How porn has become the slang term for everything from food to literature to ruin.
I’ve been thinking a lot about masturbation lately. Wait, don’t go! Don’t get the wrong idea; I’ve been a model, PG-13-rated citizen over the past nine days. (And I’m an unwed dude anyway, I’m entitled.) But since writing about Detroit, Michigan, and so-called “ruin porn” last week, a conversation has developed about the definition of pornography and, more specifically, about the proclivity of the professional commentariat to expand that definition on a rhetorical whim.
Defined as “The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings,” the English word “pornography” first appeared in 1842 in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The word was classified under an umbrella of “lower classes of art” along with “rhyparography,” a 1678-vintage word that means “The painting of (or writing about) distasteful or sordid subjects.”
That Smith’s Dictionary chose to separate pornography from rhyparography in 1842 is interesting. In 1841, British inventor and photographer William Henry Fox Talbot developed the calotype, an advancement in photographic technology that made possible the reproduction of multiple copies of a single negative. (The calotype’s predecessor, the dauguerreotype, could only make one copy of a photograph.) Though it may be coincidental that the development of the calotype in 1841 was followed by the coinage of the word “pornography” in 1842, the relationship of mass-production and porn is still significant. Whether or not the calotype actually led to the pornography neologism is unimportant; the invention of the former nonetheless made possible the invention of the latter. It is, after all, lot more difficult to defend the aesthetic integrity of this, a one-off, than it is this, the best-selling adult movie of all time.
So after 164 years of rhyparography, it would seem, it wasn’t enough simply to declare a work of art sordid or distasteful; by the nineteenth century and the publication of Smith’s Dictionary, the intent of the rhyparographer had necessarily come into play. What’s more, “pornography” is derived from the Greek word for prostitution, which adds the tawdry patina of economics to a hitherto purely leisurely pursuit.
It was one thing to portray or chronicle acts of love and other such nonsense; it was quite another to do so with the aims of reproduction and sale to as many people as possible. But the mass-production and economic exploitation of something – erotic or not – don’t make it porn. Moreover, it creates a standard that leads to the definition of all two-dimensional art (and literature) as pornography.
In 1955, the concept of “pornography of violence”- the first nonsexual use of the word – was born. American philosopher Abraham Kaplan declared, “The pornography of violence is more widespread in our culture than all the other categories of obscenity put together.” Kaplan’s use of the word “pornography” – when “problem,” “phenomenon,” or “portrayal,” would have worked – is puzzling. If you return to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of pornography – “the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity…” – it doesn’t even make rhetorical sense.
True, sex and violence are thoroughly intertwined in mind and body, but the two tropes – fucking and fighting – are so elemental to humanity that it would make more sense to use different terms to describe their employment as titillating, non-aesthetic material. Eating and drinking go together, but hunger is a physical sensation and philosophical concept completely distinct from thirst, and we label and define it as such. The conflation of sex and violence into one monolithic urge, though, is an oversimplification ripe for abuse; Kaplan’s precedent allows for anything remotely sexual (or sexy) to be hastily linked to sexuality, and thus to pornography. Hence, “ruin porn,” “ego porn,” and “food porn.”
What’s more, Kaplan, intentionally or not, by definition removes the aesthetic component from something when he describes it as porn. To take food porn as an example, is one expected to display comestibles as aesthetically unappealing as possible to avoid any taint of titillation? The term “food porn” doesn’t just link style to sex, it equates the the two. Is this pornography because it’s beautiful? National Park sex, anyone?
The British media has taken to classifying certain kinds of memoir as “misery porn,” and the personal pleasure one gets from reading – hitherto lauded as a low-tech, cerebral benefit – is now subject to critical (and implicitly criminal) judgment by the chattering class. Across the pond, finding value in a memoirist’s literary treatment of past sexual abuse, for example, makes one a closet pedophile, or at least a pervert. “Pedophiles are down there with the Nazis and Judas as all-time bad folk,” novelist Gerry Feehily told the BBC in 2007, “so these stories are easy on the writer, easy on the reader. Most of us not being pedophiles, we are in a comfort zone with these books, where we feel edified and also morbidly thrilled.” I can only speak for myself, but pedophilia does not put me in a comfort zone and is, in fact, quite the opposite of titillating for me.
But misery porn titles sell in the millions, presumably to people who have access to far more explicit forms of salacious material, like actual porn. Nevertheless, if something is deemed to have been enjoyed too much by too many people (or if it has earned its creator too much money), it runs the risk of falling victim to a critic’s urge to call it porn. (Disclosure: I enjoy MTV’s Jersey Shore – perhaps too much – and I admit to having once described it as “ego porn” in a review).
Ironically, if our culture is indeed engaged in a prurient “race to the bottom,” then it’s in great measure due to critics’ bizarrely priggish appetite to keep raising that “bottom” to higher and higher strata of perceived decency. These days, anything bright, anything provocative, or anything that eschews stripped-down Modernism in favor of something more decorative is called pornography.
If you want to stamp out pornography, then widening the scope of the definition to include non-sexual material is the wrong way to go about it. Pornography can’t be watered down into oblivion. Salacious art isn’t The Phantom Tollbooth’s (a must-read, modern-day Alice by Norton Juster), Subtraction Stew (A consumer grows hungrier with each bite), and inventing more things at which to tsk-tsk doesn’t make real porn go away.
Image source: Flickr