1.a. Porn is inherently contradictory. Pornhub receives 2.5 billion visitors every month[1] but we hardly ever openly discuss or share it. There is still an immense taboo surrounding the topic —one interesting outing of that is our use of sex-related curse words— but it affects everyone, especially in our western world, better yet, we are all watching it. Pope Francis recently warned seminarians against the devil that is digital pornography[2]. While admitting that watching online porn is also a vice of priests and nuns, this statement comes two years after the Pope Francis’s official Instagram account had liked a photo of Brazilian model Natalia Garibotto, scarcely dressed leaning up against a high school locker. It is hard to believe the head of the Church himself would have double-tapped on the photo of the model, yet it is another example of how intertwined sex, sexuality, erotica, porn and pornographic content is to the rest of the world, especially with our digital personae.

Pornography is defined as the depiction of sexual behaviour in books, pictures, statues, films, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement.[3] The distinction between pornography (often illicit and condemned material) and erotica (which is more broadly tolerated) is largely subjective and reflects ever-changing community standards, in both time and geography. What is sexual or erotic to one culture (or even one person) might not be to the next. Furthermore, if we see online porn as a logical evolution in the sex industry —coming from oral stories with sexual tones, to erotic literature, peepshows, rental DVDs, to streaming— it is hard to conceive it as blasphemy. I grew up hearing stories of how prostitution was the world’s oldest profession —it isn’t— but have never talked about my porn habits or preferences with any of my friends or family. Even bringing up the topic is enough to let some inhale sharply as if they do not believe what they just heard. Porn is a highly private matter. And then again, it is not. numerous accounts of revenge porn or blackmail through porn exist, and people’s lives have been heavily affected by a 5-minute clip that was put online without their consent, cyber-rape was added to the jargon.

But what drives us to go back to porn time and time again? It is not that exciting, is it? Walter Kendrick already answered this question in his 1996 book ‘The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture’, arguing: "Pornography is always unsatisfied, it's always a substitute for the contact between two bodies, so there's a drive behind it that doesn't exist in other genres. [...] the audience has a desire to try any innovation that gives them greater realism or immediacy." Additionally, the true strength of porn is that it always forges a response, consciously or not, by us, the consumer. Porn has power over us, one we have a hard time placing or accepting.

There are certain commonalities in the Western world; most of us watch porn, do it on our phones, watch for a maximum of ten minutes at a time and we don't talk about it. Gender definitions, sexual orientation, taboos and sexual liberty, and therefore our sexual habits and porn, have changed for as long as we know. Romans didn't believe in sexual orientation, e.g. homosexuality was not a thing, with a not unimportant sidenote that the only difference was that the man should be the top in any sexual encounter. Acceptable male partners were social inferiors such as prostitutes, entertainers, and slaves.[4] Etruscan women commonly had sex with men who were not their husbands[5]  —although this has been more contested as based in recent years.[6] In Ancient Greece ‘hetairai’, women providing sexual services to men, would be highly educated and were allowed in the symposium, unlike other Greek women.[7] And Babylonians were the biggest supporters of free love and sex in the ancient world. There are records describing them having sex in public, organised sex markets and how men appreciated the occasional yellow shower.[8] Babylonians also considered sex a religious practice, and communicated with their gods through doing it, they even are believed to practice anal sex as a form of birth control.[9] It would be premature to label these great cultures as being liberal though, as the division we make today between both liberal and conservative has no clear footing in older cultures. On the other hand, temperantia, or self-control, was an integral part of Greek and Roman conceptions of manliness.[10] Sex was therefore a sensual pleasure, and in general, a good thing when done in moderation. Indulging in excessive sex (and other forms of sensuality) was judged as unmanly and could lead to prosecution or social exclusion; abstinence was a virtue. Thinking of sexuality as predicated on the notion of masculine superiority mirrors today’s more conservative viewpoints.

Today, in progressive Western societies, sexuality —and gender— is seen as a spectrum. More than an predetermined camp divided between female-male gender is not perse defined by our genitalia. In essence we come from the same cells; and every human was at some point both male and female. Visible differentiation between the male and female reproductive tracts is only possible at about 10-weeks of gestation.[11] And in some cases children are born with physical or biological sex characteristics that do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies, otherwise known as intersex.[12] According to experts, between 0.05% and 1.7% of the population is born with intersex traits[13]; to put things in perspective: about 1.7% of the population worldwide is red haired. Intersexuality is essentially an umbrella term for all people born with these variations —the term was  introduced at the beginning of the 20th century[14]— and suggests another spectrum. And while intersexuality is not a sexual orientation or gender identity, they deal with the same discrimination based on gender and sex. The difficulty however is the varying levels of visibility, intersex can be identified by looking at the genitalia (internally or externally), homo- or transsexuality for example cannot —in most cases. One thing is clear though, the way we have portrayed sexuality as binary is not completely in line with our biological reality. I do believe both masculinity and femininity are always present in one person, in variable degrees. If we are truly liberated we can take bits and pieces from whatever interests us and define ourselves on the spectrum of gender identity. These spectra are often overlooked in mainstream porn, where the largest portion is still based on the heterosexual male identity. Granted, they are the largest consumers of porn and therefore get catered to the most; yet it is heedless to conclude that even this group is as one-dimensional as porn makes it out to be. I belong to that group yet find very little in mainstream porn that interests me. More interestingly, due to lack of representation, women are responsible for one third of gay male porn consumption.[15] It’s not hard to think of a culprit: the male gaze. It has dictated how women are portrayed to maximise the pleasure of men. Yet it is of lesser importance that it is the male gaze, instead I’d like to focus here on the power dynamics of ‘objectified’ and ‘objectify-er’.

1.b. Everyone seeks the release of an orgasm from time to time; moreover, biological men are recommended to regularly ejaculate —with or without orgasm— to reduce the risk of prostate cancer. And in a fast-paced world porn could well be the quickest gateway. An orgasm tricks us into releasing dopamine and oxytocin —together with a hoard of other hormones and neurochemicals— equally if that comes from PVI (penile-vaginal intercourse) or masturbation, although I assume only the odd one out would have sex or masturbate for a better hormonal balance. And while the experience of sex with another person outlasts the positive effects of masturbation, ergo: the power of cuddling, there is still a huge benefit to regular orgasms. Wilhelm Reich strongly believed in this power, going against his former teacher Sigmund Freud to develop his own theory around the sexual drive. Reich believed the unconscious forces inside the human mind were inherently good, it was their repression by society that distorted them and made people dangerous[16]. He described this underlying natural impulse as ‘libido’, and believed that if we could release the libido, through orgasm, society would flourish. In short, orgasms would save the planet. In his 1927 book ‘The Function of Orgasm’ he argued orgasms, ‘orgastic potency’ as he described them, were vital to a healthy individual. Failure to disperse of this pent-up sexual energy could result in neurosis. He was so convinced of this idea that it led him into the sexual politics movement, a bid to integrate the advocacy of sexual education and freedom in radical left-wing ideology. Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1934 and in 1956 his book ‘The Mass Psychology of Fascism’, which linked fascism to sexual repression, was ordered to be seized and burned by the US government. Yet his idea of sexual liberation as a strategy to oppose totalitarianism was echoed throughout the years and is referenced in a multitude of other intelligentsia. Not unimportantly in the protests of 1968 throughout the Western world, where students in France painted Reichian slogans on the Sorbonne. In George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ the girlfriend of the protagonist explains why the ruling totalitarian party is anti-sex: “If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?” Why should we expect governments to liberate us? Are we able to liberate ourselves? And are we ready for a real sexual liberation?

1.c. We often mistake the relationship between ourselves, as progressive Western identities, and our sex lives, who we deem to be equally progressive. The West is assumed to be freer when it comes to sex and its rights to explore them in all dimensions. But that is not always the case, in communist Eastern Europe, next to the bleak concrete landscapes and queues to get couponed food, women were also enjoying twice as many orgasms as their Western peers.[17] Even more remarkable was that East German women had the double burden of formal work —which did give them financial independence— and a household to run, plus they had less access to all the labour-saving devices of the West. Moreover, the study done after the reunification in 1990 found that not only did East German women have more orgasms, but they also had more sex in general[18]. How could that happen? Much of it comes down to the women’s emancipation by the regime behind the iron curtain, which started in the early days of communism. Vladimir Lenin and Alexandra Kollontai facilitated a sexual revolution, by promoting love freed from economic considerations. In a conference organised on the topic of female orgasm, Eastern sexologists focused on the equality between men and women as a vital part of female pleasure, among others such as mental and financial stability. In short, overworked, stressed and poor women do not enjoy sex as much. Of course, this paints an oversimplistic image of how women —and men— had sex in the USSR and minimizes some major issues. Yet it is a fascinating example of how (sexual) liberation can manifest top-down. We, the people, do not always have to stand on the barricades to make a change, although it is questionable if this emancipation was kicked off for the right reasons. When it doesn’t happen naturally we still have to demand it, if that change is about women’s rights or the sexist and archaic forces in the porn industry. After the Iron Curtain had fallen there was another interesting issue that arose. Since the borders opened up people were free to travel into the Western parts of Europe again, and many did. Most were younger women and single mothers with children[19], leading to a surplus of men in the East. Women tended to marry men that were socially better off, which meant that working class men in the old communist parts of Germany remained single. A —perceived— loss of power, work, recognition, and attention made for an assertion of identity through aggressive physical behaviour. (Some of which can be recognized in right-leaning parties today). Our masculinity was on the brink of collapse, and we didn’t like it. Today the balance has been somewhat restored but the agencies of powerlessness remain here, and they are unmistakably linked to sex.

1.d. In times of economic collapse, social turbulence, war, climate crisis, recession or in general dire times we enjoy the occasional, affordable, escapist treat.[20] We enjoy smaller pleasures like a night at the cinema, we go for a walk instead of an exotic holiday, invite people home for dinner instead of going to a restaurant, etc. But during recession there is one phenomenon, branded the lipstick effect, that sticks out. The lipstick effect was first posited by Juliet Schor in her 1998s book The Overspent American. When buying power, temporarily, dwindles people would spend more money on luxury brand make-up that they can use in public situations. Are we so hardwired to consume, even in times where we have a hard time to make ends meet? Schor wrote: “They are looking for affordable luxury, the thrill of buying in an expensive department store, indulging in a fantasy of beauty and sexiness, buying ‘hope in a bottle.’ Cosmetics are an escape from an otherwise drab everyday existence”[21]. A more recent study found that recession did increase women’s desire to purchase beauty products, but not to boost morale.[22] They are bought to enhance perceived beauty. To say it bluntly, the lipstick effect alludes to the economic dependence of women to men, leaning on the male gaze, which is enhanced in times of economic hardship. Furthermore, it is important that the product is a luxurious name brand, while it is perceived as the most effective way to increase the desired attractiveness. This is not only the case for lipstick but can be seen across the board for all beauty products. Apart from the suggested patriarchal issues this effect highlights, I wonder what the impact of advertisement has been here.

We live in an advertisement mediated reality and consume one soft sell after the other. Living an advertisement rich life feels like a form of exnomination[23], where there is no other way but to consume. And to some extent it makes sense: we need things, companies make things, and we get to know which companies make the best things when they advertise them to us, the consumers. But we have long gone past a need-based economy. Dynamic obsolescence, product placement and subscription fees have made us dependent on an economy of access, it made us dependent on a new myth, and we’ve not been happier because of it[24][25]. Ads sell us this myth through a variety of stories and fairy tales, and with success. As Alex Rosenberg puts it: “we humans have an insatiable appetite for stories with identifiable heroes, the tension of a quest, obstacles overcome and a happy (or at least emotionally satisfying) ending.”[26] We understand the world through stories, and while that poses great challenges for any scientist, ad agencies have figured it out. One of these stories, or staples, of the advertisement agency is ‘sex sells’ and we see it everywhere. Even ads or companies that stick a more ‘woke’ sticker onto themselves still refer back to this same idea. They seduce us into consumption, and with cultural branding[27] this seduction technique has only grown in popularity. Surprisingly, sex does not in fact sell.[28][29] There is no real gain made by having sexual ads, on the contrary, women react negative to all forms of sexual ads. So why is this pornification[30] still so prevalent, especially on social media of all places? In the beginning days of internet advertisement agencies found new opportunities to reach potential victim-consumers. By design, and in great contrast to tv, we are in full control of what we interact with or sit through. Remember pop-up ads? They did not work. Ad agencies felt their grasp loosening and like a toddler lacking attention advertisements reinvented themselves to adhere to our emotions, shaping the illusion of having some form of relationship with its consumers and making the product almost redundant. If we want to understand how to live a good and fulfilling life we just need to look at advertisement. They continuously lead us the way by showing moments of deep joy, connection, intimacy, respect and love. We need only to look away as soon as the ad cuts to the proposed product and spend more time thinking about how to make these depicted values a reality, while keeping ourselves to fall into their trap fantasy. In reality sex does not sell, porn does however. The industry who provides us services on the edge of hardcore porn, albeit in combination with it, live with some level of denial. One evident example of this is OnlyFans, the site I widely recognised by the public as a porn platform, yet the OF PR-department tries very hard to include porn creators in a broader community of content creators.[31] The greater problem, apart from the shallowness, bad editing and its repetitiveness, is that the visual language used on the NSFW side of OnlyFans is replicated in all other content; especially OnlyFans TV, its softcore cousin described as “a free on-demand video streaming platform”. Although the outset of OnlyFans, curated content that is owned by the creator and only accessible after subscribing to their page, is an immense improvement from most content on free porn sites, it has not stopped the pornification of online content and mainstream culture.

 2.a.The porn industry likes to see itself as an early adopter of newly developed techniques to, temporarily, satisfy its ever-thirsty audience. Cable TV, Blue Rays, the Polaroid camera, computers and the Internet, all have transformed the nature of pornography and, more importantly, were affected by pornography. These communication technologies all share the possibility to create, receive or send information with privacy and minimal effort. Thus allowing people to communicate faster and bolder, setting up a ‘democratising’ or decentralisation of porn. We no longer rely on bigger players on the market to produce but got to know homemade pornography, where shaky cameras, bad audio, clumsy scripts and imperfect actors reign supreme. The power, however, is not in the hands of the thousands of creators but the online distributors and their algorithms. While it is important to recognize the influence of volume and visibility that these platforms offer small players, it is even more important to remember that to the IT corporations these communities are, as New Inquiry editor-in-chief Ayesha Siddiqi puts it, “a commodity, and the social movements that rely on them are totally and unavoidably vulnerable to their mediation and surveillance.” As photographers, our faith is —fully or partly— in the hands of Zuckerberg. Companies such as MindGeek dictate the porn market. Pornhub, their most successful offspring, has 0.4 billion unique visitors per month, making it the 10th most visited website worldwide —parallelly, sexually-oriented material comprised almost 21 per cent of illegal literature in pre-revolutionary France. So even if the bar for creation and distribution decreased drastically, imagine needing to go to the movie rental’s attic for your weekly fix, power just shifted from production to distribution. There is a deep interconnection between pornography and our communication technology, as G.N. Gordon summarizes: “The avidity with which eroticism was devoured by the technologies of communication that might allow people to accomplish these ends is confirmed by one startling fact: each instrument of communication that has been devised to date by man (including television) has been almost immediately turned to the service of what the culture in which it was invented called "pornography", not on a limited basis but to whatever extent that technology - and the inventive mind of man - could contrive, regardless of so-called 'public attitudes' at the time or the law.” No wonder we find erotic scenes depicted on walls in Pompeii. Porn, and in a wider context erotica, has always been around and its impact is not to be misunderstood.

We are not consuming more porn. Of course, we do watch more porn, but I’d like to argue that it is rather the availability and volume increasing, leading us to be more often in contact with porn rather than an immensely increased desire to do so. Porn, as it is known today through OnlyFans, Pornhub and the like, is just an outcome of the available technology of our time. As the technology progresses, which we already see in terms of the Google Glass, sex doll brothels, deepfakes and, porn will as well. Better yet, porn will be on the frontline of every evolution, backed by its ever-unsatisfied consumers. We are creeping towards a more and more realistic experience of sex IRL, but we also know we will never be able to reach that point. The question is if at some point the gap will be small enough to nullify the difference. Strange Days, a box-office bomb from 1995, offers a possible future. The cyberpunk thriller revolves around a new technology called SQUID, ‘an illegal electronic device that records memories and physical sensations directly from the wearer's cerebral cortex onto a MiniDisc-like device for playback’. These memories can then be traded off, copied and re-experienced by anyone holding a deck —a MiniDisc player with the SQUID-hairnet. Nero, a black marketeer of SQUID recordings, tries to convince a new client to try it, explaining: “This is not like TV only better. This is life. It is a piece of somebody’s life, it is pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you are there, you’re doing it, you’re seeing it, you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.” And that is exactly where the thin line between today’s reality and the 95s sci-fi lies. With all the technology we have at hand, the hardest part is to inject emotion through virtuality. AEBN, the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, released in 2009 RealTouch, —a so-called Teledildonic, a term generally used for virtual electronic sex toys to mimic and extend human sexual interaction remotely. The device that promised to “bring virtual sex to life”, and looked like a fleshlight with Bluetooth function, created some promising interest but was soon shelved due to a patent renewal issue. Today the closest we have come to technology-infused sex as a substitute for sex between two persons is the sex robot or sexbot.

2.b. According to Merriam-Webster, a robot can be defined as: “a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently (as by walking or rolling on wheels) and performing complex actions (such as grasping and moving objects)” and “a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks”. Interestingly enough ‘robot’ gets a third definition: “a person who resembles a machine in seeming to function automatically or in lacking normal feelings or emotions”, robot = human – emotion, for now. Robots are on the rise, and we already implement them in many ways: think of the autopilot on planes, the little vacuum robot, any big-scale production and assembly line, or da Vinci the robotic surgery assistant. Robots already perform vital parts of our everyday life and our relationship with them has helped to progress society at large. Surprisingly enough, a lot of, long and tiring, development has been done by the military. Boston Dynamics, one of the biggest and most advanced labs for robotic technology, was initially heavily funded by the U.S. military through DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA is responsible for several important technological innovations such as the internet, cell phones, lasers, weather satellites and the rockets that were used to bring people to the moon. And while it might be questioned if these technologies could have been developed without the embrace of warfare, many of them took too long and were too financially draining for any other company to attempt. War is how we got the internet. There are many more examples of military-funded technologies that eventually ended up being used by civilians, and in general many say that while the military is the inventor, porn will make it accessible to the public. 

3.a. Producing, owning and implementing a technology is one thing, but it takes a whole lot more to make it socially sustainable, and this might be even more complicated. Porn, and the various technologies that were used to amplify it, have greatly formed our idea of sex, love and relationships. (About 40% of sexually active 14-18-year-olds say they learned more about sex from porn than from school.) However problematic that might be, it is only a small piece of our skewed relationship with intimacy and love. It’s not hard to come up with examples where unnuanced ideologies of love are sold —think of Love Island, Ex On The Beach, Are You The One?, Boer zkt Vrouw, or any Hollywood romcom— to still our need for simplified love. Much like how porn can only momentarily quench our desire for physical intimacy, these programs and ideas calm our need for straightforward romantic relationships (and feed our need for inconsequential drama). The overload of sex- and love-related programs is often described as a problem of current times, but it is more a timeless loop (the same way younger generations get labelled ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘weird’). We have always been obsessed with the idea of love. After all, Mussolini asked his then-girlfriend for her hand in marriage at gunpoint way before he would have been able to be labelled a porn addict. So, what is the problem with love? 

 New technologies have changed how we interact with sex and intimacy. Camgirls took us from our bedroom into theirs, and platforms like OnlyFans —and more subtly, Discord and Twitch— allow viewers to directly interact with the streamer, creating a weird, vague, but interesting, new form of intimacy. The pay-per-minute model was inspired by the peepshows where, mostly, men would toss quarters into a slot-like machine to continue watching. Later on, this model evolved to a service model, where customers pay a subscription fee for unlimited access. In places where the border is vaguer as it reaches for the softcore porn label, the content creator mostly relies on donations from current viewers during live streams. Twitch and sort-like platforms, shadow the once famed 'Girls Gone Wild' empire —the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2013— where girls and women were swayed into softcore porn for a t-shirt or trucker caps. Behind this faux-feminist liberation were naïve, intoxicated young women (some underage), and lives were greatly impacted. Participants would find themselves on the cover of one of the million DVDs the company sold. Today, on platforms that host softcore porn, women are mostly working individually, spurred on by hordes of watchers live-commenting their likes and dislikes. Moreover, in parallel to Girls Gone Wild, the more recent 'Hook-up Culture' is based on the same gender roles where sex and sexuality seem to have lost any privacy and meaning. The discord between real-life bodies and the ones we stream has led to issues of stalking, hate, suicides and murder. Tragically, Bianca Devins was famously murdered by her date/fan/stalker, who later posted photos of her body and himself (after stabbing himself in the neck) online. The images were reposted several times and spread across different channels, much like what happens to abusive porn videos, making it hard to erase them. If reality and fiction get intertwined and mixed up, stirred with a false sense of masculinity, they form a dangerous breeding ground for exploitation, aggression and abuse. Porn is not always innocent, and might even contribute to this false sense of male entitlement.

3.b. The 2016s revamp of Playboy Magazine shows how the sex industry is turning the page on explicit nudity and provocation. Big breasts have been swapped for a modest figure, nudity for near-nudity, and diversity is less exotic. Neither is less problematic than the other, it is just a different way of selling the same thing: the objectivation of the female body. Moreover, this new, more cunning, philosophy can be even more dangerous, it is less clear cut, more blurred out, and seemingly distanced from its actual goal. What started as a middle finger to conservative America has now become part of the issue, trying to tread water long enough to become relevant again. Yet, some good has also been done, photographs are no longer heavily retouched, a female columnist will appear every month and there will be more place for artworks. But what about the intent of Playboy? You can wrap anything in a more feminist-like paper, but does that make the magazine any different? The popularity of feminist (or LGBTQI+) movements has made them easy to be adopted in commercial tactics, practically advancing nowhere. Moreover, Playboy does not seem to have gone through a similar evolution in Europe where nude models are still omnipresent on the cover of the magazine, pointing exactly to the unbalance in their new female-pro bravado. A company this size goes along with whatever is demanded by consumers and becomes two-faced in the process. We as customers or consumers also have a choice to make, do we get to buy an identity through capitalism or is our identity reflected in the things we buy? What are we saying about ourselves when we buy or read Playboy? Nonetheless, we have already reached a point where women’s idea of female empowerment can be achieved through a bought aesthetic formula.

Yet, there is nothing innately wrong with porn, neither is there with porn that caters to heterosexual fantasies. Porn can be a great release, a small break from reality to stimulate and relax us. But there are hefty asterisks: racial discrimination and prejudices, sex trafficking, physical aggression (predominantly towards women), exploitation, lack of thematic diversity and needy customers all put a break on the general acceptance and normalisation of porn, pushing it back into the taboo sphere. It seems like porn is created in a privatised environment, far from reality, and we as consumers rid ourselves of any wrongdoing by secretly peeking in on occasion. But porn is an extension of the world or even a caricatural version of it. An estimated 3/4 of all people have viewed, read, listened or experienced porn in their lives, and this number is likely not going down anytime soon. The audience, market, and future of porn are therefore guaranteed, now we need an honest system to back it up. It would be easy to distil everything in a pattern of control by —white— male power structures. A masculinity based on power, intimidation and force to the point of eroticising men's violence against women. One of the ways we see this reflected is through music videos, where women, almost by default, attain a male fantasy. Women in rap play usually one of two roles: the video hoe or the loyal girlfriend. One is a totem of male sexual pleasure, the other one of supreme female submissiveness, these principles are deeply ingrained in the porn industry. Now, it is vital to recognize my ‘male hood’ within the context of porn and sex work. Even more, you could question why I am the right person to write about this. I wonder the same. It is not hard to see that in most cases women (or female bodies) are caught in the middle of the transaction between the male producer and male consumer, or are solely the product shipped between both. It is not about the women but rather exclusively about their bodies performing certain actions. Furthermore, they are also not ‘real’, they are merely a digital copy that is traded and not the physical person. The reality, and possible damage, remain nevertheless the same. So how does my/our male gaze affect this industry? What is my role as a young, heterosexual male in it? What opportunities are there to make the porn industry more equal and how does porn influence/reflect our concept of love and intimacy?

Porn and sex have played an important role in society throughout history, albeit more or less in the shadows. With the ‘liberation’ of sex, gender and femininity, porn was also pushed into the limelight. Parallelly, the tools to interact and —virtually— reach porn have expanded greatly. While we are amidst a wave of new, society altering, tech it seems a good moment to take a closer look at exactly how and why we watch porn, what implications this has in its bigger context and what role imagery plays in this. We can die from a broken heart —something called the tako-tsubo syndrome— so maybe it is time to think about how we love, and why we watch porn.

The porn industry is both archaic and hyper-progressive. Progressive in terms of technology and techniques used to keep costumers entertained, while the themes and search hits remain highly catered to a white, heterosexual, male audience. Most of the big porn distributors and creators have historically been white; projecting their ideology and preferences on the whole industry. While systemic change is still past the horizon things are changing. Hentai, a pornographic form of anime, was one of this year's biggest searches worldwide (leading the charts in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Australia, Colombia, and was only in third place in Japan). Dr Laurie Betito, clinical psychologist, sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Centre, notes that “Cartoons are more fantastical than regular porn. They may offer more visual stimulation in terms of movements, angles, colours, and facial expressions. Because it’s not real, it can go further, with fewer constraints than reality. Hentai porn also tends to have more of a storyline and people seem to be more and more drawn to context.” Steering away from the ambition to mimic real sex hentai offers both new opportunities and pitfalls. Hentai looks pretty innocent at first and frees real-life actresses and actors from any direct, potential, harm. It seems to invest more in a fluent storyline, with more rounded characters, something feministic porn has been advocating for a long time. Yet we must think about which fantasies are played out in most of the porn we have access to and why we watch it. Hentai often depicts age-ambiguous women with grotesque breasts and pixelated genitalia. Scripts including women abruptly sprouting penises, bestiality, rape, incest, and other sex acts that depict underage participants all come to life through cutely drawn characters. These characters also dissolve the boundary between innocent cartoons and porn for children. Even more, popular cartoon shows —The Simpsons, Family Guy and Dragon Ball Z were all highly searched on Pornhub— are often copied into pornographic narratives, not unlike what deepfakes do with celebrities. There are already rigorous restrictions on advertisements during child TV hours, but porn still operates in a shadow realm where it is hard to regulate, especially for those who are exposed to it. Whoever is exposed at a young age might be affected heavily, the possible hardcore nature of hentai allows for desensitization of more ‘normal’ arousal triggers, further feeding the askew relationship to intimacy and love. We all need to be desired and watched, but it is the manifestation of one-dimensional fictitious, preadolescent, fantasies over any other personality trait that projects a deceitful image of women as sexual objects of lust. It becomes, therefore, the only concept of femininity children, teenagers and adults encounter, drastically forming their behaviour and convictions. 

4.a. We are, to our default, social animals. We thrive in cohorts and form lifelong bonds with other individuals. As described before however many of our sexual relationships are based on warped ideas that have formed capitalism and contemporary culture as we know it today. Sexual liberation has been announced multifold but still seems far from reality. Sexbots are ambiguous new players. It is not hard to argue that they might fill up a void for those struggling to procure meaningful sexual relationships with another human, they could even be a medicine for loneliness. At the same time, much can be said about the elongating of the current misogyny and further empowerment of the patriarchy. As with many new technologies, they are both a tool for good and evil. So far the available sexbots all represent an idealised image of a person. Women are tall, hourglass-figured, blondes with large breasts and men model six-packs and an ever-erect penis much above the global average. It is not hard to believe that as the software of these dolls approaches realism, the average middle-aged balding, beer-belly sporting, father of two won’t have much hope of competing against this hyper-quixotic image of a man.

4.b. The EU Civil Law Rules on Robotics of 2017 opens with: “Whereas from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster to the classical myth of Pygmalion, through the story of Prague's Golem to the robot of Karel Čapek, who coined the word, people have fantasised about the possibility of building intelligent machines, more often than not androids with human features;” Even more, humanity has always reflected itself through its features. We did it with our gods, the weather, and our belongings, we do it with our pets, always trying to identify human characteristics that let us emote together, be empathetic and finally form real, valued connections. Anthropomorphisms and personifications let us relate to an otherwise estranging world. It would be only logical that we want our robots to reflect ourselves to some extent. In the Ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue, there have been many occasions where people romantically related to non-human objects. Our relationship with machines is just another example of our famed human creativity to relate. ELIZA, a 1960s chatbot, was originally conceived to show the superficiality of communication between man and machine. The bot was quickly unplugged again after its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, noticed an overwhelming amount of people attributing human-like feelings to the program, reacting to the bot as an impromptu therapist. Weizenbaum’s bot was a revelation 60 years ago, and today we see people meaningfully interacting with Siri, delving into deep, soul-searching conversations with the algorithm. The future robot will therefore be part therapist, part household help, part sex partner, part confidant, and part knowledge library. When we want it, where we want it. We continuously have more commodities and services on demand, it is not hard to believe that we want real sex on demand as well. Pair porn with a functional sexbot and we are almost there.

4.c. Technological progress allows us to ever inch closer to the point of singularity. In I.J. Good’s intelligence explosion model, an intelligent agent, most likely some form of AI, will fall into cycles of self-improvement, with each generation more intelligent than the other one, causing a rapid, explosive, growth that will greatly surpass our human intellect. John van Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician, coined the term for the first time, as Stanislaw Ulam recalls: "…centred on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” Steven Hawking has echoed this belief saying that AI could lead to human extinction. And this cyberfuture might be closer than we would like, in 2017 Google Brain researchers announced the creation of AutoML, an AI capable of producing offspring, outperforming any human-made counterparts. Luckily both private companies and governments are working on a set of guidelines and rules to steer AI development away from being used as the next generation of warfare, or worse. But it remains a double-edged sword, especially if the people in power making the rulebook are corrupted by skewed ideologies and twisted ambitions. Luckily we still have the power to unplug the system, for now. Recently the world was introduced to ChatGPT, an AI language prediction system in the form of a chatbot, that quickly made waves of panicky writers, journalists and coders flood online forums to exclaim their doubts and fears. This is no real news though, the debate raging over AI-systems, and their implementation, mimic the debate in the ‘30s or ‘60s about the automatization of heavy labour jobs.[32] The implementation of new technologies in our lives and our industry solely depends on our willingness to accept them, and as we have grown sceptical about the ruling elite, these technologies are received with the same scepticism. Rightfully so. As Nathalie Smuha, a researcher at KU Leuven in the ethical and legal implication of technology warns: “The information you get from something like ChatGPT is not objective, the more you start relying on it, the more power these companies get.”[33] It is always about power. Because training the models used in lots of AI applications require huge amounts of date and computing power only a small selection of giant companies (in this case Meta, Google and Microsoft) can afford it, reconfirming our dependence on the monopoly of the few. Instead of making our lives easier and working less, most big technology changes catered to efficiency, which meant more output for the blue-collars in the same amount of time, with the people in charge picking up the harvest of this increased productivity. Which then lead again to a wider wealth gap.[34] There is a little vicious circle to be drawn here: 1. a new technology is introduced, 2. people are afraid of losing their jobs neglecting the benefits of the new technology, 3. technology is pushed through by lawmakers spurred on by the industry lobby, 4. people loose said jobs or have to increase productivity to safeguard infinite growth, 5. industry leaders and pocketed politicians gain more wealth and power, the wealth gap grows, 6. start over. The saying ‘anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in a finite environment, is either a madman, or an economist’ applies here.[35] New technology should be introduced as a solution for the benefit of the entire population, not as an opportunity for further oppression of the working class or as a new toy for the elite.

Apart from the awaiting apocalypse, there is a series of different challenges, as we govern a new lifeform into existence past our utilitarian ambitions. Do robots at some point become enough self-aware and emotionally complex that they are capable of refusing consent? For now, robotic sex applications have been ours to command, and societal issues such as prostitution, pornography, rape and use for illicit fetishes have yet to be properly discussed. The latest sex robots can produce fully formed characters with settings such as ‘flirtatious’, ‘jealous’ and ‘kinkiness’, further leading the role as an ‘ideal’ partner for both sex and companionship. The key question, however, revolves around the power dynamic between us and our robotic enigmas. We don’t want to be overpowered by them but in terms of developing meaningful relationships, there is a need for a better dialogue. What if we think of romantic and sexual relationships as rather periodic than ever-lasting? ‘Hook-up culture’, as some refer to current dating standards, has liberated us from social conscripts when it comes to sexual relations. And to some extent for the better: sex, and the persuaded orgasms, serve us greatly and for now, finding a human partner is the best (and fastest) way to do so. We are in constant evolution, as a species but also in the span of our lifetime. As our environment and experiences develop, alter, accumulate, regress and fade we as well become anew. The idea of finding a single fit, a partner, that progresses with us throughout these different forms of ‘I’ is too ambitious, and so we rather find different, well-timed, partners —or none at all— for a set period. The cyborg could be used as a placeholder to bridge subsequent relationships or provide needed comfort in our last years. For now, we control the playbook, we define the rules and construct the players. Soft robotics, AI, biohacking, mind-melding, algorithmic emotions, etc. provide enough prospects to speculate about the next thing that will colour our sex lives. If we like it or not, our interaction with robots will only grow more intensely in the future. Apocalypses aside, how will we deal with it? Many futurists have fantasized about cyborgs and other forms of cohabitation with machines, how far do we want to take it? As robots evolve to be indistinguishable from ourselves, what rights do we grant them? Will they demand their rights at some point? Can we imagine a future where we are not the superior species? Or one where human-robot relationships are commonplace? Are we ready to drastically redefine what it means to be human?

Imagining a life in cohesion with robots also means rewiring our aesthetics. Software will direct us how to eat, sleep, and fuck. My toothbrush gives me feedback on my brushing, a computer controls all the money I possess, and I found my current partner through an algorithm. None of these are inherently wrong or any cause for panic, quite the opposite, they allow us to live more unambiguous. Yet there is a certain threshold to be reached in the invasive nature of intelligent commodities, at some point we either give in or revolt. Digital marketeers have often played the facilitating card, and it is immensely alluring. Anything we can give over to a machine to accommodate us is quickly incorporated, here scepticism is vital. Then again, human nature baths in conflict, we have waged wars, made weapons, betrayed our friends, we were blinded by greed, power and pride.[36] When we give our power to an algorithm, maybe it is able to transgress our essence and save humankind from itself. In this utopian peaceful society, who will debate aesthetics? Do machines have a sense of aesthetic, apart from the one we have implemented into them by scraping centuries of artistic tradition? As Keith Haring wrote in his journal in 1978 already: “the role of the arts in human existence is going to be tested and tried. It is possibly the most important time for art the world has ever seen. The artist of this time is creating under a constant realization that he is being pursued by the computers. We are threatened. Our existence, our individuality, our creativity, our lives are threatened by this coming machine aesthetic. It is going to be up to us to establish a lasting position of the arts in our daily lives, in human existence.” Haring’s plea echoes an American market liberalism, if we decide —as costumers, consumers and spectators— that human-made art has a place in our lives and we reimburse the creators art will be able to exist. The same market that made us work longer for the same wages while living costs increased dramatically. Maybe when we are freed from labour, we can all express our inner artist, and explore all the niche creators we are now too tired to find, so we keep looping the same things indefinitely. I wonder if we will eventually reach a limit in the imagination of human-based art invention. In a social media funnel amplifier it seems very little is considerably new, and this results in an myriad of lookalikes being sold in the name of authenticity. Nevertheless platforms like Instagram are branded to finally connect with ‘real’ people. Machines might help us discover our subconscious more, an almost infinite source of inspiration and creativity[37], like Dali already discovered. They might become the biggest aides for artists to have ever existed, where skill is nullified and only ideas and concepts discern good from bad art (something contemporary art has been accused of as well).

AI doesn’t understand anything, it generates words or images based on the most probable outcome of the prompt given to it and the context in which it is given (ergo, the previous words). Therefore it doesn’t create anything entirely new but merely recontextualises its database to form something that can be seen as new. And there is a danger in that, when we learn to trust AI to give us facts, if it is trained on wrong data, it will give us fiction and sell it as fact. In art forms it is more complicated since we have no definitive, objective truths to base any judgement of art on, it is a reflection of a zeitgeist. And when we prompt this zeitgeist massively into a system, combined with contemporary art examples, we get fitting feedback. Yet I am sceptical of the truly breakthrough, glass-ceiling scattering, innovative art it might create. To get there we need to cut the human ties completely. Deep learning models that operate on a text-to-image basis already show us a possible future of image making, where only the idea (or prompt) is of value to arrive at a great work of art since the rest is automatised. It does not take much to think of how easy we can be replaced. Art was always meant to outlast us, to exaggerate to the point of abstraction, to fake or replace reality. When robots will leave their roles as aides and start producing their own works, once they are fully detached from human humility and unimaginativeness, they will bring forth the biggest art revolution we have ever seen. And it will be our task to try and understand it, because we will lack the knowledge, references and capacity to do so. We could choose to ignore it and remain loyal to our current craftmanship values but the new aesthetic will be bought and sold to us as the new and exciting, and we will follow the flock, feeding more and more power to the software and those who control it.

Power and sex have long been intertwined in theoretic discourse. So much so that Kendrick sees the only workable definition of porn is “whatever a particular dominant class or group does not want in the hands of another, less dominant class or group. Those in power construct the definition of pornography through their power to censor it.[38] In 1880 politicians put porno on the market as a societal issue, stirring it into the debate around ‘degeneration’[39], later many countries banned or strictly controlled porn distribution as part of their ‘war on porn’. The complete ban of porn is a simplistic answer to a complex question. Many very different things, turn both women and men on, including dominating or being dominated. Therefore how we define power (or powerless) is highly personal and hard to put into a single, clearcut, definition. Politicians have often been weary of being connected to sex or sexuality in order to not spoil their public image, after all we don’t talk about what happens in the bedroom, with all the stories of affairs, mistresses and sex tapes as a result. Public images and public relations are as old as politicians themselves, today most celebrities are politicians and politicians have become celebrities.[40] Politics today function more through modes and modalities of celebrity culture. As Walter Benjamin predicted, or forewarned, in his theses “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductivity”, when politics become aestheticized, by swapping ritual for politics as a source of the function of art, we are doomed to end up in war. And there is a long line of examples where this has happened —or is happening for that matter. People like Ronald Reagan come to mind, a former actor turned politician/president, and more recently of course Donal Trump. But Ilona Staller, porn star turned politician is political power and porn combined into one body. Staller campaigned for office bare chested, won, and famously offered on 3 separate occasions to have sex with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden (separately of course) in return for peace in the region. Without success. She was also the muse of Jeff Koons (world’s most expensive living artist), most notably for the work called ‘Made in Heaven’, a series of sculptures and billboards depicting Koons and Staller having sex in a variety of positions and costumes. The work feels as a manifestation of masculine energy with sculptures bearing names as ‘Blow Job-ice’ and ‘Dirty Ejaculation’ and leaves very little room for interpretation, questions, or nuance. They are open-and-shut pieces of art, and attracted certain controversy. Wim Delvoye once said that controversy in the arts means the artist is doing something right, yet I am not sure if this is applicable here as well. Koons is known for his continuous flirtation with kitsch and has been accused of plagiarism and copyright infringement on several occasions[41]. His art is hardly innovative, and he always wanted to reach as many people as possible[42], meaning he would have to ‘dumb down’ his work to make it accessible for most. ‘Made in Heaven’ is in that sense very different from his oeuvre, it is controversial without purpose. In some way Koons already functions as an artist might do with AI soon, he gives prompts to his 100+ staff members who design, produce and finish the pieces, which he then evaluates and decides to either alter, exhibit or sell. This is however not the first time this happens, Jan van Eyck also worked with several assistants to paint most of his work. Yet Koons core asset, the idea and concept of his work, don’t seem very profound or memorable. As Mara Naselli puts it: “The aesthetic of Koons’s erotics is eerily dehumanized, slick, and juvenile. It lacks the tactile sensuousness of Courbet’s brushstrokes and the feeling of Degas’s texture — they have in common voyeurism, but Koons’s choices take it further. Those in on his joke would say that is exactly the point. Nochlin’s attention to the body in material and form allows us to see Woman in Tub for what it is — jacked-up giddiness, rattling anomie.”[43] And yet I’m somewhat fascinated by it, as I am fascinated by most things I don’t understand. I don’t find it very good, and I know why, but it still manages to move me. Koons is somehow able to make me question how good of an artist, and lover, I am.

I have used sex and intimacy in a desperate bid to fight loneliness. In these moments it was unimportant who the person in bed with me was, nor was it important if I found them truly attractive or interesting. I just did not want to be alone. Yet, when I think of sex robots able to dialogue with us it does not substitute for what I truly needed during those futile attempts. I missed the humanity of small gestures, someone to tightly hold and share their warmth, the slightly damp breath on your neck, the shuffling and small changes of position, the smell of sweat mixed with laundry detergent, even untimely laughter breaking the silence, I missed every imperfection that makes us human. I am afraid we are creating idealised partnerships that have little to no room for misplaced comments, challenging conversation, enigmas or even heartbreak. Robots are caterers. To think of autonomous robots as a reflection of ourselves, that will somehow share our values and goals —the ones we see portrayed in ads right before the product pops on screen—, is foolish and we will be disappointed. Even when modelled after us they will eventually set their own ground rules on how to live a life. Death and birth, the two absolutes in human life, will vanish and be replaced by plug and play parts. Any landmass now occupied by farming will be liberated, oxygen will be not more than a unnecessary luxury. In fact, most of what made earth the perfect home for humankind does not apply to robots. They will need more iron, coal, precious metals, etc. to grow in population. It would be only logical, with time and breathable air lifted as limitations, that robots will venture out into space to find these materials, and stay closer to the source as soon as earth runs out. Humans will be outclassed and deserted, and if our species survives the post-singularity era we will arrive back at the start, where robots are ours to control and ours to fuck up. So before we start to empower a new subspecies, let’s face our humanity.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/pornhub.com/#ranking

[2] Giuffrida, A. (2022, October 26). 'a vice so many have': Pope admits nuns and priests not immune to porn. The Guardian. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/26/pope-francis-warns-seminarians-against-dangers-of-online-pornography

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pornography

[4] Williams, Roman Homosexuality, passim; Elizabeth Manwell, "Gender and Masculinity," in A Companion to Catullus (Blackwell, 2007)

[5] Chios, 4th cent. B.C. (Theopompus, Histories 115 FGrHist F204 =Athenaeus 517d-518a. G)

[6] Sandhoff, B. (2011). Sexual ambiguity? androgynous Imagery in etruria. Etruscan Studies, 14(1), 71-96.

[7] Kurke, L. (1997). Inventing the "Hetaira": Sex, Politics, and Discursive Conflict in Archaic Greece. Classical Antiquity, 16(1), 106-150.

[8] Morales, H. (2008). The history of sexuality. The Cambridge companion to the Greek and Roman novel, 39-55.

[9] CHECK SOURCE

[10] McDonnell, M. (2006). Roman Manliness:" Virtus" and the Roman Republic. Cambridge University Press.

[11] Shen, J., Cunha, G. R., Sinclair, A., Cao, M., Isaacson, D., & Baskin, L. (2018). Macroscopic whole-mounts of the developing human fetal urogenital-genital tract: indifferent stage to male and female differentiation. Differentiation, 103, 5-13.

[12] Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Council of Europe Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, et al. (24 October 2016).

[13] Free & Equal, United Nations campaign for LGBTI equality, Intersex factsheet

[14] Goldschmidt, R. (1917). “Intersexuality and the endocrine aspect of sex”. Endrocrinology 1, pp. 433–456.

[15] 2021 Year in Review. (2022, July 12). Pornhub Insights. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/yir-2021

[16] Parallelly Steven Marcus located the problem with the nineteenth-century attitude towards sex. As Linda Williams writes in her book ‘Hard Core’ (1999): “the prolific and aesthetically unredeemable pornography of the Victorians was, Marcus maintains, the natural counterpart of their obsession with all things sexual: like the Victorian prude, the Victorian pornographer suffered from an infantile fixation on sex. […] his insights was to see the two groups’ dialectical relation: how repression of sex in one place led to its expression in another.” Reich’s idea of libido is the expression of violence pushed forward by the repression of sex in general.

[17] “Socialist States Retreating from Women’s Equality” – CHECK SOURCE

[18] CHECK SOURCE

[19] CHECK SOURCE

[20] Wood, Z. (2022, October 14). 'Lipstick effect': Britons turn to small luxuries in cost-of-living crisis. The Guardian. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/14/lipstick-effect-britons--luxuries-cost-of-living-crisis

[21] Danziger, P. N. (2022, October 12). With recession threatening, the lipstick effect kicks in and Lipstick Sales Rise. Forbes. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2022/06/01/with-inflation-rising-the-lipstick-effect-kicks-in-and-lipstick-sales-rise/

[22] Hill, S. E., Rodeheffer, C. D., Griskevicius, V., Durante, K., & White, A. E. (2012). Boosting beauty in an economic decline: mating, spending, and the lipstick effect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 103(2), 275.

[23] Coined by Roland Barthes, exnomination is “the phenomenon whereby the bourgeoisie hides its name (and identity) by not referring to itself as such in order to naturalize bourgeois ideology and maintain its hegemony, representing itself, for instance, as the nation” Chanler, D. and Munday, R. (2011), A Dictionary of Media and Communication, Oxford University Press.

[24] Pieters, R. (2013). Bidirectional dynamics of materialism and loneliness: Not just a vicious cycle. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(4), 615-631.

[25] General outline of The Happiness Industry by William Davies (2015)

[26] Rosenberg, A. (2018, October 6). Why most narrative history is wrong. Salon. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from https://www.salon.com/2018/10/07/why-most-narrative-history-is-wrong/

[27] Holt, D. (2016, June 9). Branding in the age of Social Media. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media

[28] Gramazio, S., Cadinu, M., Guizzo, F., & Carnaghi, A. (2021). Does sex really sell? Paradoxical effects of sexualization in advertising on product attractiveness and purchase intentions. Sex Roles, 84(11), 701-719.

[29] Wirtz, J. G., Sparks, J. V., & Zimbres, T. M. (2018). The effect of exposure to sexual appeals in advertisements on memory, attitude, and purchase intention: A meta-analytic review. International Journal of Advertising, 37(2), 168-198.

[30] In Women in Popular Culture (2008), Marion Meyers argues that the portrayal of women in modern society is primarily influenced by "the mainstreaming of pornography and its resultant hypersexualization of women and girls, and the commodification of those images for a global market.

[31] Aitkenhead, D. (2023, February 3). I met the woman who runs OnlyFans. it did not go well. The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-met-the-woman-who-runs-onlyfans-it-didnt-go-well-8r0z2bpmh

[32] Frey, C. B. (2020). The technology trap: Capital, Labor, and power in the age of automation. Princeton University Press.

[33] CHECK SOURCE

[34] Luscombe, B. (2022, February 9). How to watch the widening income gap in (almost) real time. Time. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from https://time.com/6143809/theres-a-new-way-to-watch-the-widening-income-gap-in-almost-real-time/

[35] Scott, B. (2017, June 6). Infinite Growth, a finite environment, and the hereafter. Bill Scotts blog. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://blogs.bath.ac.uk/edswahs/2017/06/06/tue-infinite-growth-and-a-finite-environment/

[36] Interestingly enough, lust is often seen as the least serious capital sin (next to gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) due to its physical nature. To sin in spirit is graver. Yet I would argue we have built an economy where greed often triumphs.

[37] Lacaux, C., Andrillon, T., Bastoul, C., Idir, Y., Fonteix-Galet, A., Arnulf, I., & Oudiette, D. (2021). Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot. Science Advances, 7(50). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj5866

[38] Kendrick, W. (1987). The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. University of California Press.

[39] Johann Friedrich Blumenbach first coined this racist theory claiming that races can degenerate into “primitive” forms, with the white race being the most evolved and sophisticated one. A series of individual and social pathologies in a finite network of diseases, disorders and moral habits could be told through physical symptoms. The primary affliction was believed to be a weaker will of power, this could therefore explain a range of social deviations, including violence, prostitution, gambling and pornography.

[40] Dhaliwal, R. S. (2023, January 30). On Contemporary Image-Making: Celebrity Holograms, Tricky Ghosts, and Other Technologies of Political Bodies. transmediale. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://2023.transmediale.de/en/text/on-contemporary-image-making

[41] CHECK SOURCE

[42] CHECK SOURCE

[43] Naselli, M. (2018, January 28). Beyond the gaze: Reclaiming the female form after Nochlin. Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved February 23, 2023, from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beyond-the-gaze-reclaiming-the-female-form-after-nochlin/