He Fixes The Cable?

Apart from awful, what is pornography?

Porn is like art, in that we tend to think we know it when we see it. A literal translation of the Greek comes out as “writing about” (graphein) “prostitutes” (porni) but in the modern world porn is a more amorphous concept. I’d call it monetised desire, but that’s capitalism.

OK let’s do the easy bit, the awful. Mainstream internet porn for guys. The porn even porn thinks is grim. Those wishing to humanise this dehumanising form often reach for the idea that once upon a time porn was better, it had production values, it had craft. Craft is always noble. This idea underpins PT Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” and creeps into Lucy Kirkwood and Dawn Shadforth’s series “Adult Material”. Both lament the passing of this artisanal porn made by people who cared about making it. Not like our internet porn which glorifies stereotypes of gender and race in the most pernicious way. This is the patriarchy literally laid bare. This isn’t the micro-aggression, the nuance, the subtext - this is the aggression, this is the text of rape culture. An industry too full of stories of performers pressured, tricked or genuinely forced into acts they didn’t fully consent to, the worst of porn glorifies the actual rape of rape culture.

Not all porn is this brutal worst thing. But attempting to dress it back up in the layers discarded to reach this nadir creates a sense of ethical Zenoism where the arrow of your disgust seems unable to move at all. Porn where the performers fully and happily consent still tends to perpetuate toxic myths that create real danger for women in society. The stars of pre-internet artisanal porn may have had to learn dialogue but no one is fooled. Debbie didn’t Do Dallas to express an existential truth about the nature of team sports.

Here we get into the trouble of what porn is. Much like Maude Lebowski, my rule of thumb is that if I’m being told a story and along the way people get naked then that’s still a story but if the story is just an excuse to get people naked then it’s something else. But what then is Tinto Brass’ “Salon Kitty” which could claim to use its many non-simulated sex acts to confront the viewer with a truth about Nazi culture? Does a story transform porn into art? Unconvinced? What about “The Night Porter”? Is it just inverse sexism that makes it feel like Brass, a man, aimed at titillation whilst female director Liliana Cavani had her mind on higher things? Besides if raising the heartbeat is an acceptable ambition for a director, what’s wrong with increasing blood flows to other areas of audience’s bodies? Is it simply that the sadomasochistic Nazi sex in Cavani’s film is simulated? If so, is porn’s problem not a lack of craft or of story but an abundance of biology?

We’ve lost sight of something. Is the awfulness of mainstream internet porn the harm it records, the harmful message it embodies or just its sheer graphic reality? Cinema’s problem with the male gaze is well documented, as is its problem with performer consent. At least porn is watched by an audience mostly some part aware that they are engaging with a form that feeds a desire for the taboo. Whatever else porn is, it isn’t ok. By contrast film and television’s fetishisation of female bodies and behaviours is a normalisation of the same harmful message of patriarchy. The difference between porn culture and pop culture is just how graphic, how real, how honest porn is.

Or is the problem precisely that porn is not honest? Not really real at all. Real sex doesn’t look like porn sex or like cinematic sex. Both present fantasies but here the audience’s tacit understanding of what they are watching, or rather, that they are watching, plays in cinema’s favour. The audience in a movie know (or pretend to know) that they are witness to a fiction. Is the problem that in porn the actual biological reality of the sex act being filmed hides the fiction it expresses? In the same way that the actual reality of edited tv news footage hides the fiction of how those real events are being presented.

In this understanding porn is a bad documentary. A scripted reality where the performers create a real event that really happened but only  did so because they were asked to. Is that what pornography actually is? Not the truth edited to be a story like a documentary. Not stories told to evoke a truth like drama. But an event of reality that nevertheless is less than true. A Schrödinger’s event that both actually happens and actually doesn’t at the same time.

In this definition Tom Cruise doing his own stunts is a form of pornography. He really did jump out of that plane in the 6th Mission Impossible film. That actually happened and the reality of it actually happening is truly compelling, far more so than the story of “Mission: Impossible - Fallout” which is just an excuse to get Tom Cruise to jump out of a plane 25,000 feet in the air. Does watching Cruise perform his own stunts turn you on? Maybe. Does it give you a thrill whether you want it to or not? Yeah, sure. Dude just jumped out of a plane. Like, woah.

If sex porn is biology dishonestly divorced from emotion, then constructed reality tv like “The Only Way Is Essex” or “Made In Chelsea” is the emotion of relationships dishonestly stripped of true human intimacy. Like fuck focused gynaecological porn, feelings porn like “Love Island” reinforces racial and gender stereotypes. It also causes real harm to those performing it for you, up to and including death by suicide. All this it does from the public space of prime time TV.

Perhaps the Greeks were right after all. The internet of influencers hasn’t redefined pornography, only the ways in which a person can be porni.

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I would not have written this had I not binged the horrific but fascinating podcast Unreal: A Critical History Of Reality TV by Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale which is probably kinder to the genre than I am being here. If, indeed, you think being compared to porn is unkind.

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Reading back I realise that in my focus on showing how the worst aspects of porn culture are just our culture, I omitted the best of porn. To be clear, of all the many justified attacks that can be aimed pornography and the industry that creates it, the simple fact of people fucking on camera is not a thing I think anyone need lose sleep over. Should you wish to find examples of porn made by consenting adults in order to express a non-stereotypical form of filthy joy then you should look here and absolutely look here where Vex Ashley creates art that is defiantly not art and definitely is porn. (obviously both these links are NSFW. Unless you work somewhere where people enjoy watching others fuck).