I’m the Operator With My Pocket Vibrator: Collective Intimate Relations on Chaturbate

Abstract

This article focuses on the use of a remote-controlled vibrator on Chaturbate, a sexually explicit webcam platform. Looking at the complex arrangement formed by so-called human and nonhuman counterparts in networked settings, I analyze an intimate moment hosted by the selected erotic platform, observing how a sex toy that can be controlled by distance modulates the affective underpinnings of such “vibrant” assemblage and participates in this carnal activity by heightening and clustering different groupings of bodies to create an orgasmic moment. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory and theories of affect, I focus on the sociotechnical affordances that constitute this sexual setting and describe the movement of actants as they throb to develop senses of intimacy and presence in the unfurling event, thus showing how a great number of players, from varied scopes of intelligibility, participate jointly to develop visceral affect and body friction even though they do not share the same spatial frame.

Sexual Interaction in Digital Contexts and Its Implications for Sexual Health: A Conceptual Analysis

“…Both privacy breaches and sexual assault are discussed as serious threads of smart sex toys ( Wynn et al, 2017 ). Remote-controlled sex toys are also integrated in commercial sex, for example in commercial webcam live sex shows where the client pays to control the sex toys handled by the sex worker ( Martins, 2019 ). The risks of consent violations described for non-commercial sexual interactions are applicable to commercial sex.…”

Interpersonal Relations and Social Actions on Live Streaming Services. A Systematic Review on Cyber-social Relations

“…Sometimes, there is a moderator for the chat [36]. Viewers and streamers may interact through chats and remotecontrolled vibrators [37].…”

Whose stream is this anyway? Exploring layers of viewer-integration in online participatory videos

“…Generally, when it comes to understanding IOPVs as examples of viewer participation, we fundamentally follow previous scholars engaging with such content in their description as moments of community-collaboration. However, in aiming at a systematic introduction of IOPVs as a data-type in itself we question the notion of "peaceful collaboration" that underlies the work of scholars such as Martins (2019) in his explorations of collective, intimate relationships on Chaturbate. Instead, we break with this latent assumption in proposing that tensions between, for example, streamer and people watching the stream ("chat") can be productive (or even essential; Kuhn, 1977) and need continuous practices of negotiation between involved actors, which also includes technical artifacts like, in Martins" case-study, remote-vibrators.…”

“…As we "ascend the ranks" of participant-integrating video-formats, we find live-streams that include, for example, voting polls to decide what should/could happen next and ultimately, direct means of engaging with a video-livestream. Be it in the form of changing virtual environments (like in Miko"s World) or in mediated, bodily interaction with the streamer him/herself such as remote electrocution ii or, -more pleasurable, yet no more safe for workremote vibrations on sensitive body-parts (Martins, 2019).…”

“…Acknowledging this trend, in this paper, we seek to systematically introduce the emerging data-type that we identified as IOPVs (integrated, online, participatory videos) and to explore specific variants of how streamers / video-producers and their audiences / participants play off each other in their creation. Through a comparative analysis of three plus one IOPV case-studies and by contrasting those to pre-existing work on bodily streamerparticipant-relationships on the streaming-platform Chaturbate iii (Martins, 2019), we demonstrate that the process of creating IOPVs is characterized by the introduction of various layers of user-integration that vary explicitly in the following regards: First, in terms of how directly ("bodily") they impact the stream/video, in other words, how much space they leave for the streamer him/herself to interpret the participatory act.…”