Pornography, the Everyday and Material Culture

 

Pornography is widely discussed and debated, usually framed as a ‘problem’ in many popular settings and in academia. For example, in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century (2021), her highly acclaimed bestselling book, the philosopher, Amia Srinavasan, argues that ‘porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains. It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli bypassing that part of us which pauses, considers, thinks. Those associations, strengthened through repetition, reinforce and reproduce the social meaning assigned by patriarchy to sexual difference’. Porn, she argues, needs ‘nothing from us - no input, no elaboration…only our enthralled attention, which we are compelled to give, and give willingly (…) the imagination halts and gives way, overtaken by its simulacrum of reality’.

 

In this kind of account, pornography is imagined, in Martin Barker’s words, as ‘not a form, but a force’; abstract, with no particularity. It turns people into things. It is ‘not real’. It replaces real relations with something that is inauthentic, spoiling relationships, disconnecting people from each other and from their own imaginations. Human beings are presented as simply responding to stimulation, devoid of thought or complexity of emotion. Neither does porn appear to exist in any kind of human world; the spectator and their life are left a blank.

 

It is much less common to encounter discussions of porn that focus on its ordinary, material, everyday dimensions or on people’s diverse engagements with it. As Susanna Paasonen and her colleagues note (2015), introducing their study of Finnish people’s memories of pornography, the place of porn in people’s lives is one ‘of the most obvious knowledge gaps in studies of media history’. Work like this, in contrast to the generalizations of writers such as Srinavasan, is concerned with pornography’s relation to the material world and to different forms of culture - media, popular, sexual, with pornography’s various forms and formats, and with an interest in porn as grounded in particular spaces, places and times, part of their connections with other people and part of a relation with the self.

 

Over ten years ago I began work, with Martin Barker and Clarissa Smith, on a project that was to take up many hours - and then years - of our time (for discussions see Barker 2014, Smith, Attwood and Barker 2015a, Smith, Attwood and Barker 2015b, Attwood, Smith and Barker 2017, Attwood, Smith and Barker 2018, Attwood, Smith and Barker 2021). We wanted to find out what would happen if we asked about people’s ordinary everyday engagements with porn, what they accessed and why, where they were and who they were with when they did it, what motivated them, how it connected to their feelings about themselves, their bodies, and about sex. We wanted to know how people found their porn, how they searched for it, what patterns of use there might be, how their relationship with it might change over time. We used an online questionnaire to ask our questions and we received replies from 5490 people. What we gathered is still highly unusual, all these years later, as a collection of ordinary people’s words on the subject of pornography.

 

In our project we adopted the idea of the porn ‘career’ as a way of thinking about how people might first encounter porn, how their relationship with it had developed over time, and how this might have related to the various contexts of their lives. We asked people to use the sentence beginning ‘I first came to porn…’ as a way into this, and to end with a sentence that started ‘Most recently I have…’. Looking at people’s descriptions of their first time with pornography, it’s striking that what our participants counted as porn is very diverse, unlike the monolithic ‘pornography’ that Srinavasan assumes, and even going far beyond the usual range of pornographic sub-genres that academics have written about. For example, participants listed software magazines, publications aimed at teenage girls, tabloid newspaper ‘sexy’ imagery such as the UK’s ‘page 3’ models, lingerie adverts, forbidden books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Portnoy’s Complaint, Japanese graphic novels, self-help books like The Joy of Sex, library books on human sexuality, the work of Nancy Friday, feminist writings about porn, and fantasy novels such as Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rules. There is a world of difference here between the kind of account presented by Srinivasan and the very wide range of sexual materials that become important to individuals in their own everyday lives, and that belong to different cultural fields and with very varied aesthetics and modes of address.

 

The distance travelled between first and most recent encounter can be glimpsed in many participants’ accounts; from a brother’s bootleg vhs copy of New Wave Hookers to later searches for ‘midget porn, group/gangbang scenarios, costume play’, from Playboy where women looked like ‘living art’ to ‘amateur porn that was just raw, low/no production sex’, from smuggled copies of Mayfair at school to ‘photos I took of my lover’. Tastes often change throughout the porn career, though sometimes it is the resonance of a particular kind of content and the continuity it provides that gives it its value - one participant told us that ‘pornographic fanfiction and fanart has continued to be one of my main sources of entertainment and socialization, leading to many lasting friendships’. For this participant, porn is also a focal point for relationships and connections with others, and not just sexual partners.

 

Whether it is shared like this or consumed alone, porn is rooted in the material world. It is encountered in particular places and spaces. Here is a participant describing a range of formats, genres, and aesthetics, and telling us something not only about the content of the porn they have sought out, but the states of sensation and emotion that they desire;