Thursday, April 1, 2010

Stop Calling It Porn!

I am really offended by 'porn'. And I don't mean videos, pictures, or any other medium depicting sexuality or sex. That's fine. I'm offended by people calling everything some sort of porn.

The movie 2012 was called disaster porn. The Food Network is called food porn. Anything with luscious landscapes is called scenery porn. Any particularly gory movie is gorn (gore + porn).

Pornography doesn't mean that something is extreme. It means that something sexual (and usually explicit) is going on. It originally meant writing about harlots. And although I understand and accept that words change definition over time, this one really bugs me. It comes off as cheap and ineloquent to say the least. I also don't want it to be another stale synonym of "very". I never want to hear somebody say something like "my Swiss army knife is pornographically useful." It creates some very disturbing images.

When I hear it, disaster porn is an orgy in the twin towers on 9/11. Food porn involves cucumbers in the. . .well, you can guess. And I don't even want to get into what gorn would be.

This isn't so much about creating as it is about critiquing. Still, critique is integral to writing. Being able to be as specific and exact as possible when you critique some one is pornographically useful. (nope, it still feels wrong)

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