In the 1950s Superman television series, the townspeople regularly gathered on the street, pointed up at the sky, and exclaimed, “It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!” If only it were that easy to clearly identify what pornography is. It’s hard to think of anything more difficult to classify.
Our general sense of what porn is can differ dramatically depending on whether we like it and use it, or fear it and think it should be banned. Porn advocates are quick to call it “harmless visual stimuli,” “free speech,” and “eye candy,” while porn critics call it an “insult to sex,” a “cultural pollution,” and a “sex-crime manual.”
Depending on circumstances and perspectives, porn can function as lots of things: a product, a fantasy, a sexual stimulant, a sin, free speech, a game, a drug, a sexual competitor, a guide, a show, a sexual predator, a perversion, art, a crime, or a joke. We can experience porn as one thing at one time in our lives and another thing later on. Or we can relate to it as several things at once. Our confusion about what to call porn contributes to its hidden power and ability to influence our lives. Without a clear consensus on what it is, as a society we are constantly debating its nature instead of studying its impact and agreeing upon the smartest and healthiest way to deal with it.
In addition, each one of us has our own sense of whether a specific drawing, photo, book, or film is pornography. Whether we see something as pornographic depends on a number of factors, such as our age, sex, upbringing, and cultural background, as well as on how porn impacts us physiologically, emotionally, and morally. This is why couples fight, for example, over whether the Sports Illustrated magazine’s annual swimsuit edition is pornography.
More than forty years ago, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart made the now famous comment about pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” While his comment generated a few chuckles given Justice Stewart’s notoriously poor eyesight, it brought home the point that porn is in the eye of the beholder. What this means is that when something looks and feels like pornography to you, for you in that moment, it is.
We describe pornography as any sexually explicit material that is intended to be or is used as a sexual outlet. Our definition doesn’t rest on how sexually graphic porn is or on the nature of its subject matter, but rather on the type of relationship a person develops with the sexual material. Unlike sex education materials, which provide accurate information about sex, and erotic art and literature, which are produced to celebrate the human body and sexuality, the goal of porn is to sexually arouse and, ultimately, involve the consumer in a sexual relationship with it.
Porn’s power comes from its ability to provide an experience of sexual stimulation coupled with immediate gratification. Porn asks the potential user, “Why bother with setting the mood, meeting the needs of another person, or even taking off your clothes, when sex can be just a mouse or remote control click away?”