Content area
Full Text
Sexuality & Culture (2017) 21:423440 DOI 10.1007/s12119-016-9397-3
ORIGINAL PAPER
Joseph Brennan1
Published online: 28 November 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Boys Halfway House is a gay bareback pornography website that purports to host the recorded abuse exploits of managers of a halfway house. It is a recent addition to the genre niche of abuse and exploitation pornography sites that have surfaced in recent years. This article reads viewer commentary of scene updates on review site WayBig.com so as to consider the controversy associated with the proliferation of gay abuse porn, and of Boys Halfway House and its theme in particular. More than 500 comments over a 2-year period help explain Boys Halfway House as a variant of extreme pornography, and canvas a range of views on rape and humiliation fantasy in gay porn more broadly. The study ends with discussion of the anxieties and appreciations the site has prompted in viewers, and the presentation of two themes in particular: bad porn and harmful porn. Also considered are the ethical implications of such male sexual abuse fantasies, which is a subject of lasting trauma for victims, and one that poses unique challenges in wider contexts.
Keywords Abuse porn Boys Halfway House Cultural studies Discourse
Extreme porn Gay pornography Textual analysis
Boys Halfway House (boyshalfwayhouse.com) is a gay bareback pornography website launched in 2014. It releases approximately three new scenes monthly under the premise that these are the recorded abuse exploits of managers of a halfway house inhabited by troubled young men. Scenes are described as incidents and performers as residents on the site, with video titles offering some insight into the types of narratives and performances on show: Earning His Keep The Hard Way,
& Joseph Brennan [email protected]
1 Department of Media and Communications, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of
Sydney, Level 2, John Woolley Building A20, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12119-016-9397-3&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12119-016-9397-3&domain=pdf
Web End = Abuse Porn: Reading Reactions to Boys Halfway House
123
424 J. Brennan
Catholic Schoolboy Raw Misery, and Straight Boys In Distress, to nominate just three. Titles such as these, together with site slogans Probation is worse than he thought it would be, Would you bareback him if you could?, and Better than...