“In a Sea of Dicks”: The pleasures and frictions of sexual social media

Why do sexual platforms matter? In this lecture, Prof Susanna Paasonen will dive into the significance of digital sexual sociability and examines where such interactions can occur on social media that is simultaneously awash with sexual content and hostile toward it.

The felt value of sexual social media

Alaston Suomi (est. 2007) is a Finnish-language online image gallery for naked self-expression with some 145,000 registered users. It is used as a platform for amateur porn, an avenue for hooking up, and a site for socialising where different sexual subcultures coexist without necessarily overlapping. Building on a three-year ethnographic research project exploring three local platforms operating in Sweden, Estonia, and Finland (Sundén 2026), and zooming in on Alaston Suomi in particular, this talk explores the felt value of sexual social media in a context where nudity and sexual communication are increasingly vigilantly ousted from mainstream social media platforms and the forms of sociability that they allow for. What is special to the sociability of Alaston Suomi? What contributes to is social glue? And what rubs its users the wrong way?

Bio

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, networked media and affect, she is the author of e.g., Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, MITP 2019), and Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter (with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, MITP 2026). Susanna serves on the editorial boards of e.g. the journals New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Sexualities, Porn Studies, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.