NEW YORK — The neo-puritan and anti-porn scolds love using the word “porn” because it lets them sound certain to each other while saying absolutely nothing to the rest of the world. They throw it around as if it were a precise category, when they’re really just using it as a catch-all insult for sexual material they dislike (and they think they’re being clever about it). It’s intellectual laziness masquerading as moral seriousness…
They can’t define it clearly because clear definitions would force distinctions they don’t want to make. They would have to separate consensual from coercive, fantasy from reality, commercial from private, art from trash, eroticism from obscenity, representation from exploitation. God forbid, that would require actual thought. “Porn” lets them skip all that and leap straight to disgust.
That’s why they always look ignorant when they use it so confidently. The word is doing all the work their argument can’t. It’s a cultural sneer, almost a slur, pretending to be analysis. They say “porn” the way a superstitious person says “evil spirit,” as if naming something badly were the same as understanding it.
They flatten the relationship between porn and pornography, as though the shortened word has magically settled the matter. But pornography, like other forms of media, can be artful or artless, expressive or mechanical, thoughtful or disposable. It can carry aesthetic value, emotional value, cultural value, and yes, sexual value. None of that disappears just because someone says the shorter word with enough contempt.
They lump every form of sex work into “porn” too, as if a prostitute on the street, a performer in a studio, an erotic photographer, a cam model, and a dirty magazine are all one indistinguishable moral blob. That isn’t sophistication. It’s what happens when disgust does the thinking and intellect gets locked out of the room.
As for me, I sell SMUT. I’m not confused about that, and I’m not ashamed of it. There’s nothing lofty about most of it. It’s not a sermon, not a museum piece, not a self-help program. It’s meant to arouse you, help you do what you have to do, and then let you get on with your life. And that’s enough. Not everything people consume has to redeem them. Some things are there to stimulate, amuse, distract, or satisfy. Smut is no different from a tabloid, junk food, gossip, or any other little jolt of pleasure people reach for because it gives them what they want in the moment. The only real difference is that the puritans, or the scolds as I’ve come to call them, are more embarrassed by desire than by dopamine.
Yup, I sell smut.
They sell contempt dressed up as concern.
At least I’m honest about my product.
P.
ART BY LAURENT ANASTAY PONSOLLE
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