Blonde Girl Bent Over Desk Writing About Porn (not clickbait)
If I were to buy a six-foot canvas and paint a true-to-life nude portrait of myself you would call it art. If I posted it on my socials you’d praise my skillful brush strokes, the attention to the detail of the goosebumps on my nipples and the shadows that define the curves of my body. That painting could probably get me a fellowship somewhere (please I need money).
Now imagine if I were to post the picture that inspired such a portrait. My phone would buzz to the point of exhaustion with calls and texts from traumatized grandmas and friends asking me if I’ve lost my mind. My employment prospects would disappear before they were ever born. An array of menopause-stricken mothers would feed a Facebook thread about that one girl who got into an Ivy League just to pose in front of a mirror with her pumpum out. What a shame. The girls of today, they’re up to no good, they’d lament, praying that their six-year-old daughters grow to have better judgment. You’d call that many things: irresponsible, obscene, inappropriate. But you certainly would not call it art.
It’s too easy to dismiss pornographic material as a lesser medium. It’s almost instinctual. We think of porn’s existence as entirely transactional: born to appease horniness, dead as soon as you’ve climaxed. Nobody keeps watching porn after they finish. No, no—afterwards, you sit in your bed, sheets wrinkled, toes curling, panties hanging from your ankles, and stare at the wall and repent for how disgusting you are. Porn is just a reminder of our animalistic desire, our primal state that we wish we could’ve left in some earlier evolutionary stage. We’re supposed to be deep.
But is it really fair to say that that’s all porn is—a transaction? When directors make porn, their objective is, admittedly, to turn you on. To do so, they must make specific artistic choices to construct a fantasy. Crafting porn is about moving an audience by connecting with their desire; a desire which, by the way, is more true to life than emotions which have been over-intellectualized and de-sexualized. You don’t exist as a human with envy, sadness, and joy without sex—emotions are motivated by sex at their roots. Brushing off porn as “non-art” in its display of the (allegedly) most depraved parts of the human life psyche ignores that its raw humanity is exactly why it is art. Everything is about sex, and porn directors know it. Deal with it.
I understand the instinct to push back on this statement: art is supposed to hold meaning. But so often we think only pretentious things can hold meaning, basing our definition of art in its intellectualist (and thus necessarily classist and exclusionary) history. So, to make my case rock-hard (to give it a boner, one might say), here’s an established theorist: 20th-century visual artist Marcel Duchamp. He explores the definition of art through his piece, Fountain, which is, without doubt, a urinal. Duchamp believes that art becomes art through the act of artistic choice. The legitimacy of art is often related to the process of its craft, the physical labour behind it. Duchamp says all you have to do is simply decree with intention. If that is so, we can say that craft is part of the process, but not an integral one, unless otherwise decided by the artist. The reason why a urinal has earned its place at the Tate galleries in London is the same reason why we cannot categorically exclude porn from being considered a form of artistic expression. To say that porn cannot be art due to its lack of a “legitimate” artistic process is pointless because the process doesn’t make the artwork, and, while deeply appreciated by audiences, is not necessary.
The process of creating a pornographic fantasy is not fundamentally different from other kinds of filmmaking: a porn director considers how positions create meaning, sometimes looping in narratives to create a more complex story world, and, most importantly, reflects on the specific desires of the target audience, tapping into how the human brain works to simulate it properly. These are all qualities that can be directly transposed onto how other artists go about their artistic processes in more legitimately deemed artistic fields. The fact that it’s motivated by a desire to arouse makes it no less meaningful: sexual desire is a psychological phenomenon, even as it manifests physically. The nerve endings on your penis trace back all the way to your brain. Those two things cannot be separated.
It’s also incredibly hypocritical to decree that porn cannot be art when sex is woven into much of the less-explicit media that we consume today and openly acknowledge as art, when both porn and said media use sex to sell with the same strategy and intention. Putting Sydney Sweeney in cleavage-exposing shirts for no “artistic” reason at all, or Sabrina Carpenter’s “have you ever tried . . . this one?” are only two examples of how sex is continually brought onto the table by artists in provocative ways to draw audiences. What differentiates porn, frankly, is that porn doesn’t try to distinguish itself as anything more than just selling sex. It’s honest, while, on the other hand, casting hot celebrities in TV shows is a subtle way to get you hard while not screaming “you’re a pig for watching this” in your face. Porn does not comply with the notion that sex is taboo, while art that implements sexual arousal discreetly can make money off of this system while reinforcing the shame associated with sex-related matters by not holding the viewer accountable for enjoying it.
It is imperative to understand that while porn can be art, this by no means implies that porn only has positive effects on those who consume it. That said, the problem is not about porn itself: it’s about the ways in which human’s new media consumption habits, combined with the dominance of large companies that produce art with the interest of making a profit, have fundamentally ruined the human experience of appreciating art in non-overly indulgent ways.
Today there’s a porn video for every itching consumer. As Oprah would say: you get a porno, and you get a porno! While representation is beautiful, this has happened because, as you may have guessed, sex sells more and is thus exploited more than anything else in the world. The artistic choice to make porn today is being put into motion not for the purpose of speaking to its viewer, but with the intention of making money by ensuring that all possible erotic territory is covered, pumping out an endless stream of unclothed bodies, going through every position, partner, and kink imaginable. Immediate access to any media we want to consume has made the twenty-first century mind rabid and impatient, and now the markets, including the sex market, act in consequence of this machine of insatiable demand. It is this pattern of consumption that makes porn so problematic: it’s a lot more dangerous to consume porn irresponsibly than it is to consume movies in such a way. That’s why nobody calls film geeks “addicts,” because the consequences of their behavior are less severe. Until someone watches too many mafia movies and convinces themselves they’re Rambo and shoots up their local grocery stores. So even then, is porn that much worse than the fact that we now have ten Fast and Furious movies? In the same way that the consumption of porn has become transactional, so has a lot of our consumption of media in other forms.
So yes, porn is art, and anyone who says it’s not is in denial of the fact that they like sex too. The shame attached to porn that de-legitimizes it as an art form is a fruit of how scared we are to face the human being in its most vulnerable state: naked. Sex and nudity have stayed taboo because of this, and humans are perpetually afraid of being reduced to their naked bodies by external judgment. That’s what happens with porn too—that instinctual reaction to the naked body, the conviction that it is born and it dies in its purely sexual form, is a product of fear.
Wake up world: we all like to have sex and there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
