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The free tour of the CyberDyke network Cyber-dyke.net includes a promotional ban-
ner [Figure. 1] that captions thumbnail images of happy naked women with the phras-
es: “real fantasies / real orgasms / real lust / real butches / real bodies / real sex.” As
evidenced here, “real” is the primary term the site uses to frame its project, implying
that the realness on offer at CyberDyke is what distinguishes their product from “fake”
commercial lesbian porn. The immediate problem with this strategy, which is com-
mon to much alternative netporn (see www.altporn.net), is that “real” is just as much
a ubiquitous catchphrase of the very commercial porn from which CyberDyke and its
ilk want to set themselves apart. WeLiveTogether.com, for example, a porn site which
features three supposed roommates who pick up a different girl each week for a group
lesbian scene, also invites potential customers to “Find out how REAL lesbians live”
[Fig. 2]. Thus, if CyberDyke and WeLiveTogether offer the spectator palpably different
experiences — and to me it seems that they do — the status of this difference remains a
provocative question: Is it just that WeLiveTogether is lying about being real, whereas
CyberDyke is telling the truth? And if so, what precisely is it about CyberDyke that is
more real?
In addition to being a popular marketing buzzword, realness has been identi!ed by
many theorists of porn as a de!ning characteristic of the genre. In order to schematically
condense this !eld, I’d like to propose that pornography is typically understood as having
a privileged relationship to the real in one or more of four ways:
• it records an unsimulated, authentic sexual act (realness of production)
• its images appear real due to their character and conventions (realness of representation)
‘THE REAL THING’:
REFRAMING QUEER PORNOGRAPHY
FOR VIRTUAL SPACES
Julie Levin Russo

C’LICK ME240
• it acts directly on the viewer to produce real effects (realness of reception)
• it is directly tied to real economic, political, and/or cultural processes (realness of
social context)
As an especially apt and microcosmic example, CyberDyke mobilizes all four argu-
ments in their FAQ. Elaborating on the question I raised above, “So what’s the differ-
ence between ‘hot lesbian action’ for ‘frat boys’ and quality porn aimed at real women
and lesbians?” they answer:
We use real people and couples as often as possible, and narratives based on real-life
and real fantasies. We try to depict the sex the way people really have it, not just in po-
sitions that maximize expos[ure] to the camera or that make the women look a certain
way… That other kind of porn is easy to recognize: it has obvious cues, like a silly con-
trived plot-line or arti!cial-looking women; it’s not about the real world at all… Even
if the content is almost identical in terms of the action and explicitness, the personality
of the camera holder makes [a] big difference; he or she is a proxy for the viewer.
(my emphasis)
This statement relies on a realness of production in its claims that its models are “real
people and couples.” It invokes a realness of representation in its discussion of visu-
al strategies, like naturalistic staging and implied viewer positioning, that allow Cyber-
Dyke’s images to “depict the sex the way people really have it.” It references a realness of
reception in identifying CyberDyke in the query as “porn aimed at real women and les-
bians,” suggesting that it will effectively act in pleasurable ways on these authentic minds
and bodies. And elsewhere in the FAQ, it’s clear that CyberDyke is also concerned with
a contextual realness: they write that “we’re out to redeem porn!… women often don’t
have much extra pocket-change for things like porn sites, and… they are anxious about
signing up for adult sites as well. I thought a network of sites made by women, a safe
space on the Net where sex was given respect, was needed.” This is a project to inter-
vene, through porn, in the broader sociopolitical !eld of gendered sexuality.
Now, the fact that this four-fold conceptual tether, or some part of it, is taken up by
both alternative and mainstream porn sites, and (as I’ll discuss) by both pro- and anti-porn
critics, suggests, at the very least, that this convoluted historical, theoretical, and ideologi-
cal nexus of pornography and the real requires rigorous examination. For politically-en-
gaged queer netporn sites, the question of what assumptions they perpetuate when they
embrace this language is especially important. The idea that porn has a special capacity
to transparently re"ect the real, one of the most common aspects of this discourse, is nec-
essarily problematic in its erasure of mediation. But it becomes increasingly untenable as
porn encounters !rst video and then the Internet, moving further and further from the
speci!cally visual and indexical particulars of its cinematic roots. If the celebration of
referentiality is in tension with the digital pixels of the net, it is equally antithetical to the
ideal project of queer porn, which is anything but re"ecting an established, static “real”