What is pornography

a question I will never stop asking

I fear I will repeat myself a lot. That is a familial trait. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, my mother all are storytellers. The way that family stories get told is through a kind of call and response - everyone has a different ending for the same story, and all the versions have been told again and again. When a story begins, it’s only a matter of time before it will be interrupted. It’s only a matter of time before it will cascade into yelling and laughter - no matter how dark - the language of no language. But everyone will understand it. Though everyone may understand it differently.

What I wanted to say this morning is that pornography is everything all at once. It is a collection of stories, and the stories cascade into wordlessness. It is a language of the physical, and it pushes at the edges of what is possible to say. What is possible because we have no language for it and what is possible because we have little political education to understand it in all its meanings. The history of pornography - that is, the history of a category of content that is called the “pornographic” - is intertwined with the history of the Enlightenment and the history of democracy. As Lynn Hunt writes:

In early modern Europe, that is, between 1500 and 1800, pornography was most often a vehicle for using the shock of sex to criticize religious and political authorities. Pornography nevertheless slowly emerged as a distinct category in the centuries between the Renaissance and the French Revolution thanks, in part, to the spread of print culture itself. Pornography developed out of the messy, two-way, push and pull between the intention of authors, artists and engravers to test the boundaries of the “decent” and the aim of the ecclesiastical and secular police to regulate it.¹

So the way we have of thinking of pornography as a distinct category is quite modern, despite the fact that we often think of pornography as ancient - imagine a time when there was no category, and the explicit was simply a part of communication - dating back to antiquity, if you consider the many, many, many examples of explicit art that decorate ceramics, mosaics, and frescoes. And perhaps to prehistory, if you consider the archeological representations of nude or semi-nude figures with exaggerated reproductive organs (e.g. the Venus of Willendorf). Scholars seem to agree that these prehistoric artworks served some kind of totemic or sacred function, but does that exclude them from what we can define as the “pornographic?” Can the pornographic not also be sacred?

In common usage, “pornography” seems to have as many meanings as there are people who speak the word. It can encompass everything one considers obscene (even including books on gender and sexuality meant to be educational), it can mean anything that is viewed to evoke a feeling of desire (even when that thing has nothing to do with sex - consider the “food porn” of early instagram), it can be circumscribed to include only the commercial and crass, or it can be described by its use-purpose (typically understood to be masturbation). That there are subcultures devoted to each of these specific meanings only confuses the meanings further.

So what does it mean to take pornography seriously? A problem with the project of taking pornography seriously is that the “serious” has been, in common verbiage, largely carved out of the “pornographic.” What I mean is, too often we find ourselves defending a certain piece of art or writing by claiming that it is too serious a work to be “pornographic.” But what if we were to let go of that lexical defense? (A defense deeply influenced, I think, by the legal definition of “obscenity” - a word that is too often interchanged with “pornography,” but which has a very distinct legal meaning, and excludes any work with “serious political, literary, scientific, or artistic value”). What if we were to say that the serious can be pornographic and the pornographic can be deeply serious?

I’m not arguing that we need to claim all pornography be understood as having serious meaning - in fact, I think to do so would be to too closely draw the circle around the many purposes of pornography. Pornography should be allowed to be both serious and wildly unserious. It should be allowed to be laughable and lust-driven and political in distinct cases or occasionally - perhaps in its most successful forms - all at once.

Am I repeating myself here? Maybe. But I’m likely to do it again and again. Because these questions strike me as deeply important and worth going through more than once. And perhaps in the end, they circulate into no-language. Perhaps they end the way the stories of my childhood did - with a dozen, contested resolutions or with wild bouts of laughter, rueful or joyous. Perhaps with both.

1. Lynn Avery Hunt, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (1993) p. 10