There has been a subtle but strange shift in the way we talk about porn. From the depths of internet slang, now gradually entering common parlance, “porn” has become a category: We admit to ogling scenery porn, tease each other for getting sucked into food porn, complain about the movie industry for capitalising on disaster porn, and accuse the media of propagating fear porn. 

Somehow “porn” has come to mean something very different from when US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart assured us, “I know it when I see it.” 

This shift follows trends in rhetoric encouraged by text-dominated communication modes. In chat rooms and social media posts, dramatizing the trivial is an acceptable way of getting agreement and attention. The slang “frape” (Facebook rape) exaggerates a prank — modifying an online profile without permission — into an act of violation. Online rhetoric inflates words traditionally reserved for the most traumatic human experiences, with the corresponding loss in value. 

The word “porn” has degraded in precision

After the fashion of internet slang, the word “porn” has degraded in precision. Just like the much lamented “literally”, it now is used for emphasis, rather than for its technical meaning.

Categorizing any attention-grabbing image as “porn” shifts the focus from the content of the images to the behaviour of the person looking at them. The fixed stare, the slack mouth, and flash of image after image, cuts a comic profile when mixed with a furtive glance over the shoulder and the impulse to shield the screen from prying eyes — when that screen is populated by what should be harmless. 

The activity might not be harmless even if the content of the images is, however. Mass media has made possible the absurd scenario postulated by CS Lewis in his essay on sexual morality in Mere Christianity: 

“You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?”

The Food Channel is not far off from this moral nightmare, nor the commercials played on sports channels. “There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food,” Lewis tells us, but “there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.” 

Lewis claims there is a moral problem with indulgence no matter what is being indulged: the sin lies not only in the content of the images, but in consuming them without moderation and out of proportion to their worth. The shame of excess accounts for the self-derogatory tone of confessions to clicking on “property porn” — or the knowing invitations to come and get some here. 

Completely unobjectionable images of seaside bungalows, glowing sunsets or cheese boards can become problematic if they absorb time and attention that should be dedicated elsewhere. Binge watching Netflix shows isn’t healthy, no matter how pure and uplifting the topic. 

The question remains: do images that titillate the sexual appetite merit an exclusive term?

There may be a moral logic then, behind stretching “porn” to cover all kinds of material, but the question remains: do images that titillate the sexual appetite merit an exclusive term? Is the popular discourse conflating things that should be held distinct?

If we co-opt the term “porn” to describe any images that hold our attention more than they ought, rather than the distinct category of explicit sexual content, we run the risk of undermining efforts to curtail the violent and unhealthy behavior tied to sexual porn addictions. No matter the essential sameness, to apply the term indiscriminately can’t help but trivialize the one in association with the other. Burgers, woodlands, women’s bodies — it all depends how you look at them. 

Even when the term “porn” is adopted purposefully to invoke the strength of its moral censure, the unintended consequence may be normalizing pornographic material as a feature of modern society. Today you can watch fear “porn” in your living room, or take your kids to see disaster “porn” in the theatres. This language makes “porn” an accepted feature of family-friendly content. 

Social stigmas attached to sexual pornography continue to erode

As the slang becomes more mainstream, it shouldn’t surprise us that the social stigmas attached to sexual pornography continue to erode. It would be impossible to isolate the cause and the effect — do we talk this way because we look at porn, or do we look at porn more because we talk this way? In all likelihood, the trends are mutually reinforcing.

Perhaps it is this moral leveling that allows for the adamant insistence on giving sexual pornography free rein in online art communities. One of the few remaining bastions of anti-censorship on the Woke Left maintains that people must be free to indulge their darkest and most twisted sexual fantasies (“kink”) in fiction and art — the more depraved, the more deserving of protection. This position meets with increasing resistance from dedicated safe-spacers, who rightly feel an inherent inconsistency in canceling trace signs of abuse against vulnerable groups in major media while celebrating anonymous depictions of the same. 

So far the two can reach an uneasy truce grounded in trigger warnings, where the old guard excuses all content if properly labeled and the new front of social justice fretfully subsides. 

The implication here is that no content is inherently problematic

The implication here is that no content is inherently problematic but rather depends on outside factors: the perception of harm caused to others, for instance, which cannot always be measured in practical terms but must be determined by community consensus. 

Of course, only certain people qualify as spokesmen for the community. These days, it is not Supreme Court justices who decide what goes, but self-appointed internet denizens who police our language. They are much less concerned with the moral consequences of how we view porn, or the creeping relativism of undermining its objective definition. 

The more we smuggle the word into unrelated contexts, the more difficult it becomes to restrain the real thing.