An Introduction to “Me Watching You Watching Me” — Alex Cocotas

Contemporary pornography’s mania for categorization and subcategorization, for genre and subgenre, is a logical conclusion of Enlightenment thought, whereby “the multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter”—and desire to fetish. The possibilities are practically innumerable: ass-to-deltoid spectacles, mouth-to-ear waxworks, armpit to legpit. Such combinations, what ingenuity—O blooming orifice! The category page of the porn mega site, that teeming Olympus of Aphrodite’s bosom, is more than a mere distillation of the Enlightenment’s predilection for classification—it is a meta-Enlightenment architecture, enlisting the Enlightenment’s choice bits and enduring dowry: race, nationality, science (via anatomy and scatology)---all under the slavish unity of sexual desire----enabled (in no small part) by wage arbitrage in Slavic countries-----. Through cross-classification, pornography promises to be the Enlightenment’s final, and greatest, triumph: man’s domination over sexual desire—that sphinx that has bedeviled, stymied, and subverted human rationality, the quest for human progress, for millennia! To which we can only reply, “That being is man.” Ask the Trojans. No, ask yourself: Was the July Ultimatum an unsolicited dick pick gone horribly awry? Is fascism a COS play spectacular? Was Mutually Assured Destruction the ultimate coitus reservatus? We can only speculate and engage in counter-factual. History does not share in our awesome insights. 

The porn directory is a metropolis built on the side of a volcano, signifying Man’s total domination of Nature, turning molten desire into the mere basalt of fetish, a benign distillation of discrete perversion; it promises a rare, almost frightening self-knowledge; it promises to reveal the sources, to expose the murky depths of subconscious, to acts as a sieve of our desires; it promises to provide an ever more granular explanation, to distill a single insoluble cell of explication for the erection in biology lab, the unjust sensitivity to polyester, the intense arousal of porcelain, the irrational sensuality of rectangles; it promises, in some sense, to gain mastery over our desires through ever greater refinement, i.e. anal to Asian anal to Chinese anal to Chinese pregnant dwarf anal. O Anus Mirabilis! (As the poet says.) And what could be more mysterious than our desires, the drivers of irrepressible lust? Whole disciplines have been established, disregarded and “reconsidered in light of recent developments” to plumb its external plumage! Empires rise and fall on this knowledge! Ask the Trojans, victims of the original voyeur cuckold. No, ask yourself: Were forty years in the desert a terrible exercise in edging? Was Ghandi the ultimate sub? Is Dick Cheney a certified horsefucker? Oh, the lives of beekeepers! We have been waiting for this knowledge since our expulsion from Eden, since it was never clarified whether the apple in question was red or green, Gravenstein or Granny Smith, sour or sweet, and whether it would have been better served with pork chops (quelle horreur!) or as a spry compote after duck à l’orange. Damnable omissions! But now. Mature Bodybuilder Cores Apple With Her Cunt. Oh lord. Latino Stud Eats An Apple Out Of Her Ass! Oh Lord! Is this original sin or its recession? But the information is practically endless! 

To look at the porn directory, that infernal list of alphabetical tags, crosstags, detags, and retags, is to stare into the raw totality of the world. Where does one start? One can exercise the greatest powers of imagination, realize the most obscure curiosity. You can dabble in geopolitics (Israeli-Arab sex!); explore every race and nationality imaginable; experience the dialectic of power relations (student-teacher, cop-civilian, jailor-prisoner); class conflict (boss-worker); ruminate on psychology (the collective unconscious of the orgy; the essentially Freudian framework of ass-to-mouth); rectify historical injustice (interracial in every direction); play on latent racist tendencies (interracial in every direction); understand neo-imperialism (middle-aged English blokes picking up third-world prostitutes); indulge a host of taboos (rape, incest, bestiality, hijab porn, missionary); substitute a variety of settings (outdoors, underwater, classroom, car, IKEA); experiment with every sexuality in all its nuances, every ratio of male to female participants; and for the strict formalists, every possible position and angle imaginable. But what if one’s true vocation is Hungarian waterworks? Or was it Mr. Green with the strap-on in the library? Ach, the possibilities are endless! And time, we have so little time. Only five to ten minutes an engagement (let’s be realistic), at most two to three times a day (excluding adolescents). That’s, at most, at a two standard deviation maximum, 1,500 impressions a year, out of thousands—possibly millions!—of iterations. The road to self-discovery, of enlightenment, is arduous and filled with false starts. Where does one even begin? How does one know himself? And how to proceed from there? How to not be distracted by featured videos and recommendations—away, lascivious underlings!—and drill down to the inner depths of one’s being? The fantasies are endless! Fantasies? Yes, fantasies. For they are fantasies. 

Pornography, with its multitude of genre, kink and fetish, offers a powerful illusion of self-discovery and self-knowledge. It seems to offer a new identity, to give a name to amo(u)rphous longing. No longer will the world be subjected to that ossified division of labor, Ass Man and Tit Man. Once we distill an ever finer, ever purer fetish, it seems as though it could liberate us from established categories, in which we find ourselves but never quite find ourselves: kink as an imprint of the human soul. For what are black and white, rich and poor, when you know with scientific certainty that watching a woman defecate on the various national flags of the world while you sit in a salad bowl of ice cream is the True Cross of arousal? Is there any knowledge more powerful than what we cannot know about ourselves? Those impulses whose origins we can only guess at? We may never know why we like what we like, but to know what you like with certitude, to give it a place in the world, is the closest many will ever come to tasting the primordial stew of our being, the veneer separating us from the undifferentiated masses, our glint of specialized existence, expunged from the multi-millennia monotony of the missionary position. The fetishist steps out of history and announces a chasm of terms, is propelled into a future of ever greater fetish, encompassing the whole of the material world, a human life conceptualized as a compendium of fetish—sneeze fetishists, fern fetishists, cobalt blue fetishists—entailing ever greater nuance, refined to an ever greater degree, proliferating as new synthetic fetishes, fetishes unthinkable to previous generations—the fetishist of pineapple juice spilled on fresh paint, the fetishist of simulated white noise in the rain forest, the fetishist of lathered pine tar in an abandoned coal power plant, the fetishist of smoked salmon consumed on sand dunes—Principled Lesbians For Cocoa Butter. Multitude humanity! Manifest individuality! An individual deconstructed and classified with unprecedented precision, a human genome of the soul! Is this not what we have been waiting for? The human spirit, true human ingenuity realized, individual dignity finally soaring above the glowering mass, liberated from the damnable concept. Is this not the ultimate fulfillment of the Enlightenment’s promise? Total human mastery, total human self-knowledge—classified! Is this post-post-modern or simply pre-modern? Is it a New Dawn or Dawn Reconsidered? We are getting ahead of ourselves: nomenclature is for the academics, those molars of human wisdom. But can one build a life around a predilection for blurry Japanese porn? Is sniffing used underwear a revolutionary act? Can society be reconfigured on the basis of ball gags and anal beads? We shall never know, because the promise of pornography is predicated on fantasy. 

For five or ten minutes you can choose any fantasy you want, take a whirl on the fetish carousel. A few clicks. High definition. Enough options to fly to Mars and back without missing a beat. It costs nothing—except your personal information, highly targeted ad campaigns, a few uncomfortable moments of self-reflection, and a bulging file of potential blackmail on an undisclosed NSA server. But the possibilities of those five to ten minutes! You’ll join the local leather club—you’d burn down the Reichstag just to singe your pubes—you’d give a stranger your life savings to massage your prostate—you’re visited by the ghosts of orgasms past, confronted by a phantorgasmagoria, a lifetime of sexual pleasure condensed with such force in fleeting seconds that it seems to confirm the theory of relativity—you’re practically flying, riding some universal wavelength, your lust the destroyer of worlds—this must be what soma felt like—you’ll do it all! Just after——oh, oh, ee, oo, oo, oh. 

The universal brotherhood of man has faltered, revealed itself as farce. You come crashing down to reality, where your car has an oil leak, you haven’t received a raise in a decade, and your wife left you because, among other things, you kept trying to put a finger in her butt. Wretched realism! You hasten to close the video. Malaise. You sit there in silence—maybe a car passes outside, maybe a dog barks—a wetnap resting between your thighs, looking like the saddest little angel. Reality rushes in as things to be done and things to be undone. You stand up and wash your hands. For this is the reality: for fifteen to thirty minutes a day (if we’re being honest) you are a god, setting in motion the fantasy of your choosing from a practically infinite number of possibilities; and for those fifteen to thirty minutes it is the fauna and flora of your being, the known bounds of human existence, effectively negating the accrued knowledge of civilization, reduced to props, insignificant symbols; for those fifteen to thirty minutes you are free to live in a world of your own making, a utopia of primordial urges, the most profound human desire: a complete efficacy of will, utter mastery of our given lot. And then you come to, as though roused from a dream, half-surprised to find yourself in the living room, in bed, in an airplane bathroom, blinking at a backlit screen, torn from the violent roils of desire, thwarted (as always) by inconsiderate pacing, the entropy of arousal, half-surprised to find yourself subject to the world as such. Those fifteen to thirty minutes (in an honest world) are the release valve into which you flee, where for one half of one percent of the day you are not a commodity, not sentient raw material for the turbines of society; and in this it is only a small, particularly fantastic window into the vast entertainment complex of American life. 

Nothing has materially changed. Nor has anything changed spiritually (if we can call it that). Few will ever realize the harried, pell-mell vows of erotic absolution. Few will ever carry the refined sense of proprietary fetish into this other, altogether less fantastic world. Few will ever dare. For every out and out fetishist, there are ten more with a dusty pair of leather pants in their closets, and twenty more who enjoy browsing Dungeon Duds from time to time—you know, just in case. No one wants to become known as the neighborhood foot guy. And it is thus that the great promise of pornography’s Enlightenment thought, its prototypically Enlightenment structure of thinking, its pretense to self-knowledge, mastery of the most stubbornly volatile realms, reveals itself as farce. There is no knowledge, no revealed truth, only fantasy, exponential fantasy, ever greater delusion in the guise of accumulated data, ever greater layers of self-deception, a nascent schizophrenia, a chorus of subcategorical imperative. The Enlightenment begins in a Frenchman’s head and ends as a crumpled-up ball of rigamortified tissue in the waste basket next to yesterday’s half-eaten sandwich. The material life of the mind! Well, what now? What are we left with? The tides of human progress roll out and we are left to find the sands strewn with fossils in various states of fornicate—a T rex coddled by ten velociraptors, a brontosaurus fisting a pterodactyl—primitive hieroglyphs of ball and stick. The merciless cruelty of a liminal age! 

But even the categories and subcategories, the genres and subgenres, the cross classifications and unclassifications, are not devoid of some value; even where they fail as Rosetta Stone, they reveal other stories, become an imprint of collective currents. Every node of fantasy, every gateway of illusory desire—in its popularity, its potential for cross-genre pollinations, tells something of a collective (or at least male) psyche, peels back a peephole into its fundamental assumptions, the lubricant of broader operations. How else can we interpret the sudden, widespread popularity of heterosexual anal sex porn among young men but as a massive homoerotic longing embedded in the male psyche, finally given a modest, albeit deceptive, expression? You really want to fuck your buddy Todd—oh, how he glistens after a run—and not really knowing what to do with this confused—does his fuzzstache tickle?—and, despite what the media will tell you, not altogether liberated feeling—the exquisite masochism of those blows on the shoulder that let you know he’s “just kidding”—and so you land on Teen Tushies, watching some twenty-six year old try to make the best of a clearly miserable experience, dreaming of Todd’s forbidden sphincter. And it is certain that Todd, at this very moment, is doing the exact same thing—you should see how he looks at you while you play video games—browsing Butt Bombers, but dreaming—oh he’d wrassle u, he’d give u a good wrasslin’—of your elusive sphincter. For this is the truth of male friendship: sphincter love is only one overly sensuous suplex away. But this insight, available in the aggregate, is unavailable to the individual, who conceives his fantasy as a solitary and unique proprietary burden imbued with his personality. A delusion! False consciousness! Pure ideology! And thus the directory, bypassing individual revelation, shines a probing light on broader structures: collective fascinations, ingrained stereotypes, latent perceptions, and societal projections. Genre is thesis and antithesis, action and reaction. Ask the Trojans. No, ask yourself: Was the Cold War a garbled safe word? Is American liberalism the political wing of humiliation porn? Is “trickle-down economics” the ooky cookie of wealth distribution? We can only hope to point our armchair in the direction of History. 

One genre, in particular, has become very popular in recent years, the casting couch. It is, perhaps, the first true genre of the Internet, the defining genre of the times, enabled by the democratization of video technology, the ease of recruitment facilitated by instantaneous communication amid geographically dispersed communities, and the collective impulse to suspend disbelief and naively enjoy its pretense. The basic contours of the genre are simple enough. A man runs a casting agency of sorts. Its precise nature is never fully disclosed. The man is anonymous. He either appears (mostly) behind the screen as a gonzo presence, or his face, and perhaps other distinguishing features, are blurred. He is not, from what we can tell, a good-looking guy. He has a paunch. He has tribal tattoos. We intuit that he is probably in his forties. He probably drives a jeep. His penis is small and uninspiring, certainly not envy-inducing; if anything, confidence-boosting. These are all important details, his anonymity, his essential everyman physique: they abstract any distinct personage from the scene. Gone are the well-endowed demigods and demiurges of previous eras; enter the schlub. With the anonymous schlub as the male lead, the casting couch has effectively co-opted the viewer as co-conspirator, put him behind the camera. The schlub is everyone and no one. 

A young woman appears. Sometimes she is there right from the beginning; other times she knocks at the door. She is pretty but not too pretty. She wears the sort of clothes you would see at a suburban mall. Jeans and a halter top, maybe. No platform heels, no frilly lingerie, no fur linings, no garters, no fish nets, no leggings. Jeans and a halter top, maybe. She does not wear heavy makeup. Her figure is proportionate. Everything about her is organic and natural, seemingly. Her blemishes are her blemishes. She does not look like a “porn star.” She looks like the proverbial girl next door. She is innocent, naïve. She remembers all the details of her first kiss. She shouldn’t be here, in front of this camera. This is what we are made to believe. The viewer is watching her defilement, her fall from his projected purity. He meekly wishes to intervene, to prevent her from proceeding, silly as he know this to be, to negate the unnegatable, to stop what is already past; and yet, as pseudoparticipants, he intensely desires this outcome, urges it on to conclusion, impatiently skips ahead to its consummation; this is, after all, why one watches, why one does not turn away: the gratification of his moral superiority, realized in the anonymity of his participation. 

An interview ensues. It is one of the anachronisms of the casting couch, the Internet genre par excellence, that it is rigidly formalistic. The instant gratification of Internet porn, its ease of access, has obliterated the old conventions, the ancien régime of contrived storylines, failed acting careers, the numerous tumescent workmen around the house. No longer must we watch the courtship of Count Shlongfellow and Baroness Lottatits. No formalities, no friendly greetings, just an exchange of utility with the viewer. An interview ensues. It goes on for five, ten, fifteen minutes, defying the expectations of brevity instilled by the Internet. The viewer can, of course, skip ahead; he knows with some certainty what will transpire; but perhaps he lingers, uncertain why, certain of his ultimate goal yet momentarily distracted by an ancillary curiosity, perhaps the promise of some raw, unfiltered reality amid so much artifice. He won’t, of course, find it here, but he is still drawn—helplessly, incessantly—to its pursuit. This is a great mystery of pornography for its (male) consumers: Who is this woman off screen? What led her to this moment, the illusory crossroads of their intersection? Why has she transgressed the known boundaries of societal acceptance? He craves the biographical reality behind the pseudoreality of the video; he craves the reality behind the pseudoreality of life as such. He is haunted by his own impotence, soon reified by the overconsumption of porn. The male, half abstracted, anonymous, holds no interest for him—who drives a jeep! But she—she is the image of the libertine, a projection of what is suppressed in him. He cannot see how little separates them; cannot view himself as a party to this interaction, viewing it as a discrete artifact of the past, occurring independently of his experience, indifferent to his will. The screen is a veil of ignorance; his moral standing is not impinged. 

An interview ensues. The interview, of course, is completely stilted. Yet the viewer waits for a glimmer of reality, a moment of the unassailably true. A glance, a stutter, intimations of discomfort, something. The only thing that could really be real for him is regret. He knows that he will not find what he is looking for, knows on some level that it is absurd, but he suppresses his capacity to disbelieve. Pornography thrives on these self-deceptions; they are integral to its perpetuation. The actresses, you know, do this for altruistic reasons. You can, you know, learn something from watching this. It will, you know, improve your sex life. But the promise of a crack in the façade of pseudoreality is too compelling, too enticing, o v e r r i d e s rational skepticism, allows us to indulge the manifestly false. 

He asks her some questions about herself. She is eighteen or nineteen, always. She goes to State U. She studies criminology. She works as a nurse, at a clothing store, as a waitress at the diner on Main Street. Her favorite color is russet. She shows some sort of identification to the camera. It’s real! Even the false pretense of the interview is based on a false pretense. She thought this was for a modeling agency. She didn’t think she would be having sex today. He is only a talent scout. This video won’t be posted online; it’s only for the eyes of some producers, who will give her work if they like what they see. Is there any end to the mendacious lies of this world! She nods her head along. There are flashes of uncertainty. Her manner is awkward. She clasps her hands, knocks her knees, squirms about under camera’s glare. Are these genuine shows of discomfort, anxiety, or are they further gloss? The questions turn more intimate. Does she like sex? Why, yes, she does ha ha. She says this like it is an embarrassing confession. What kind of sex does she like? She laughs he he. She didn’t expect this question! Oh, all kinds. Like what? Embarrassment. Her eyes shift from side to side. She demurs. He names something, the sexual equivalent of chocolate, of breathing air. Yes, she replies through a secondhand smile. He lists more positions, combinations, increasingly deviant, the sort of things no upstanding citizen will admit to. Yes, she replies to all, growing more flustered, yes, yes, she likes it all! She likes it all! Does she have a boyfriend? She sighs. Was it a genuine sigh? Yes, she does. Does he know that she is here today? Yes, he does. What does he think about that? He thinks it’s hot. Good. As long as the spirit of monogamy remains unbroken! Insoluble bonds! So, would she be willing to have sex on camera today? There is a pause. Will she do it? Of course she will! But what if she said no? What if she said no? What if you were locked into this experience, unable to fast forward, unsure if they would actually go through with it? Subversive! She assents. Of course she will. Was there a moment of hesitation, a moment of doubt? We will never know. We can only guess; we can only project our socialized anxieties and disapproval. She assents. The anonymized everyman, society’s shlub, asks her to undress. She takes off her top, possibly halter, her pants, her dress, and twirls for the camera. The interview continues half-heartedly, proceeding to the finale, the downfall of virtue, we always knew, in spite of our half-hearted delusions, would occur. A few minutes later the Enlightenment is in the waste basket. Nosce te ipsum! 

Perhaps the lust for the biographic reality persists for a few moments. But there are bills to pay; there is work that needs to be done, or work that needs to be found; there are other forms of entertainment that must be engaged, to cultivate and maintain our ties with the mythic collective of our country. It is over. The more judicious clear their browsing history. It has never happened. A few clicks and it is wiped from our virtual memory, which increasingly sets the terms of analog memory. In a sense it never happened. The girl and her fall from grace has been banished from conscious memory, no more than a flicker in the farthest reaches of our being, never to be revisited again. It is a ritual repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times per year by millions of men, and each instance is a discrete event, unchained from some greater trajectory or arc, exiled from their conscious plain in the vast majority of life when it is not the totality of their conscious being. They may not return to this girl, this former paragon of virtue, but in these moments, seized by holistic frenzy, they will often return to the casting couch, to a new girl, already sullied for many others, but fallow territory for the newcomer, the johnny-come-lately. 

There is something that draws them to it, that brings them back, that accounts for the casting couch’s popularity, despite its flagrant violation of the Internet’s unspoken conventions. Perhaps its appeal is found in that transgression, thwarting viewers’ desire for immediate gratification. How else could we explain its popularity? Except in this regard, it is virtually indistinguishable from a hundred other genres, millions of other videos. They come for the interview; they come to watch a moral downfall on the altar of their assumptions. The interview reaffirms their assumptions; this is why they indulge its knowing falsehood and why they ultimately give themselves over to it. It hinges on the belief that all women are corruptible. Not just the girls with the neon pink heels, the impractical lingerie, the impossibly large bosom, the assortment of underthought tattoos; the proverbial girl next door is also corruptible. Their supposed innocence, their supposed naivety is the essence of the appeal. Even the local student at State U, clothing store saleswoman, nurse, waitress at the café on Main Street is a raging nymphomaniac underneath the pious façade and suburban mall outfitting. It just needs to be drawn out of her. In the guise of false pretense, naturally! She has to be coy, hesitant. She can’t come right out and beg to be sodomized. That wouldn’t do. It must be gradually unraveled. She must be, in a sense, seduced, tempted by dark forces. Her downfall must be caused by her weak-willed resistance, her capitulation to temptation. 

The casting couch is the recapitulation of the sacrifice myth, the sacrifice of the young maiden, simultaneously demonizing and affirming a community’s values. It gratifies the virtues of the viewer, behind the screen, removed by distance, granted a voyeur’s immunity. It is a morality play, paradoxically affirming behavioral norms even as it encourages their violation. But it relieves the viewer’s conscience by presenting the young woman’s fall from grace as a discrete incident of the indeterminate past, inculcating the inevitability of its occurrence, excusing his avid engagement from fault for contributing to future defilements of purity. They have not yet occurred but their occurrence is inevitable. The anonymous schlub is only a tool of fate. What outrages in public, arouses in private; a private-self distinct from the public image: America’s true polarization. But the casting couch, beneath the veneer of thunder and lightning, is also effective meta-theater. The obviously false pretenses of the interview make a mockery of the inane conventions that pornography has always relied on—the XXXL Pizza Delivery Company has questionable business practices, to say the least—and which viewers have happily gone along with, acknowledging the absurdity yet ultimately giving themselves over to it. It chastises viewers’ naivety even as it cajoles that naivety with winks and nods. The viewer’s inevitable capitulation affirms its cynical hypothesis. The interview isn’t just a tawdry depiction of a young woman’s downfall; it satirizes, surely without meaning to, the viewer’s gleeful suspension of disbelief, for believing it all could be so simple, for the flashes of guilt and remorse, for their parochial sentiments on her behalf, ultimately for thinking that they are much different that she, that much separates them. He is fooled into thinking he is the anonymous schlub. Her interview, her coyness, her faux innocence—it’s him. The interview is a meta-representation of pornography’s appeal, its corruption of one’s better—that is, socialized—sense, ultimately its seduction of reality, the revelation of our culpability to pseudoreality, the conversion of reality to pseudoreality. Its indictment of the young woman is an indictment of our subservience to its superficial conventions, its superficial court of morality. It becomes clear that the casting couch, as the ultimate expression of pornography, points to broader truths about our relationship with reality, at a time when porn, as a desexualized idea, spreads throughout the broader culture. 

Today one hears of food porn, travel porn, ruin porn, war porn, etc. With the possible exception of war porn, these labels are not applied pejoratively; rather, they characterize a relationship with the depicted subject, with the underlying reality of the depiction. They suggest a gratuitous voyeurism of reality, the capture and conversion of reality into a pseudoreality. Food porn takes the most basic element of human survival and turns it into a tool of social capital. And yet even its patrons and enthusiasts acknowledge that there is something unreal, sometimes obnoxiously so, in this depiction. The food never looks like that for more than a few minutes, but in food porn it lives on in this state forever. Restaurants have beautified their presentations accordingly; have coaxed reality to the demands of pseudoreality. It doesn’t even matter, ultimately, if anyone eats the food, if the food tasted awful, if it was sent back to the kitchen for something aesthetically bland. There is no toilet porn, no TUMS porn, no oh-god-take-me-to-the-hospital porn: non olet. If humanity decided to switch to nutritional gruel as universal sustenance, food porn would live on, produced as entertainment for our visual consumption, for our visual comfort, as our deeply desired projection of reality. Ruin porn converts the ravages of time, the dowry of economic decline to moments of aesthetic beauty, to be appreciated far from the dilapidation. It abstracts the viewer’s sense of culpability, their connections to this rotting hulk, the broader forces that precipitated its fall. Even a Wall Street financier can admire the beauty of boarded up towns, crumbling factories, abandoned halls, once bustling streets. We are free of indictment even as the images read down our judgement. Travel porn, or more broadly experience porn, is perhaps the most pernicious, promises to swallow up the whole of reality as pseudoreality. Experience porn turns life into an aestheticized open diary, a series of idealized images. In its quest to subjugate reality, experience porn excises much of what makes reality, reality: our perceptions, emotions, and thought, replacing them with the collectivized tyranny of the selected, and selectively edited, image. In its reconstitution of reality to the stipulations of pseudoreality, conforming to a confinement, it constricts the spaces for those other things—thoughts, perceptions, emotions—that color reality, heightens a sense of schizophrenia, a divergence between the demands of pseudoreality and the intractability of reality. War porn, with its affinity for the moving image and its whiff of social opprobrium, is probably closest in relation to its sexualized progenitor. We are flooded with images and videos of war porn, and its cousin, disaster porn. Like ruin porn, war porn can aestheticize human suffering and communal disaster; but unlike ruin porn, there is a lingering discomfort, an unavoidable insight into the reality behind the pseudoreality. Like porn porn, there is some debate regarding its utility, the wisdom of its wide dispersion. The debate is mostly beside the point, has become a moot point. With the Internet anyone can feel themselves to be real participants—in reality, voyeurs—in distant wars on the other side of the planet, sometimes two wars in the same day. Nor should we underestimate the ability of war porn to delineate reality to the desires and needs of a pseudoreality. Wars are now fought in accordance with the demands of pseudoreality. Reporters are embedded with troops, are given a privileged, and limited, view of the theater (a good word choice) of battle. The reality of war becomes the pseudoreality of the news, the only depiction that many of us will ever know of the underlying reality. 

So porn, it seems, is everywhere; as a linguistic construct, as a mutually intelligible concept, it has entered the broader cultural lexicon. Porn is no longer just sexual photos and videos for solitary gratification, sealed from the regular flow of life by a wall of silence. What, then, is porn? What does it share with things various as food, ruins, travel, and war? What makes these new iterations of their engagement “porn” and not simply entertainment of a sort, perhaps even journalism? Part of it lies, perhaps, in their exaggeration of a shared impulse. Most people have sexual desires but few ever do porn. Many enjoy reading about war but few openly salivate over images of mangled bodies. Everyone eats but few ever arrange their food into aesthetically pleasing tableaus, and so on. And yet, their popularity indicates that the exaggeration is not too much of an exaggeration, that it fulfills a collective wish of some sort, transgresses a vague behavioral norm, a line we know exists but are not sure exactly where it exists, received wisdom that colors our thoughts if not our behavior. So porn, in one sense, is immoderation. It is brazen immoderation on the part of its creators and participants, but is the product of a much broader desire for immoderation, encouraged by, practically guided and produced by, its passive participants, the viewers and consumers. 

There is a symbiotic relationship between consumer and creator in porn. One cannot exist without the other. A porn, whether it be sex, food, or experience, is rarely made purely for the artistic gratification of its creator. This is what separates it from the writer, painter, or director, for whom process is a fulfillment of sorts; it’s difficult to imagine a pornographer spending two hours, let alone two months, trying to find the perfect lighting for pubic hair. A porn is meant to be viewed, shared; it is meant to provoke an extreme emotional response: arousal, envy, horror. What really distinguishes this relationship is the implicit collaboration between creator and consumer, a wink and a nod, a mutual naivety. But the chief characteristic of a porn is its peculiar relationship to reality. 

Porn is closer to reality that just about any other media. There is little doubt that the thing depicted actually happened. Those people actually had sex; the food was indeed served; the war is really happening; your buddy Todd and his delectable sphincter really is on vacation—vape-cation—in Amsterdam. It is this basis in reality that invites its corruption. A porn reduces reality to a decontextualized image, absent all but the most superficial content, creating a pseudoreality. But….and this is the crucial point….the insuperable distinction….love me….the pseudoreality is willfully accepted as reality by the viewing audience. (SUPPORTING QUOTE: THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY; CTRL+F: HERMENEUTICAL SODOMY→NEW YORK LITERARY GLORY.) Like the casting couch, viewers ultimately give themselves over to the lie. The food becomes the meal, the travel photos the vacation, the battle images the war: the psuedoreality becomes the reality. The conventions cease to be conventions even as they are acknowledged as such. The image is accepted as truth if it represents a desired consensus of truth. Porn is an ethic: the conversion of reality into pseudoreality with the tacit agreement of a faux-naif audience; porn makes every man a mortician. In this sense, porn is all around us, adjacent to our daily lives, encroaches daily on our perceptions; porn, for all its stigma, for all the negative connotations, has subsumed our experience of reality. 

The main consequence of this proliferation is a heightened sense of schizophrenia, a quaking chasm between the public and private self; a social schizophrenia between reality and the ever expanding pseudoreality, the reality where we live and the pseudoreality where we live vicariously. The pseudoreality may subjugate reality, may place increasing demands on reality, but reality as such is never abstracted. People still run errands; they still feel dissatisfied; people are still poor, unable to pursue their lives as they please. A porn produces intense reactions, but they are rarely negative reactions, except for war porn, and even this is a sort of negative gratification: at least that’s not me. A porn is a public production: anyone, in theory, can access it; but a porn is a private consumption; even when consumed on a mass scale, it is almost always consumed, and internalized, privately. However, as the pseudoreality of porn places greater demands on reality, as reality becomes more like a public production of porn’s pseudoreality, reality is increasingly experienced as a series of discrete images; the drab, everyday miseries of the private-self find less and less space for expression, momentarily alleviated, but ultimately intensified by the blinding glare of porn’s pseudoreality, are glossed over by demonstrations of pornographic pseudoreality—how much fun we’re all having!—instigating a mass multi-personality disorder. Porn harbors a divergence of the public and private self. The private self may be gasping under the weight of credit and debt, but the public self, the self the public seems to demand, is just loving these nachos! Just as in sexualized porn, the private self may crave an Indonesian woman to shit on its chest, but the public self busily chats away about fantasy football with his buddies—how ‘bout them Packers! 

Porn crackles through the culture like static on a country road, the voluntary nature of participation, superficially, preying on involuntary instinct until one is pinioned in the transaction of reality and an ever-proliferating pseudoreality, subject to a constant and imperceptible transposition of image and imagination, infringing on those intimate realms—thought, language, feeling, perception—rudiments of personality, like a coastal shelf gradually formed by the ceaseless tides yet which seems to possess a distinct, self-generating form of its own, simultaneously projection and reflection, simultaneously inhabiting this self and its avatars and their reckonings, the spectral flow of image and post and response seeping, seeping unceasing until it has insinuated itself in one’s very being, intermingling freely and usurping the native prerogative; enthralled by desire and haunted by its phantoms. So how does one live?

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Alex Cocotas is a writer living in Berlin. Liebendigo, from which this is excerpted, is his first novel and is currently seeking a publisher