Sport Hazing Initia-
tions in a Culture of Decreasing Homohysteria.’’ Journal of Adolescent Research 27:
427–48.
Beasley, Chris, Heather Brook, and Mary Holmes. 2012. Heterosexuality in Theory and Prac-
tice. London, UK: Routledge.
Brabham, Daren C. 2008. ‘‘Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction
and Cases.’’ Convergence 14:75–90.
Buchbinder, David. 1994. Masculinities and Identities. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne
University Press.
Buchbinder, David. 1997. Performance Anxieties: Re-producing Masculinity. St Leonards,
Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, UK:
Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1999. ‘‘Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures.’’ Theory, Culture & Society 16:11–20.
Cover, Rob. 2003. ‘‘The Naked Subject: Nudity, Context and Sexualisation in Contemporary
Culture.’’ Body & Society 9:53–72.
Cover, Rob. 2004. ‘‘Digital Addiction: The Cultural Production of Online and Video Game
Junkies.’’ Media International Australia 113:110–23.
Cover, Rob. 2006. ‘‘Audience Inter/Active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control and Recon-
ceiving Audience History.’’ New Media & Society 8:213–32.
Cover, Rob. 2012. Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? London,
UK: Ashgate.
Creed, Barbara. 2003. Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen
& Unwin.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley.
London, UK: Penguin.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St. Leonards,
Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harvey, Rebecca. 2012. ‘‘Young People, Sexual Orientation, and Resilience.’’ In The Social
Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, edited by Michael Unger,
325–35. New York: Springer.
Kimmel, Michael. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London,
UK: Sphere.
McKnight, Jim. 1997. Straight Science? Homosexuality, Evolution and Adaptation. London,
UK: Routledge.

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016

Cover 175

Mouffe, Chantal. 1995. ‘‘Democratic Politics and the Question of Identity.’’ In The Identity in
Question, edited by John Rajchman, 33–45. New York: Routledge.
Oswin, Natalie. 2008. ‘‘Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer
Space.’’ Progress in Human Geography 32:89–103.
Savin-Williams, Ritch C. 2005. The New Gay Teenager. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. London, UK: Penguin.
Tortorici, Zeb J. 2008. ‘‘Queering Pornography: Desiring Youth, Race and Fantasy in Gay
Porn.’’ In Queer Youth Cultures, edited by Susan Driver, 199–222. Albany: SUNY Press.
Warner, Michael. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life.
New York: The Free Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1990. ‘‘The Technology and the Society.’’ In Popular Fiction: Technol-
ogy, Ideology, Production, Reading, edited by Tony Bennett, 9–22. London, UK:
Routledge.
Zeeland, Steven. 1996. The Masculine Marine: Homoeroticism in The U.S. Marine Corps.
New York: Harrington Park Press.

Author Biography
Rob Cover is Associate Professor in the Social Sciences, and Head of Media and Communi-
cation Studies at The University of Western Australia. He has published widely on topics
related to a range of gender, sexuality and youth identity topics, typically in the context of
digital media and communication, wellbeing and resilience. His recent books include: Queer
Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Ashgate 2012), Vulnerability and
Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculinity and Ethics (UWAP Scholarly 2015) and Digital
Identities; Creating and Communicating the Online Self (Elsevier forthcoming).

Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at UNIV AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON on September 5, 2016