Nothing Wrong With Porn, Dammit
It’s really common — especially among people who are still trying to reason with the unfeeling prudish moderation robots of porn-hostile social media — to argue that a certain thing is not porn, but art.
Any time you hear that argument, remember that the speaker is off the bubble and has lost the plot.
Anything can be porn. A watercolor painting of an elbow. It doesn’t matter. ANYTHING.
The important thing is that there’s nothing wrong with porn. Trying to shame social media owners into changing the nipple-shy behavior of their bots only proves that you’ve been seduced into division. “My tasteful photos are erotica, or art, or a lunch menu; it’s your stinky stuff that’s porn.”
If you’re not defending porn with your whole chest, you aren’t in the fight.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=31940
I completely concur that we should defend against the vagaries of ridiculous labelling. I firmly believe that censorship is wrong, and would much prefer content advisory to be advisory, and nuanced. Censorship is a slippery slope full of subjective interpretation and error.
Where I’m going to drop in a peccadillo and disagree is with that really annoying Victorian artifice ‘pornography’. Pornography was coined by the Victorians into english as a way to stigmatise things they thought were unsuitable for the masses (whilst either defacing or stealing said material and putting it in their own collections as erotica). Rather cannot we class all the forms of matter which we find arousing, stimulating or inflaming (romantic or sexual) passion as erotica (so not sport guys). Erotica derives from the concept of passion in ancient Greece. Pornography comes from the french for writing about prostitution, something rather narrower and probably chosen to be carry stigma in the society of 1840s London. Etymologically at least pornography has little to commend it.
I know language evolves, common usage of pornography has moved on to include a wide scope, elbows and all, and we now refer to all things erotic (and much not) as porn, but I much prefer to talk of matters erotic. For one thing it dilutes the mental stigma of the subject for now, and might actually allow a less perjorative discussion on the role of content advisory labelling vs gaming censors or moderators and their attempts to craft impossible rules in a subjective universe.
Besides I know you like a nice bit of linguistics Bacchus.
Finagle I love linguistics, but I refuse to be shackled by them.
One such shackle is the stigma that attaches to the word pornography, or the Americanism “porn” that has largely replaced it.
This post began as a subtoot (think “subtweet”) on Mastodon, where I was responding (without the original tooter ever knowing) to an art photography exhibit announcement, where the usual highbrow bizarrely-framed sterile black-and-whites were introduced with a surfeit of “nudity is not pornographic, this is not porn” disclaimers. My point isn’t so much about how we treat porn as a category. Rather, it’s about the pathetic and ill-advised tactic of pleading “my stuff is erotica, my stuff is art, my stuff is highbrow, my stuff isn’t porn, don’t you dare filter me, shadow-ban me, or put me on search invisibility” to the pornocalypse censor-bots and their owners. Arguing with prudes about whether they should exclude you from their treehouse is a weakling tactic and a mug’s game. Better to burn down the treehouse! And the first step to doing that is to say “So what if it is porn? Your hostility to porn is the problem!” And then go build your own treehouse, which is where Mastodon is beginning to shine.
100% agree, I hate the artificial distinctions people erect whether that’s to evade stigma, ease their conscience or blag that they are any different to the rest of us.
My proposal is to eliminate the stigma by ditching the phrase. It was introduced specifically to create stigma, and it has served that purpose it’s whole life. Rather than try to rehabilitate it, to a use it never had, let’s burn it.
Just a random thought in passing, I’ve never seen ‘porn’ or ‘pornography’ used in t&cs that I can remember, and I’m the kind of person that does read them at least cursorily to see what legal nonsenses are being thrown about. It’s always ‘adult content’ which is never defined.
Once we have rid of a word that is purely about stigma and an early example of newspeak, maybe we can start to talk about how that very gorgeous elbow arouses and titillates you, but does nothing for me, and that’s ok.
I would love everyone to be open, and say ‘this turns me on, a bit, or a lot, so I rated it x/5 for eroticism’, or ‘I created this and it is intended to arouse a bit, or a lot’. But also, this film has deliberate shocking scenes, so it’s rated 5/5 for nastiness. For example Un Chien Andalou. An ‘art’ film collaborated on by Dali which is the most stomach churning thing I wish I’d never seen. Another film may have spiders or snakes, so hey, let’s label that too. Classification not censorship, information not prohibition, honesty not prurience.
Different approach, but the same goal.
You might call Helmut Newton nudes art (but probably not based on the above), I see them as frequently violent, sometimes disturbing, occasionally non binary erotica. Both are right, but we can make an informed decision to see them or not based on the latter, not the former. No one stopped me looking at Newton pictures as a child, or page 3 topless models, but heaven forfend I saw inside a copy of Playboy which was less ‘pornographic’ than Newton. All at an age where some of my class mates were legally enjoying sex with live cooperative young ladies.
Glad Mastodon is shaping up for you.
The thing that worries me long term for Mastodon is that it will be unable to cope with legislative attacks on social media platforms. It may also come under specific attack, because it’s model not only allows you to build a safe treehouse, but also anyone who finds the commercial offerings to no longer be safe.
At present there is ample evidence Meta at least turns a blind eye to bad actors, and that may well poison Mastodon’s well. I have personal experience of seeing Meta ignore police trying to identify a groomer. It may be a tactic of Meta et al to continue to allow bad actors specifically because they can afford the legal costs and legislative landscape changes better than any competitor. I know Mastodon is open source, and distributed hosting and it is my hope that prospers and avoids badly written legislation. However I fear it’s increasingly likely Meta et al will use their nascent AI to craft proposals which naive legislators may accept aimed publicly at bad actors, but privately targeting Mastodon and the like. Maybe a touch paranoid, but good luck building a secure and safe home there. Although I don’t use social media, I wish you well.
Mastodon has a long way to go but against state-level threat actors, even the biggies are vulnerable; massive lobbying budgets help but are no panacea. We’re still waiting for genuine technical resilience against legislative attack, and if we ever get it, we probably aren’t going to like all the bad actors who get on that bus with us. Distributed systems with a large fanbase are collectively pretty resilient en grosse, even when individual servers are vulnerable. Legal threat took down “the sex worker instance” (Switter) but sex workers still thrive on Mastodon. An instance may go down in a hostile jurisdiction but others can easily sprout in other jurisdictions. National firewalls might take the USA or Great Britain out of the fun for awhile, but in the long run it’s hard to imagine an internet that functions well enough to serve national economic interests while locked down so tight that people can’t swap bad jokes about furries on a server rack in Turkey.
I’m not all that enamored of Mastodon, in truth. But it *works* as social media, it functions on a human scale without big-tech budgets, and the critical mass of technically adept users and operators is such that I think it likely will survive most threats short of a concerted state-level effort of international scope to stamp it out.