A Puzzle about Pornography

A Puzzle about Pornography

Sex and food are clearly powerful forces in the psychic life of human beings. The question may be raised as to which is more powerful (is there a power imbalance?). But there is a curious asymmetry between them: we like to watch pornography but not its culinary equivalent. We like sex porn but food porn not so much. You never hear about people with a food porn addiction. Why is this? People like to watch other people having sex, but not other people eating. People don’t watch food porn videos when they feel hungry—why not? Why do people like watching sex porn when they feel horny? Isn’t it just as pointless as watching people eat when you feel hungry? Isn’t it irrational? The case is like imagination: people regularly have sexual fantasies, but it is not normal to have recurrent eating fantasies. Sexual fantasies are felt as gratifying, but not food fantasies. Teenagers don’t fantasize about chowing down all day. And people like pornography even when sexually active; but they don’t go in for food porn when well-fed. What need is satisfied by sexual images that is not satisfied by gustatory images? Why are there no magazines specializing in pictures of delicious meals? Why is a nude a lot more stimulating than a still life of a plate of food?

A variety of answers suggest themselves. Is it because pornography breaks a taboo but food images don’t? Is it the thrill of violating a taboo? It is true that we see naked food all the time but not naked bodies, and that it is regarded as taboo to want to see the latter. What if we inverted the two? Suppose people were general nudists but food is kept under wraps: you never see people eating food, but you constantly see them naked and fornicating. Would we then revel in food porn? Hardly. Pictures of food don’t have the power of pictures of naked bodies: food going into the mouth is not like the penis going into the vagina (etc.). The two types of “penetration” are not equivalent. Also, it would be breaking a taboo to watch film of people excreting, but hardly anyone would be enthusiastic about that. Taboo-breaking is neither necessary nor sufficient. What about the idea that sex is (partly) visual but eating isn’t? This sounds on the right track: the visual plays a role in actual sex, but not so much in eating. We are stimulated by the look of a naked body but not by the look of a ham sandwich. But is it true that vision plays no significant part in the pleasure of eating? That sounds wrong; it plays some part. And isn’t sex in the dark or blind sex pretty exciting too? Yet we don’t thrill to a purely auditory representation of a sex act. It isn’t that the sense of sight is absent from the food case but essential in the sex case. However, what is true is that sex is typically private and eating is not; and vision is what reveals the private most forcefully, as in voyeurism. Is it that sex porn satisfies our curiosity about this private matter, while food porn would do nothing analogous because eating is public? If we invert the two, the asymmetry seems to fade away: if all sex were public all the time, so that we were inundated with the stuff, we might lose our interest in porn; but if eating were always done privately, away from prying eyes, we might find some frisson in seeing images of it. It’s a question of privacy and curiosity. Yet we don’t have a comparable interest in toilet activity and it is also private; and I doubt there would be much of a market for food porn once the initial novelty wore off (how many times can you watch a man eating a hamburger?). The visual element seems part of the appeal of pornography, and lack of appeal of the food counterpart, but we have not yet identified the crucial difference. It begins to seem quite puzzling.

The puzzle deepens when we recall that food and sex are not just analogous but also connected. People seem to enjoy coupling the two (while coupling) and food-sex pornography is apparently quite popular. Yet no one is interested in pure food porn (except the odd gastronomic weirdo): people don’t want to salivate to the image of a roast chicken or a serving of sushi, no matter how much they may enjoy eating these things. Watching people eat is just not arousing or fascinating or exciting. It is the sex part of food-sex porn that gets people’s juices flowing not the food part. At this point we might be tempted to wax metaphysical: pornography is all about the human condition, death, embodiment, the soul. I don’t think this is completely wrong: thoughts of our animal nature, our talent for creative ideas, our strange juxtaposition of the godly and the goofy, our understanding of interpersonal relations, our grasp of the phenomenon of common knowledge, the mystery of reproduction, civilization and its discontents—all these may come into play. But they omit the primordial character of the depicted sex act—what really sets it apart viscerally. And here I want to mention an obvious fact: the genitals are on full display in all their anatomical glory. And the genitals are of enormous interest to us, because they are the organs of reproduction; the genes have programmed us to be obsessed with the genitals. Their future depends on them. The genitals are objects of endless fascination because of their biological centrality. If we had no interest in them, reproduction would grind to a halt (under normal conditions). I would bet that if you showed a video of the rear end of a female ape in heat to a male ape you would get a reaction. Copulation is genital, trivially. So, pornography is popular because of an ancient biological imperative: genital awareness, genital competence. Sexual selection is part of this: the genitals need to be seen to be present and healthy. Nothing like this holds in the case of food—the female is not going to reproduce with food! Genital know-how is what pornography efficiently enables, and that is useful knowledge to have. Genital curiosity is built into the genes and pornography satisfies this curiosity. A taste for porn is therefore innate and unavoidable. One might even conjecture that pornography works as a learning tool for the human species (think of the wall porn in old Pompei). If we combine this with the other suggestions mooted above, we can see why sex porn has a special interest not shared by food porn. We have no particular interest in plumbing the depths of the mouth and stomach, but the genitals are another ball of wax. We need to keep track of them in sexual encounters, hence the visual element, and their general hiddenness and privacy deprives us of ready access to their anatomy. Pornography enables us to remedy these difficulties. We can simulate in our minds the act depicted, which can then be applied in real life; it is a skill that has to be learned. That is the deep evolutionary meaning of pornography. Puzzle resolved.[1]

[1] I have relegated to a footnote one theory strangely popular these days, namely that the appeal of porn resides in its depiction of women as abused and degraded. This is not plausible as a general theory of the appeal of porn, though some porn no doubt trades on this deplorable proclivity. Obviously, much porn has nothing to do with it. Porn comes in many varieties, though the common factor is the genitals, one way or another. The genes program interest in the genitals and pornography caters to this instinctive interest.