WHAT IS PORN?

This is a response to an essay in Aeon called “Pornocopia,” written by Maria Konnikova.

This is an art doll made by Nita Collins

What IS porn? Most folks would assume a very limited stereotype: a male slob watching a pretty teen he would have to pay to get access to. We define it in terms of physical objects or specific language rather than dynamics, which are too hard to render into legal exhibits. Porn is psychological, different for each person. What turns on one person is indifferent to another.

This post will try to broaden that. As the limits of what can be known about are pushed back, like water going out of a bathtub, in recent years a lot of stuff has become publicly exposed. Some of it is hard to sort.

All human behavior is just a big messy mass that we then try to define into categories so we can separate and name them. But categories as dynamic as sex cannot really be captured. We might do better to concentrate on the nucleus of each “named” thing and ignore the boundaries. Maybe sexual displacement is a good example: if the episode is close to the cultural stereotype — say, “Playboy” — that’s one thing. If the circumstances are bizarre, unprecedented, like a particularly ingenious bit of sci-fi, that’s different. I’ve never forgotten a riff on Medusa, pictured as an interplanetary sex worker. Instead of snakes, her “hair” was worms that wrapped up her customer in monster K-Y jelly to enable electrochemical stimulation, putting him into ecstasy, but then turning up the stimulation until it killed him.

by Kathryn Weese

First category division: That which is only imaginary, like writing, photos, art work Vs. that which is physical, like lap dances, or performances behind glass, or a proscenium onstage. Plus, acts that only EMT’s and cops know about. Testimony I’ve heard from them include penises getting stuck in vacuum cleaner hoses or bathtub faucets, or objects getting stuck in orifices. Or relating to animals as though they were humans. One guy was obsessed by giving fellatio to a small horse. This is not porn, but sense-displacement, paraphilia like sexual stimulation from a glove or shoe.

The physical kind of displacement from routinely acceptable kinds of sex is generally not considered porn, but rather some other category like masturbation or sodomy or addiction. Even shopping, if we’re being real. The most troublesome displacement is that which does damage of some kind. Bodies must stay within the limits of homeostasis. Using physical risks that could burst a gut or break an eardrum, or adding chemical danger like drugs or psychological danger is quite possible when operating at extremes. Esp. when children are the object. But we’re talking about porn watching, not doing, using the mirror capacities of the brain. 

So the next division is merely watching erotic behavior. The consideration here is what it does to the larger culture, like maybe encouraging child abuse. I would include both the latency child who may not understand what’s happening and the adolescent who has confused sex with love, so is sexting. 

Now we’re talking CSI porn, which substitutes righteous rage for sexual stimulation. Our culture WANTS this confusion because it is so commodifiable. In a sense, porn is advertising and advertising is porn. If we eliminated porn, industries would go broke. Not just explicit films, writing, sex work, but also the economy of political favors, privilege markers, blackmail, and people having to face some pretty ugly internal dynamics. I’m not saying that these dynamics come from porn but that they can often lead to porn as well as bad behavior.

It’s fashionable to speak of high luxury that most people have no access to as “porn.” “Food porn,” “automobile porn,” and my fav: “house porn.” This is acknowledgment of the status of the porn as “high end.” But status doesn’t have to be a marker for eroticism.

http://aeon.co/video/culture/eleanor-ambos-interiors-how-to-build-an-empire-playing-house/

Eleanor Ambos is a person more like me than most of the people turning out torrents of print about their trivial lives struggling with jobs, fashion trends, friendship issues, and the consequences of sleeping around. She doesn’t write. She is a sensualist who works with space and furnishings and she is appreciated by photographers looking for evocative settings. Ambos is not a writer or artist herself in the sense of creating something — she is directly connected to her objects. That the young (male) observers consider her crazy is labeling her as though she were a pornographer, because she’s not like their own sub-cultures. Crazy is always relative.

To me, this is also a useful distinction when dealing with the observation of things the culture wants fenced and obscured because people want to watch it too much. I think of a man who bred horses too near a highway, which caused many accidents because people wanted to see what was happening. (Horse sexual behavior is like a dance.) The law made him build a high modesty fence.

Nudity — just plain exposure — is suppressed by law, which keeps us from seeing the variousness of human bodies. Many resort to National Geographic, but the fact of only seeing black people with no clothes creates strange conviction patterns. Sex among the most primitive peoples can be pretty matter of fact. “Black is sexy” plays into the forbiddenness, the guilt, and therefore the porniness of white Euro culture. The link with slavery remains, so the highest value on physical characteristics still accrues for a blonde, beautiful, self-possessed person: male, female, or child. Ask a Nazi.

Speaking of which, this link is a very disturbing case that is not porn except that it arouses very strong feelings. It is a real life case, extreme “playing doctor.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/this-doctor-wtf#.ivBYExYLD   If he hadn’t been messing around with genitals, he might not have been recognized as an outlier.

The point of playing doctor is intimate, unsupervised access to bodies for the purpose of healing. In order to keep people trustingly going to doctors, they must be portrayed as benign, ethically balanced, conservative people. Like any group, many of them are not. No more than ministers or lawyers or congressmen. Or mothers. Perhaps I’ll wrote a sci-fi story in which the high status and privileged access people are then obliged to provide sexual access to themselves for all their clients. In a masochistic culture like ours, it might become real pretty easily: consider four-inch pointy-toe shoes that are so painful and dangerous that women only pretend to wear them, keeping slippers under their desks. They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t signal power, which is why female cops on TV wear high heels to crime scenes.

Violence entwined with sex takes us to the psychological and neurological set-ups of the individual. The Great Rule of neurology is “what fires together wires together.” Every experience changes the brain by adding, deleting or conjoining neurons. This means that if porn is based on adrenaline, risk and mirrored suffering, it will appeal to a differently experienced consumer. If porn is based on the oxytocin loop, nurturing and kissing, it will attract quite a different sort. People who have grown up in a depriving, punishing, confining sort of emotional atmosphere will be vulnerable to the same things expressed metaphorically in art or sex.

Our technical capacities have deep consequences and I’m not just talking about robot dolls that can gyrate and talk dirty. The fad for vanity plastic surgery is a measure of just how pornographic our ordinary assumptions can be, esp. in relatively young girls trying to be attractive. Consider the pull of websites featuring facial plastic surgery gone wrong, esp. people we know, like celebrities. They are grotesque, compelling and shuddery in a mirror kind of way.

Maybe the case of the doctor is most disturbing because he was imposing helplessness, unconsciousness, and inability to respond — that is, his arousal was based on the impossibility of theirs, like a date-drug rapist. Much less could they consent, not just because of being knocked out, but because they were down the prestige ladder where social powerlessness prevented them from ratting out the doc. Anyway, as Bob Scriver used to say, “If what you do is outrageous enough, no one will stop you because they won’t believe it.” And, “People will do anything they can until someone stops them.” Ask a Nazi.

The best way to avoid destructive porn is to develop full humanity in people, but that’s the first thing that gets cut in our education systems, the last thing to be funded by the government. It’s interesting that the most prudish politicians are so often in trouble over sexual matters. “You know nothing, John Snow.” Our pornographic yearning is for power and specialness — never admitted or even necessarily conscious, but suppressed and displaced.