Shitong Sun
ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It refers to an emotional and physical sensation characterized by light and sparkling tingles, typically occurring on the head, neck, and extending down the spine. According to the website, ASMR University, the feelings include both physical sensations and psychological sensations. The former refers to bodily sensations usually described as tingles, while the latter refers to deeper states of relaxation. ASMR can be triggered unintentionally in situations like haircuts or when listening to whispers; it can also be intentionally induced. In ASMR videos, including ASMR porn, ASMRtists use sound technologies and performance techniques to trigger the sensations in the audience.
Recently, a popular trend is the use of ASMR in erotic and pornographic text. This entry is the first in a series on ASMR porn research, in which I will imagine the potentials of ASMR porn as a non-visual-centric genre of porn, thus offering a potential pathway for non-visual-centric pornography and its study. In this entry, I compare this new genre of ASMR porn with other existing genres like the described porn for the visually impaired group, and further indicate that through auditory devices, performance techniques, and digital technologies, ASMR porn has the potential to challenge the unparalleled status of the visual in pornography. The following entries will focus on the bodily experience of the audiences and the auditory technologies. With these entries, I aim to explore the connections and particularity of ASMR pornography in relation to mainstream pornography. Hopefully, it may be the basis for examining the feasibility of how this genre can carve out a novel space (for care, intimacy, respectful and moral consumption) in pornography.
Graphic: Jackie Hur
Sources: SmithsonianMag.com, ASMR University – Origin Theory of ASMR
From ASMR to ASMR Porn
ASMR and ASMR videos are not believed to be inherently sexual. In an effort to establish ASMR as a healthy and normal auditory practice (thus helping with sleep, alleviating depression, etc.), the ASMR community and much of the research on ASMR (including both scientific and social science studies) tend to distance themselves from the “sexual fetish stigma” and pornographic content (Grothe‐Hammer, 2024). Although ASMR has been increasingly used by porn performers, many ASMR experiencers and practitioners also insist that ASMR is about intimacy, not sexuality (Ibid). Studies that directly link ASMR to sexuality are relatively limited, while Waldron (2016) is one exception.
If we consider ASMR porn, which refers to sexually explicit materials that primarily aim to sexually arouse the audience through ASMR, the most prominent feature of this audiovisual material is its focus on the auditory sense. Looking at the etymology of "pornography" with the root of graphein, meaning “to write”, we find that it is about writing, making pictures, and thus inherently visual. Most forms of pornography, whether in the form of erotic sculptures, paintings, stories, or films, predominantly engage our visual sense.
However, one might ask: What about pornography for the visually impaired group? Could porn for the visually impaired be similar to ASMR porn? Pornhub once promoted a so-called "described video" category for visually impaired people.[1] In these videos, unlike regular porn, beside the sexy voices of actors, a voiceover that describes the scene is added to the video's soundtrack. Although Pornhub claims that the fifty videos initially launched in 2016 were professionally narrated, many of the 34 remaining videos in the "described video" category feature voiceovers that simply describe what is happening in the video in a somewhat dispassionate tone. Therefore, we can almost say that, in porn culture, audiences' senses except for visuality are genuinely often understated.
In contrast to described porn, ASMR mainly stimulates the audience's body through non-verbal sound effects rather than verbal narration. For example, ASMRtists may kiss or lick a specially made microphone, or use objects such as feathers or plastic sticks to rub the microphone and create such sound effects. In ASMR pornography, not only the sound is crucial and has the magical power to arouse physical sensations, but this genre is also rapidly growing in popularity. For instance, over forty thousand results when searching for "ASMR" on Pornhub stand in stark contrast to the only a few dozen to one hundred results for "described video.”
Reflecting Visual-centrism with ASMR Porn
ASMR porn also opens up a new space to reflect on the visual-centrism of mainstream pornography. Bull and Back (2003, p.1) write, “In the hierarchy of the senses, the epistemological status of hearing has come a poor second to that of vision.” Donna Haraway (1988, p.583) laments and questions, “The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power…These are… learned in part walking with my dogs and wondering: how the world looks without a fovea and very few retinal cells for color vision but with a huge neural processing and sensory area for smells.”
Mainstream pornography is characterized by extreme visual stimulation, cold spectatorial perspectives, and a mechanical understanding and manipulation of women’s bodies. Women, for example, are the victims of the “eyes with the perverse capacity”. Dines (2006) found that mainstream gonzo pornography seeks to push actresses’ bodies to their limits—not to enhance male sexual pleasure, but to maximize the visual stimulation derived from women’s humiliation. Irigaray (1983, p.26) voices her concern about the gendered implications of visual-centrism, stating that “the predominance of the visual… is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation.”
In terms of ASMR porn, would things be different in a non-visual-centric genre of pornography? The emergence of ASMR pornography provides a great opportunity to respond to another version of Haraway’s question—how does the world of pornography look with sensitive cochleae, auditory nerves, and auditory cerebral cortex?
Photo by Kaboompics.com from Pexels
“The Bodily Nature of Sound”
Many sound scholars acknowledge the bodily nature of sound (Ihde, 1976; Connor, 2004). “Instead of separating the body from its object, as seeing does, hearing connects body to object,” Young (2021, p.393) writes. Unlike vision, which provides a stable perception of the world, auditory and other senses “plunge me into the world’s mutability” (ibid.). Visual perception is instantaneous; with just one glance, a person can grasp the surface of an object. In contrast, hearing requires an object to vibrate and unfold over time, thus it “opens up parts of the world from which vision is closed off: I hear beyond the rim of sight” (ibid.). Different from “looking”, auditory practices embrace sustained contact between the sounding object and the receiver, which is the prerequisite of intimacy. They welcome their own instability, and reject the binary opposition and power relationship inherent in the act of seeing and being seen.
Hence, ASMR pornography—whether considered audio-centric or audio-visual-centric—seems to hold the potential of getting around of the long-lasting ocularcentric biases and consequences in porn. I want to foreground related discussions with inquiries on how the audiences' bodies are aroused by the assemblage of sound technologies in ASMR Porn. If we do not understand how the sexually appealing sounds in the genre of porn are recorded, encoded, transmitted, and played, and how our bodies interact with to such sounds, any discussion would remain only speculative.
There are two key aspects to that question: body and technology, which I plan to address in two separate blog posts respectively. On the one hand, without the technology to record and reproduce detailed sounds and surround sound, ASMR videos and ASMR pornography would not be possible. On the other hand, the viewing mode of ASMR might differ qualitatively from traditional pornography. It is the auditory or audio-visual senses, rather than the visual alone, that trigger arousal accompanied by tingles that directly affect the body. So, I will explain how the "lived body" (in the phenomenological sense) of ASMR porn audiences is moved by the audiovisual materials; and how auditory technology and devices—including those for sound recording, transmission, and playing—mediate this sensory experience. What is also important is the context in which our bodies are connected to auditory devices. That is, to answer what happens at the moment of encounter between sound, headphones (as is often the case), and our bodies.
Now, are you ready to become a bat? Even with poor eyesight, exceptional hearing can allow us to navigate the night with ease. We will listen, not just see—an erotic world that does not revere vision holds many more possibilities for fulfillment, pleasure, intimacy and beyond.
References
- Bull, M., & Back, L. (Eds.). (2003). The Auditory Culture Reader. Routledge.
- Connor, Steven. (2004). “Edisonʼs Teeth: Touching Hearing.” In Hearing Cultures, edited by Veit Erlmann, 153–172. Oxford: Berg
- Dines, G. (2006). The white man’s burden: Gonzo pornography and the construction of black masculinity. Tale Journal of Law and Feminism, 18, 283–297.
- Grothe‐Hammer, M. (2024). Tingles and Society: The emotional experience of ASMR as a social phenomenon. Sociological Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12618
- Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
- Ihde, Don. (2003) [1976]. “Auditory Imagination.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 61–76. London: Berg
- Irigaray, L. (1983). This Sex Which Is Not One, 5th printing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Waldron, E. L. (2017). “This FEELS SO REAL!” Sense and sexuality in ASMR videos. First Monday, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i1.7282
- Young, Katharine. (2024). 'Scrape, Brush, Flick: The Phenomenology of Sound', in Harris M. Berger, Friedlind Riedel, and David VanderHamm (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, Oxford Handbooks (online edn, Oxford Academic, 14 Apr. 2021)https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190693879.013.16