What Does “NSFW” Mean in the Age of Social Media?

Awash with content available at scales too massive for human cognition to fathom, social media revolves around the constant quest of capturing and diverting attention; tracking it through the clicks, likes, shares, and recorded visits; and monetizing it. Jodi Dean argues that the search for affective intensities drives the movements of users across social media platforms in search of both distracting thrills and more lingering attachments. When browsing through Facebook news feeds, trending tweets, or the top images of Imgur, most content flows by with little effect.

When something does grab attention, it leaves some kind of impression, no matter how momentary or minor, that evokes a desire to engage. The logic is not altogether dissimilar from that of dating apps where the task is to find attractive options after being presented with a contingent mass of available choices by actors such as databases, social networks, likes, preferences, and algorithms. From the perspective of the platforms in question, content that grabs is valuable in its stickiness that makes users pay attention. This is explicitly the key aim of clickbaits that feed, and live on (and off), Facebook and Twitter traffic generated through eye-catching headlines and visuals promising affective jolts, shivers of amusement, interest, and fascination.

That this attention economy is elaborate, is finely attuned, and operates at expansive scales and speeds is not to say that its principles of circulation and distraction would be entirely novel, or that it was suddenly born around 2005 with the coining of the concepts of Web 2.0 and social media. Content published in order to bemuse, cheer up, amuse, irritate, and shock has been shared on discussion forums and home page links of all kinds throughout the history of the Web—and, well before, in e-mail, bulletin board systems (BBSs), and Usenet newsgroups. What is novel is the increased and organized monetization of viral content that emerges and results from such circulation of data.

Moreover, the content spread in social media has grown increasingly and characteristically SFW. Much of the meme production that has characterized platforms such as 4chan (est. 2003)—the home of not only Anonymous but also Pedobear and myriad strands of controversial humor—fit ill in the landscape of clickbaits that, for understandable reasons, prefer to avoid having their content flagged as controversial, obscene, or offensive and their user accounts closed on the platforms that are their main engines of traffic. Commercial partners do not, for the most part, want to be associated with content deemed obscene or otherwise controversial.

Exceptions do apply, of course. Established in 2009, Dangerous Minds is a news and media website—or, according to another interpretation, a clickbait. Operating a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account, as well as a Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google+ presence, Dangerous Minds publishes content on music, visual art, and the mundane oddities of popular consumer culture. Like numerous other sites, Dangerous Minds trades in spreadable media, yet, unlike the more high-profile clickbaits such as BuzzFeed and Bored Panda, it regularly publishes content marked as “NSFW,” “slightly NSFW,” or “NSFW-ish” that leads to articles on vintage pin-ups, cross-dressers, and pulp fiction; films, paintings, and sculptures dwelling on the fleshly details of human bodies; and introductions to “the erotic art of the enema.”

In its combination of the artsy, the subcultural, the bizarre, the vintage, and the cultish, and by flirting with the boundaries of the risqué, Dangerous Minds contributes to and occupies a specific ecological pocket in social media’s attention economy that comprises its natural habitat.

Despite the various titillations offered by the quintessentially NSFW genre of pornography, its visuals do not dominate most social media platforms precisely for the reason that #NSFW is also a technique of content filtering. Pornographic imagery has, despite its broad volume and perennial popularity, fairly seldom grown viral. In addition to the community standards policing appropriate content, this is equally a question of humor and the lack thereof. Memes, in general, live off their participatory possibilities of remix and alteration, and their appeal is centrally dependent on their ability to amuse. Humor can intermesh with cuteness, as in the case of baby animal videos; it can be offbeat in its cuteness, as in the case of the meme cats, Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat; or it can be vitriolic, as in the case of pro-and anti-Trump memes. It can be cruel, heavy with offensive overtones, nostalgic, warm, or absurd.

Sexism and racism tend to be mundane enough to be staple elements of much online humor and meme culture, not least in the United States. As Sarah Roberts notes, a great deal of popular user-generated content

trades directly on its disturbing racist, homophobic, or misogynist tropes and images. While social media platforms perpetuate the myth that such content may simply arrive on a site and become a hit due to serendipity or other intangible factors, the reality is much more complex and is predicated on a long tradition in American popular culture of capitalizing on media content that degrades and dehumanizes.

Independent of its particular edge or resonance, humor plays a key role in how online content catches attention and inspires likes, shares, and modifications through which it further spreads and prospers. When watched with the purpose of sexual arousal, pornography fits uncomfortably in the frame of humor: it is, after all, not routine to laugh at that which turns us on. The sexual fantasies and desires of others may nevertheless be a source of great amusement, especially when these differ from normative palates of straight vanilla sex. The clichés and conventions of porn can also be a laughing matter, as in the Brazzers Photoshop meme where the logo of the porn studio is pasted onto unrelated images, reimagining them as stills from a porn video and thereby sexualizing the interactions of the people, animals, and objects appearing in them.

Since its invention in 2011, the Brazzers meme has been amply applied to the products of film and television fiction but also news events such as royal weddings and presidential press conferences. The Brazzers meme recodes sexually nonexplicit, markedly mainstream, and SFW images with the key aim of amusement. When it comes to visual content of the sexually explicit kind, though, the imagery to gain virality has typically belonged to the category of shock and gross-out, watched for reasons of bemusement and surprise rather than arousal.

The Appeal of Grossness

In addition to people knowingly seeking out sexual, explicit, titillating, or gross materials in search of sharp affective rushes of arousal, disgust, or laughter throughout the history of the Web, they have also shared links to so-called shock and gross-out imagery of a sexual nature as practical jokes. Whitney Phillips (2015, 19) identifies classic viral porn images such as Goatse (1999) and Lemon Party (2002) as key to prototrolling practices where users open a link of shock porn when expecting to encounter something altogether more innocent and SFW.

These relatively early gross-out imageries notably often focused on male bodies coded as gay. Lemon Party, for example, features three senior men engaging in oral sex while Goatse, familiarized by the Stile Project, shows a man stretching his anus, revealing a broad expanse of his rectum. Meatspin (2005), a short video set to the 1985 Dead or Alive song “You Spin Me Round,” involves a clip from the transgender porn film, TSBitches. It features a shot of anal penetration while the partner on top spins their penis round and round in circles. As Meatspin plays, a counter marks the spins made and, after 45 spins, a text appears stating, “YOU ARE OFFICIALLY GAY :-).” As is the case with 2 Girls 1 Cup (2007), a one-minute video of coprophilic play once known as the most disgusting video on the Internet, links to these visuals have been shared with unsuspecting friends and colleagues with the overall aim of driving them to states of shock, disgust, amusement, and embarrassment—in different degrees and combinations.

The frame of grossness, often rife with homophobic undertones, works to cut off these images from sexual titillation while also demarcating the boundaries of bodies, desires, and sexual acts deemed appropriate. Yet grossness in no way automatically forecloses or excludes a broader range of titillations, homoerotic undertones included. In her analysis of sexual connections between straight white American men, Jane Ward points out that transgressions of the boundaries of heterosexuality—such as the insertion of fingers in each other’s anuses, sessions of oral sex, or incidents of tea-bagging—that occur under the guises of humor, under the influence of alcohol, or within the homosocial rituals of hazing work to reinforce rather than undermine the sense of straight white male identity:

That straight men are grossed out by men’s bodies, that they appear especially obsessed with what is grotesque about their own and other men’s anuses, and that they use homosexual sex to humiliate and demean and dominate one other are all important pieces of information for analysis, but they are not evidence that these acts are nonsexual.

Ward explains this simultaneous sexual flexibility and rigidity through a streak of childishness, an embrace of boyish sexuality among adult men, that is “implicitly heterosexual but primarily male-bonded, sometimes sadistic, and oriented toward an aggressive enjoyment of grossness and the anus.”

Hands-on play with other men’s bodies is, as the title of Ward’s book encapsulates, coded as “not gay” in balancing acts between interest, repulsion, and titillation. Disgust plays a key role in these affective dynamics, for “rather than a signal that straight men are simply ‘not into’ touching other men’s bodies, [it] is also a fetishized and performative mode of encountering men’s bodies, its own mode of sexual relating.”

Writing on sexuality and disgust, Beverley Skeggs notes that the maintenance of tasteful distance toward sexual excess involves visceral intolerance toward the kinds of tastes than one does not share, as well as tenacious fascination toward that which is being expelled from view. Disgust marks the boundaries of taste, sexual tastes included, and not all bodies have equal position in the dynamics of grossness, fascination, and desirability that it entails. Accented expressions of disgust are a means of generating moral distance toward things seen as violating the boundaries of acceptability, good taste, or appropriate demeanor, as in displays of sexual explicitness and extensive bodily detail.

Following Ward, it is nevertheless crucial to note the intermeshing of grossness, amusement, fascination, and desirability in straight male bodily explorations, as well as how articulations of repulsion may be a means to affirm and maintain the malleable boundaries of straight sexual identities. The surprise sharing of Meatspin, Goatse, or Lemon Party can be understood as cut through by a similar affective dynamic which, while dominated by exclamations of disgust, involves a broader range of affective intensities where only a thin membrane separates the straight male homosocial from the homoerotic or the homosexual. Grossness breaks against the norms of taste and is therefore titillating.

The tag NSFW is one means to mark out such grossness and to invite certain forms of encountering content thus marked. The tagging practices on the GIF-sharing site giphy.com, for example, point to such interpenetrations of NSFW with the notion of grossness. Animated GIFs—both ones tagged as NSFW and not—are routinely used as reactions to posts, and they are tagged and searched specifically for such purposes. Massanari notes that “a reaction GIF’s effectiveness lives and dies by its ability to encapsulate a specific response creatively and precisely while still expressing a kind of universal sentiment with which others can identify.” Such sentiments may not be precisely universal, though, but rather steeped in specific formations of gender, class, and sexual norms that become articulated predominantly through products of North American popular culture.

This is easy enough to identify in the common GIF reactions offered under the tag #NSFW. In the top hits of January 2017, the comedian Wanda Sykes frowns in dismay; the actor Adam Scott from the TV series Parks and Recreation pulls back from his desktop with his mouth open in an explicit expression of dislike; and Sponge Bob of the animated TV series digs himself into a hole in sand, which then becomes covered with the text “nope.” In these instances, NSFW is something clearly unwanted, disturbing, and disrupting and routinely accompanied with further tags such as #disgusted, #gross, #ew, and #shocked. In one #NSFW GIF after another, people are shown to grimace and frown in disgust, shake their heads, and hide their faces in reaction to unappetizing things just seen and heard.

The second broad category of GIFs tagged as NSFW on Giphy, notably smaller in number than the first, features degrees of female nudity—most conspicuously displays of breasts and buttocks—with additional tags such as #censored, #boobs, #booty, #her, and #girls that echo those found in our Twitter sample discussed in chapter 2. While the first category of GIFs features reactions in the unambiguously negative affective register, with the aim of amusement and distancing the sender of the reaction GIF from the content commented upon, the second aims more at sexual titillation as that which is being shared between the sender and recipients.

A more specific search for “nsfw” and “men” results in GIFs from the alt-country band Indiana Queen’s homoerotic black-and-white music video (other tags include #gay, #lgbtq, #connections, #gay men, #gay sex, and #twinks); from a Mad Men episode where the actor John Slattery is shown sitting naked on the floor; one is of a topless Hugh Jackman as Wolverine; one with a group of men tying up another man snugly with duct tape; and another with a man dressed up as a giant bunny sitting on a toilet seat, inviting others to join in. There seems notably little place in these tagging practices for sexualized displays of male bodies as objects of desire without them being marked as either gay or creepy. None of these top hits are tagged as #hot or #sexy. While the sexualized female bodies we noticed here and in our Twitter sample become coded as NSFW by virtue of being objects of desire, in gross-out content, male (homo)sexual bodies become intertwined with concepts of horror and disgust and, through that, earn their status as NSFW.

Hyperbolic, humorous expressions of being grossed out or titillated in potentially risky ways, as conveyed through reaction GIFs, are thus in line with, and contribute to, broader affective dynamics that drive online exchanges forward and carve connections and detachments between different embodied identities, sexual palates, and broader taste cultures. Reaction GIFs, in particular, both frame and orient the flows that online exchanges may take. By rendering impressions of other people’s posts visually tangible, reactions GIFs, similarly to the Facebook reaction options of “like,” “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry,” simplify the dynamics of online exchanges by pinning them down in quickly identifiable and clear-cut categories of feeling. Ambiguities do not easily prosper in such exchanges. At the same time, such ambiguities are rife in people’s relations to each other’s bodies and in sexual lives of all kinds, a fact amply demonstrated by the ambivalences identified in the valorization of nude selfies—and particularly in the diverse uses of the dick pic.

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Excerpted from NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media by Susanna Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett, and Ben Light. Copyright © Susanna Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett, and Ben Light 2019. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press.