I’ve pondered long on the concept of Pornography of Violence (PoV). As an acronym it chimes neatly with Point of View (POV) too, putting us in the room in various digital symphonies of sex or destruction, as well as being someone’s point of view or eruptive soundbite you could find in any TikTok or YouTube short (think any Trump messaging his base with calls to action of violence, or casual bigotry).
I first heard of the pornography of violence around the time that Will Self wrote so commandingly about it in the Guardian (in what seems to be from another time completely than now: 2014). His piece which starts with a fiendishly crafted victim POV slice of fiction was inspired by the villains of that decade, ISIS who shocked the world with their highly performative and vile acts of decapitation of Western hostages.
The ISIS years, in my opinion really set the bar high for the pornography of violence by mixing real world horror with increasingly sophisticated production values and public theatre spectacle.
You remember Islamic State, don’t you? I mean, think about it, it’s only a decade ago since they did their little dance all over the Middle East, but it feels longer, right? But that’s probably when the shit turbulence started that got us here to where we are in PoV2024 where the line between pornography and violence is completely blurred as it is between realities experienced outside of war zone of your choice.
One could almost imagine 2024 being the final convulsion of two mutually attracting phenomena that started copulating in meme space decades ago, the products of which are now being greedily consumed by humans simutaneously fascinated by but immured to horror.
Will Self at the time saw it more in terms of a world populated by dyspeptic, passive, (read bovine) over-consumers and addicts to violence in production, reproduction and postproduction when he wrote in December of 2014:
‘No, what we couch potatoes are suffering from is the most acid imaginable reflux, as we chew the cud of our addiction to the pornography of violence and its consequences.’
But in 2024, this gobbling of sex and destruction media has become an obsessive-compulsive act. Simultaneously we are both audience and transmitting sex organs of the digital technologies that convey it — worker ants in a labyrinthine hive of mass reproduction, bloodlust dissemination and consumption.
In 2024, are we experiencing the consequences of that addiction which Self predicted? Acid imaginable reflux is an interesting juxtaposition of ideas hinting at something almost hallucinatory in its biliousness.
We’ve already been primed for binge watching, a phenomenon that kicked off two years before Self’s article with digital streaming and violent fantasy shows like GoT in 2011 and lives on to this day in various graphic mini-series. These extended submersions into fantasy suggest a kind of mental cocooning — an insulation against reality, as it were.
Binge watching aside, I would argue that this vicarious digital fantasy consumption got its first exposition in the increasingly violent first-person video games and video nasties kicked off in the 90s. These fantasies of violence have only built in complexity and graphic detail as the decades progress while steadily building our tolerance for more violence.
As for pornography, well it’s as old as antiquity but our modern-day version could be encapsulated by Pornhub, that digital success story kicked off in Canada in 2007 — only seven years before Self’s article.
It’s not insignificant that today it’s the 17th most visited website globally and the one stop shop and secretion clearing house for horny freaks of every stripe. Even in the ‘hetero- vanilla sections’ of Pornhub, acts of choking, humiliation and defilement towards women have gradually crept into its exposition.
It’s not a new idea but if this is the kind of exposure to sex that children and adolescents receive, it casts a long shadow over the sexual mores of all future generations (not to mention the present day enraged incels that consume porn like pizza delivery men, seeing but never tasting the product).
Forgive me for joining the dots, but don’t you think that post 2000, our modern consciousness has been continuously fashioned by a staccato beat of dopamine click rushes and violence as spectacle? The pornography of violence has been enshrined in almost all we perceive whether fact or fiction.
Taking these phenomena together, we now find ourselves at the upward part of the sigmoid digital adoption curve where producers and consumers of stuff like deepfake porn, no limits hentai, or snuff videos can feed and feast, seemingly without censure.
The uncanny valley has become the garden of earthly delights delivered straight to the couch.And whether one cares to distinguish from real or fake, the damage has already done to our fragile psyches. Once something has been seen, it can’t be unseen.
Digital portrayals of violence and assaults against the body are equally graphic, mixing incongruously with real footage. As the Self article inferred in 2014, we were already then approaching a Dr Strangelove climax of violence where we can ride a nuclear weapon to its target. That was imagined in 1964.
In 2024 you can literally follow a Ukrainian kamikaze FPV drone visual feed until it dissolves into static upon impact with a tank or infantry man. These are no longer human beings rendered into atoms but rather, Non Player Characters (NPC). And when this digital line between audience and reality is blurred and crossed, the moral imperative to shun it or control its consumption is weakened.
I think you would agree that we are at a weird juncture in human history in 2024. The two main wars being fought in the media, first Ukraine and now Gaza make no sense to anyone, least of all, I would wager, the combatants. Both are David and Goliath struggles in their vulgar asymmetry and the pornography of their violence.
The former, if you unpick it is just another brutal and shabby landgrab from the Russians before their demographic implodes. The death and destruction from battlefields and civilian bombings come at you in short and long form feeds.
In Gaza, we are invited to join in the moral outrage that ensued from the pornography of violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. It’s hard to imagine a more retina-burning montage of wanton sadism committed against civilians and soldiers on that day.
From whichever end of the kaleidoscope that you perceive it, the slab of glass and steel or the UHD screen in your room of choice, these theatres of war screening the pornography of violence have your attention — you can’t look away.
Judging though from the little I have seen and heard of the October 7th acts, it seems that the perpetrators outperformed the Taliban, ISIS insurgents and Jack the Ripper for all the indignities they invited upon their victims and their bodies pre and postmortem.
The Israelis wasted no time sharing these horrors with an international body of journalists undoubtedly seeking for their complicity in the ensuing war to liberate hostages and lay waste to Gaza and the Hamas organization.
Interestingly though, the media have seen fit to spare us the pornography of violence being meted out on the Palestinians as they IDF go about their work. Ravaged urban landscapes can only go so far to convey the butcher’s window porn of corpses littered among the destruction. The overplayed visual trope of bodies in winding sheets atop an anguished crowd has lost its ability to shock.
Nothing seems to make sense anymore when we frame our own lives against these barbarous proceedings happening collaterally in meat space and real time. The pornography of violence dehumanizes us and its subject matter. We are nevertheless asked to participate by watching.
As a brief aside to my main arguments, I thought it was interesting to share with you a random encounter with Microsoft Copilot, which for some reason, took the title of my blog and offered its own 50 cents without me soliciting it, (which I find curious).
Anyway, here is its formed opinion, which took the angle more from the exploitative aspect of pornography against women.
From porn to true crime stories, we must end the portrayal of violence against women. Society is full of structures that dehumanize and trivialize women, but we have the power to disrupt them. Let’s change how we understand and talk about violence against women.
Violence against women is not an isolated incident; it exists on a continuum, with different forms overlapping and cumulative impact. Women’s views of the world, based on their experiences, should be accepted. Dismissing their fears and safety precautions as hysteria is unhelpful. Women are caught in a catch-22: panic too much, and they’re labeled paranoid; panic too little, and it’s their fault if something happens.
We must recognize that we are all complicit in structures that dehumanize women. Recent research highlights that dehumanization, denying women’s “human uniqueness,” contributes to sexual offenses. We need to stop producing and consuming representations of women as mere conduits for men’s actions. Mainstream pornography often portrays sexual violence as sexy, perpetuating harmful ideas. Similarly, “true crime” stories frequently retell men’s violence against women.
Let’s actively challenge these harmful narratives and work toward a world where women are respected, safe, and free from violence.
The text contains all valid points but like most AI generated script that I have seen so far, it has a kind of vanilla vacuity and a sense that the author is missing.
Added to this, the conclusion, while offering a worthy sentiment to fight against ‘harmful narratives’ doesn’t offer any real insight into the problem. I would agree, and I touched on the issue a few paragraphs ago, that pornography is about objectification, dehumanization and violence, the inevitable conclusion of which, is weaponized deepfake porn.
Well, you can decide for yourself on Copilot’s opinion, but one conclusion I can draw from all this is that we should all be aware of our role in the pornography of violence and not to fall for trite answers or any media generated by a machine with great artifice but without a soul.
Sooner or later, it’s going to be a tightrope walk figuring out what machines may show and tell us and what our reaction should be. Inch forward carefully with a critical eye and an even more critical mind for nothing is at is seems.
