Pornographic domesticity: amateur couple porn, straight subjectivities, and sexual labour

This paper provides a case study of SellYourSexTape, a pornographic website offering explicit videos shot by straight amateur couples that show them having sex and playing house in their (alleged) homes. I argue that the juxtaposition of domestic work and sex acts makes for the special appeal of this specific site, and helps to produce it as legitimately amateur for online porn audiences who look for representations of ‘real’ sex. While this strategy seems to work to attract viewers, it fails to naturalize straight coupledom: by mashing domestic work with mainstream pornographic sexual numbers and enshrining these acts in the phantasmatic space of the familial home, straight subjectivities become very visible as subject positions that have to be worked for – hard, dirty, and on our knees and backs.