Porn in Popular Culture: Just Like BDSM or Not So Much?

Our class discussion about porn and the possible effects that it could have brought up a point that we did not really develop in class: the pervasiveness of the use of the word "porn" in popular culture. I was intrigued by the point when it was brought up and I think its important to examine how the use of the word porn outside the context of sexually explicit material might function.

When it comes to popular culture on Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook, I feel as though I see the word porn plastered across hashtags and descriptions constantly. Things like #foodporn and #wordporn are used all of the time and it would seem like the word "porn" can be attached to anything that is appealing, whether that be food or words or even a picture of a sunset. Instagram accounts like the one to the right play on sexually explicit words even- "FEMME_FOODIE" rings a bell with "Femme Fatale."

In searching for some visual representations of the use of the word porn within hashtags and in the popular discourse, I came across a very interesting image that gives a definition for porn. The first definition that Merriam-Webster's dictionary gives when you search the word "porn" is "movies, pictures, magazines, etc. that show or describe naked people or sex in a very open and direct way in order to cause sexual excitement."

But, porn takes on a new definition when one actually takes the time to read through the extended definition of the word. The extended definition looks something like this:

This is where it gets interesting: "emphasizing the sensuous or sensational aspects of a nonsexual subject and stimulating a compulsive interest in their audience." This definition is described as 'informal' and makes room for the word to be attached to things that are clearly nonsexual, like food or poetry. This extended definition brought to mind our class discussion about BDSM and how that kind of sexually explicit material is made part of popular culture. Margot Weiss argues in her article "Mainstreaming Kink: The Politics of BDSM Representation in U. S. Popular Media" that popular images of of BDSM promote acceptance of sexual minorities only through acceptance via normalization and understanding via pathologizing (Weiss, 2006, p. 103). Might this kind of understanding of BDSM apply to the use of the word porn in popular culture? When porn is taken outside of the context of sexually explicit and sexually arousing material, I would argue that the word becomes accepted in popular usage through normalization. When the word "porn" is attached to a juicy hamburger or a beautifully written verse of poetry, the word "porn" becomes much more approachable because it becomes inherently desexualized. 

Take the YouTube account TheFoodPornChannel for example. This is what they call the "The FoodPorn Channel Intro" video:

      

This video is a perfect example of how the word porn is taken out of its sexual context and attached to something new that popular culture has latched onto. This video of a guy devouring a massive burger is not sexually appealing- it instead is purely sensationalized. The question then becomes how the popular use and association of this word is working to affect the understanding of porn in a sexual context. If the word porn is commonly associated with food and the like, that might logically lead to a more pathologized understanding of sexually explicit porn. 

Media literacy might come into play here to combat the negative effects of normalizing the use of the word porn. Pinkleton et. al found in their 2012 study "The Role of Media Literacy in Shaping Adolescents' Understanding of and Responses to Sexual Portrayals in Mass Media" that teens who participated in media literacy training better understood that media influence teens' decision making about sex and were more likely to report that sexual depictions in the media are unrealistic and glamorized (p. 460). However, maybe the results that the study found need to be extended to understand how media literacy training might make way for understanding different ways of expressing sexuality. Media literacy, in teaching how sex in popular media is influential, might have the potential to explain how expressions of sexuality like porn in the popular discourse are not necessarily accurate either. Porn has come to have multiple definitions through the intervention of popular culture and I think that those multiple definitions need to be understood to avoid making sexually explicit porn and its use isolated from understanding it as a potentially healthy expression of sexuality and a safe way for adolescents especially to experience sex when they have little experience. 

As the word porn attaches itself to Instagram pictures and Twitter hashtags, it is plausible to understand porn in popular culture as having the same normalizing and pathologizing effect of BDSM in the mainstream. As the word is used outside of its context in sexually explicit material, the word is detached from a form of sexual expression and that sexual expression might eventually become completely unapproachable. If media literacy programs were to address this type of word usage and combat the understanding of porn only as a hashtag, a healthy discussion about the use of porn might result. 

References

Pinkleton, B.E., Austin, E. W., Chen, Y.-C. A. A., & Cohen, M. (2012). The role of media literacy in shaping adolescents' understanding of and responses to sexual portrayals in mass media. Journal of Health Communication, 17(4), 460-476. 

Weiss, M. (2006). Mainstreaming kink: The politics of BDSM representation in U. S. popular media. Journal of Homosexuality, 50(2/3), 103-132.