Pornification
Recently on WMST-L, the Women’s Studies discussion list, someone posted a call for papers about porn culture. The call was clearly anti-porn and the posting provoked a brief but rapid pro-/anti-porn debate before the moderator shut it down for being inappropriate to the mission of the list. Those old issues from the feminist sex wars still prickle at us feminists and I’m predictably on the fence about porn. I content myself to remember the title of the book, Pleasure and Danger, because porn is both those things, a crucial point about sex that we should always remember.
But one thing that does bother me is the pornification of consumer culture. I mean this in a different way than the typical use of the term as a comment on the how advertising borrows heavily from porn’s tropes and porn itself has infiltrated every aspect of popular culture. I’m referring instead to how everything has become “this porn” and “that porn.”
I recently read an article filmmaker Nancy Meyers that called her highly stylized and carefully designed sets “architecture porn.” It struck me that we’ve been seeing this linguistic construction a lot in pop culture. There’s food porn, travel porn, horror porn.. you get the picture.
On the one hand, it’s an interesting use of the word. It names our visually-oriented hyper-consumption for what it is. Indeed, we’ve pornified our lives through media, reducing experience to captured images, living vicariously, removed from the real thing. The analogy works. And the imagery does often poach from porn’s visual tropes to represent whatever its subject is. Everything is mediated today. (Of course it always was, but that’s another discussion.)
On the other hand, reducing architecture, food, and travel imagery to porn is entirely bothersome. This flattening, hollowing out of “porn” simply suggests how commonplace the objectification of women is. Pornography is no different from travel pictures in an airplane magazine or a spread in Architectural Digest. It’s similar to the way Millenials casually use the word “rape” to signify a screwing over: “That test raped me.” I have a hard time hearing people toss those phrases about when they are steeped so heavily in sexual politics, the ongoing battles to end violence against women, and the hard-won gains for women through the women’s movement.
Yes, pleasure and danger, a lesson none of us should forget.
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