UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In my paper “BeautifulAgony. com and the Representation of Pleasure,” I examine a website launched in 2004 known as Beautiful Agony: Facettes de la Petite Mort in order to explicate the ways in which orgasm and pleasure are conceived and represented. Beautiful Agony is a subscription-based website featuring downloadable video submissions of both women and men experiencing orgasms. The videos are framed from the shoulders up and contain no nudity; the videos convey sexual pleasure entirely through facial expressions and sound. The creators of the site define it as “hardcore without nudity.”