Approaching analog amateur porn empirically: Video practices in Austrian swinger classifieds,1981–1990

Amateur video porn in the age of the internet: Trash, treasure, myth?

Given its status as a routine reference in many genealogies of the figure of the amateur, homemade video porn from the pre-digital era remains notoriously underresearched as a material artifact and as a social and cultural practice. Only few publications discuss specific audiovisuals in terms of their modes of address, their narrative and performative content, their sound and image textures, their moods and atmospheres. For the German context, Georg Seeßlen names four compilation series to illustrate the range of amateur material video rentals carried during the ‘video boom’ (Deutschland privat, Homann Privat Serie, German Erotica and German Bizarr), but only mentions them in passing (1990: 321). ¹ David E James close-reads four 20-minute videotapes compiled as The Best of Amateur Erotic Video Volume 11 by American amateur distributor Susan's Video (James, 1996: 219–223). However, insufficient contextualization – James does not provide a production year or release date for the volume he discusses, nor does he disclose the dissemination range and submission policy of Susan's distribution network – makes his analysis a random and isolated highlight. In general, concrete information about specific contexts of production, consumption and distribution – who watched, traded, and shot what, where, when, why, and for whom – is hard to come by. Drawing on articles in popular and trade magazines, Jonathan Coopersmith offers a brief overview of the number of amateur pornographic videos produced for professional rental and retail in the USA between 1980 and 1991 (2000: 29 f.). Still, his account remains vague about what exactly amateur producers taped, how they presented their products, and how they imagined, found, or chose their audiences.

The scarce and indefinite literature makes 1980s' amateur pornographies on analog video appear as most elusive ephemera of 20th-century porn culture. This impression was confirmed by my own initial attempts at tracking down suitable material for further research. A revaluation of the sources discussed by Coopersmith and James seemed hardly possible, as amateur-focused trade periodicals like Amateur Video News and the catalogs published by Susan's Video have left no substantial traces online. Neither did they turn up in the local archives, public libraries and private collections I had access to when drafting this article. My hopes of finding physical copies of the specific tapes or collections addressed by James or Seeßlen were frustrated ² for the same reason. Locating my own source material proved similarly difficult. Inquiring about actual videos with Filmarchiv Austria, Austrian Film Museum (OeFM), Österreichische Mediathek, Wien Museum, and with collectors and filmmakers who frequently work with found footage and home movies, turned out a dead end. No one had access to any such videos, and nobody knew where else I could possibly find some.

While amateur erotic material of any format is generally hardly represented in (public) archives and collections due to its sensitive content (Swanson, 2005: 140), the striking absence of 1980s' amateur audiovisuals and related trade publications is also owing to two modalities distinct to homemade analog video porn. These modalities affect the preservation of a possible corpus on two different temporal levels. First of all, amateur pornographic videos seem to have faced a very limited range of distribution at their historical moment of production. Though amateur tapes were available on pornographic markets, they remained an ‘extremely marginal form … of … erotica’ (James, 1996: 261; also see Coopersmith, 2000: 30; Esch and Mayer, 2007: 101; Paasonen, 2011: 71). The literature usually describes homemade pornographic videos as being exchanged through informal ‘swap-and-buy services,’ which sometimes operated exclusively within a tightly knit community of like-minded amateur producers and connoisseurs (Paasonen, 2011: 72; also see O'Toole, 1999; Seeßlen, 1990: 322). From the viewpoint of the collector (and perhaps also the researcher desperate for actual sources), amateur pornographies that were only traded in informal special-interest communities become a treasure: a precious chance finding that does not lend itself easily to discovery, but has to be hunted down. ³

On the other hand, however, analog amateur video pornographies are hard to come by today because they were discarded as trash when the technology was outmoded in the late 1990s (Benson-Allott, 2007; Noble, 2013: 730). Unlike in the 1980s, analog videotapes are no longer consumer commodities. As a home entertainment technology, VCRs and VHS cassettes (not to mention Betamax and Video 2000) have given way to digital formats that play on DVD players, computers and handheld devices, which charges analog video equipment with an aura of the obsolete, the bulky, the noisy, and the cumbersome (Benson-Allott, 2007: 176; Marks, 2002: 93 f.; Nathan, 2010; Noble, 2013). In Vienna, the stylized image of a VHS tape has graced municipal waste management garbage containers since the early 2000s (see Figure 1). Vienna waste bins, however, are not the only places where tapes figure as symbols for trash. A similar sensibility manifests in many threads on various help pages on the internet, which offer advice on the disposal and recycling of analog video cassettes. ⁴ OPEN IN VIEWER

The trashiness of video also shows in the curatorial policies of public collections of homemade film. Unlike other obsolete (audio-)visual formats, VHS, Betamax or Video 2000 tapes do not presently qualify for the care of archives and museums. The Austrian Film Museum's annual Home Movie Day, for instance, which aims at ‘rescuing’ amateur audiovisuals captured on outdated, analog formats, will only accept contributions on Super 8, 9.5 mm or 16 mm film. ⁵ Paolo Caneppele, Head of Collections at the Austrian Film Museum and curator of Home Movie Day in Vienna, discloses that the long run time of analog video formats exceeds both the hours and the storage capacities the institution can provide for processing tapes for digital preservation. Therefore, the museum has refused video donations for the last three decades. As a consequence, the home movie collection at Austrian Film Museum holds virtually no amateur production from the 1980s and 1990s. ⁶ Other local institutions have recently directed more careful attention to analog video, but single projects were still in very early phases of sounding, planning, and reorientation when this article was drafted. ⁷

The precarious present status of 1980s' amateur video porn tapes as both trash and treasure charges them with an appeal that seems to set them apart from the more recent amateur pornographies widely available today. Present-day amateur productions often rather problematize than confirm the promises of intimacy that draw viewers to homemade content, as digital technologies and media practices on the internet tend to erase the boundaries between the public and the private, between the sex worker and the cute girl next door, between make-believe and the truly intimate confession (Attwood, 2010c; Esch and Meyer, 2007; Paasonen, 2011: 71 ff.). Analog tapes, on the other hand, seem to offer a nostalgic look back at a moment in time when the dissemination of consumer-level recording technology did not yet question, but rather brought about the amateur as a private subject taping sex beside and beyond professional interests. If 1980s' tapes are scarce because they circulated predominately in special-interest communities, it is easy to imagine them as products of intimacy and authenticity. If 1980s' amateur video porn is missing because it was swapped among producing couples only, it seems possible that such direct exchange encouraged performances that were uninhibited and spontaneous, and avoided repeating industry clichés. If 1980s' amateur content is exceptionally scarce today because it is indeed the product of ‘a truly private activity’ (Coopersmith, 2000: 30), then it might harbor unknown pleasures long lost for audiences in the age of the internet. The fact that actual tapes are usually unavailable for a validation of such claims, of course, only fuels these imaginations. At times, the myth of 1980s' amateur video pornography as the hallmark of authenticity even suffuses contemporary porn practices online. The American amateur couple porn site SellYourSexTape, for instance, will only host digital material from the 2010s, but still features an image of unlabeled VHS tapes in its banner, as if this reference could bestow some of the aura surrounding the lost analog object upon its more mundane digital clips (Hofer, 2014).

Amateur video practices in ÖKM classifieds: Numbers

As informal trading practices are crucial in constructing analog amateur video pornographies as a myth, I turned my attention to an archival source that allows insights into the development, scale and dynamics of such exchanges: sex-contact magazines. Sex-contact magazines are classified magazines that publish personal advertisements from individuals, couples or groups looking for casual sexual interaction. Most personals propose swinging dates, that is, sexual encounters in which (mostly heterosexual, often married) couples engage with partners from outside their mutual relationship in each other's presence and with each other's consent (Bergstrand and Williams, 2000; Rooke and Figueroa, 2010). The production, consumption and trade of pornographic audiovisuals is a marginal, but regular presence in sex-contact ads. Though the number of personals explicitly addressing (audio)visual artifacts usually remains well below 2% of all ads per issue in the case studied for this article, the ads still allow a discussion of trends: Which medium plays what role in local swinger culture at what time, and what sort of pornographic material is imagined, proposed, suggested, put up for sale and trade, or in demand by what audiences.

One of the largest and most important European sex-contact magazines still in print today is ÖKM or Österreichisches Kontaktmagazin (Austrian Contact Magazine). The magazine was founded in 1981 in the small Upper-Austrian town of Bad Ischl by the Janisch family, and soon became a central medium of exchange for swingers in all provinces. ⁸ Throughout the 1980s, ÖKM grew from a monthly, rough-and-tough, 32-pages, black-and-white publication dominated by glue-and-scissors aesthetics into a magazine that would appear bi-weekly, and feature both black-and-white and color photographs on glossy paper and up to 72 pages. From the very beginning, ÖKM would frame the personals with sex-related articles, advice columns, serialized novels, photo stories, cartoons, and letters to the editor. Still, the personal ads and especially the (pornographic) photos submitted by advertisers looking for contact remained the magazine's core feature. Under the headline ‘Haven of Love,’ ⁹ ÖKM published a rapidly growing number of classifieds that were often accompanied by self-shot photographs of ‘real-life readers.’ As the realness of these pictures made for an important marker of distinction, the editors pursued a strict photo publishing policy. The advice pages of early issues repeatedly reminded readers not to submit ‘wish pics’ (in other words, generic pornographic pictures showing what they ideally looked for in a prospective partner), but images of themselves in erotic poses. The editors obviously took pride in the promise of authenticity and access residing in such reader-submitted photographs. In 1988, a large red title box spreading over a double page of personals announced ‘We shape the image of reality: ÖKM' in bold black letters.

For this article, I have approached ÖKM by combining content analysis and close reading. I tried to delineate what role analog video played in relation to other image recording technologies, especially photography, during the decade; how Austrian swingers imagined incorporating it in their practices; who planned on shooting homemade porn, with whom, and why; and under which conditions analog videos labeled as amateur or ‘private pornography’ were offered as gifts, sold, or traded. To these ends, I first screened an approximate total of 64,000 personals in 90 issues of ÖKM appearing between February 1981 and December 1990, counting references to video in general, and to amateur video in particular. For reasons of comparison with other image-producing practices, I also included ads that would refer to photography, yielding a sample of 2625 personals explicitly addressing photography and/or analog video. ¹⁰ I then categorized those 611 personals referring to amateur video, dividing them into calls for making, and calls for exchange. I have coded personals addressing video making according to the production practices they suggest (DIY video production, switching the video camera on while swinging, or the provision of video services, see my discussion later in this article). For ads looking to sell or trade amateur pornographic audiovisuals, I have asked which agents offer amateur content on video (couples, singles or third party traders, see my discussion later). In a second step, I have close read these ads in dialog with letters to the editor that offer opinions on or reviews of video making and exchanging practices.

Media practices: Trends

The first impression emerging from the abundant material is that video debuts on swinger markets not as an amateur practice, but as a carrier medium for commercial productions. For the first six months of ÖKM in print, references to video are absent from the personals section. In the article section, the very first issue of ÖKM of February 1981 declares ‘Video on the rise,’ but discusses it primarily in terms of new consumption practices afforded by the technology (1/1981, p. 29). ¹¹ In June of the same year, an article advising readers to spice up their married lives by producing their own porn (‘“Home porn” for flaccid marriages,’ 5/1981, p. 5) still ties such practices strictly to small gauge film. ‘When the projector hums and I see myself on the screen making love, a burning desire for my husband grows within me,’ intimates 23-year-old ÖKM reader ‘Hildegard F’ from Upper Austria in the article. From August 1981 onwards, ads offering video service (‘Private! Video filmer will film your parties. Absolute discretion ensured,’ 7/1981, p. 18) or looking for performers (‘Tirol/ Salzburg: I look for attractive girls for erotic video production. Video is for home use only,’ 18/1982, p. 33) start appearing, though they remain few and far between: In 1981, only 0.17% of all ads address amateur video. This number remains low throughout the first half of the decade (1982: 0.12%, 1983: 0.11%, 1984: 0.19%). It increases slightly in the 1985 issues, when 0.67% of all ads contain references to amateur video porn. Numbers keep growing at a lazy pace, and peak in 1990 (1986: 0.81%, 1987: 1.22%, 1988: 1.55%, 1989: 1.66%, 1990: 2.28%). By 1990, classifieds with pictures routinely sport headers referring to amateur video filming (‘Privatvideos are in!’ 173/1990, p. 35; ‘I vilm [sic] you while fucking!’ 192/1990, p. 35; see Figure 2). The gravitation of video-related ads to the end of the 1980s also reflects in the numbers of personals suggesting video consumption as part of swinging dates (‘Hobbies: Video,’ ‘We like video,’ ‘Interested in video,’ ‘VCR available,’ ‘We have many VHS tapes to give us ideas’). While these ads remain under the 0.1%-mark up until 1983 (1981: 0.09%, 1982: 0.02%, 1983: 0.04%), they increase around the mid-1980s (1984: 0.33%, 1985: 0.36%, 1986: 0.96%, 1987: 1.39%). By the last three years of the decade, they make up almost 2% of all ads (1988: 1.98%, 1989: 1.94%, 1990: 1.92%). (All numbers: see Table 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

ÖKM reader offers his services in the production of homemade porn, 1990.

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Table 1.

Number of personals referring to media practices (producing photos, producing videos, consuming videos) in ÖKM 1981–1990.

	1981	1982	1983	1984	1985	1986	1987	1988	1989	1990
Photo	1.16%	1.44%	1.76%	1.46%	2.51%	3.96%	1.9%	2.09%	1.5%	2.16%
Video	0.17%	0.12%	0.11%	0.19%	0.67%	0.81%	1.22%	1.55%	1.66%	2.28%
Consuming  video	0.09%	0.02%	0.04%	0.33%	0.36%	0.96%	1.39%	1.98%	1.94%	1.92%
n	151	346.8	665.8	660	645	689	928.7	907	1136	1041

n = Average number of ads per issue, calculated per volume.

The ÖKM ads, however, also demonstrate that video was not the only significant media practice pursued by Austrian swingers in the 1980s. Up to and including volume 1988, ads with amateur video references are outnumbered, and often significantly so, by ads proposing the production or exchange of amateur-pornographic photographs (1981: 1.16%, 1982: 1.44%, 1983: 1.76%, 1984: 1.46%, 1985: 2.51%, 1986: 3.96%, 1987: 1.9%, 1988: 2.09%, see Table 1). In 1986, photo-related ads peak at an astonishing 3.96% of all personals featured in the magazine that year, which amounts to the highest number of ads addressing any media practice in all 1980s' ÖKM volumes. Though declining from then, photo-related personals still add up to 1.5% (1989) and 2.16% (1990) of all ads posted in the last years of the decade. These fairly strong and constant numbers suggest that among Austrian swingers, the ‘video boom’ of the 1980s did not supplant, but rather added to the pre-video media practices in its early years. This assumption is backed by advertisements for ‘discreet’ film and photo development services, both amateur and professional, which remained a regular presence between 1982 and 1987. Some of these ads make explicit how earlier and ‘new’ media practices need not be understood as competing against each other in 1980s' swinger cultures: Beginning in 1985, ‘W.D. Filmservice’ of Vienna Meidling does not just offer the development of amateur pornographic photos ‘at standard rate,’ but also the transfer of homemade films and diapositive slides to videotape (76/1985, p. 17). Towards the end of the decade, however, convergent professional service ads vanish, with one single last case appearing in 1988.

Close reading ÖKM personals: Of swingers, couples and third parties

While the numbers presented in the previous section allow an overview of the practices projected and the agents involved in video production and exchange in the Austrian swinger cultures of the 1980s, they do not afford a critical discussion of the promise of intimacy, exclusiveness and unmediated access to ‘real life’ couples at the core of analog video amateur pornography's mythical charge. A close reading of ÖKM personals and letters to the editor, however, complicates the assumption that homemade tapes only ever documented sex acts set in romantic coupledom and exclusive domesticity. In contrast, readers routinely articulate imaginations that reach beyond the idea of dyadic intimacy. This characteristic owes to the special-interest context of the source material consulted for this study: as a sex contact magazine, ÖKM explicitly addresses swingers, that is, agents who seek sex with partners outside their romantic relationships (Bergstrand and Williams, 2000). Consequently, the largest part of all personals proposing video-making activities are by ÖKM readers looking to videotape themselves swapping partners. If, as the literature discussed earlier suggests, the authenticity of amateur porn hinges on the depiction of emotionally intimate ties suffusing and transcending the usual pornographic representation, then most of the videos projected by ÖKM readers hardly meet this standard. Many of the ads from the ‘swinging with video’ category imagine situations that generate an erotic appeal from challenging the exclusiveness of the romantic couple in a controlled environment. A common proposal, for instance, involves the invitation of a single male or female into the marital home. The visitor is encouraged to have sex with and take pictures of the wife, while the husband videotapes their engagement (‘Who loves me in front of the camera? Vienna: If you are a horny man, good-looking, well-endowed and not easily worn out, who wants to shoot photos and videos of a hot, shaved woman, write me. My husband remains passive and will film, too,’ 100/1986, p. 40). The very point of such videos, it seems, lies in recording activities that open up domestic sexual spaces to outside parties. The fact that ÖKM readers largely frame the production of homemade pornographies as part and parcel of swinging probably necessitates a more nuanced discussion of the specific intimacy at work within such video-making practices. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (2000) remind us that intimacy is an instrument of normalization: the boundaries of the intimate also mark the boundaries for proper sexual exchange. In ‘heterosexual culture,’ proper sex is private and de-politicized, taking place in the seclusion of one's home, and in the comfort of a relationship whose standards (for instance, its duration and stability; as well as the age, sex, gender, and number of the partners involved) meet a hegemonic community's approval (Berlant and Warner, 2000: 317). Though swinging obviously transgresses some of the boundaries delineating common straight intimacy, the ÖKM personals nevertheless create a normativity of their own. In all types of ÖKM ads, ‘intimacy’ (often coupled with ‘discretion’) keeps reappearing as a keyword indicating quality media, quality sex, quality contacts. Here, intimacy seems possible among more partners than just the romantic couple, as intimate engagements explicitly include exchange among a wider community of fellow ÖKM readers. Within this community, however, many of the norms that generate common straight intimacy are still in place; most importantly, the logic that any sort of sexual exchange is most proper and respectable when it is not motivated by financial gain. In letters to the editor, readers often exchange cautions about ‘professionals’ posing as fellow swingers, and warn each other off agents who would promise to send photos for a fee and take the money, only to never be heard from again. From issues 74/1985 to 105/1987, the editors attempt to clearly separate ‘professional’ from amateur ads by introducing an extra section titled ‘Donation Ads’ (from issue 90/1987, the title changes to ‘Generosity and Gentlemen’). The wording makes clear how the magazine wanted to downplay the scale and purpose of these financial transactions: money passed from reader to reader should not look like wages paid for sexual service, but like optional, fundamentally insubstantial contributions given on top of the pleasure each party gained from the exchange. For 1980s' video pornographies, this means that ‘intimate’ audiovisuals can very well be produced in the presence of not only another swinger or swinging couple, but also of a third, sexually uninvolved party providing recording equipment and skills. In a letter to the editor of April 1987, ÖKM readers ‘W and M T’ from Vienna-Meidling comment:

Through ÖKM, we have met a couple of friends who wanted intimate videos of themselves. Repeatedly, problems occurred, since it is impossible to swap partners and film at the same time. Looking at the product afterwards, the quality was often so poor that one is losing interest in seeing oneself ‘doing it.’ We wanted to change this, but had to find out that many camera owners were just into it for the money. Lately, we met someone who manages to produce really good films in a professional manner. Save for the cost for materials used, he will do it for free. Interested parties who have had the same difficulties may write us for his contact details. We will provide a short film showing ourselves to anyone interested in checking out his ‘quality work’. (112/1987, p. 38)

The swinger intimacy typical for the ÖKM community also reflects in the substantial number of personals offering video production service to would-be amateur porn performers. Interestingly, however, these ads show an increasing tendency to rhetorically tie homemade porn production back to the couple as an exclusive dyad as the decade passes. In issues before April 1985, video service ads address couples as one of many possible sorts of clients. Domestically charged spaces like bedrooms, which will be key for invoking exclusive, private couple intimacy when advertising amateur audiovisuals in issues to come, still figure alongside other, more communally connoted spaces like sex clubs and saunas (‘Attention, video lover! I bring my professional VHS-video equipment to your bedroom, your sex party, your sex club. I have no financial interests. Tape remains with you,’ 23/1983, p. 34). Starting in 1987, however, video service ads discover couples as a special clientele with a possible interest in infusing homemade pornographic videos with an air of two-person private intimacy. Using rhetorics reminiscent of 1950s' home movie discourses (cf. Zimmermann, 1995: 132 ff.), these agents advertise homemade pornography as being all about the preservation of happy family memories: ‘ÖKM reader tapes your most intimate moments (on VHS)’ (106/1987, p. 40), ‘Do you want me to tape your intimate experiences on video?’ (109/1987, p. 47), ‘If you want to have your most sensual hours caught on video, I am your man’ (112/1987, p. 18), ‘Catch your most intimate pleasure on video at net cost’ (113/1987, p. 57), ‘Attention, married couples! Hobby filmer (VHS) will make a very private video film’ (156/1989, p. 47), ‘Who wants to document their most beautiful moments on video?’ (192/1990, p. 68), and so on.

On the trading side, couples seeking to sell or swap their homemade videos via ÖKM increasingly employ similar rhetorics as the decade passes. From 1985 onwards, the couple's bedroom becomes a central trope in many personals of this category (see Figure 5). These ads still lure audiences by promising exclusive access to their homes – however, the type of access granted is different from that offered in earlier advertisements, as it is different from the personals looking for swinging dates discussed earlier. While ‘swinging with video’ ads open the couple's domestic space to the visitor for actual participation in person, and earlier exchange ads often aim at getting to know prospective swinging partners by watching each other's homemade video, these later personals foster a voyeuristic engagement: looking, not touching; mediated by a tape. In a move perhaps paradoxical for swinger cultures, the couple re-emerges as the closed off entity it is in its common straight conception. These rhetorics place erotic charge no longer in testing the boundaries of dyadic intimacy, but in watching, imagining, and fantasizing about exactly such intimacy from afar. OPEN IN VIEWER

The shift to couple intimacy also seems to be motivated by its promising exploitability on the growing market. After all, third-party traders and commercial advertisers pick up on the trend during the last years of the decade. While the late 1980s still see ‘swinging with video’ ads making up the largest part of the personals in the production section, which suggests that the bulk of homemade porn in circulation was hardly exclusively couple-centered, third-party traders begin highlighting ‘the couple’ as the most curious sensation amateur videos had to offer. With taglines such as ‘I own hot, homemade amateur videos. If you want to see uninhibited couples in action, write!’ (132/1988, p. 49), they quickly establish the heterosexual couple as a stock character of amateur pornography. Commercial ads offering amateur porn through professional video distribution services – which remain relatively few throughout the years, and can be easily spotted because they provide phone numbers or postal addresses instead of the anonymous box numbers assigned to private advertisers – incorporate the figure of the couple from 1988 on: ‘Young couple (her a blond beauty – see image) gives away bras, panties, erotic slips and thongs, suspenders, und really hot photographs and videos. Discretion is a question of honor. Direct requests to phone number provided above or write to general delivery: Vienna 1103, code word “PEACE”’ (139/1988, p. 36, see Figure 6). In April 1990, a large advertisement by a professional exchange service for amateur video co-opts the voyeuristic peek into the country's real-life bedrooms as its central marketing angle (see Figure 7). OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 7.

‘We’ll give you insights into Austria's bedrooms!’ Advertisement for a professional video exchange service, 1990. Note the postal address instead of the usual box number.

A possible explanation for this shift is that the charge of privacy and exclusiveness inherent to couple-centered intimacy could set individual productions apart from the bulk of amateur videos showing ‘partner swaps’ and other swinger activities. As references to video making increase in ÖKM, and more and more amateur pornographic material is on offer in the magazine produced by couples and third-party traders alike, the need for distinction among suppliers grows. Advertisers draw attention to their non-commercial motivation even more urgently than before to stress the authenticity of their recordings. As belonging to the circle of swingers around the magazine transcends trading in audiovisuals to community labor, personals highlight their status as ‘ÖKM readers’: at times, advertisers submit photographs showing themselves sporting ÖKM fan gimmicks like T-shirts (see Figure 8). ¹³ In the last years of the decade, the generational status of the actual cassettes exchanged begins to matter. By 1989, personals draw distinct lines between first-generation tapes, which harbor the promise of being self-produced, original, and unique, and retaped or copied content, which obviously was considered too close to the mass-produced commodity to assure viewers of the authenticity of the action recorded (‘Vienna: Young, attractive couple, both 26, swaps private videos (VHS and 2000). No pirated copies, only absolutely private scenes,’ 172/1989, p. 27). OPEN IN VIEWER

The rhetorics of demarcation deployed in ÖKM personals suggest that by the late 1980s, amateur porn on analog video is anything but unconcerned with negotiations of who and what qualified as ‘amateur’ in the first place. Unlike the literature discussed earlier proposes, amateur realness does not magically arise from the introduction of consumer-level video technology to a market of savvy prosumers. As the ÖKM personals show, authenticity is a product of ongoing processes of differentiation, which are closely linked to shifting perceptions of what counts as intimate. Among ÖKM readers, these shifting perceptions increasingly privilege a common straight conception of dyadic intimacy to mark amateur realness. Are the producing performers a couple in their everyday lives? Did they record (or at least direct) the material themselves? Are they giving it away for free? Do couples and third parties belong to a community of credibly authentic fellow readers? Curiously, these authentication strategies closely resemble those of similar, present-day amateur pornographies, especially those produced for and disseminated on the internet (Jacobs, 2007: 61 f.; Paasonen, 2011: 71–105; Patterson, 2004).

Conclusion

My mapping of video practices in ÖKM personals challenges the assumption that 1980s' amateur pornographic video, now missing as a corpus, would provide an uncomplicated, perhaps even unmediated access to real-life sexual and emotional relationships by merits of its technology (cf. Hillyer, 2004: 51). Though the ads and articles do not allow insights into the look and feel of actual videos exchanged among the ÖKM readership, three major tendencies can be delineated from the material at hand. First of all, ÖKM ads show that throughout the 1980s, Austrian swingers did not practice videography in an isolated manner, but that video shared the field with other well-established forms of pornographic image production (especially photography), which suggests a certain continuity in themes depicted, aesthetics pursued, and conventions followed in media old and new. Second, ÖKM advertisers predominately propose recording swinging practices, which are extraordinary, special, often ritualized events that need not necessarily bear close connections to a couple's more mundane everyday erotic exchange (Bergstrand and Williams, 2000; Rooke and Figueroa, 2010: 220 f.). Third, ÖKM personals show that ‘the (heterosexual) couple,’ as an exclusive entity that would grant audiences access to their private lives (and domestic spaces) through homemade pornographic content, emerges largely as a collateral of trading rhetorics seeking to differentiate and legitimate one's own product on a video porn market of growing competition towards the end of the decade. Finally, the classifieds in ÖKM suggest that most parties involved in the exchange of amateur couple porn in the age of analog video were aware that amateur authenticity needed producing by dynamics of distinction, and played these dynamics deliberately, instead of simply generating naïve records of their private sexualities with a video camera.