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Pornography a personal investigation being a brief account of several days spent in Usenet
'Pornography' is a word which is given far too much work to do. It continues to function (remarkably) as an art-theoretical term and serves in this capacity on fronts, such as those concerned with gender issues, where the fighting is particularly intense. It is a marketing term, used with positive intent (as opposed to a pejorative) by people who are either offering porn for sale, or seeking to purchase it, and in either case they would not be interested in 'erotica' or 'art'. It is a political term with (remarkably) abiding currency and the capacity to generate publicity for the shameless, and it is, in spite of all of the above, still also a word used by many to raise moral issues (or, more accurately, to direct moral condemnation).
All of this freight can be itemised without ever actually looking at any porn. My purpose in this short note is to say, there's precious little I can do with a couple of thousand words to comment constructively on 'the pornography debate'; not least because there isn't one: there are several, and each of them has been raging for decades if not centuries. The relevant literature is effectively infinite.
What I propose to do instead is to actually look at some porn and see what we see. As a way of establishing a finite object of study, I have chosen to consider a Usenet newsgroup, and to look at the range of postings to it over a period of roughly ten days. Rather than choosing a newsgroup with a particularly specialised subject, I have chosen a general newsgroup from the alt.binaries.pictures tree. As expected, this group contained material ranging from 'soft' to 'hard', and from relatively uncomplicated scenarios to scenarios where some aspect of fetish is prominent.
The newsgroup
The newsgroup I chose is alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, and I looked at posts made over a roughly ten-day period, from the 6th to the 16th of January 2004. That amounts to approximately 150,000 messages. See separate note on sampling. Clearly not all of these could be examined, and the selection is rather arbitrary.
The messages were a mixture of spam and of collectors' posts. One of the most apparent characteristics of porn and the use of porn is obsession. Usenet binaries groups clearly cater for a significant population of collectors, who use specialist software to categorise and organise images. Images from particular sources (particular websites, images of particular models) are assessed for the filesize, filename (there are 'authorised' lists) and checksum (a value which helps to distinguish files of the same name and size). Specialist file types relating to collections enable individual collectors to eliminite duplicates, identify files that have been altered, and compile lists of specific files needed to complete a particular collection. A large proportion of Usenet posts consist of the posting of these 'wanted' lists (csv files) and the responses from other collectors who post what they have of a given person's wants. Collectors also occasionally send a 'flood' or a 'fullpost'. The files originate, for the most part, on pay sites, and so give an indication of the popularity of particular types of web-based porn. Spam typically advertises pay sites, some of which offer original content, some which offer content taken from third party sites. In addition, individuals post images of their own. The web sites represented either in spam or in collections vary hugely, from large commercial sites to sites run by couples or individuals; the latter range from completely free sites run by enthisiasts, to small-scale pay sites.
Considering the images themselves: a very large proportion are posted in series, and often there is some sort of narrative progression. At its simplest, a woman starts the series clothed, and ends it naked, or naked and with her legs spread, or naked and with her legs spread and something inserted. In some cases there is a background scenario and some attempt to show a story. I would estimate that images not belonging in some way to a series represent barely one percent of the total. For whatever reason, narrative would appear to be one of the most typical elements of pornography.
The mise en scène varies from elaborate and expensive to 'what's a mizz on sen?' The quality of the photography varies; some is as carefully lit and exposed as a fashion shoot for a mainstream fashion magazine, some is grabbed from low-resolution, under-exposed, ill-focused amateur video footage.
Apart from the production values, what varies most widely is the emotional content of the imagery. If we leave to one side the question of taste or preference, it is evident that many of the participants are doing so with great enjoyment, even exuberance, while others show awkwardness, embarrassment, or in some cases, distress. Still others are being imaged in circumstances which suggest they were completely unaware of being photographed or filmed. More of this when we come to discuss specific examples below, but for the moment let it suffice to say that the contrast came constantly to mind between Kristeva's two categories of jouissance and abjection. This was an initial observation considering the participants, but I became aware that it also served to characterise my own responses.
The map
As a rough and ready way of characterising images I found myself operating by mapping them quite simply on two axes: the first is my eirenic - agonistic axis, as discussed elsewhere; the second is the Kristevan axis from jouissance to abjection. This creates four quadrants, as below:
I found that simply drawing the axes like the axes of a graph, however, seemed unsatisfactory. To try and convey something of the feeling of the different quadrants, I wanted to add colour. As the axis moves towards abjection, I found that I was equally drawn to darkening the colour, and to simply reducing its saturation, so that the gradient fell from strength to colourlessness, rather than from bright to dark.
Of course, this map (like all maps) simplifies; as I have discussed elsewhere, the extremes meet, and while a category may be consistent, human situations rarely are; we experience mixed emotions, and in a situation which is particularly charged erotically, the mixture may be particularly contradictory and extreme. Photography allows us relatively direct access to body language and the cues of facial expression, but these are often ambiguous, and skills in reading them are, surprisingly perhaps, given that art-theory makes particular demands on visual literacy, markedly under-developed.
Nevertheless, I would argue that this is the kind of framework we need to bring to the reading of erotica. It translates into accessible questions such as 'Is he or she enjoying it?', 'Is he or she a willing participant?', and requires of us simply the we attempt to separate these questions from others such as 'Am I enjoying looking at this image?' ... the latter, of course, not always easy to answer, and not always accurately answered with an unambiguous 'yes' or 'no'.
The images: selection issues
First of all, I cannot show here anything but a tiny proportion of all the images I found. Apart from the sheer amount of space needed for such a gallery, some images would undoubtedly break the rules established by my own web host, which is not an 'adult' host, and some would perhaps be illegal.
I have ruled out, then, any images which seem to show women below the age of 16 (the age at which in Britain it is legal to have sex: it is also, coincidentally, the age that Jilly Johnson was when a photograph of her naked was printed in The Sun, beginning the publishing revolution in Britain which led to the Page 3 girl.
In fact this ruled out very few images. Age in young women is of course difficult to assess from a photograph, but I would say that none of the images I saw were clearly and unambiguously of women younger than 16. In practice, the few that I did eliminate were images where I felt there was a reasonable doubt about the age.
I also ruled out images of bestiality. There were not many of of these, but they did crop up fairly regularly; or at least there were a significant number of images showing women in close proximity to animals' genitals, including images where there was some contact (mouth or hands) with the animal's penis, in some cases where the animal's penis was clearly erect. I am not certain what the finer points of the law are here; suffice to say that showing these images struck me as offering little which the verbal description above hasn't already provided, except to say that not one of the images concerned suggested, in considering the facial expressions of the participants, the least element of jouissance. Not even the horse.
And I eliminated images which were so blurry, grainy, dark or otherwise illegible as to offer no clear content of any sort. There were a significant number of these among the spam webcam postings.
What follows is primarily an attempt to show the range of variation. I have not commented at length on each image; the choice was either to make a relatively wide selection, or to comment in more depth on a smaller number of images. I chose the former. This is, after all, intended primarily to put some flesh on the word pornography, rather than to be an exhaustive moral or intellectual appraisal. I have presented the images together with a selection of header lines, but have omitted information added by the Usenet system for its own tracking purposes, and which does not reflect any authorial intent on the part of the original poster. In one instance I have also looked briefly at websites associated with images. Web addresses are typically included in logos or copyright notices on the images themselve, so are accessible to anyone who wishes to pursue them.
The images: a selection.
I begin with images from web sites with high production values. These are clearly the most popular among collectors. The sites are all extensive, have been established for several years, and use as models many of the more upmarket porn stars (for example, Aria Giovanni, Aimee Sweet, Tera Patrick, Sidney Moon ...) The sites generally have a well-developed merchandising operation integrated with the galleries.
Some of the sites, such as Suze Randall and Perfect Girls (pgirls) make frequent use of 'narrative' sequences. Some simply use a variety of poses within the staged space, sometimes with a progressive strip, sometimes not.
I present here a selection of images from each of the following sites: On this page, I show two images at 60% of the original pixel size (as posted, generally the same resolution as on the site) but with additional compression to save space and download time. In some cases I have put a sequence on a separate page to indicate the 'narrative' style; these sequences are not necessarily complete, in fact some are much truncated. No individual images have been cropped or edited (for levels, contrast or colour, etc).
Mystique: Photographer Mark Daughn (a former Playboy photographer)
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According to the site, Project ISM is:
a public art apparatus. Each day we exhibit a new folio in which the artist presents herself in a bold statement about nudity, fame and the Internet. This is Selfploitation. It can make you look, make you think, make you jelly-kneed, and if you want, it can even make you famous.
Conclusion
If we consider porn against the axes I mapped out at the beginning of this survey, with the capacity to be eirenic and joyful on the one hand, or agonistic and abject on the other, then I propose that the phenomenon is simply too diverse and too contradictory to bear labelling with a single word. The word 'erotica' can bear usage across almost that wide a spectrum, since at least the whole spectrum is capable of serving as some sort of fulfilment of erotic desire for someone. There is probably no bit of this stuff that doesn't, for someone somewhere, trigger sexual arousal.
If we consider the images themselves and attempt to suspend any moral or theoretical judgment, again, I believe we have too disparate a phenomenon. It encompasses the romantic, the mutual, the profoundly unequal, the conventional, the transgressional, the beautiful and the ugly. Apart from its capacity to twang the nerve-endings, much of it has little to connect it to any other stuff that traditionally the label 'erotica' has been applied to. If we consider, for instance, a voyeuristic sequence, watching a girl urinate: The last shot, which may be simply of the toilet being flushed, would not really look out of place in a magazine about domestic interiors, as an advert for bathroom fittings. Completely ordinary household objects, a pencil, a table fork, a clothes peg, ... all these, in the right context, with the right narrative framework, can mean in such a way that some people are aroused.
This, it seems to me, is where a reading of pornography which looks to semiotics is fundamentally flawed; while semiotics gives us tools for understanding the sign, it does not help us with what I find it useful to call an emblem. An emblem is not simply a sign. An emblem does fulfil that semiotic function, but it also incorporates or, in the case of the human, incarnates the other. And unfortunately, almost everything is emblematic, or has the capacity to be so. A completely ordinary household object, in the right context, with the right narrative (or cognitive) framework ... it does not simply mean sex, it can proposesex, and go on to be a part of sex. Its textures, its physical qualities, are sensed with and merge with the sensations of flesh against flesh, or the responses of nerves and glands to the overall scenario. Nor does psychoanalysis deal adequately with this emblematic quality of human life. Particular emblems, like signs, have a history; in fact Benjamin's notion of 'aura' is particularly useful here. But we are dealing not simply with signs such as the Swastika / Hakenkreuz, a standard of bdsm imagery; we are dealing with the everyday material world. Clothes pegs, candles, needles are all for one thing vastly more pervasive even than the almost ubiquitous iconography of such institutions as the National Socialist Party and the Christian Church. Ropes, rubber bands, sellotape / scotch tape / clingfilm ... the list is endless, and the response of particular individuals to these things is not simply a consequence of their own personal history, but also a consequence of the aura of the physical object. If this should seem to favour fetishistic sexuality, exactly the same is true of sunsets, beaches, waterfalls, voile fabrics, lace, and so on. One of the most interesting contemporary emblems is the camera itself, which functions in scenarios from the gently romantic to the extremely sado-masochistic.
I would argue that pornography as a word is simply past its sell-by date. The issues which matter are issues of consent and freedom. There is power and there is convention, and those who abuse the word pornography, it seems to me, are often the same people who abuse power and serve convention hypocritically. But that is enough morality. The basic contention of this piece is that we would do better to look at pornography, and in particular to attempt to read the non-verbal cues of the participants, if we want to understand what porn actually is and what it actually does. This brief survey doesn't have room for much of that discussion, but it does at least serve the purpose of grounding discussions about pornography in contemporary imagery and marketing.
Harry Smart, January 2004
