The pornification of everything
by Helen Joyce, The Critic:
In today’s dating market, women who would prefer porn practices kept out of their bedrooms have little negotiating power.
Every meme has its day, and “Rule 34” — the observation that on the internet you can find porn featuring every imaginable protagonist and situation — is now so banal that it’s been ages since I’ve seen it mentioned. It is said to have originated 20 years ago with a webzine cartoon of a man staring in horror at a screen. The speech bubble reads “Calvin and Hobbes?”, and it’s captioned “Rule #34: if it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.”
With hindsight, those were innocent times. The intervening decades have seen the arrival of Pornhub, now the world’s largest porn site; smartphones, which put free porn in everyone’s pockets, including children’s; and OnlyFans, which disaggregated and disintermediated live sex work.
Porn aesthetics have reshaped women’s bodies, with trout pouts and Brazilian waxes now mainstream, and breast and butt implants nearly so. Meanwhile porn tropes have made their way into bedrooms: young women report that spitting, slapping, choking and anal are now normal expectations on the dating scene.
Anti-porn campaigners tend to have three concerns: what porn does to the performers; what it does to the viewers; and what it does to the wider culture. The zeitgeist is uncongenial to thinking seriously about such issues.
Self-denial and delayed gratification are out of fashion. The rising identitarian mode of politics conceives of people as bundles of innate characteristics — not just race, sexuality and gender identity, but specific and sometimes outré sexual tastes framed as “kinks”, which supposedly come pre-installed. The main task of teenagers and young adults is thought to be self-discovery, not building character.
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