Everything is Porn

I just want to feel something real! Please! Just one more!

You’ve had a long day, you tell yourself (emails, instant coffee, and a wank), you’re idly scrolling on your phone (infantile reels of meals you’ll never make and places you’ll never visit), whilst finishing up making your dinner (another oversized portion of lame, floppy pasta with some half-baked sauce). You grab your meal (an orangey sludge, with cheese!) and head over to wherever a screen is, likely in front of the PC, but it doesn’t matter, as long as there’s something there to entertain your eyes.

You sit down, place your meal to your left, your phone to your right, and open up a new Youtube tab. Roughly 10 minutes pass, and your food is now lukewarm. You found a video to watch whilst eating, some asinine crap about how a Michelin Star chef runs their restaurant, or a renovation video, or something you’ve seen 10 times before because it’s cozy and a good ‘meal time video’.

You checked your messages twice - A friendship, the entire foundation of which is reliant on the occasional pithy meme, and your mum, telling you some relative you spoke to once 20 years ago died, and, oh! The neighbour moved the fence again! - You forget about these messages for now, for a second, whilst you take your first bite. You don’t notice it. Your eyes flicker to the screen, to the phone, to the screen, to the phone, Oops! A piece of pasta has slobbered down your crotch, back to the screen, to the phone…the meal is finished, you can’t remember it. You can’t remember the video. You can’t remember who you messaged or who messaged you or why or what or when.

You get up, grab your plate, and head back to the kitchen. You dump the dish in the sink, grab a fizzy drink and a snack (ready for later), and head back to the screen.

You feel ontologically clammy, like a strong wind would turn you into a forgettable grease and wash you away; internally, you feel like waking up on day four of having the flu, alive, but not really.

Absolute fucking bliss.

~

Day in, day out, countless highly satisfying lives roughly approximate this way of life. The existence of a being caught between various and incessant (supposed) points of literal, sensual, and abstract orgasm. Entire lives built around moving from one sense-based peak to the next. The grammar and rhythm of modernity is pornographically tripartite (Choose, Charge, Cum), never to find that much needed fourth stage, namely, relaxation. But, before we get to the process, let’s tackle one of the fundamental issues at hand - Everything is pornographic.

The standard definion of pornography has a reductive focus on the explicitly sexual aspects of porn, e.g.

1. the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement

2. material (such as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement

However, there is a 3rd definition, which at least in part allows some entry into the broader abstraction that is ‘porn’:

3. the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction

See, the first two definitions themselves obfuscate what is happening within the act of sexual excitement when it’s attached to porn. What previously (in a natural setting, with a real man or woman one loves) would have been an act of unity, openness, surrender, and affection (to name but a few of those tough terms that orbit ‘love') becomes an act of possession, wanting, grasping, requiring, needing, must-having, and Urgh Gimme!-ing.

Now, sexual porn is very much its own beast, and shouldn’t be neither cast aside nor subsumed into some abstraction seeking to deflate it. However, the terms ‘pornography’ and ‘porn’ have already become synonymous with that which is akin to a sensual overload. Whether it’s the notion of ‘food porn’ (a chorizo dipped in dorito dust and cheese), ‘prose porn’ (purple prose a la Melville or Nabakov or McCarthy), ‘nature porn’ (a beautiful desert), or ‘Earth porn’ (a sunset, for fucks sake), it’s no longer a term constrained to its specifically, overtly sexual place of origin, and has become a placeholder for any thing taken to the Nth degree of sensuality, that purports to promise the most coveted or fleeting feelings, the orgasm! (Please, just one more!)

In the modern world, it is no longer sufficient for entertainment to simply entertain; it is required that it be pornographic, that it goes beyond mere attention-keeping and interest-seeking, but promises an eventual social, sensual, or literal climax. Food has to be sweeter and saltier, films have to be longer and louder, music has to be faster and crasser, video games have to be more detailed and graphic, TV shows have to go on forever, walks in nature need to be documented, bike rides logged, conversations screen shared, books simpler, identities specific, relationships faster, and orgasms incessantly infinite!

Everybody wants to cum 24/7. Everybody is instinctively looking for the next opportunity to shoot their respective wad! Wherever it’s eating the best pizza ever, watching the next thing immediately, acquiring the latest gizmo now, or just ramping up various status scores (likes, followers, subscribers, shags, X-consumed, etc.), the point—this much is clear—is no longer to be curious, to engage, or to be interested, it is solely to consume-as-to-cum. Consumption for the purpose of the climax! And the next…and the next…and the next…ad infinicum.

The act of faux-entertainment taking place during consumption of said porn is, of course, masturbation. Again, this is a term that, reduced solely to its sexual, literal reality, becomes almost redundant. Yet, allowed its full abstract truth, we see in masturbation self-entertainment in search of a peak. That is, one masturbates with thought for eventual climax. In our modern minds, we are nearly always mentally masturbating. That is, we are constantly developing fantasies of tension and lack regarding our chosen objects of consumption, that we then therein tell ourselves shall afford us monumental orgasms upon point of acquisition. We masturbate by telling ourselves that we can choose, then charge, and then cum. This process (Porn > masturbate/entertainment > climax) is the Four Stage model of sexual response, as put forth by Wilhelm Reich [1], except the final stage, relaxation, has been lopped off, forgotten. The model is as follows:

1. Psychosexual Build-up/Tension:

   This stage involves the initial arousal and build-up of sexual tension. Reich viewed this as a form of biological excitation.

2. Engorgement and "Charge":

   As tension increases, the sex organs become engorged, and Reich believed this was accompanied by an electrical charge within the body.

3. Electrical Discharge at Orgasm:

   The peak of sexual excitement, Reich theorized an electrical discharge occurred, which he attempted to measure (orgones)

4. Relaxation:

   Following the discharge, the body relaxes, and sexual tension is released.

We get turned on, we hump, we cum, we relax. I know, we think we’re such complex creatures, and yet so much of everything is—so annoyingly—contained in this four-part process. For Reich (put roughly), everything going well, the fourth stage of the process (relaxation) should both help us dissipate our armoring (stored bodily trauma and tension) and, more importantly for this piece, allow for sufficient relaxation such that we won’t immediately go scrambling to find the next release. Or, tension (as per its name) should be released. Despite the false social understanding of Wilhelm Reich as the coomer par excellence, who spearheaded the worst parts of the sexual revolution, one of the most transparent and telling questions Reich asked was (among many) - Why do people feel the need to keep orgasming, if the function of which is to dispell said tension in the first place?

The question, in short, then, is, why is everyone so tense? The answer is, because everything is porn. The focus isn’t on the meal, but the next meal. Not the dialogue, but the next season. Not the narrative, but the sequel. Not the sex, but the orgasm. Everything that is happening is missed due to all will and thought being directed toward a climax not yet. And, as it stands, the climax happens, and we’re often none-the-wiser (the meal is gone, the show is over, my jeans are soaked), and immediately, almost as if such a decision is made during the moment of orgasm, we are mentally masturbating about the next possible orgasm, the next best pizza, the next best show, etc. Before we have a chance to sit, feel, and delve into the wondrous happening now, we’re already dragging our tension to the next hypothetical station. In short, everyone is discharging, and yet no one is relaxing. To be tense is to want and desire; to relax is to be open and accept vulnerability.

Don’t worry, though, we’re not entirely to blame (does that make you feel better?) Eventual orgasms sell better than relaxation. Desires denote a lack to be fulfilled, and our consumer economy is proficient in developing ever-increasing lacks that one supposes they need to be fulfilled.

The way out—though calling it that makes it sound like another identity-focused event to own—is simple, yet unimaginably difficult. Very much an If only you had eyes to see and ears to hear scenario. One can’t consciously sit down and tell themselves I am going to focus on my meal as an act of rebellion against our porn-addled society! That, in itself, is a pornographic undertaking that makes you the hero and, once more, the meal forgotten. It’s simple in that you just have to be.

Why are you watching that?

Why did you forget your dinner?

Are you even friends anymore?

Why are you keeping this up?

Are you consuming all this porn because you’re frightened of being true to yourself?

Are you using porn as infinite filler because you’re afraid of change?

Is this comfort and convenience worth waking up one day to realise you’ve been dead for the last 20 years?

It aches, doesn’t it?

-

For a good intro to the work of Wilhelm Reich, watch (consume!) my interview with James Strick.

Then, read The Function of the Orgasm and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

And, if you want a book to kick you in the guts, read Listen, Little Man!