From this thread with a bad hijack perpetuated by myself (I couldn’t help it!), I got to thinking:
What if there was ‘porn’ centered around non-sexual activities, and in fact there was no sex involved at all? What would it be like? In that thread, we were talking about food 'porn. What else could there be, and how would you describe it? Some examples: Sports, outdoor activities (like hiking, boating, fishing), reading(!), talking on the phone, etc. etc.
Some golfing friends of mine refer to The Masters (or any big tournament, but mainly The Masters) as “golf porno”. Getting big money to play on the impossibly beautiful courses that a real person wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting a tee-time at.
Most travel shows are “vacation porn”. Traveling to exotic, off-the-beaten path locations, with no concern for time or budget and getting all-access treatment along the way.
Man, could that last sentence be a double entendre or what? 
The word you are looking for is “advertising”.
Well, for quality control people, there could be “quality control porn” where you film someone checking calculations or documentation and everything is done perfectly woth no mistakes!!!
Or, you could have *Ghanima’s SDMB porn, which would involve at least five or ten active threads involving Dune in each forum.
OK, now I feel like a big old geek.
The irony of my error-laden previous post is not lost on me…:o :smack: 
I have long referred to plant catalogues and gardening magazines as “garden porn” – no weeds, everything perfect, lush, inviting…
And, oh yeah baby, I devour it when it arrives in my mailbox.
twickster, you do know what flowers are, right? Hot throbbing stamens and all that.
Someone once dragged me to a martial arts movie and that was my reaction within minutes — this isn’t a movie, this is “fight porn”.
I’m into a lot of video game porn, including superplay movies like the infamous “SMB3 in 11 minutes”. I know how they’re made, and I don’t care. Worrying about whether or not emulator savestates and slowdown are used in a superplay movie is like worrying about fake tits and artificial lube in a porno. Either you like it or you don’t, why sweat the details?
In a similar vein are fighting game combo demos. They’re usually done on practice mode with tweaked settings, but they look cool.
I’ve also heard of a couple of videos of games being beaten with unusual handicaps. Like beating Soul Calibur on the highest difficulty with a Dreamcast fishing rod controller, or finishing Resident Evil with only a handgun… walking backwards the whole time.
My favorites, though, have to be the glitch videos. Players doing things the programmers did not expect them to, and the sometimes hilarious results. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 and Mortal Kombat II have some of the neatest glitches.
Then there’s “Business Porn.” You’ve seen it on those color glossy mags hanging out so innocently at the drugstore or even the grocery store … magazines like “Forbes” and “Business Week,” full of images of faultlessly tailored titans industry posing in their all glass and chrome offices, gazing at inset flatscreen computer monitors reeling off streams of data that would make a millionaire of any mere mortal who could even glimpse it.
Yes, it’s business porn, with edgy entrepreneurs speculating about chicken futures in Abu Dhabi, or hotshot computer geeks hot on the trail of the latest killer app, the incredibly brilliant computer code that will spawn so many businesses that it’ll make the dotcom bubble look like a recession.
Mmmm, business porn, where all the women working in the offices look like models and wear demure office slacks but the slacks are so tight that if the woman had a dime in the slacks’ back pocket (if they had back pockets) you could make out not just FDR’s head, but the little letters under it that tell where the dime was minted. And these women have the kind of butts that fill tight slacks … perfectly. What’s more, they’re 120 wpm typists who can speak and read three languages and hold MBAs from Harvard and they work for minimum wage, and they’re glad of it because they’re HONORED, HONORED to work for such brilliant men.
Meanwhile the guy reading the mag is wearing a suit so old that the elbows have become threadbare, and he’s had his creative staff (aka his wife) sew leather patches over it because he can’t afford a new suit right now and besides, it might make him look professorial. But he doesn’t look professorial, he looks dumb, because he’s a cheap-ass overnight printer in a town full of overnight printers. And his part in the glorious free market economy is to fight desperately with the cheap-ass printer down the street for jobs so small that profits will buy him maybe a can of beans if he’s LUCKY.
And that’s the appeal of business porn. It keeps those guys fighting over those cans of beans, and that’s what keeps the free market moving, baby.
Every catalogue of audio and/or recording gear is “tech porn.” No people are reqiured in the photos, not even a glossy finish. Just looking at all the knobs and sliders on the new digital consoles, or the layout and functions of the newest club mixers, or the turntables that have SPDIF outputs and can change the pitch but not the tempo, or the tempo but not the pitch while playing a record, or the newest line of large-diaphragm microphones is enough to make any tech-head drool. Your Playboy centerfold? Yeah, she’s cute. But look at this optical compressor! Look on this page, the new modeling software that will reproduce a Hammond B-3 with dual Leslies! All the Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzers and Hohner pianos and every setting they ever had plus thousands more, for a couple hundred bucks! Rrrrrowrrrrr!!!
The girls I lived with my senior year of college called wedding magazines porn for girls. They loved to read it for the “articles,” and they tried to hide it from men.
I’m sure the “Fetish” section of Wired fits in here somewhere…
shoe shopping porn
mmmm you devote all the time in the world to it, examine every detail, lovingly caress every part of every one; every vamp, every tongue, every toe, every heel…and then…when you think you just can’t stand it any longer…
yes Yes YES! Oh sweet jesus!
it’s the perfect pair of open-toed three-inch heels and…oh my god, they fit and they are…god, I love it…on sale!
I have to take a nap now.
Political porno: CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, C-SPAN (which is, of course, soft, loving, gaze-in-your-eyes chick porn)
The O’Reilly Factor would be some really freaky tied-to-a-spit S&M porn.
Crossfire would be political bukkake porn.
Tomorrow night should be something like golden-shower orgy porn: There’s just so much stuff going on, and a lot of the stuff you really want to watch, but there’s just so much piss flying around it’s hard to keep your finger off the fast-forward button.
And of course there’s a-plenty of political smut mags.
It’s all just so wonderfully filthy!
Warren Miller makes “Ski Porn”
Why do you think they’re called “Techno Thrillers”?
And I’ve heard “Gorenography” applied to some graphically violent action movies. (Most of it’s soft core Gorenography, if that, if you ask me. It’s the wimpy prudes who cringe at the sight of a blood squib who made up the term.)
As an add-on to travel porn, there is food porn. Not cooking shows, but more as an ad-on to travel shows, where the host travels all over the world tasting exotic cuisines, for free!
Car & bikes shows on tv are vehicle porn. I’m especially jealous of Jeremy Clarkson - he’s a pompous prick, but he does have the best job in the world.
:smack: I just read my post! Make that: Then there’s food porn…