Coming on camera: beautiful agony’s orgasmic porn / VICE

Written by Rula Al-Nasrawi for VICE.  Originally published on June 2nd, 2014. 

Along with erotic projects like Hysterical Literature (photographer Clayton Cubitt’s video series of women reading literature at a desk, while being pleasured underneath the table) and MakeLoveNotPorn.TV (a site where regular people submit their own sex videos for online rental), Beautiful Agony is pioneering a shift in the porn industry away from the male gaze.

“[Beautiful Agony] is something that fits right in with what has been kind of evolving over the last 10 years with the feminist porn movement internationally,” said Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara. “It’s implicit critique is that the graphic display of pornography doesn’t necessarily equal pleasure for the viewer or the performer, and that you could possibly have something that’s less graphic or a more confined view.”

Beautiful Agony also sets itself apart from other porno sites by the agency its users have in the videos they submit. The person diddling on camera has 100 percent say in what the world gets to see—and what angle they see it from. The control given to the users and the amateur nature of their videos gives Beautiful Agony an intimacy that Miller-Young finds refreshing.

“In a society of surveillance, I think, people have fantasies that are rooted in privacy and are rooted in no one knowing,” she said. “I think that it’s what is so interesting about Beautiful Agony, because masturbation is supposed to be this private act.”

Read more about ‘Beautiful Agony’ here