In a society of incessant digital consumption, everyone has to produce content and consume it. We strive to show ourselves as sexy as possible: our looks, achievements and thoughts. Together we create a pornographic reality or pornoreality, a perfect picture for consumption. But it is devoid of life. We discuss how mediatized pornography kills irony, sincerity, and “live” sex.
The Deadly Indifference of Fashion.
We are all necroerotomaniacs and even necropornomaniacs today. We are aroused only by dead matter: fashion in all its manifestations and images on the screen. Dead means “safe.”
We are complete hypocrites and cannot tolerate direct talk about misfortune, especially in the public sphere. Sickness, death, and generally everything “unpleasant and hard” (except in cases of force majeure) are universally banished from our lives.
So, Facebook will quietly hide your “negative” posts, and Instagram will make you a shadow ban so as not to spoil the positive mood of users (you don’t even have to complain, the system itself will detect the violator of the benign mood and gently expel him from the feeds). But death flourishes where we were not expecting it. It triumphs where we would never have thought it could triumph. In addition to disasters, accidents, wars and epidemics, its triumph is unfolding before our eyes – in fashion.
And, of course, in the realm of the sexual, which, when transferred to the screens, surpasses itself and becomes super-sexual, supra-sexual, totally sexual. Sexuality becomes frozen, icy porn that has nothing to do with living matter.
Fashion in all senses of the word (fashion, la mode) plays an enormous role in modern life. This icy substance radiates cold fascination and provokes a dual desire: on the one hand, to be like everyone else and enjoy the feeling of belonging to the world of consumption, on the other hand, to be different, to “stand out” by possessing exclusive models.
Fashion is always inanimate materials: they die in the process of their emergence, undergoing all kinds of manipulation and purification, emaciation, in order to finally become stiff under the cold lenses of cameras and camcorders. It is because of their “indifference” that these fashionable matters are so irresistible. The same can be said of “fashion in general”: fashion in politics, fashion in sports, fashion for certain relationships, fashion for appearance – everywhere the same rigor mortis and icy ecstasy of consumption, artificial (co)communication, and deadly indifference.
Instead of sex, we have sexual practices
Today, pornography has replaced sex for us. In pornography, emotions have disappeared from sex itself; all the living has disappeared, even the human being himself: instead of a person, a thing in human guise has appeared, and mockery and mockery of this thing.
Pornography excites viewers only with the humiliation of the human being reduced to the status of a thing; and the desire to turn this thing into a slave, that is, an ideal thing, triumphs.
Sex has disappeared from the real world with its spontaneity, but society-particularly the sex industry and the mass media- pretends that this has not happened by turning it into “sexual practices. It would be more correct to call them pornographic practices, since we get our information about them mostly from porn.
Passed through the prism of screens, sex ceases to be alive: the image is too sexual to be alive, hypersexual. And this hyper-reality kills reality. We are witnessing the extermination of sexuality by screen sex – this dead pornography of the real.
Who can be interested in just sex today? You need either a fetish or some particularly arousing practice that involves you being active in it and having contact with some group or community that shares your interests.
For example, you go to a yoga class where you practice some activity with like-minded people on a particular philosophical system. Other times you go to a sexual practice and engage in sexual activity there: for example, swapping partners in a swing club or practicing sex with strangers in a park.
Or you mimic sexual activity, such as blowjob courses or deep cunnilingus on all kinds of “simulators”-that is, without the actual genitals involved-that gives it a grotesquely vulgar connotation to what’s going on.
What could be more vulgar than your mouth working on a “simulator,” and under the gaze of others? After successfully passing the exams at the end of these courses, you can consider yourself a certified expert in one sexual practice or another. There is nothing exceptional, scandalous or ironic about these exercises and practices; they are legitimate (or semi-legitimate in the case of sex in the park) and nothing more.
You can be a champion in all seriousness in both the organized blowjob courses you pay for and the “spontaneous” orgies at the swing club or in the park. A monstrous and wicked irony! Or, conversely, the lack thereof? It’s like riding a car, bicycle or some other vehicle, any other exercise on a simulator or simulator. There is no sex in it anymore.
Instead of free sex, it’s porn sports.
But modern sex practices are like jogging. Have you ever seen an ironic jogger? No, he runs to satisfy an almost narcotic addiction to a certain speed, rhythm, the rubbing of tight running clothes against your body, it even feels like a ritual… In today’s world it is very sexy. It is your participation in society, marking your presence in it, movement for the sake of movement. It’s a mesmerizing run to nowhere.
Cinema and partly cassette porn in the beginning carried the banner of the liberation of desire, meant “the play of bodies and personalities” and “the free circulation of sex”, using the techniques and expressive means of “big cinema”. It was an era of liberation, at the same time playing on taboo.
With the advent of online porn, almost everyone has the opportunity to be part of this dull online orgy, if not among the creators and actors, then at least among the audience. And it is not so much about the current availability of porn as it is about the medium: the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan correctly observed. With the new medium and the new conditions for the dissemination of porn, the “game of bodies and personalities” and the “free circulation of sex” have come to an end. Porn also, despite all attempts, did not become “big cinema.
In online porn and in the modern world in general, sexuality has finally dissolved into pornography. Sex in the mirror of porn has become a kind of sport with its record-breakers and champions, a field for bizarre experiments and a job for which you get paid.
No one remembers that sex and porn used to be fun, carefree, and even ironic (!). A powerful porn industry has emerged, with its porno stars and superstars, in which it has become a mark of prestige to take a “worthy place. It’s about time we included porn in one of the Olympics’ competitions. Or start your own porn Olympics.
Today, there is no more freedom, naivety, irony and joy in sex and in its “reflection” – porn (the distorted mirror of sexuality). Instead, there is a cold body of “sexual-medical practices” with their indifferent cruelty and subtle violence.
And as a consequence of this, the total penetration of the pornographic into our daily lives.
Media as pornography: competitiveness and transparency
The modern world is saturated with the logic of forced participation. It dictates a new moral imperative: if you have something to show, show it and make money from it. Or pay and join in! Pay and play.
It is clear that outside of this wonderful new world remain all those who cannot or do not want to afford any exclusivity, be it an actual clothing brand or car model, or at least an annual porn subscription. And also those who have nothing to show, nothing to present to others, nothing that people are willing to pay for. Not having anything to show is the worst punishment of today’s pornographic world.
If not your body, at least your brain should be sexy, should excite you. Everything should work and be useful! Ideally, everything should be sexy at all. Because it’s cool.
Today’s global world is as full of waste and garbage as ever, including human waste. And it’s not just about overpopulation and ecology. Waste includes everyone who does not meet the criteria of social success, age, external data and involvement in the process of relentless digestion – that is, consumption, be it Big Data, buying clothes from environmentally friendly and “ethical” brands, “right thinking” or attitudes toward migrants.
But the most important principle is transparency. You must always be present, you must be seen and evaluated, you must constantly present yourself to the world. In what form, you decide, but being visible is an imperative.
Today’s man is irradiated by the media, undressed, indecently exposed to the public, like a naked mannequin in a store window, because everyone he meets is also potentially a media, an attitude, a set of rules and… a screen. The principle of transparency is revealed in all its power. What is this but a pornographic reality?
I once visited a strange contemporary art exhibition in Amsterdam’s Old Church (Oude Kerk), in the heart of the Red Light District. In this eerily empty space, beneath solemn medieval vaults, were on display completely naked mannequins, some sort of “bald singers” from an Ionesco play. There were many of them, their silent detachment completely taking over the former temple, which had become a site for art experiments. I was embarrassed, so I left as quickly as possible. Not because I was offended by anything. A kind of wicked pornographic yearning hung over those ancient vaults, and the “bald singers” seemed to grin unkindly. I began to think that it was not them, but that I was naked and on display for all to see.
That same evening I stumbled across a video clip on the Internet that had been popular in the 1980s: it combined the indifferent shamelessness of the mannequin I had recently seen with cold pop porn: fashion crossed with Californian aerobics – and it was not sexy at all.
Death as Pornography
Postmodernity with its ironic smirk – albeit not (always) sincere, but in many ways salutary – has been replaced by the sudden super-relevant cruelty and violence that reign in any modern “porn film”. It’s hard to call it porn anymore: no emotion, no play, no irony, just entropy and transparency of bodies, a corpus of sexual practices and a near-pathological invasion of the human body – the harsher and deeper the better.
The viewer today is used to a lot of things, and it is increasingly difficult to surprise him. And they still want to be surprised. This is how sex gets on the slippery slope of conventional “snuff porn,” that is, of being shown in the context of “real” murders, as in Philippe Granriere’s Nights of Defiance, or the no less murderous drug-like ecstasy as in Gaspar Noé’s Ecstasy.
If we take a closer look at contemporary pornographic videos and pornographic films, we see that the desire for domination and slaying seeps in everywhere. Every sex act depicted today is either fetishistic (which is also the death of sex and often overt aggression) or overtly carnivorous, murderous. The reproductive organs, from organs that give, albeit with reservations, joy and pleasure, have finally become organs of punishment.
But here is the problem: many people are no longer surprised by “snuff,” because they have already seen it, one way or another, in the news and in amateur shots from cell phones, in social networks, relentlessly depicting accidental and programmed death.
The taboo no longer exists. What taboo when even death has become pornography? Like the work of a contemporary artist who videotaped her own mother’s slow death, or the anonymous videos of the execution of Saddam Hussein and the massacre of Muammar Gaddafi that have “leaked” into the media.
Terrorism as Pornography
The tapes of the atrocities in Syria opened a new era of porno-terrorism. Terrorism that did not even try to create any legitimate basis for itself, because under the umbrella of a common cause, every gang there did a complete arbitrary act.
Whereas before the terrorists (and even Osama a posteriori) were built into a more or less unified vertical system and tried to justify the appearance of chilling footage of the murder of prisoners and hostages and sabotage, in Syria a new genre of terror appeared to us, senseless and merciless – and very effective in terms of propaganda and fear-mongering.
In fact, the stupefied thugs happily posed and recorded their “exploits” solely for their own enjoyment. This is the pornography of terrorism.
However, the tapes from the American Guantanamo Bay prison turned out to be no less colorful. No one will be surprised by the atrocities in the “third country,” but this is a special case: the United States is the country of reference. It turns out that a special kind of pornographic sadism flourished in the “bastion of democracy”, which for some reason some of its members allowed themselves.
These acts of sadism were carried out so confidently and unquestioningly, as if with the tacit “approval” of the democratic system (which, of course, never existed). But the servants of the law took advantage of the global shock of the system after 9/11 to satisfy their sadistic tendencies under the pretext of just retaliation.
War as pornography
War has already become pornographic. Haven’t you noticed that? First shot: the missile launch, a direct phallic symbol or, rather, the beginning of the act of copulation. And the second shot: the missile hitting the target. You mean orgasm. Discharge. This is how we see war in the mass media. Everything else is details. The victims, the destruction and the refugees are left out of this porno, which the Marquis de Sade’s heroes, obsessed with the total destruction of the world, could only dream of.
Of course, the ecstasy of contemplation of such powerful spectacles evokes in the “right” viewer an equally strong sense of guilt.
The result is abundant crocodile tears about innocent victims, etc. As the English proverb says, if you play you will pay. You have to pay for your pleasures.
The totality of porn.
Pornography has become everything, and everything has become pornography. We are entitled to ask: Is pornography itself alive? The question is ridiculous. Of course it is not! It has disappeared, just as sex itself has disappeared, dissolving into literally everything.
We are pornographic actors in this pornographic world without a stage, in an obscenely naked hyper-reality. And we don’t even need to take off our clothes anymore, we are naked all the time, and we are always ready for contact, for communication, for intercourse with virtuality. We don’t even need to be forced to do this anymore, we are perfectly trained.
It remains for us to continue to get our orgasms artificially, making love to the screen, locking the streams of “passion” on ourselves, looking at ourselves like Narcissus in the watery surface of our all-powerful gadgets equipped with mirrors, those black boxes that record all our thoughts and know everything about us.
We no longer need the Other as a symbol of radical difference, nor the Other in the sense of our neighbor, with whom we are now more willing to share an evening meal than a bed. Our best lovers are no longer others (or even ourselves, which is still somehow understandable and somewhat old-fashioned, though infinitely depressing).
Our best partner is our estranged self, making love to an artificial intelligence. The perfect pornography is to see our own brain in a longitudinal section that copulates with the ramifications of a virtual mind.
Even if we share our ardor with others, if we make love to real people, we are still in an artificial virtual reality. We have become our own artificial companions, our bodies devoid of distance – and at the same time we are very distant from each other. Our contact with others is no longer intimacy, but connection through media.
More and more messages, information, communication, messages, signals – and less and less real communication. We are leaning more and more toward artificial communication, as befits artificial satellites.
Any real action today requires its embodiment in the “reality” of media, in virtual reality. Every action has to be fixed, otherwise it does not exist. Either you are the fixer, or you are the fixable. Either you are the spectator, and you are also involved in the process of exchange.
Everything, including yourself, must appear as it is, utterly illuminated and real. This is the pornography of the real.
P. S.
It is difficult to tear oneself away from a mirror, especially an artificial one. And if this mirror is today’s world, all the more so.