You don’t need me to tell you that porn is everywhere and more easily accessible than ever before. Pulling out your phone to watch hardcore sex scenes has become as simple and easy as checking the weather or sending an email. On so-called tube sites (Pornhub being the most prominent among them) that aggregate videos uploaded by users, you can find all kinds of porn and genres, and browse every conceivable category of perversion and taste. (Last year, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold a Texas law requiring age verification on sites like Pornhub; 24 other states have passed similar laws.) But pornography, or at least provocative erotic content, isn’t just relegated to tube sites. Instagram and TikTok are full of softcore content, some of which serves as advertisements for porn performers and models to promote their accounts on OnlyFans. OnlyFans is a platform where users pay a subscription fee to view explicit and sometimes personalized content. As more of our lives become focused on screens, the inescapable sexuality of pornography—the ease of consuming it, the ever-present possibility of being aroused by it—has become perhaps the least-theorized area of social upheaval in modern life.
Most mainstream pornography, especially the kind filed in tube sites’ “most popular” categories, the category of porn that author Lillian Fishman called “front page,” follows a simple premise: people appear to be coerced into sex they desperately want but are not supposed to want. Employees seducing bosses, teachers seducing students, stepchildren seducing stepparents, stepparents seducing each other, friends sleeping with each other’s spouses—basically, any taboo other than biological incest or violent nonconsent is well represented in popular pornography. Many of these videos have millions of views and depict sex as potentially dangerous and illegal, both greedy and morally precarious. We wouldn’t do that, right? I couldn’t! But when the characters in these videos actually decide to do it, the do-it-or-don’t tension is released and the thrill exudes, embodied in great consensual enthusiasm. It is a central tenet and a never-ending cliché of mainstream pornography that in the face of extreme pleasure, one abandons all restraint and critical faculties, even if the life-destroying consequences that lie beyond that pleasure. Fishman writes: “To view these farcical coercive settings as inherently non-consensual or degrading is to deliberately misread this deep and ubiquitous desire that pervades every puritanical, sex-negative society: the desire to have what you want while denying it.”
Critics of pornography have often cited the objectification and degradation of women (both the performers themselves and the characters they portray) as the reason for the form’s irredeemable immorality. Scholar Amanda Corston argues that “pornography is a form of externalized sexism that provides a form of mediated domination and exploitation that bypasses normal mechanisms of personal moral evaluation,” echoing influential feminist theorist Catherine MacKinnon’s belief that pornography sexualizes misogyny and promotes gender inequality. However, philosopher Nancy Bauer argues that “there is no place for the concept of objectification in the mise-en-scène of pornography.” In Bauer’s “pornotopia,” “the conflict between reason and sexual desire is eliminated, and using another person only as a means to fulfill one’s desires is the ultimate way to respect that person’s humanity, and humanity in general.” Other “pro-sex” discussions tend to center porn as a form of labor rather than humiliating entertainment, and that porn is both empowering and paradigm-changing for workers, a gateway to a freer, more inclusive, and less oppressive society. Such beliefs make OnlyFans seem like a reputable hub for sex workers, but the app, like many gig economy platforms, has devised a model that favors the few and silos the many, exacerbating “long-standing inequalities in the world of sex work,” according to author Benjamin Weil.
The porn taboo is not limited to the producers of pornographic content. They always extend to the viewers who decide to watch it. But in the hyper-digital age, the problem of watching too much porn is increasingly intertwined with the problem of too much screen time. In Daniel Collitz’s viral essay, harpers“The Goon Squad” and he reports on the “gooning” community, a group of people who watch porn almost full-time and masturbate, prolonging their climax for hours and sometimes days at a time. Many Gooners identify as “pornosexual.” This means that their sexual orientation is solely towards the consumption of pornography. Crucially, Kolitz’s ethnography does not depict Gooners as a strange niche group operating on the fringes of society. Their plight represents the plight of most people living in a technology-optimized world. Gooners can be our family members, co-workers, neighbors and friends. Is it really that hard to imagine someone watching porn for hours every day? Isn’t that why people consume social media anyway, as an infinitely replayable alternative to the real world?
