The Pornification of Everything

Abstract

Introduction In recent years, the word “porn” has been increasingly used as a kind of descriptive suffix in aesthetic categories like “food porn”, “nature porn,” “trauma porn”, and “inspiration porn”. Some scholars in Porn Studies have commented on the phenomenon as a notable expansion of the concept of porn, noting the striking fact that almost none of the porn-suffix categories contain representations of sex. Thus, an obvious puzzle emerges: what is it exactly that makes food porn, nature porn, or trauma porn pornographic? While a number of scholarly publications have examined the sociocultural implications of some of these categories, such as the examinations of food porn within food studies (see Krogager and Leer), of inspiration porn within disability studies (see Grue), and torture porn within film studies (see Lockwood), few have examined the proliferation of such porn-suffix categories as a sociocultural phenomenon in itself (see, for example, Hester; Nguyen and Williams). One notable exception, Helen Hester’s book Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (2014), examines categories like war porn and misery porn, which are primarily used as negative evaluative judgments that insinuate the moral depravity of the aesthetic objects under consideration (not unlike trauma porn, poverty porn, and disaster porn), usually highlighting the ways that human suffering is sensationalized for entertainment. While this kind of category – what I call categories of moral critique – encapsulates a major component of the porn suffix phenomenon, this article will focus on a different side of the phenomenon: categories like food porn, travel porn, architecture porn, and nature porn. Unlike trauma porn and poverty porn, these categories – what I call categories of aesthetic indulgence – do not imply a negative moral judgment upon the aesthetic objects under consideration, but instead refer to a viewer’s indulgence in enticing or attractive images of objects. Such categories proliferate on social media platforms through hashtags (#foodporn, #architectureporn) and subreddits (/r/natureporn). What has come to be known as Reddit’s “SFW Porn Network”, in fact, includes 98 such categories, each devoid of depictions of sexuality or sexual activity – from the fairly self-explanatory “architecture porn” and “space porn” to the more nebulous “human porn” and “things-cut-in-half porn”. Such categories take on a valence qualitatively distinct from categories of moral critique, and thus imply a different social attitude toward porn. It is the aim of this article to examine what the proliferation of such categories reveals about our shifting attitude toward porn, entertainment, and gratification. Central to my investigation will be the examination of the role that aesthetic judgment plays in the formation of these categories and, by extension, porn itself. Within the principles of aesthetic theory, labelling an image, film, or novel as “pornography” is not a value-neutral category attribution – like identifying a four-legged animal as a “cat” – but an aesthetic judgment involving the aesthetic faculties, similar to judging a painting beautiful. In a similar way, labelling an image as “food porn” or “nature porn” is a judgment of the aesthetic qualities of that particular image. By drawing on the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant and Frank Sibley, I show how the casual adoption of “porn” as a metaphor to name these image-sharing communities in fact acknowledges and reflects on the aesthetic foundations of porn itself. Specifically, the rapid emergence of aesthetic categories like food porn and nature porn reflects upon “porn” as a transparently value-laden concept that, like beauty, is devoid of identifiable criteria, a condition best exemplified by Justice Potter Stewart's well-known declaration about obscenity: “I know it when I see it”. Ultimately, I will argue, the porn suffix reveals how “porn” has come to signify the role that mere aesthetic feeling, rather than logic or reason, plays in the creation of some of our most politically charged concepts.  Two Forms of “-Porn” In the introduction, I suggested that there are two primary (but not exclusive) ways in which the porn suffix has been used: categories of moral critique and categories of aesthetic indulgence. Categories of moral critique, such as trauma porn and poverty porn, apply a negative moral judgment to the aesthetic object labelled as such. Investigating similar categories in their book Beyond Criteria, Hester has argued that it is the socially determined associations with pornography – “prurience”, “the real”, “authenticity”, “intensity”, and “transgression” –, not the genre-defining element of sexually explicit representation, that undergirds the pornographic nature of such categories (14-16). But categories of aesthetic indulgence like food porn, travel porn, architecture porn, and nature porn, which do not imply a negative moral judgment upon the aesthetic objects under consideration, invoke a different valence of “porn”. Referring to kinds of images that are especially attractive, such categories draw on a far stranger – and yet even more revealing – metaphorical relation to pornography, one that is not reliant on the familiar moral judgments that pornography is inherently exploitative. To explore what it is that makes travel porn and nature porn pornographic, we need to attend to one of the most recognizable porn suffix categories: food porn. The concept of food porn can be traced back to the 1970s (Cockburn), but its contemporary usage is inextricable from its proliferation on social media (McDonnell 245–249). While food porn generally denotes images of food that are particularly glamorised to maximise the sensuous desirability of the food on display (Krogager and Leer 1; Tooming), in its earliest manifestations the term food porn connoted enticing images of rich foods high in fat and sugar (McBride 38). The category thus drew on a valence of “porn” that implied unhealthy or depraved gratification. While traces of such a meaning still arguably remain within the realm of ordinary usage (Krogager and Leer 7; Nguyen and Williams 147), and while some have suggested that the term food porn carries a valence of dismissiveness toward the aesthetic merit of food porn imagery (Tooming), most recent accounts of food porn indicate that the category has broadened to refer to the aesthetic particularity of the image of food more generally (Tooming; McDonnell; Taylor and Keating) – especially sensuous and textural properties like gooeyness and moistness (Dejmanee 436-437) – rather than a moral stance on the consumption of such food. Food porn thus began partly as a category of moral critique – casting an overt negative judgment on the object represented –, but became primarily a category of aesthetic indulgence – only implying the indulgent degree of a viewer’s visual gratification. It is this latter valence that informs categories like car porn and architecture porn, which, between 2005 and 2010, emerged alongside food porn as image-sharing groups on platforms like Flickr and Tumblr, thus cementing a new metaphorical valence of “porn” that has wildly proliferated both online and in ordinary language. But what, precisely, does the “porn” in such terms imply? On the subreddit pages for food porn, Earth porn, and space porn, where one might expect to find an explanation of the category, users are only given vague descriptions indicating the importance of visual beauty. The description of r/foodporn reads “simple, attractive, and visual” (“r/FoodPorn”); the description of r/Earthporn reads “amazing images of light and landscape” (“r/EarthPorn”); and the description of r/spaceporn reads “SpacePorn is a subreddit devoted to beautiful space images” (“r/SpacePorn”). What unites such categories, though, is not mere visual attractiveness but, as a number of scholars have intuited, a kind of “excess” of such attractiveness (Recuber 29; Dejmanee 429). Consider fig. 1, a highly upvoted photograph of cheeseburgers on the r/foodporn subreddit. The image is not only attractive or enticing, but it is excessive in its enticement, in its invitation to gratification, specifically through the visual amplification of sensuous particularity – the gooeyness of melted cheese and the moistness of the burger, tomato, and onion. Fig. 1: An image from the r/foodporn subreddit. While many have suggested that food porn’s sensuous appeal indicates a more direct emulation of pornography (Dejmanee; Krogager and Leer; McDonnell; Lapina and Leer; Cruz), a relation undergirded by similarities between the sexual and the gustatory appetites and cultural parallels between the objectifications of food and the female body (Dejmanee 433-34; see also Adams), it is only the general notion of visual excess that is shared by the dozens of other categories of aesthetic indulgence. The picturesque and colourful landscapes in r/earthporn (fig. 2), the hyper-detailed and hyper-saturated astrophotography in r/spaceporn (fig. 3), and the ornate and exotic buildings in r/architectureporn (fig. 4) may not conjure an appetitive desire for what is represented, nor do they necessarily emphasise the sensuous materiality of what they depict, but they do trigger an excess of visual stimulation through an abundance of granular detail, saturated colours, and high contrast colour values. Above all, what seems to unify these images is, in Tisha Dejmanee’s words, an “aesthetic of excess” that not only alludes to pornography’s “vivid details to evoke strong reactions in the viewer” (Dejmanee 429), but also implies that the visual gratification I receive from such images is excessive, that it exceeds some kind of boundary of propriety or purpose. Fig. 2: An image from the r/earthporn subreddit. Fig. 3: An image from the r/spaceporn subreddit. Fig. 4: An image from the r/architectureporn subreddit. Porn as Aesthetic Judgment