Try Googling that one.
More precisely, what makes porn, porn?
Most dictionary definitions pin it to sex, but I believe that we have moved beyond that. We talk about gadget porn, disaster porn, even safe box porn in a recent thread!
So what is it that makes someone’s act of watching something pornographic?
When it elicits a specific reaction?
I’m sticking with porn is porn when it is designed to elicit a specific reaction. Just because one gets all hot and bothered watching Alton Brown cook doesn’t mean he’s food porn.
Yeah, when it’s used in those other contexts, it’s intended to describe a reaction of almost creepy excitability.
Certain kinds of people can almost drool and have shaky hands when dealing with their particular geeky interest. Even if that’s not true, that’s the image using ‘porn’ is trying to convey.
From the Miriam-Webster Dictionary:
(Bolding is mine)
It looks to me like intent is the major factor here to me.
I’m really into those horrible torture porn (saw, hostel, etc) movies. I think its anything that is not sugar coated. Its GRAPHIC. No genitals hidden under sheets no pan away when limbs are cut off. the camera is right up in it.
<Tom Lehrer>
To be smut it must be utterly without
redeeming social importance.
</Tom>
So the sex must be primary, and not a side theme.
I know it when I see it.
So send me examples and I’ll let you know.
I like erotica.
You like porn.
He likes smut.
Susan Sontag had a definition for “erotica” vs. “porn”.
She said erotica requires some kind of intellectual engagement in order for there to be any arousal, whereas porn illicits an immediate response (either arousal or revulsion).
A friend of mine, as a philosophy student, on the other hand thought that “porn” was purely a political construction because of the negative/subversive connotation. “Degenerates” like porn, art connoisseurs liked “erotica.”
Meh, I kind of like Sontag’s definition. I’ve seen photos of naked people that have been boring, but I’ve seen orchids photographed by Mapplethorpe that were positively obscene!
ok, so stepping out of sex, when would you say that something is porn?
Returning to sex for a minute, you can jerk off to the Sears catalog, but that doesn’t make it porn. Likewise for a computer catalog, you can be fascinated by it, but I don’t think that is porn.
Many auto magazines, OTOH, I think come pretty close to being pornographic. Sure, some people read the articles, but they are mostly for car fans to look at pretty pictures (and read the stats, even) of unattainable cars.
I think disaster porn is pretty well covered by the police tabloids.
Is there real gadget porn out there? Other types?
I like that one. Perhaps coupled with
I can readily envision entertaining dramas that happened to revolve around martial arts. Seen some (The Karate Kid will do). But I’ve also been dragged off to see what I think of as martial-arts porn. There’s no plot, and there’s no bodily-damage repercussions to being whopped and slammed either; it’s just constant & repetitive depictions of adversarial martial arts combat moves.
Bodybuilder porn. Often assumed to be for gay visual consumption, I don’t think sex has much to do with it, nor is it about techniques or workout routines, but rather muscles for their own sake, freakishly ridiculous amounts of muscle mass photographed in pornographically obsessed repetitive detail.
Fashion, whether women’s hi-end “catwalk” stuff or those creepy little girls’ photo-retouching specialists, where the focus has swerved so completely from depicting the models as they actually are (or clothing as it could actually be worn by any real person in any real setting) and is instead a competitive pursuit of “a certain look” that has become an end in itself, I think constittutes a form of porn, again not sexual per se but singularly obsessed and repetitive in content.
I agree with your two choices and very much so with this last bit. The one thing that strikes me from porn and auto magazines is how many shots of the exact same thing they can have. Interesting.
Ditto for my wife watching clothing catalogs. I can walk by her 20 times in a day and see her watching [what to me look like] the same shorts or shirt in all different colours (without a person inside, most of the time, in case you were wondering).
We might be getting closer to a definition here.
I toyed for a while with the idea of the object being out of reach, but I don’t think this is the case. I still wonder if it might be the variety and quantity that is out of reach. I can buy ANY gadget I see, but I cannot buy ALL of them. Ditto for girls, I have dated porn-worthy girls, but I couldn’t possibly date all of them. Not sure how this would apply to disaster porn, though.
You can jerk off to Motor Mechanic Monthly if that’s what rocks your boat.
Porn is nekkid women, lots of nekkid women 
doing things …yannow 
And, on the other side of that, Nigella Lawson’s material has been called “food porn,” probably correctly. Have you seen the woman lick brownie batter from her finger? :eek:
The key word in every good definition I’ve ever come across for porn is gratuitous, and that covers “torture porn” and it’s ilk as well.
As to Nigella Lawson “food porn,” great big tits don’t hurt, either.
Is she doing it to get brownie batter off her finger, or is she swirling her tongue around her finger and looking sexily at the camera and moaning?
I mean, sometimes licking brownie batter off a finger is just licking brownie batter off a finger.
I’ll take that as a “no” to my question. If you’d seen her, there would be no doubt as to the intent.
Haven’t seen that yet, but I have seen an episode where she sensuously massaged a dry rub into some fortunate chunk of meat, batting her bedroom eyes for the camera, as a Skinemax softporn sax solo swelled tumescently in the background… so yeah, no question of intent.
My wife jokingly professes jealousy when I watch Nigella’s show, but I don’t think she’s entirely joking.
(Further evidence for the non-culinary basis of Nigella’s appeal is that IMO, many of her recipes are laughably pedestrian, if not disgusting… baked potato skins with ketchup? Are you kidding me? Still, I think that roast needs a bit more rubbing…)
I am not sure about “gratuitous”. Care to elaborate? Do you mean that it comes a propos of nothing? That would fall under the intention bit, I would think.
As for brownie batter, focus guys, focus. Please
Have you ever seen a car junky looking at an auto magazine and drooling over the cool cars? He might as well be looking at Hustler. Or a woman with IMS (Imelda Marcos Syndrome) when she walks into a shoe store? She acts like a guy walking into a strip club.
Porn is anything that thrills you at a visceral level. It’s not necessarily of a sexual nature but it elicits the same intense feelings of pleasure that normally are associated with sex. A gadget porn addict gets their rocks off by looking at Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs. The Food Network satisfies the food porn slut.
My friend is into baseball porn. I don’t mean he gets off on watching A-rod. He collects the cards, gets the rosters, plays fantasy baseball. He has to hide his collection from his wife because it became such a sore point with her. You don’t want to watch a game with him because he makes comments like, “Oh god, that catch was fantastic,” or “Will you look at the way he swings!” in the same tone of voice that, if we were watching Shaving Ryan’s Privates, he would have been saying, “Oh god, that three-way was fantastic” or “Will you look at the way she sucks!”
In Chicago, we have a weatherman named Tom Skilling. Whenever he talks about severe weather he gets more and more excited until it looks like he is about to cream his pants. He’s definitely into weather porn, drooling over high pressure systems and Doppler radar.
I think you guys are onto something here with ‘gratuitous’.
For something to qualify as porn, it seems to need to be divorced from any appropriate context (by whatever definiton). For instance, if I’m shopping for a new Bentley coupe (heh), and I’m checking out the catalogue, that’s not carporn. If I don’t even have a driver’s licence, but I still subscribe to Phallic Dream Cars magazine, that’s porn.
Same with depictions of sex - even if a sex scene in an arty movie involves explicit penetration, three-way, and a snowball, it’s not porno because it serves to advance the auteur’s artistic vision (or the story or, you know, something). Even more extreme example - if a bordello uses explicit videos as a catalogue for their customers, I’d say that’s still not porno. The customer checks the videos quickly, and then makes his/her pick, and moves on in. If you take those same videos home purely for viewing pleasure, with no intention of entertaining the ladies depicted in them, the videos are then being used as pornography.
As for food porn - isn’t there some futurist dystopian sf movie where there’s no food anymore, people are fed with pills or something, and go to watch movies where the actors eat ‘real’ food ? Soylent Green maybe ?