A sketch of two parallaxes of porn and its use: revelation and regulation

ABSTRACT

Pornography has seemingly always had a strained relationship with ideological and repressive sociopolitical, economic, and cultural state apparatuses in the various permutations of the Western zeitgeist. Condemned as a vehicle of inevitable psycho-emotional decay, pathology, and catastrophe, porn has been as much decried as a vector of an ongoing public health crisis as much as it has been valorized as a vehicle of open, honest, and creative psychosexual expression. Referring to Foucault, Pornhub Insights, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this article article will analyze and sketch out two parallaxes of porn and its uses in contemporary late capital global society.

KEYWORDS:

• Porn
• parallax
• Foucault
• pandemic
• regulation
• PornHub

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My understanding of the Real in this way emerges from such texts as Lacan’s Ecrits, The Language of Self, and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and various Seminars (Lacan 1956, 1966, 1981, 1988, 1991, 1994, 2007), as well as Žižek’s discussions of the Real in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Žižek 1989, 1991, 2002).

2 ‘Scientia sexualis’ is a term Michel Foucault (1978) uses in The History of Sexuality Volume 1 to describe the operation of the proliferation of analytical discourses of sex and sexuality through scientific, clinical, medical, religious, and judicial apparatuses of European states during the eighteenth century. I use it here as a short hand for the conversion of sex and sexuality into discourse which, in our contemporary epoch, takes the form of the dissemination of ostensibly high-precision data analytics under the rubric of productive archives of representations of sex and sexuality, such as that employed by Pornhub Insights.

3 For more detailed commentary on this confessional aspect of porn, see Tembo (2018).

4 See Steinem (1980), Gallop (1988), Dworkin (1989), Potter (1989), and Cossman (2004).

5 See Isaacs (2020).