What Is Porn

I/8/18

Just thinking aloud about porn, and pretty tentatively at that. 

I’d love some push back.

I read a criticism of the the series This Is Us, which I watched 1’ of and saw it wasn’t for me, that had the tease, “Poignancy Porn.”

It led me to note that porn has come to have a meaning, and maybe it always did, not necessarily connected to sex, as in violence porn or poignancy porn. 

Which got me to wondering what the core meaning of porn is such that it can apply to such a variety of subjects.

What I’ve understood about porn in relation to sex is that at its core it is about fetishization, or the obsessive focus on sex as such detached from all else. Another version of this way of seeing it is as Wiki has it: “Pornography (often abbreviated porn) is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purpose of sexual arousal.” Which seems similar to “no redeeming value” and “prurient interest only.” 

On this definition, purpose, “for the purpose of,” is a key. But how do we infer purpose? Maybe it’s what the  creator tells us, if we can get that. But what if we can’t? Or what if the work defies the expression of purpose? And what is purpose anyway? Is it motive, the reason why, or is it intent, the intended effect? Mustn’t it be the latter? For the reason why may be simply (say) to earn money. But, again, the work’s effect(s) may defy the intent. So, I think the only real basis for judging effect is the work itself, which once completed doesn’t in the sense of response or critical response belong anymore to the creator. (“Trust the tale, not the teller.”)

On this reasoning I’d slightly modify the Wiki definition to “....the portrayal of sexual subject matter whose only effect is sexual arousal.” Then we can distinguish between such works and works in which sexual arousal is part of something more than itself whether in effect or in meaning. And that more than itself will go to “redeeming value” and beyond “prurient interest only.”

To extract from porn as solely sexual arousal in order to get at the meaning of porn apart from sex, (say) poignancy porn, I’d merge the idea of obsessive focus and the idea of singular and heightened effect. Might that then lead to this as a general definition of porn beyond sexual arousal: any depiction arousing an overly-heightened reaction that doesn’t go beyond itself? Or, maybe functionally, porn is that which intends to arouse a reaction analogous to when the depiction of sex is only for sexual arousal. 

So violence porn can be seen to be the depiction of violence for its own sake and not for anything else. 

And porn in This Is Us as poignancy porn may be more metaphoric than literal, as in suggesting the manipulative arousal of overly heightened emotion.