What is Pornography?
How should we distinguish between art and pornography? The question might appear frivolous at first glance; however, I would argue that this particular philosophical conundrum has acquired urgency in our current political climate, with fascism, prudishness, and moral panic on the rise around the world.
Why Does it Matter?
Free speech feels more threatened today than it has at any other point in my lifetime. As of the time of writing, more than half of all American states have passed laws imposing age-verification requirements on online platforms, imposing complex and confusing rules surrounding what kinds of information are accessible. The stated purpose of such laws is to protect children from viewing adult materials. Taken at face value, this is a noble goal; every reasonable person wants to keep kids safe online. However, there are good reasons to be skeptical about online age verification laws, as they are currently being implemented. Many critics have argued that actual endgame of this type of legislation has more to do with censorship, surveillance, and political manipulation than it does with actually protecting children. The UK’s Online Safety Act, for example, does not merely restrict access to pornography—it also blocks discussions about the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Worse still, it turns out that not only are age verification technologies a privacy nightmare for adults, they are largely ineffective at their stated goals of keeping children away from adult content online. Indeed, even if these age verification technologies were being implemented effectively, it seems clear that they would still accomplish little more than shuttering those websites which take obscenity laws seriously, thereby driving traffic toward the shadiest, least ethical, and most exploitative purveyors of online smut.
Finally, there is the thorny question of who, exactly, gets to decide what kind of online content qualifies as “pornographic” in the first place. Anyone with a cursory understanding of America’s far-right book banning movement will know that many religious fundamentalists use the term “pornography” to describe not just explicit content designed to titillate, but also sex education materials, queer literature, and even books which accurately describe America’s shameful history of racism and slavery.
We certainly need to take children’s online safety seriously. However, any good faith effort to do so would involve a serious and sober conversation about the best policies to achieve this goal. Instead, we are beset by bad political actors who wish to foment moral panic in order to pass draconian regulations and curtail free speech. There is a lot at stake. At the heart of this political firestorm lies the long-standing philosophical question which I raised at the beginning of this essay: What is pornography? Indeed, we don’t even need to take a position on the usefulness of banning pornography to understand the importance of having a clear definition of the term. If an entire genre of human expression is going to be regulated, surely we can all agree that it matters a great deal how one defines the boundaries of that particular genre…
“I know it when I see it.”
In conversations regarding the definition of pornography, one frequently encounters the flippant response: “I know it when I see it.” This adage might suffice if we simply wanted to distinguish between the Mona Lisa and some shoddy step-sibling video on Pornhub. But what actually matters to the discussion at hand are precisely those forms of media which could be considered controversial. Works which blur the boundaries between art and porn are obviously the most at risk. It follows, then, that such edge cases are the ones which require the most attention.
Yet another problem with adopting an attitude of “I know it when I see it” is that individual hangups about porn vary greatly. To most of us, the idea that Michelangelo’s statue of David could be considered pornographic seems laughable. (Indeed, that preposterous idea was even the basis for a 1991 episode of The Simpsons.) However, this is precisely the argument made by some Florida parents in 2023, resulting in the resignation of a school principal. It is important to remember that the loudest voices in favour of pornography bans are religious extremists. We simply cannot take it for granted that most adults will agree on the broad contours of what porn looks like.
Following Hans Maes in his article Who Says Pornography Can’t Be Art, for the rest of this essay I will discuss the four most common approaches to differentiate between art and pornography, arguing that each is ultimately unsatisfactory.
A Question of Content
Probably the most obvious way to define pornography is on the basis of its content. Pornography is sexually explicit. Pornography leaves nothing to the imagination. Pornography revels in the most lurid and graphic details of the sexual act. Art may sometimes broach sexual themes; however, such explorations tend to be more tasteful, more subtle, and more interested in the emotional state of a subject than the details of their genitalia. In practice, most internet platforms seem to endorse some version of this content-based definition of pornography. A black-and-white image of a nude woman might be considered “erotic art” if her nipples and vulva are tastefully concealed in shadow. But a picture of a penis penetrating an anus will be labelled “pornographic,” regardless of that particular image’s artistic merit.
The problem with this definition of pornography is that it is at once too broad and too narrow. On the one hand, it is easy to find examples of legitimate art which are very sexually explicit. (A few of my favourites from literature include the works of Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Georges Bataille.) On the other hand, it is also easy to identity media which should clearly be understood as pornographic but which, nonetheless, contain no explicit nudity whatsoever. This is quite often the case for porn videos depicting spanking, farting, smoking, balloon popping, and countless other niche fetishes. Any claim that graphic depictions of penetrative sex are integral to pornography but antithetical to art relies on a profound misunderstanding of both types of media.
A Question of Morality
Rather than focusing on content, we might instead seek to draw the boundary between art and pornography along moral lines. In this approach, pornography is understood as degrading, exploitative, and misogynistic by its very nature. Whatever depictions of sexuality are not morally problematic are, by contrast, classified as “erotic art.” While I certainly agree that a great deal of mainstream pornography is ethically problematic, this particular line of argumentation strikes me as a dead end. I could point toward ethical adult content creators who describe their own work as “porn.” But that effort hardly seems necessary given that the entire purpose of this definition is to facilitate condemnation. One arrives at the desired conclusion “all porn is unethical” by simply adopting a definition of “porn” which amounts to “something that is unethical.” Such arguments are obviously tautological and need not be taken seriously.
A Question of Artistic Quality
It is tempting to argue that the distinction between art and porn must have something to do with depth. Porn is superficial, disposable, one-dimensional, and trite. Porn is a mass-produced commodity—the very antithesis of art. The problem with this definition is, of course, that the same could be said about a lot of popular culture. Most romantic comedies, slasher films, and superhero movies are just as formulaic and repetitive as the average smutty clip on Pornhub. Moreover, the idea that porn must be defined by its poor artistic quality precludes the possibility of some thoughtful artist choosing to create pornography, in the same way that there have certainly been artistically valuable slasher and superhero films.
The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe will serve as a useful foil to any claim that porn must be lacking in artistic merit. His photographs of the gay BDSM scene are plainly inspired by the porn mags of his era; any sensible analysis of Mapplethorpe’s work must account for this lineage. Moreover, many of these photographs are shockingly explicit, even by contemporary standards. Take, for example, Mapplethorpe’s 1979 photograph Fist Fuck, which shows a man being fisted in graphic detail. To claim that such an image isn’t pornographic seems absurd. But it seems no less absurd to deny Mapplethorpe’s bona fides as a serious and important artist.
It’s Porn If You Masturbate To It
Our fourth and final attempt to distinguish between art and pornography concerns the work’s function. Under this definition, a piece of media is considered to be porn if it is used for masturbation. While there is some intuitive appeal to this definition, I find it insufficient. After all, many people have admitted to masturbating to the Sears catalogue (or similar) when they were young adults. Even now, in the age of streaming online video, one can readily find clips stolen from mainstream films on porn websites. Clearly, there is nothing particularly unusual about someone masturbating to a piece of media that is not generally considered to be pornographic.
The functional definition of “porn” also vastly underestimates how varied and complex human sexuality really is. For objectum sexuals—people who experience romantic or physical attraction toward inanimate objects—even a still life painting might conceivably be used as a masturbatory aid. American competitive archer Erika Eiffel is apparently so enchanted by the Eiffel Tower that she married the structure in 2007. Should we reclassify photographs of the Eiffel Tower as “pornography” based on the likelihood that at least one person might find such media sexually arousing?
A slightly different functional definition of “pornography” might be the following: a piece of media should be considered pornographic if it is intended to be used for masturbation. The Sears catalogue, for example, might have been used as a masturbatory aid by some people; however, that is clearly not the catalogue’s purpose. Thus, using this refined functional definition we could reach the desired conclusion that the Sears catalogue is not porn. That is well and good, but we still cannot properly account for the variety of human sexual sexuality. Does a photograph of the Eiffel tower count as “porn” if the photographer happens to be objectum sexual? Would another photograph of that same structure—nearly identical in every meaningful way—have to be considered “art” if the photographer is not objectum? To me, this seems absurd. Any functional definition of “pornography” would have to be so dependent upon context as to be utterly useless.
Why Can’t Pornography be Art?
The failure to establish a clear boundary between art and porn comes down to an implicit assumption that these two categories must be mutually exclusive. But why should this be the case? After all, we do not make this distinction when it comes to any other form of human expression. No one would ask the question: “What is the difference between art and Western Fiction?” True, a great many Westerns are formulaic, sensational, and morally questionable in their depiction of Indigenous peoples. But we all acknowledge that nothing precludes the creation of a great work of art within that genre such as, for example, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Why should the tone of the conversation change so radically when the subject matter turns from cowboys to sex? Why does it become acceptable to question the artistic merits of an entire genre the moment sexuality is involved? In my opinion, the entire art/porn dichotomy is little more than uptight prudishness masquerading as media criticism.
We are living in an age of censorship and moral panic. From restricted websites to school book bans, the label “pornography” is being used to silence marginalized voices and to erase important forms of speech, ranging from news to art to queer history to sex education. We should oppose this blatant censorship. But we should also reject the premise upon which the argument has been constructed. Calling speech you don’t like “porn” as a pretence for banning it is an effective strategy only because so many of us already accept the idea that pornography has no artistic merit. I reject this framing. I believe that pornography is an art form, just like any other. The fact that so much porn is superficial, low effort, and unethical should not be taken as cause to reject the genre in its entirety. Instead, this should be a reason for us to make more porn: ethical porn, porn with clear artistic intent, porn as beautiful as a Renaissance painting, porn which is creative and novel and daring, porn which challenges the boundaries of the genre…