Autoeroticism as Sexual Commons: Erotic Media Meets Two Public Health Crises

This talk examines how public health crises have reframed masturbation as a socially responsible and culturally significant practice, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS pandemic as historical points of comparison. In 2020, harm reduction guidelines advising solo masturbation or “virtual sex” reframed a practice historically considered deviant and asocial as a legitimate erotic and civic expression, aligning it with digital technologies and domestic space in ways that echo Playboy’s mid-century domestication of autoeroticism. Situating this within broader histories of sexual citizenship, erotic embodiment, and the porous boundaries of public and private space, the paper turns to a case study from the AIDS era: the late-career work of gay adult film star and director Al Parker. His productions, namely Turbo Charge (1988), the first commercially released pornographic film promoting safer sex, reframed solo and non-penetrative acts as central erotic practices and intervened in the visual grammar of adult video through their eroticization of safer sex, strategic depictions of masturbation and fetishism, and a decentering of penetration. By bringing these histories into dialogue, the talk will show how Parker’s work offers a significant historical precedent for understanding masturbation as both a sexual practice and a media nexus of enduring public interest in a time of crisis.

Nikola Stepić is an FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. His research links queer film history and studies of the cinematic city, and focuses on the masturbator as a media figure that has demarcated the boundaries between public and private spheres. Nikola received his PhD in Humanities from Concordia University, where he was also named a Concordia Public Scholar. His research on the history of gay pornography in Quebec was awarded the Gerald Pratley Award from the Film Studies Association of Canada for its contribution to the understanding of Canadian and Québec cinema, while his paper on the filmic mediations of San Francisco in hardcore films by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. received the inaugural Early Career Scholar Best Paper Award by the SCMS Adult Film History Special Interest Group. Nikola has published and presented widely on his interests in sexuality studies, porn studies, and queer cinema and material culture. His work can be read in Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, The European Journal of American Studies, Porn Studies and other journals.