Thread by @AyoCaesar

Thread incoming, and heads up for those who need it, there's racist and sexually abusive language in the screenshots to follow.

But basically, yesterday's brush with the sticky floor of the internet got me thinking a lot about how porn shapes the language of online...

... and how we don't really have honest conversations about it.

My approach to this stuff is generally anti-censorship, pro-workers rights, and regulation should focus on consent, age, and workplace conditions.

And that's very much still the case. But from having to go through various uses of my image captioned and commented with degrading material, it was striking how much of the language (generally at the intersection of 'racist' and 'horny') overlapped with the register of Pornhub.

Grim screenshots below: you don't have to read them to understand the rest of what I want to say, which isn't really about me at all, but useful for illustrating what I mean.

This kind of thing is typical of the kind of user generated content (titles, tags, and comments) found on any adult streaming platform. It's unmoored from reality, equates escalating cruelty with sexual intensity, and race functions as a language of sexual dominance/degradation.

Most of these things pre-date modern pornography. I don't think that porn has invented this kind of racist and misogynist lens through which to view sex, but it has reinforced and amplified it.

Porn is the most intimate kind of mass media that people consume. And it's intimate not just because of how it's made, but because of how (and where, and with whom) it's watched.

It's had an impact on our culture's visual language, it's transformed how people learn about sex, and that's not necessarily all bad! But in part because of this intimacy, and a history that sees the porn issue as one of censorship vs permissiveness, we don't talk it properly.

I think there's serious questions to be asked of what porn's reflecting back (in more sensational/spectacular ways) of the society that produced it. And I don't just mean the video content itself, but the texts around it - the title which drives clicks, the comments and the tags.

What I thought about the threads that I read wasn't (just) that they were gross, or racist, or celebrated rape. It's that the people who wrote them don't have a language for talking about desire outside of the primary colours of Pornhub comments...

and don't have a way of thinking about objects of their desire beyond racialised and gendered axes of domination and cruelty. I think these two things speak to each other, amplify one another.

I don't know if more regulation could address these things, or if you'd even want to were it possible. I do think that the state should stay out of our sex lives as much as possible - but that doesn't mean we can't try and change the culture in which all this takes place.

I don't have answers for how you do that - this thread was as much to work through my own thoughts as it was to share anything useful. But the problems presented porn are, to a large extent, a product of what's lacking outside of it. Mostly honest conversations about sex.

When porn does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to socialising people into sexuality, that's an indictment of everything else. Sexuality, explicitness, curiosity aren't bad things - but when privacy tips into a culture of silence, we reinforce the sense that they are.

Anyway this thread is now unconscionably long, so it's going to end here. TL;DR people are disgusting on the internet and I think it's cos society is bad at sex.