Porn Reviews: a Plan

Hey so I crowd-sourced an opinion the other day¹ and it seems like there’s some marginal audience for a review/reading of terrible pornography. As an adult person, I consume a great deal of pornography willingly or otherwise and a great deal of it is of varying quality, so I felt like it’d be interesting to try and dialogue² with that pornography in some small way.

Some ground rules about how this is going to work:

1. I am capricious. I’m not going to do a rigid review of a specific overall genre of pornography, unless I feel like it. I’m open to suggestions and submissions, but I’m doing this for fun! On my own time! The pornography won’t always be terrible. Perhaps it will just be rare and interesting.

2. Pornography can be and frequently is some of the more thoroughly offensive and demeaning constructs of art. A large part of “terrible pornography” here is going to be discussing some of the rather awful stereotypes and situations depicted in pornography. As such I will be putting trigger warnings before the jump and I pre-emptively apologize for the general horribleness of humanity.

3. That being said, I’m not in the business of judging people who consume whatever pornography. It’s a waste of time. We are all terrible in our own unique ways and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. I will happily judge the deficiencies of the authors of terrible pornography, but I’ll try to do in an expansive way that isn’t just petty name-calling. It’ll be cool, I promise.

The goal of this side project is to have an outlet for me to express my feelings about the pornography I encounter without having to rely on anonymity or whatever to have ultimately meaningless conversations with random people over the internet. The less personally motivated goal is to educate you, dear public, on the wide vagaries of human sexual expression. Frequently discussions of “freaky” pornography look sort of like this:

And that’s a paradigm I want to break. Middle stick dude should be totally able to talk about the hardcore BDSM humiliation pornography he consumes and not be afraid or ashamed or terrified to do so, even with his vanilla friends. Diverse sexual tastes are not mental illnesses and should not be social stigmata.

I want to close this introduction with a short definition of what pornography is. The law has had a lot of problems with this³ but I think we can use a pretty short and serviceable definition. Pornography is any material designed in some way to cause arousal. This is a fairly broad definition, and undoubtedly covers a great deal of advertising material and things people would consider softcore or simply window dressing sexuality. It also covers certain marginal parts of larger works whose themes might not be explicitly arousal, but feature some form of erotic material in the middle of it. What it does not cover is material that certain people find erotic, but was not designed with that audience in mind. This can get a bit fuzzy because you have to assume authorial intent and generally divine people’s feelings, but I think for a lot of things it can be clear. Diaper fetishism, for example. Diapers themselves are not pornographic, but attaching them to (usually) an adult human can be pornographic with other markers of pornography attached (nudity, titillating looks, exaggerated sexual features) but can also simply be comedic by not having those markers attached, yet still sexually appeal to a certain subset of people. So perhaps the specific intent is determined by the presence or absence of erotic markers.

This combined with society’s aggressive sexualization and objectification of the female body has created the problems in legalistic society. Do we consider all titillating images to be pornography? This suddenly includes every photograph of a woman, since the expected standard of sexuality is that men will be attracted to that photo and capable of being aroused by it. So instead of dealing with the broader implications of the fucked up headspace popular sexuality is in, we develop contextual markers to indicate when an image is designed to be used as pornography and when it’s not, and then we back those contextual markers with the force of legalism as a hopeless and futile attempt to prevent eroticism moving into or blending with the mundane. A definition using intent here is good though, since among other things I want to talk about those pornographic markers.  

I should have the first review up within the week.

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1 You should totally also get in the habit of using internet buzz-words. Saying them in casual contexts makes them sound ridiculous and destroys their business jargon power. Words are magic, by the way.

2 Seriously it’s fun.

3 Read about obscenity laws! It’s really interesting. Generally the way legalism interacts with sexuality is interesting.