Porn is Not: About Bodies

In two previous posts, we critically considered two claims about the use of pornography that are almost taken for granted. The first dealt with the claim that porn was sexual, while the second dealt with a related idea that porn is primarily driven by the desire for an erotic experience.

In this post, we will look at the idea that porn use is about bodies. Given that the basis for the porn use is the depiction of bodies engaged in sexual activity, it would seem commonsense to claim that bodies form the material substratum of the act of using pornography, and that in porn providers are providing something real and tangible with the aid of that body.

Be that as it may, what we must also be aware of is that the main point of interface between the user on the one hand and the pornography on the other is not a body as such. Rather, it is the depiction of a body, an image of a body that is mediated through electronic means of distribution.

The reason why I am drawing attention to images is because pornography does not make sense outside of the context of a culture that is built around images. We tend to think of our culture as materialistic, but it is more accurate to say that our culture is essentially a never ending tsunami of images of things, whether through ads, logos, or, if we really are honest with ourselves, our games, our laptops and yes, our phones. Just to give a sense of how exposed a person is to images, digital marketing experts say that the average American is exposed to anything from 4000 to 10000 ads alone per day. This does not include the images you see in emails, YouTube videos, the 2.5 hours of social media the average person sees per day and the countless more hours of streaming that the average person sees. We have become so awash in these images that we actually organise our lives around them. We plan holidays, hold elections, and arrange schedules and our wardrobes around particular kinds of images, images of insta-worthy travel shots, politics and celebrities, the list can go on. 

We may not pay too much attention of the mediating effects of images because we usually tend to think that an image is still anchored in the real world. An image of a cat has a relation to a real life cat, an image of a building to a building and so on. In actual fact, the power of images is much subtler.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard summed up the kind of power images have with the word “hyperreal”. Baudrillard argued that in postmodern culture, images do not necessarily refer to reality. Rather, images have become a reality unto themselves, they need not have any referent to a reality outside of themselves (this was covered in greater detail in a recent book chapter). When we get to this state, Baudrillard says that these images are hyperreal. They have become more real than reality itself. Under the conditions of “hyperreality”, Baudrillard says, it is not so much that the image is a reflection of reality, rather, reality is regarded as something that is second best relative to the image. A cat in a video probably is a little boring unless you put a filter on it, for example. Under conditions of reality, images have become the grounds of reality, reality is then regarded as inadequate, and then reality is made to conform to the image.

If you want a concrete example where reality conforms to an image, think of body image, where a person's sense of what their body should be like is determined by images which are usually artificially modified using airbrushing techniques. Not only that, images have become such a grounds for reality that we are seeing a boom in people making use of plastic surgery to align their own bodies to these airbrushed counterparts, and guess what, there is increasing evidence that the images seen in pornography are now becoming the standard by which a person’s body is judged. In hyperreality the body, instead of being the epitome of reality, has actually become a plaything of a reality determined by images. 

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