Abstract
The purpose of this article is to reflect on the relationship between digital pornography and big data, with a special focus on the ways in which the “novinha” category, used as a way of classifying pornographic content, circulates and is appropriated, transforming itself into data and metrics. This category is part of the common sense vocabulary in Brazil, being widely used in songs, in peripheral contexts and as a way of classifying a specific type of adolescence experience. The perspective developed here is based on ethnographic observation conducted on PornHub. More specifically, this reflection is interested in the information disclosed by PornHub Insights, dedicated to the publication and analysis of access data. From this, I seek to understand how the dissemination of these data - platformized and far from neutral - raises questions related to the intersection between sexualities, moralities, violence and adolescence, in addition to functioning as an index of what would be part of Brazilian sexual behavior. In this sense, as proposed by Saunders (2020), I start from the idea of “sexual datafication” (Saunders 2020), which transforms sexual practices, bodies and sexualities into supposedly quantifiable data, establishing forms of governance of sexualities. In addition to the data from PornHub Insights, I also bring observations from my own browsing through PornHub, as well as excerpts from the debates raised by the 2016 data from publications on Facebook and Twitter. Finally, using Nvivo Capture, I bring an experimental mapping of how the “novinha” category circulates on Twitter, being associated with hashtags and posts that corroborate its appropriation to indicate erotic content. Thus, I seek to show how this category and its use as a demarcator of pornographic content calls into question the limits of sexuality (Gregori 2016).
Keywords:
Pornography; Big data; Morality; Datafication.
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