Cathedral of Erotic Misery: The Pornography-Industrial Complex and Social Engineering, post-OnlyFans

Prior to the recent decision by payment providers to pull their support from the porn-saturated OnlyFans subscription service, you could easily be forgiven for forgetting that pornography was ever a significant player in the still-raging American “culture wars”. Ironically, it is the present diversity in anti-pornographic movements and philosophies that testifies to this medium’s total lack of marginality maybe better than the staggering quantity of available pornography itself: much like fast food and cigarettes, it remains omnipresent even with a society-wide choir of voices arrayed against it. Among these protests, the classical feminist argument almost needs no reiteration; and assertions such as Robin Morgan’s (“pornography is sexist propaganda…pornography is the theory and rape the practice”)1 doubtless still have plenty of currency within that movement, along with the contentions of writers like Diana Russell and Andrea Dworkin (both instrumental in theorizing porn as a physical form of violence). Elsewhere, much of the nascent MGTOW movement grounds its protests in a refusal to allow any form of feminine authority to direct their lifestyles, seeing pornography as inherently degrading to men (i.e. solitary masturbation squanders resources that could be put towards stereotypically manly activities involving a modicum of challenge and risk). Lastly (but only in this brief inventory) leftist critics like Chris Hedges and Gail Dines see in pornography the apotheosis of capitalist excess and dehumanization: “Porn is woven into the corporate destruction of intimacy and connectedness, and this includes connectedness to the earth…if we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn.”2 The sheer number of available objections hints at a truly universal reach of the product itself.

In the U.S., at least, pornography is now so easily accessible that it seems like legislating bodies can’t even be bothered to deal with it, similar to the pragmatic line of thinking that is gradually being applied to drug-related offenses to public morality. This is particularly true now as they face more pressing concerns like an economy on the brink of collapse and the prevention of growing demands for a “national divorce” pro-secession movement. As such, at least some thought needs to be given to the unconventional opinion that the reigning managerial elites prefer the arrangement whereby pornography is more readily available than forms of media that “ask questions” in an engaging, even entertaining, manner. Can a medium which, though it may “reject the social order itself” (per critic / historian Thomas Laqueur), and which is based on a socially indifferent premise (i.e. “we only ask for something from the public sphere if it offers a supplement to what we can have alone”)3 be put into the service of a massive bureaucratic State? Can there in fact be a “pornography industrial complex”?

It would not be without precedent that pornography has been used to benefit a State in crisis: Takeyoshi Kawashima reports that, in the Imperial Japan of the 1930s, “pornography restrictions were relaxed in order to ‘reduce labor unrest and take the students’ minds off politics’”,4 and it seems this local policy would have been more fully fleshed out if not for the way in which it led to a loss of face on the international stage. Surely, those governing bodies in charge of mass pacification know the value of a product that not only diminishes the prospect of perceptible public dissent, but has the potential to be an addiction-forming preoccupation, and they may even welcome the public opprobrium that comes from their ignoring a social ill: in one fell swoop, they will have created a potent means of channeling social discontent among regular users and anxious morally driven demands to “do something about it,” which in turn will grant them an expansion of their regulatory powers. If it sounds cynical to suggest any sitting government would pursue such a strategy for its consolidation and self-perpetuation, consider the alleged role of the U.S. government as (per pornographic subject matter expert Peter Sotos)5 “the greatest producer of child pornography”. As Sotos contends, “those people are making it available, and not because they have to catch all these pedophiles, but because they have to keep their jobs […] these cops and organizations who are bent on breaking these rings are actually creating the rings.”6 These accusations mirror similar ones directed at federal intelligence agencies who are simply creating domestic and foreign “terrorists,” and entrapping them, when no notable instances of the real thing can be found to justify these agencies’ considerable budgets. More importantly, though, they suggest a level of strategic callousness that would make a State interest in directing the flows of conventional / consensual pornography pale in comparison, and eminently possible.

Before going further, it does need to be acknowledged that porn in any format is not entirely monolithic, and many of its producers would be incensed at associations with the identikit content churned out by the San Fernando Valley, let alone being implicated in a large-scale public pacification program. Amateur, home-brew pornography offered with no expectation of monetary compensation does exist, and can make some argument that it is critiquing, cutting into the profits of, or occasionally revitalizing the mainstream of pornography. The successful softcore brand Suicide Girls and its many offshoots may have made women liberally tattooed or pierced, with zany hair colors etc. into objects as worthy of fantasy as the silicon-deformed “ideals” to which they are presented as an alternative.7 An argument could indeed be made that the normalization of such alternatives for bodily expression owes itself in part to the digital porn addict’s desire for continually novel visual stimuli. Other porn outlets, sill targeted mainly towards heterosexual men, have advertised their product in terms reverent of natural / authentic femininity, and are often enough distinguished by some mention of “art” (on which, much more in a moment) in their brand or domain names. Like so-called alt-porn, this is deliberately marketed as a gentler, more ethical alternative to the plentiful content that approaches pathological levels of extremism in its on-screen depictions of abuse and humiliation. However, I am not interested in the dynamics of empowerment involved in the production and consumption of this material, but rather the reactions to it, and how those are put into service of an existing social order.

Anti-porn activist Catherine MacKinnon gives away the game here with her acerbic proclamation: “There is a lot wider variation in men’s conscious attitudes towards pornography than there is in their sexual responses to it.”8 All the aforementioned manifestations of pornography manage — if they are successful — to affect the same thing, whatever the stated intentions of the producers. That “thing,” for anyone who has not been paying attention, is lots and lots of masturbation. I will patiently wait for any examples of pornography whose viewers don’t use them as a masturbatory aid, but I doubt any will be forthcoming, and likewise I am skeptical that infusing porn with some sort of socio-political theme can become a spur to subversion, whether or not the porn succeeds in its “main” job. We could say that a porn scenario featuring an assertive female dominating a pathetic subordinate in the uniform of the local regime would be an extreme form of agit-prop, yet masturbating while keeping this fantasy in clear focus does not always equal an acceptance of the terms being laid out by its producers. Likewise, the act of ejaculation is not simply a more aggressive way in which to acknowledge that one understands or even identifies with something. Ultimately, whether porn has pretensions to art / “commentary” or not, we need to consider how art aims to expand variety of available experiences, even if confining itself to the set of rules dictated by a genre or medium; whereas porn generally achieves the opposite: using a staggeringly diverse number of scenarios in order to ensure more or less the same experience. Porn researcher Gary Wilson, even in acknowledging the “astonishing diversity in matters of desire” offered by pornography, notes that they collectively contribute to a similar set of “effects on the brain”.9

Laqueur, who in Solitary Sex has written maybe the definitive book on the subject, has spent a great deal of time unpacking the history of masturbation as a social ill, and noting that even while modern moralists no longer saw the act as “a threat to health,” masturbation could nevertheless represent for them “a rejection not only of socially appropriate sexuality, not only of appropriate sociability, but of the social order itself.”10 But how true is this today? If we conceive of “mainstream culture” as being largely a culture which affirms the social order, and complements official indoctrination by diverting dissident energies towards inconsequential affairs, then fuel for the masturbation engine is as reliable a contributor to that order as any popular form of light entertainment. Nevertheless, as has already been hinted at above, there is no shortage of this material that aspires to the status of art, an activity that ideally speaks to a completely different set of needs than the purely biological. No discussion of porn’s usefulness to social engineering can be fully complete without remarking on the difference between these two endeavors.

Up until porn reached the cultural saturation point that it now enjoys, many of its fans, otherwise considering themselves to be of sound moral character, would have to participate in a now quaint ritual of justifying their tastes in onanistic sustenance. As I clearly remember from that portion my youth spent working in a Chicago video store, one of the most common defenses was that porn was a product of aesthetic, not just masturbatory, contemplation. That is to say, porn could very well rise to the level of art. For those who believe art is the creation of any type of aesthetic experience whatsoever, then even the most uninventive pornography can clear this very low hurdle, and any exposure of flesh during a streaming webcam session can be an “expressive” act. By the same token, a great deal of sexually charged art never really crosses over into the realm of pornography owing to its failure to guarantee titillation, and the concurrent possibility of being interpreted as something more like a confrontation: two of the more obvious art-historical examples being Vito Acconci’s 1972 Seedbed (in which Sonnabend Gallery patrons became the object of the artists’ live masturbatory fantasies), and Annie Sprinkle’s invitations to her audience to explore her inner cervix with speculum and flashlight. Some other visual artworks to have appeared outside the “official” art circuits, like Masami “Merzbow” Akita’s collages of discarded Japanese pornography or Jukka Siikala’s occasionally terrifying miasma of pixelated video porn, work on the senses and intellect in a similar way, providing apparently ambiguous commentaries on the omnipresence of pornography than open endorsements of it.

However, I believe that a greater consensus belief in the “artful”-ness of porn would be precisely the thing that would finally get the attention of legislative bodies otherwise unconcerned with regulating it. Of all the thematic material that porn has managed to successfully annex to its empire of masturbatory excess, the field is only rarely capable of producing material that expresses the same ideals as art’s most sublime successes: contentment in place of striving, incredulity towards “progress for its own sake”, or the enlargement of the simple ability to dictate the pace of one’s own life, including the ability to follow personally developed rather than inherited standards for achievement. None of these values are exceedingly helpful to any presently ruling regime, nor are the actions outlined by storied art critic Herbert Read in his own attempt to distinguish art from pornography (“The Problem with Pornography”):11

Art redeems our actions from monotony and our minds from boredom. We have to make things and to do things in order to live, but the routine of this endless repetition of menial tasks would dull the senses and deaden the mind unless there was the possibility of doing things and making things with a progressive sense of quality. That sense of quality is the aesthetic sense, and in the end the aesthetic sense is the vital sense, the sense without which we die.

Read’s comments here are interesting and relevant to our hyper-modernity because they propose an art-porn distinction not just on whether base instincts are brought to the fore, but on the question of whether the effect of the material is ultimately diverting or vitalizing. Namely, do the materials at hand betray a sense of defeat at the hands of external reality, and the total retreat into passive fantasy or self-maintenance that this entails, or do they insist upon engaging with it in adventurous ways? Read’s comments also presage the slogan of a later anti-establishment hero, the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, who noted that “the qualitative is our striking force”. Drawing up a “quality over quantity” distinction is easy enough in a period when porn’s key feature is its quantity, its insectoid proliferation. Yet quality and quantity are not always mutually exclusive, and there do need to be more rigorous ways of determining whether some content or other is “prurient” or “socially redeeming”. Read throws us another lifeline here by suggesting what exactly figures into an experience of “quality,” namely its promise of a freedom from coded and predictable experience:12

Memory cannot be entirely extinguished in man, his capacity for experience cannot be entirely suppressed by schematization. It is in those experiences which transcend the cultural schemata, in those memories of experience which transcend the conventional memory schemata, that every new insight and every true work of art have their origin, and that the hope of progress, of a widening of the scope of human endeavour and human life, is founded.

This is certainly a much steeper incline for contemporary pornography to follow, if it does want to be seen as art, and it is even more difficult when Read adds that “true education [is] the prevention of cliché formation — which is what I mean by education through art.”13 Pornography lags behind the vast majority of other socio-cultural phenomena in its relentless pursuit of clichés, “schematization,” and stereotypes. Indeed, commercial pornography remains one of the only enterprises in which a race-based classification system explicitly forms part of the marketing: an unalterable set of inherited sexual behaviors are ascribed to different ethnic stereotypes, whose sexual combinations are intended to be understood as “shocking”. As to the “astonishing diversity” in content and scenarios that Wilson mentions above, it is schematized nearly the moment a novel scenario appears: even filmed items dealing with the fetishism of humiliation and disappointment, like the “ruined orgasm” fetish or the “cuckold” scene, have to number in the thousands by now, and are most certainly searchable by category on the heavily trafficked “tube” sites like PornHub.

The old libertarian joke is that government is akin to pornography in that both “promise everything but deliver nothing.” If and when porn does “deliver” though, it does so in an incredibly similar way to 24-hour news media, whose content is essentially guided by State actors, and with neurological effects similar to other forms of numbing or immobilizing content. As Wilson repeatedly contends in Your Brain On Porn, “Internet porn addiction is not an addiction to naked or erotic; it’s an addiction to novelty”,14 and if ever there were a reason for it being officially adopted as a means of social control, then this would be it. For while the 24-hour news media cycle and other mass media numbing agents also exploit this addiction to novelty, they rarely manage to do so in a way that is so strongly tied in with an innate biological urge as intensely sexual material is. This particular area of research, which Wilson claims is now at a similar stage as early reportage on the harmful effects of tobacco smoke, may eventually cause the porn aversion that a million moralizations cannot: Wilson rolls his eyes at the “widespread meme online that internet porn is enabling users to ‘discover their sexuality’” at the same time that porn dependency leads to maladies like persistent erectile dysfunction and, frequently enough, total inability to engage in sex with an “IRL” partner.

After all is said and done, I do contend that the ease of access to pornography and “porn-adjacent” phenomena does correlate to their usefulness in diverting popular attention away from ongoing situations that reveal the State’s weakness or incompetence. However — is there also, in addition to this pacification effect, the possibility of an indoctrination effect as well? Namely, is there something to the “message” of pornography as a whole that conveniently reflects other values that the ruling class would inculcate in its subjects, thereby influencing both the active and passive portions of their existence? Critics like Hedges have certainly jumped at the opportunity to suggest this, positing the increasing emphasis on humiliation / degradation scenarios in porn as an attempt to normalize torture as a component of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and otherwise just “[glorify] the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, as [Robert] Jensen points out, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war.”15

For now I will give the “kinder, gentler” varieties of masturbatory aid the benefit of the doubt, and concede that they really do want to stall or reverse such a trend of exploitation by “finding beauty in the everyday” or, in the example of newer made-to-order / “bespoke” scenarios, giving the porn performer a visible sense of agency and an ability to awkwardly but earnestly fulfill other social roles.16 The specific righteous denunciations of Hedges, Jensen, Gail Dines et. Al. of course have some truth to them, but are not universally applicable. Yet, in a broader sense, it is still well worth wondering if the entire porn industry is being used in an almost propagandistic fashion: that is, being structured in such a way as to suggest the goodness of current authoritarian objectives, or to dramatically / theatrically reinforce the health of the status quo over the uncertain consequences of choosing alternative ways of life. If we entertain the idea that the modern State is founded on a belief in the possibility, and even inevitability, of continual progress in all areas, then porn’s own constantly intensifying, more-is-better progression serves as a validation of that belief. If a woman being ejaculated on once is sexy, we are told, then why not 50 times consecutively? If the sight of a 12” penis is exciting to viewers, why not some prosthetic / robotic appendage twice this size? In a time when there is an increasing skepticism about the ability of the State to provide basic resources, a porn landscape of “infinite” quantitative progress, choices and possibilities can create a potent hallucination that one inhabits a society of vast surpluses.

So, in conclusion, I believe that mass porn addiction could somehow be beneficial to a corrupt oligarchy or broad authoritarian system, at least in the short term. However, they may yet be too inept, and too convinced of their own mythology of continual progress, to realize how social experiments of this type can get catastrophically out of control. We must remember that, in the not so distant (and now fully de-classified) past, certain of our government agencies thought it a great idea to experiment with the powerful hallucinogen LSD as a sort of “truth serum,” and in the process spawned the very counter-culture which learned to despise the logic of militarism and compulsory production: none other than John Lennon quipped that “we must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD […] they invented [sic] LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom.”17 Meanwhile, encouraging any kind of widely distributed addictive habit is at best a gamble, as no governing body has fully solved the problem of how to most effectively apply “selective tranquilizing” so that the populace is numbed at just the right times and motivated to productivity at others. As another Your Brain on Porn testimonial relates:18

Porn, at its core, is much like any other addictive substance or behaviour. It DOES numb your pain, but therein lies the problem. You see, you can’t selectively numb an emotion or feeling without numbing every other emotion and feeling. So even though these things dull the sting of vulnerability, loneliness, sadness, disappointment and fear, they also dull the positive range of emotions like happiness, hope, joy and love.

Lastly, there is a danger to its identifying too closely with a medium which, though its users may be addicted to it, nevertheless understand that it is in fact “not real” i.e. it is an approximation of or abstraction from a much more sensorily involving, spontaneous, and unpredictable experience. If suspecting that the forces endorsing this media are themselves “not real,” with their power deriving from some claim to authority that could be easily enough ignored, even pacification tool this potent could backfire.

Author’s note: links to porn sites not included, for obvious reasons. None of the sites mentioned are hurting for additional traffic.

1 Morgan, R. (1980). “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.” L. Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. William Morrow & Co.: New York.

2 Hedges, C. (2009). Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Nation Books: New York

3 Laqueur, T.W. (2003). Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Zone Books: New York.

4 Quoted in Malamuth, N.M. and Donnerstein, E. (eds.)(1984). Pornography and Sexual Aggression. Academic Press Inc.: London / New York.

5 Author Peter Sotos is one of the pre-eminent writers on pornography of a violent, non-consensual, or otherwise controversial nature. Outside of literary and underground music circles, he remains stigmatized by his mid-1980s trial and conviction for possession of child pornography, which was sparked by police interest in his ultraviolent fanzine Pure.

6 Quoted in Moynihan, M. (1995). “Peter Sotos.” Seconds, pp. 52–57.

7 Obviously, the cost of upkeep for all of these “alternative” signifiers — sleeves of tattoos, body jewelry and regular hair colorings — can be argued as also representing an unattainable ideal. But this is an argument for another essay.

8 MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only Words. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.

9 Wilson, G. (2014). Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction. Commonwealth Press: Kent, United Kingdom

10 Laqueur (2003).

11 Read, H. (2002). To Hell With Culture. Routledge Classics: London / New York.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Wilson (2014).

15 Hedges (2009).

16 These scenarios are an odd fusion of pornography with the wellness or self-help industry, perhaps clever since both are segments of the economy which seem well insulated against economic downturns. Much modern pornography in fact explicitly aims at that sizable segment of the “wellness” market aimed at reclaiming a sense of agency for the helpless, allowing them to at least be shapers of simulated / broadcast reality when their abilities to navigate the reality of direct human interfaces fail. Curiously for a genre which allows the customization of erotically charged fantasies, it is not out of the question for “bespoke” / made-to-order pornographic scenarios to involve non-sexual encouragements, or uplifting talks delivered by sex performers, directed at the consumer).

17 Quoted in Kinzer, S. (2020). Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt & Co.: New York.

18 Wilson (2014).