The Pornification of Everything

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 If the “porn” in food porn, nature porn, or space porn signifies an aesthetic of excess, an excessive invitation to gratify, then what does such a usage say about our collective attitude about porn? I will argue that such a usage suggests that “porn” has come to stand in for that which exceeds a boundary, for what spills over into the too much. In other words, “porn” is invoked as a signifier that merely signals when sexually explicit art becomes too explicit. Indeed, porn’s association with exceeding or transgressing boundaries is well established. “Transgression”, as Hester has argued, is one of the key attributes associated with pornography that helps to explain the logic of porn suffix categories like medical porn, misery porn, and war porn (Hester 15). In fact, she claims, rhetorically positioning porn as “transgressive” was a goal unwittingly shared by both pro-sex and anti-porn feminists during the “feminist sex wars” of the 1970s (Hester 21-34). But I want to suggest that by drawing on the logic of excess in their invocation of porn, categories like food porn and nature porn point to such excess as the defining essence of porn. “Porn”, such categories seem to suggest, is nothing but a label applied to the aesthetic feeling that some boundary – of intensity, of stimulation, of propriety, of morality, of good taste – has been crossed. While traditionally pornography is defined as the “graphic depiction of sexually explicit acts made available for public consumption on a media platform”, especially when “their intention is understood to be primarily for the sexual pleasure of the audience member” (Sullivan and McKee 4), such a definition paves over the challenge of identifying exactly what makes a depiction “graphic”, “sexually explicit”, and, most important for distinguishing porn from erotic art (Levinson), intended “for … sexual pleasure” (Andrews 459–460). In other words, what are the criteria for these identifying qualities? As many scholars have suggested, and as Justice Stewart’s infamous remarks have only reinforced, there is no consensus on how to distinguish pornography from erotic art (Andrews 457–465). What’s remarkable about the porn suffix in categories like food porn and nature porn is that its primary semantic function – to merely indicate the excess or transgression of a boundary – playfully acknowledges this troubling condition. One simply cannot know where the boundary is located, for the difference between food porn and not-food porn, like the difference between porn and not-porn, is felt rather than defined or measured. This is the case because labelling an image as porn, like labelling an image as “food porn” or “nature porn”, is fundamentally an aesthetic judgment. In Kantian aesthetic theory, aesthetic judgments, like judging a painting beautiful, are distinct from determinative judgments, like identifying a four-legged animal as a cat. Aesthetic judgments are not objective descriptions of the object judged but accounts of one’s feeling toward the judged object. Part of the aim of Kant’s Critique of Judgment is to understand how beauty can be purely subjective – that is, devoid of any criteria for determining it – and yet can feel as if it objectively inheres in a beautiful object (Pluhar xxiv). While judging an object pornographic, unlike judging an object beautiful, is not a purely aesthetic judgment (for it includes some necessary criteria, e.g. the presence of sexual content), such a judgment is nevertheless aesthetic in nature because it requires a certain aesthetic sensitivity to the particularities of the object judged. When Theodor Gracyk argues that judging a film as pornographic requires an attention not to what the film depicts but the film’s “attitude” toward those depictions (Gracyk 106), for example, he is describing the aesthetic nature of such a judgment, for such an attitude cannot be measured with a set of criteria but assessed through a holistic aesthetic encounter with the entire work. As an aesthetic judgment, then, the word “pornographic” functions much like the words “graceful, delicate, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, and garish”, terms that, as aesthetic philosopher Frank Sibley explains, require a certain aesthetic sensitivity to be understood or applied, “an ability to notice or discern things” (Sibley 423, italics in original). While we may think of such words, which Sibley calls “aesthetic concepts”, as ordinary adjectives, they in fact only masquerade as adjectives like “round” or “square”, empirical terms of which there are an agreed-upon set of necessary and sufficient criteria. Upon reflection, though, as Sibley argues, “there are no non-aesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying” such terms (Sibley 424). In Sianne Ngai’s words, such terms, much like “cute, “zany”, and “interesting”, are “essentially ‘means by which one judges under cover of describing’” (Ngai 40). Though describing an image as “pornographic” has much higher stakes than describing it as cute, zany, dainty, or delicate, it operates in much the same way. To describe an image as “pornographic” is to smuggle in subjective judgment – specifically, a judgment about the feeling of some kind of excess, a feeling of too much – under the cover of objective description. But in the popular imagination, and in ordinary usage of the term “porn”, rarely is this slipperiness acknowledged – that is, until recently. By invoking porn’s status as an aesthetic concept indicative of excess, categories like food porn and nature porn newly acknowledge the conceptual slipperiness of porn itself. But if food porn and nature porn, like porn itself, are so conceptually slippery, so constituted by aesthetic feeling, how do they maintain consistency as categories? In the absence of definable criteria, such categories – like all aesthetic concepts – are maintained largely by a community of perceivers who agree and disagree about particular judgments. As many scholars have suggested, the stability and consistency of aesthetic concepts like genres are not upheld by necessary and sufficient criteria, but by communication and intersubjective verification within a community (see Malone; Fowler; Lena and Peterson). In this regard, it is significant that the proliferation of categories like food porn and nature porn is essentially an outgrowth of image-sharing platforms on social media, where community formation often sustains the activity of aesthetic exchange. In other words, to upload an image of a cheeseburger to the food porn subreddit or to hashtag such an image on Instagram (#foodporn) is not only a means of sorting one’s social media content through categorisation; it also constitutes the inherently social activity of category-formation. Such uploads, hashtags, likes, upvotes, and comments function as aesthetic judgments that invite others to agree or disagree, thereby maintaining (and also continually reshaping) the boundaries of a category through social exchange. Such social exchange is indicative of what Hannah Arendt has called the fundamental “other-directedness … of judgment and taste” (Arendt 68), a point she draws from Kant’s claim that part of the very nature of beauty is the desire to share our experience of it with others (Kant 159–162). This social exchange is the means by which aesthetic concepts like food porn and nature porn are formed and maintained, for the participants in this exchange may not be able to define food porn or nature porn but they know it when they see it. In this way, the fundamental indeterminacy of these frivolous “porn” categories is a playful reminder that porn itself is an aesthetic concept, a category whose practical use is maintained solely by a continuing history of aesthetic judgments. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that a particular way we use the word “porn” today can tell us something about our conceptual understanding of porn itself. Specifically, I’ve suggested that the usage of the word “porn” in categories like food porn and nature porn acknowledges and reflects upon porn’s status as an aesthetic concept and its intimate relation to the aesthetic faculty. A cursory glance at such a phenomenon might suggest that, more than anything, this particular usage of the porn suffix says more about our own self-flagellating or shameful attitude toward media overconsumption than it does about porn. Indeed, as some scholars have suggested, the word “porn” in these contexts may seem to function as a signifier of the moral depravity of pleasure-seeking media consumption. For Hester, the porn suffix within food porn and travel porn implies our submission “to a consumerist spectacle” (188); for Robert Myers, the porn suffix “reflects our era of excess, a pornocopia based on visual glut” (31); and for Jan Grue, the suffix signifies an “uncritical aesthetic appreciation” (841). On such a view, the porn suffix in food porn and nature porn is consistent with a societal tendency to exploit “the condemnatory potential of the associations with pornography” (Smith 104), a practice most evident in terms like trauma porn and poverty porn. But if we merely consider the playful valence of terms like food porn or nature porn – and the playful and positive tone of the image-sharing platforms through which the terms have proliferated – the sense of an excessively gratifying or “uncritical” consumption invoked by the word “porn” does not need to imply guilt or shame. Instead, as I have tried to suggest, food porn and nature porn use “porn” as a signifier of the pursuit of visual pleasure for its own sake. Even more than an abandonment of the “critical” faculties, the word “porn” indicates a gratification so excessive that it disables every faculty but the aesthetic faculty. 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