Abstract
This article is centred on a case study of the ‘Totally Straight’ (r/TotallyStraight) ‘subreddit’ on social media site reddit. r/TotallyStraight serves as a web forum for sharing gay pornography amongst men who identity as straight. I draw on a small-scale study of the r/TotallyStraight subreddit, conducted over a period of three months. Analysis reveals that while r/TotallyStraight is largely used as a forum for sharing porn depicting men, it also serves as a space for affirmation and sharing personal narratives related to contested ‘mostly straight’ sexual identities. The moderators of the subreddit, and the users themselves, foster a supportive, non-judgemental discourse. It is argued that this phenomenon could be representative of broader cultural shifts towards less rigidly defined sexual identities.
The internet allows for constantly emerging modes of interaction, cultural circulation, and establishing or strengthening social connections. By way of the internet, geographically dispersed people are able to connect and self-organize around shared interests, tastes, practices, ideals, and experiences. For people coming to terms with or working through sexual identities that are not exclusively heterosexual, the internet is a valuable resource for identity-work (Cassidy, 2013; Hanckel and Morris, 2014; Taylor et al., 2014) connecting with like-minded others (Russell, 2002), finding sexual health information (Mustanski et al., 2010), dating or cruising (Light, 2007; Light et al., 2008; Reynolds, 2008; Roth, 2014) and for accessing pornography (McKee et al., 2008; Mowlabocus et al., 2014; Stardust, 2014).
While attitudes towards homosexuality have improved in more secular and affluent countries over the past several decades (Kohut, 2013), there has also been an increase in awareness of sexual identities that do not fit into neat categories like gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Savin-Williams and Vrangalova (2013: 85) have recently argued for the existence of a ‘mostly heterosexual’ orientation: ‘to some extent, mostly heterosexuals are “enhanced heterosexuals” in that they add a touch of homosexuality without losing or decreasing their heterosexuality … mostly heterosexuals call into question the traditional three-group system of assessing sexual orientation’.
In order to contribute to understanding this phenomenon, this article centres on a case study of a web forum for men who identity as straight but consume gay pornography. More specifically, this site is a sub-section (‘subreddit’) of social media site reddit. As this article will explain in more detail in the sections that follow, reddit is a loosely defined online community (or, rather, a collection of many communities with floating experiences of membership) that revolves around sharing content – in the case of this particular subreddit, the content is primarily gay porn. The name of this subreddit is ‘Totally Straight’ (r/TotallyStraight), and it serves as a forum for men who identity as straight and also consume gay pornography to share porn, but to also share personal narratives and experiences related to their ‘mostly straight’ sexual identity. While users who do not identify as straight men also frequent and are welcome in the subreddit (including gay men, bisexual men, and women), as I will explain below, the subreddit is framed specifically for ‘straight men’, even though the number of users in the subreddit who do identify as straight men is unclear.
McKee, Albury and Lumby (2008: 89) point out that for queer porn consumers, there is a process of re-affirmation in consuming porn that does not depict hetero sex: One gay man used pornography as a ‘re-affirmation of my sexual identity … you don’t get in the mainstream media images of blokes sort of getting off, except in Queer as Folk, and so we – gay, poof people – are largely invisible in terms of being sexual organisms and sexual identities outside that which is considered aberrant. So porn sort of gives you this erotic charge but also re-affirms you’ve got this sexual identity involved with another bloke – there’s this sexual action you can do’.
Reddit reported over 159 million unique visitors in the month prior to the time of writing (February 2015, reddit.com/about), and the r/TotallyStraight subreddit had over 15,000 subscribers at the same time. Thus, while this sub-section of the site represents only a minor portion of the broader user base, and a very small portion of internet users more broadly, it nonetheless serves as an interesting phenomenon worthy of investigation in order to better understand ‘mostly straights’ and the ways in which the social web can facilitate the identity-work associated with sexual identities that are not exclusively heterosexual.
In this article I draw on a small-scale study of the r/TotallyStraight subreddit, conducted over a period of three months. The study involved analysing 186 posts made across three one-week samples in the second week of each month of the study (December 2014 to February 2015). As I will demonstrate, while r/TotallyStraight is largely used as a forum for sharing gay porn, it also serves as a space for sharing personal narratives related to contested sexual identities. As I will demonstrate, the moderators of the subreddit, and the users themselves, foster a supportive, non-judgemental discourse that welcomes and invites this mix of gay porn and personal narratives relating to sexual identity.
This article is divided into four sections. First, I provide background on reddit itself as a form of social media, before going on to describe and introduce readers to the r/TotallyStraight subreddit in detail. Second, I discuss the methodology and specific methods of the study reported here. In the third section I detail key findings from the study, around the nature of content posted to the subreddit, the labour involved in that process, and the personal narratives that emerge. Finally, I bring these discussions together to suggest some of the ways in which this study might reveal changes to the telling of sexual stories in networked publics alongside broader socio-cultural shifts around sexual identities.
Reddit and r/TotallyStraight
According to reddit, the site is ‘a type of online community where users vote on content’ (reddit.com/about 2015). In scholarly discourse, especially in the literature around ‘online communities’ (Baym, 2010; Hodkinson, 2006), the concept of community is a contested one that is beyond the scope of this article to fully explore. For the purposes of this article, it will be sufficient to say that, broadly speaking, the sense of affinity or belonging users – known as redditors – have with reddit can be highly variable. At one end there are paid administrators, volunteer moderators and regular, ‘heavy users’ that might experience most keenly a sense of community that could include attending reddit ‘meetups’ or conventions; right through to ‘lurker’ figures who may regularly or irregularly visit the site, but rarely or never post, vote on content, or feel a sense of connection to the site.
The research around reddit is limited. Whereas social network sites like Friendster (boyd, 2006), MySpace (Dobson, 2012; Livingstone, 2008), and more recently Facebook (boyd and Ellison, 2008; Lincoln and Robards, 2014; Raynes-Goldie, 2010; Taylor et al., Falconer, 2014) and Twitter (Marwick and boyd, 2011; Shaw et al., 2013; Stephansen and Couldry, 2014) have attracted a great wealth of research, relatively little has been written about reddit. Notable exceptions include Van der Nagel’s (2013) work on ‘reddit gone wild’ (r/GoneWild), that I will draw on below.
Beyond scholarly interest, there have been several notable moments on reddit that achieved significant media attention: in 2012, US President Obama spent half an hour on the site, responding to questions from users (Kolawole, 2012); in 2013, a group of redditors (r/FindBostonBombers) wrongly identified two suspects of the Boston marathon bombings (Bidgood, 2013); and the site was heavily involved in blocking controversial legislation in the US, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP (PIPA), that protesters described as limiting freedom and innovation on the web (Emerson, 2012).
If there is a central ‘idea’ behind reddit, it is to serve as the ‘front page’ of the internet. In other words, the most interesting, funny, thought-provoking, outrageous, beautiful, horrifying, provocative content (images, videos, links, theories, pieces of writing, news, etc.) can be submitted to the site, and users can either ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ that content. Posts that attract enough upvotes can eventually make it to the ‘front page’ of the site, ‘surfacing’ that content for consumption by an audience that may otherwise not have seen it.
Each post is nestled within a ‘subreddit’ that serves as a category, but also affords that sense of ‘community’ that reddit seeks to foster. As Van der Nagel (2013: 3) explains: Content on reddit exists in themed threads known as ‘subreddits’, which do not simply organise content into topics, but create clusters of redditors whose ties are based far more strongly on mutual interest than pre-existing connections or geography. Niche subreddits often attract those looking for others who share their passion, which tends to create intense pockets of discussion around topics as controversial as men’s rights activism, and as narrow as individual characters from television shows. Popular subreddits include ‘world news’, ‘gaming’, ‘funny’, and ‘gonewild’, which features nude self-portrait photographs.
The ‘Gone Wild’ (r/GoneWild) subreddit at the centre of Van der Nagel’s (2013) research is what reddit has deemed as a ‘NSFW’ (Not Safe/Suitable For Work) subreddit. NSFW subreddits often contain explicit content that one ‘wouldn’t want to open at work’, including nudity, pornography, and ‘politically incorrect’ content. The top five NSFW subreddits at the time of writing were: r/GoneWild (images of nude bodies, mostly ‘amateur’ female bodies with the head cropped out – see Van der Nagel, 2013, for a detailed analysis), r/NSFW (also primarily naked women, but with less emphasis on amateur content from users themselves), r/ImGoingToHellForThis (‘tasteless “politically incorrect” dark, offensive, and twisted humor’, according to the subreddit description), r/RealGirls (more pictures of naked women: ‘no paid professionals allowed … if a girl is paid to look pretty, she does not belong here’) and r/NSFW_GIF (moving image ‘GIFs’, often extracted from both amateur and professional heterosexual porn). Each of these subreddits had between 340,000 and 730,000 subscribers each. There were 829 NSFW subreddits listed on redditlist.com at the time of writing (February 2015).
Within this NSFW sub-section of reddit, the focus is clearly the satisfaction of the heterosexual male gaze, but there are also smaller NSFW subreddits directed at more ‘niche’ gazes and interests. r/LadyBonersGW (63,269 subscribers) is described as ‘a place for guys on reddit to strut their stuff … gentle, kind and dude-appreciative … accepting of self-posts and NSFW … [h]owever, NSFW is not a requirement’. r/MassiveCock (26,811 subscribers) and r/Penis (23,274 subscribers) mirror the function of r/GoneWild, but with men as the subjects of the content, largely intended for consumption by straight women. Fewer still focus on content featuring male bodies or gay sex intended for consumption by other men, but notable exceptions include r/GayBrosGoneWild (23,315 subscribers, mirroring the r/GoneWild subreddit for a gay male audience), r/BrosLikeUs (14,931 subscribers), r/GayPorn (11,356 subscribers) and the focus of this article, r/TotallyStraight (14,876 subscribers).
Introducing r/TotallyStraight
The ‘Totally Straight’ subreddit serves as a compelling example of fluidity in contemporary sexual identities, at least partially enabled by the social web. The name of the subreddit itself is both ironic and playfully, or perhaps (as per the rules below) pre-emptively, defensive. Aligning with an emergence in both popular and scholarly interest in categories like ‘mostly straight’ or ‘Kinsey 1s’ (Savin-Williams and Vrangalova, 2013), this subreddit represents a digital trace of the lived reality and practice of men who identify as straight but consume gay porn. The rules of r/TotallyStraight are as follows, and serve as a starting point to illustrate this case study (reddit.com/r/tottallystraight, 2015):
Although this sub is for guys who identify as straight but get off on gay porn, every gender and sexual orientation is welcome here.
No one gives a shit if you think we might be bi-sexual or gay. Any shaming or trying to ‘convince’ someone you believe is gay or in ‘denial’ will result in comment removal and you’ll likely be banned. Slurs, shaming, and bullying will not be tolerated.
Asking for advice or general discussion about sexuality, social norms, etc. is okay. Just be respectful and try to keep it at least semi-relevant.
These rules were established by the moderators of this particular subreddit. As long as moderators also enforce the umbrella rules of the site (don’t spam, don’t ask for votes or engage in vote manipulation, don’t post personal information, no child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors, and ‘don’t break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of the site’, reddit.com/rules 2015), then they are free to run subreddits however they wish. Moderators are unpaid volunteers (compared to the Administrators, the paid employees that maintain the site but do not get involved in the moderation of subreddits unless there is significant cause) that set rules for their subreddits, enforce them, and can remove posts or even ban users from their subreddits. They will also often have a significant ‘voice’ in discussions that arise in the subreddits they moderate.
Having established the broad parameters of the article, I will now move on to the empirical detail. In the sections that follow I briefly explain the methodology behind the r/TotallyStraight study, before analysis and discussion of the findings.
Methodology
In order to best understand the socio-technical-cultural phenomenon of reddit (broadly), NSFW subreddits (more narrowly) and the r/TotallyStraight subreddit (specifically), I took an approach of ‘immersing’ myself in reddit. I first began using reddit in January 2014, and became aware of r/TotallyStraight shortly after. My intention here was to establish verstehen (empathic understanding) towards the culture of the subreddit’s ‘community’, the practices of its participants, and the conventions developed around participation. At the same time, I sought to retain my role and identity as a researcher, by drawing empirical boundaries around the study that allowed me to ‘zoom in’ unobtrusively on a specific data set as just one component of that longer process of immersion that began in January 2014.
The more formal component of the study took place over a three-month period, from December 2014 to February 2015. Data collection covered three separate weeks in this period, encompassing a single week (Monday to Sunday) early in each month: December 8 to 12, January 5 to 11, and February 2 to 8. In these three separate one-week periods, all posts made to the r/TotallyStraight subreddit were recorded, coded, and analyzed. These three samples covered 186 discrete posts for analysis: 74 posts from sample 1 (December), 65 posts from sample 2 (January), and 47 posts from sample 3 (February). The three samples were taken to provide a somewhat representative set of posts across the three-month period while also staying within the confines of a small-scale exploratory study. The drop-off in posts over the three samples could be attributed to a higher period of intensity in the holiday period. This will be one of the first studies of subreddit to employ such a method.
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets were used to manually record and code each of the 186 posts, and also to keep track of a range of data on each post: the day, date, and time of each post; the title of the post; the username of the redditor that made the post (for analysis only, not to be mentioned in publications); the subreddit ‘tag’ or ‘category’ (Photography, Video, GIF, Selfie, Personal Story, Request or Link) associated with the post; the ‘score’ the post had received, based on upvotes and downvotes from other redditors; number of comments on each post; the link to the post itself; the source of the post, indicating where the ‘content’ that the post pointed to was stored or located (e.g. Tumblr, Imgur, YouTube, Pornhub, Xtube, Xvideos, Redtube, etc.); a brief description of the content (e.g. personal narratives, asking for advice, or the kind of pornography being shared such as anal or oral sex, threesomes/group sex, solo masturbation, shirtless but not naked (SFW), etc.); and finally some brief notes on the comments on the post. I was guided here by McKee’s (2014: 56) discussion of ‘poststructural textual analysis’, that ‘makes an informed guess about the meanings of that text made by the audiences who consume it’ and is ‘interested in surface meanings, believing that these provide us with useful information about how populations make sense of their world’.
Findings
Drawing on the previously described corpus of 186 posts collected over three one-week samples on r/TotallyStraight, in this section I focus on four key areas. First, I present my analysis of what is being shared on the subreddit, including explicit and non-explicit content. Second, I consider which content posted to the subreddit is the most ‘popular’, based on the number of ‘upvotes’ received. Third, I address the ‘labour’ involved in content production on the subreddit by asking who posts before also exploring the phenomenon of ‘source requests’, where redditors ask for links to videos (usually) from which still and moving images (GIFs) are taken. Fourth and finally in this section, I turn to a consideration of the personal narratives that emerged in the subreddit, concerned with sexual experimentation, asking for advice, and seeking affirmation around a ‘mostly straight’ sexual identity.
Content: Explicit (NSFW) and non-explicit (SFW)
I coded content as either ‘explicit’ or ‘non-explicit’, with 84% of the content coded as explicit. The remaining 16% of posts were largely images or videos featuring clothed or at least partially undressed men (usually shirtless), that might be considered ‘soft core porn’ but generally ‘safe for work’ (depending on the workplace), or the kind of content that might be found in advertising. For example: an image of a shirtless, muscular Santa from the December sample; a set of images of men exercising; an image of a male underwear model; and a group of shirtless men by a pool.
There were also several non-explicit text posts, including a discussion of a documentary titled My Husband’s Not Gay (2015), where the redditor who posted the link argued that the show promoted the belief that homosexuality is a choice. Another post linked to a Daily Dot article (Lang, 2015), especially relevant for this special issue, titled ‘The rise of “mostly straight” dudes – why men’s sex lives are more complicated than you think’. The post initiated a discussion on the broader politics of the mostly straight phenomenon, sexual fluidity, and the role of the internet in facilitating connections. There were other text-only posts that dealt with the politics around sexuality, but they most frequently appeared in the form of personal narratives that I will discuss separately below.
The most popular kind of content posted to r/TotallyStraight during data collection was pornographic or explicit in nature (84% of posts), but the forms of the porn were mixed, including still images/photographs, moving images or ‘GIFs’ (Graphics Interchange Format images) that operate on a short loop, and videos: 38% were still images, 28% were GIFs, 23% videos, and the remaining 12% were text-only posts: 4% were requests or questions; 4% were links to broader websites rather than to specific content, such as a Tumblr page or a porn repository; 3% were personal stories that I will explore below; and 1% were discussions.
Of the explicit content, who was being depicted varied: 21% of content was ‘solo’, depicting a single man (including depictions of men with both flaccid and erect penises, but usually masturbating), 59% depicted two men (including where the men were naked together but not having sex, but most usually engaged in some form of sex: masturbation, oral, or anal), 12% depicted a ‘threesome’, and 5% depicted four or more men engaged in sex. Interestingly, the remaining 3% of the explicit posts included women engaged in sexual scenarios (despite the subreddit’s focus on ‘gay porn’), sometimes as an active, central participant, and other times, as a way to ‘lure’ apparently straight men into same-sex sexual encounters. All of the content involving the depiction of women was also coded as group sex, involving three or more people. Clearly, however, the most common explicit content centred on two men or a single man.
The hegemonic aesthetic in the subreddit celebrated white, able-bodied, very fit, muscular men, in their 20 s or early 30 s, aligning with dominant western ideals of masculine beauty typified by popular figures like Zac Efron, Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth. Less muscular, smaller framed men – but still fit, white, and able-bodied, perhaps slightly younger, more likely in their 20 s – were also common, operating as the submissive (but still celebrated and desired) component in the hegemonic aesthetic. Similarly, the figure of the ‘bro’, the college-age fraternity brother in the North American system, was also pervasive and celebrated as a subject of desire. There was also a recurrent theme – in the titles of posts, the content of posts, and in comments on posts – around converting straight men to same-sex sexual activity, whether through drunkenness, youthful experimentation, or awakening and enabling an existing desire.
Aside from text-only posts, all posts on reddit are links to content located on other sites: images stored on host sites like Imgur and Tumblr, or videos stored on sites like YouTube (non-explicit), Redtube, Pornhub, Xtube, Xvideos. The function of reddit is not to host this content, but to serve as a social referral point for voting on and discussing content. In this way, reddit is also partially shielded from controversy around the hosting of certain content, especially content that is pirated or illegal. The most popular sites that posts pointed to during the study were Imgur (39% of posts) and Tumblr (27%), followed by a range of pornographic video hosting sites including Pornhub (8%), Redtube (3%), and Xtube (3%). The remaining 21% of posts pointed to a wide range of sites (<1% share each) including other video hosting sites (YouTube for non-explicit content, Manhub, Xvideos, and MyVidster), news articles (Gawker, Dailydot) and other blogging platforms (Blogger).
Most popular posts
As explained earlier, if there was a core functionality behind reddit it would be the system that allows users to vote on content. The most popular content goes to the front page of the subreddit. While my method involved tracking, recording, and analysing every post made to r/TotallyStraight during the data collection (excluding any posts that were deleted before I could record them), and not just focussing on the content with the most upvotes, I did also track the ‘score’ and number of comments each post had. Post scores are determined by ‘the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes’ (reddit.com/wiki/faq, June 2015). It is possible that further votes and comments were made after I did my data capture (approximately a week after posts were made) but the bulk of the interaction on reddit appears to occur within 24 hours of a post being made.
While there was only one post that had a score of zero during the study, the most popular posts did not attract a vast number of upvotes either. The most popular post had a score of 469, which may seem like a low number given the more than 15,000 subscribers to the subreddit. However, to give this some context, the most popular post in reddit’s history had a score of 38,160 at the time of writing. Thus, despite a large number of unique visitors to the site (159 million in the month prior to writing) and a significant registered user base (1.6 million), many of these visitors do not appear to convert to registrations, and many of the registered users may not (or may only infrequently) vote on or comment on specific posts. In other words, many users of the site more broadly, and indeed the r/TotallyStraight subreddit appear to be invisible ‘lurkers’, accessing content but not participating or leaving a digital trace through votes or comments. Presumably this ‘lurker’ effect would be amplified in an explicit subreddit, where users may not want votes or comments visibly traced back to their account. My methodological choices in approaching this study meant that I also took on the role of ‘lurker researcher’.
In order to convey some sense of the most popular posts on the subreddit, I will briefly describe here the top five posts during my data collection:
A still image in the style of a ‘selfie’, depicting oral sex between two men with a score of 469 and 5 comments; A GIF (moving image on a short loop with no audio) depicting anal sex between two men with a score of 403 and 24 comments; A still image depicting two naked, well-endowed flaccid men not engaged in sexual contact, but staring into the camera with a score of 333 and 17 comments; A still image of a single man with an erect penis and a laptop with a score of 277 and 15 comments; and Another still image depicting a single naked man – identified in the comments as a gay porn star – with an erect penis with a score of 251 and 10 comments.
It is worth noting that four of these five most popular posts are still images, and only two depict sexual contact between men. While 23% of the content posted to the subreddit during the study were videos, these posts did not appear to attract as many upvotes. One possible explanation for this might be the visual immediacy of still images and GIFs. An image is easier to quickly look at and make a determination around whether or not to upvote or downvote that content, whereas a video takes longer to load and watch. Mobile or tablet users may even need to load the video in a separate web browser.
Labour: Who does the posting?
The ‘labour’ involved in posting content to the subreddit is also worth exploring. While there were over 15,000 redditors subscribed to r/TotallyStraight at the time of writing, only 74 different redditors posted to the subreddit during the three weeks in total of data collection for this project. It is worth noting here that it is possible that a single individual could be posting under several aliases or accounts. While it may be a common practice to use a temporary or ‘throwaway’ account to post or discuss explicit content on reddit (Van der Nagel, 2013) so as to separate NSFW redditing from SFW redditing (as a digital trace of posts and interactions are recorded in the redditor’s profile), it is unlikely (although possible) that users would maintain multiple throwaway accounts for posting in a single subreddit.
While there were some users who posted more than others, the ‘labour’ here seemed to be spread across a reasonably sized group: 73% of the redditors who posted to r/TotallyStraight during data collection only posted once. The remaining 23% posted more than once, and just three redditors posted more than 10 times during the three-week period. The third highest poster had 12 posts, the second highest poster had 16 posts, and the top poster had 19 posts over the study.
The other kind of labour discovered in my analysis if this subreddit was ‘source requests’. Source requests come in the form of comments on still images or GIFs, asking for the source of images. For instance, source requests were made in the comments on the second and third most popular posts described above. Redditors may comment along the lines of ‘source?’ or ‘any idea which video this is from?’: 38% of the posts recorded during the study contained some kind of source request. Over half the time (56%) source requests were answered, by either providing a link to a full video or by providing the name of the actors and/or production house behind the video from which the image was taken. In one instance, responding to a source request for a GIF, one redditor provided not only a link to the full video, but also provided a time index for the sequence the GIF was taken from. I would argue that this represents a kind of ‘NSFW labour’ that is largely un-researched, but is at the core of the digital circulation of pornography through social sites like reddit. Occasionally, redditors will specifically post links to images with the intention of asking for a source, but on r/TotallyStraight this practice is usually discouraged and re-directed to another smaller, more niche subreddit that is specifically for source requests, r/GayPornHunters.
Personal narratives
In my analysis, the most complicated and compelling finding was the presence of posts that detailed personal narratives. These were text-only posts where redditors disclosed stories of their own sexual activities, anxieties, and experiences navigating a ‘mostly straight’ sexual identity. While they were rare (5 posts, <3% of the overall corpus), these personal narratives brought a completely new dimension to the subreddit, distinct from the porn that dominated it. These narratives revealed complicated processes of identity-work and experimentation, as narrators skirted around what was acceptable for straight men in order to pursue their desires. While there was no way to confirm these stories as true, they nonetheless serve as compelling texts in better understanding a phenomenon that is otherwise largely untold. I will briefly describe just two of these narratives here.
The first narrative (2992 words in length) details the narrator’s alcohol-fuelled, first sexual encounter with another man. The 19-year-old narrator was in the dorm room of his girlfriend with two of her friends – another male/female couple. The narrator’s girlfriend began a game of ‘chicken’, involving gradual escalation (touching, kissing, oral sex, and the use of sex toys) between herself and her female friend, and compelled the narrator and the other male to ‘keep up’. As the encounter progresses, the narrator details his uncertainty and his surprise at enjoying sexual contact with another man, to the point of ejaculation, quickly followed by shame and embarrassment. The narrator explained that posting the story to r/TotallyStraight was a way to process the experience (potentially a form of catharsis), and to also receive feedback and advice on how to proceed. He left the dorm room quickly after the encounter, and hadn’t spoken to his girlfriend about it since.
There were 21 comments in response to the story, variously expressing how ‘hot’ the scenario was (it was recounted in some detail), asking the narrator how he felt about it now, and generally providing supportive and warm comments. Two of the moderators of the subreddit also joined the conversation, reinforcing the importance of communication with partners, discussing boundaries, and knowing one’s own limits. Reinforcing individual agency was also a strong theme. Two days after the initial post, the narrator provided an update in the comments, explaining that he had spoken to his girlfriend and that they were okay. He expressed an openness to trying something like the initial encounter again, but was in no particular hurry. He thanked the subreddit for the support.
The second narrative (3124 words in length) explores the narrator’s experience of falling in love with his straight best friend. This narrative was divided into three posts that updated the subreddit on the progress of the narrative as it progressed. This narrative is less explicit than the first, but deals more with the narrator’s emotional attachment and his negotiation of sexual identity and how to communicate that identity to others, rather than the detail around a single formative sexual encounter that constituted the first narrative. The narrator guides readers through an attraction that spans several years, eventually becoming an intense friendship of several months leading up to the posts to r/TotallyStraight. He explains his heartache at seeing his friend pursue sexual encounters with women, alongside his elation at building a close bond with this friend. While the narrator eventually comes to the conclusion that he is probably bisexual, he still considers himself as ‘more straight’. While he never discloses his love to his friend, he does discuss his sexuality with him. In the third instalment the narrator advises the subreddit that they are both now dating women. He went on to reflect on the value of the r/TotallyStraight subreddit in allowing him to express his feelings and his desires.
There were 36 comments in total across the three posts/instalments, largely empathetic, sympathetic, and sharing similar experiences. Some commenters encouraged the narrator to be direct and share his feelings with his best friend, or provided other forms of advice relating to the specifics of his narrative, while others recounted their own stories of unrequited love and asked for updates. The narrator expressed his thanks for the replies and support.
Are these narratives ‘authentic’, or fabricated? Did they really happen? Within the confines of this particular study, it’s impossible to know. However, what can be said is that these narratives – and others like them – were taken at face value within the subreddit itself, as other redditors responded with their own comments, advice, and (mostly) support, rarely questioning the authenticity of the stories. Taking these narratives at face value could be described as a kind of ‘suspension of disbelief’. In many ways, consumers of contemporary culture are regularly asked to suspend their disbelief to engage with a story, whether it’s dwarves and elves in Lord of the Rings or pornography depicting ostensibly straight men being lured into same-sex sexual encounters. Whether or not the redditors of r/TotallyStraight see the content in this sub as requiring a similar kind of suspension of disbelief is unclear, and requires further research.
Despite questions about plausibility and authenticity, these two examples stand to demonstrate how reddit affords the sharing of these kinds of narratives in a relatively safe and anonymous space. Redditors are able to express themselves in their own time and in their own words. Beyond the inherent value for the narrators in expressing these narratives, there are potentially other users ‘lurking’ who consume these narratives alongside the pornography. This blend of the explicit and the non-explicit, the political, the personal, and the anonymous produces a rich social space that is in many ways unique.
Discussion: Telling sexual stories
In the words of Plummer (1995: 101–2), ‘the Modern Western World has become cluttered with sexual stories … we have become the sexual storytelling, confessional society’. In making his case, Plummer points not only towards psychopathological stories, but also to paperback romance novels, television shows like Oprah, and to openness to stories of trauma around rape, abuse, and ‘coming out’. Twenty years on, Plummer’s words continue to ring true, even as the breadth of sexual stories grows. Inquiries into sexual abuse (especially within religious organizations) are played out publicly, legislative changes to recognize same-sex marriage continue to sweep around the globe, and most recently, the stories of trans* people have taken centre stage with the very public telling of sexual stories of celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox. What are the conditions under which these stories can be told? Stories can be heard when a community has been fattened up, rendered ripe and willing to hear such stories. They cannot easily be heard amongst isolated individuals; they gain a momentum from an interpretive community of support. Thus, for instance while people could ‘come out’ as gay in the 1960s and before, it really meant in isolation, to oneself, or in the disguised and furtive world of secret gay communities – the homosexual underworld as it was often then referred to. To turn it from a private, personal tale to one that can be told publicly and loudly is a task of immense political proportions. It requires a collective effort, creating spaces in the wider social order and the wider story telling spaces. Bit by bit – through the leaflet, the pamphlet, the booklet, the book, the meeting, the recording, the newspaper, the television programme, the film, the chat show and so on – the voice gains a little more space, and the claims become a little bigger. (Plummer, 1995: 116)
The internet, and specifically the affordances of the more participatory, democratized ‘web 2.0’, have enabled even greater reach for sexual stories, opening up the telling of these stories far beyond geographical boundaries to ‘networked publics’ (boyd, 2011). Sexual stories are told on and through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and other forms of social media, both amongst close, intimate circles, and also to wider publics. While sexting as a practice (Albury and Crawford, 2012), for instance, might sit at the more closed, intimate spectrum of sexual storytelling (usually between partners, unless a confidence is betrayed), NSFW subreddits like r/GoneWild (Van der Nagel, 2013) and r/TotallyStraight sit at the more public end of that spectrum in terms of openness. On reddit, even if those stories (whether textual narratives, naked selfies, or professional pornography) are circulated amongst a relatively small public, one of reddit’s key affordances is surfacing texts to a wider audience. While texts are circulated on all of these platforms only through some kind of ‘collective effort’, in Plummer’s words, the key difference here is the changed interplay between producer and consumer. The potential reach of the pamphlet is limited, whereas a digital text can be circulated indefinitely (Baym, 2010), even beyond the control of an original producer.
Plummer (1995) theorized that when it comes to telling sexual stories, there are ‘tellers’, ‘coaxers’, and ‘consumers’ (pp. 105–6). While people may move between these different roles, the ‘products’, those ‘social objects (texts), which harbour the meanings that have to be handled through interaction’ (p. 106) are at the core. The meanings of these texts are, for Plummer, never fixed, but rather ‘emerge out of a ceaselessly changing stream of interaction between producers and readers in shifting contexts and social worlds … meaning is a problematic emergent that is contextually based’ (p. 106). In this article, I have discussed the various ways in which r/TotallyStraight – as a text, or more accurately a set of texts – is produced. As my analysis revealed, only a small number of redditors assumed the role of ‘tellers’: of the ∼15,000 redditors subscribed to r/TotallyStraight at the time of this study, only 74 (.5%) users posted to the subreddit during the three weeks of data collection. However, the nature of reddit is such that it is not only the ‘original posters’ who tell the story, but also everyone who comments on the post becomes part of that story. This digital entanglement complicates the dynamic between Plummer’s (1995) tellers, coaxers, and consumers, and yet they serve as useful lenses through which to unpack the labour that goes in to producing r/TotallyStraight.
The role of the coaxer is fulfilled on r/TotallyStraight in several ways. First, the subreddit – and perhaps the moderators themselves – invite (and thus ‘coax’) stories, be they pornography (if we can proceed on the basis that a single pornographic image represents or tells a story) or more elaborate textual narratives that I identified above as ‘personal narratives’. Second, the redditors requesting the source of particular images or GIFs (seeking the ‘full video’, for instance) could also be read as coaxers. Third, those redditors who upvote content could similarly be read as coaxers, as they reward (and further surface) certain content.
The role of the consumer on r/TotallyStraight is a more open one, and indeed all subscribers and more casual visitors to the subreddit who are not subscribers can be read as consumers. At the same time, any single consumer is able to fulfil the role of coaxer or indeed producer, given the nature of reddit. They do not need to convince a book publisher or a television producer to authorize their voices to speak about particular sexual desires or traumas. In this sense, reddit provides a space for these narratives to play out in a networked public far beyond the slow momentum discussed by Plummer (1995). In turn, exercising these stories here can lead to identity-work in a social context (with input and support from likeminded others, as in the case of both personal narratives described in the previous section) that are not reliant on the zeitgeist of the day; before, in Plummer’s terms, ‘a community has been fattened up’ (1995: 116).
The conceptual category of ‘mostly straight’ or ‘mostly heterosexual’ proposed by Savin-Williams and Vrangalova (2013) is productive for thinking through what r/TotallyStraight might tell us about nondominant sexual story telling in a broader, ‘confessional society … cluttered with sexual stories’ (Plummer, 1995: 102). The notion that men can actively consume gay pornography and still retain a straight identity troubles neat boundaries around sexualities. At its core, that is what r/TotallyStraight works to achieve. As Savin-Williams and Vrangalova (2013: 82) explain, the ‘three-group system of assessing sexual orientation is inadequate’, and this subreddit represents just one example to strengthen that argument. In my analysis, even if its actual user base is broader, r/TotallyStraight is intended to serve and provide a space for the ‘totally straight’ man who identifies as straight but consumes porn centred on men who have sex with men, thus further realizing the conceptual category of ‘mostly straight’.
Conclusion
The purpose of this study was not to provide any generalizable findings about ‘mostly straights’ or even men who identify as straight and consume gay porn. Rather, this study was intended to cast a light on the ‘Totally Straight’ subreddit phenomenon, and to further nuance our understanding of mostly straight men more broadly. Although I have provided some very basic descriptive data in this article, they are limited by sample size and the relatively small number of subscribers (and visitors) to the subreddit who actually post, vote, and comment. The non-invasive nature of this study at the level of textual analysis is also limited, and further research into r/TotallyStraight would be enriched by interviews with the redditors who contribute to this subreddit. Further, of the almost 15,000 redditors who are visibly subscribed to the subreddit at the time of the study, it is unclear how many of those users identify as straight men. The study revealed the presence of (self-identified) straight men, gay men, bi men, and also straight women in the comments on posts.
Beyond this particular subreddit, there are also myriad other subreddits worthy of deeper investigation. Indeed, aside from the pioneering work by Van der Nagel (2013) and Van der Nagel and Frith (2015) on anonymity and pseudonymity on r/GoneWild, there is very little scholarly research in this area. Further research here must also be concerned with research ethics. Reddit itself is still a relatively niche form of social media when compared to other sites and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, but it does appear to afford users a way of forming affinity groups, or perhaps ‘neo-tribes’ (Maffesoli, 1996; Robards and Bennett, 2011) around shared interests. The ways in which redditors experience floating levels of affinity to the site, or to specific subreddits, is an important avenue for further research.
Beyond reddit, this study also points towards the importance of what I have described here as ‘NSFW labour’ involved in maintaining a subreddit like r/TotallyStraight, and clearly there is more work to be done in this area. Some of the sites that posts to r/TotallyStraight point to – like Tumblr, Redtube and Pornhub – also operate on the basis of NSFW labour, and this labour requires further research. More broadly still, this whole range of avenues for further research might also contribute to our understanding of how the social web – enabled by the internet – is implicated in broader socio-cultural changes around sexuality.
To conclude, the ‘Totally Straight’ subreddit serves two central functions: first, as a space for sharing pornography; and second, as a space for sharing personal narratives about sexual identity. The first function – sharing porn – should not be quickly dismissed. As discussed earlier, porn can ‘re-affirm’ sexual identity (McKee et al., 2008: 89) and can also serve as a pedagogical text (Albury, 2014) for individuals socialized under heteronormative conditions. For men who identity as straight or mostly straight and consume gay porn, this might be especially resonant. Rather than seeking out pornographic videos, images, and text, the users of r/TotallyStraight are presented with this content, alongside comments and signifiers of value (via votes) from other users. It is unclear how this social dimension of porn might figure into its consumption, but it is clear that at least for a small group of redditors who keep the subreddit active through their own labour of posting, commenting on and moderating content, there is something significant about r/TotallyStraight.
The second function of the subreddit is, potentially, even more significant. By providing a space for the reflexive ordering and communication of narratives about sexual identity, r/TotallyStraight becomes a visible, accessible, and ongoing ‘text’ of the mostly straight phenomenon. I would argue that it both represents and propels (even in a small way) a broader socio-cultural shift towards less rigidly defined categories and acceptance when it comes to sexual identity (further evidenced, for instance by Anderson and McCormack, 2014; and Morris and Anderson, 2015). The consumption of diverse forms of pornography writes back onto popular understandings of sexuality, and on to dynamic personal accounts of sexuality that also intersect with the political. Reddit serves here as a confessional space where porn consumption practices and preferences can be openly discussed and reflected upon, and where personal, elsewhere contested narratives related to nondominant sexual identities can be exercised, archived, and communicated to others.
