______ Porn

Life being what it is these days, I recently had to explain to my tender-eared mother the concept of "food porn." You can't always trust that your little parents won't be exposed to such outre' things; you can, of course, take control of how you explain them to your family.

Food porn is this thing where people take photos of their food so they can share both the deliciousness they are about to enjoy, and tease others with how well they are eating.

It's the ubiquity of television food shows, reveling in exotic ingredients and watching judge after judge ooh-ing and ahh-ing over delicacies we may never be able to enjoy. It's both a sharing and a teasing with food. It's the basis of, at this point, SEVERAL industries - not just one.

The key to food porn of the description in quotes, roughly what I said to my mom, is the teasing, the punishment, the 'better than thou' art eating aspect. Tantalization is *meant* to be a bit cruel.

Substitute other words for "food" and we have all the teasing habits and infotainment making cultural forces we barely knew about when I was a kid.

Tantalization is meant to be cruel.

HGTV specializes in, essentially, architectural porn, a lifestyle on sale - with all the sponsors clearly delineated along the way, so you can ensure your life is properly equipped with hardwood floors never walked upon by anyone before you, white custom cabinetry, granite kitchens, stainless steel appliances.

Wealth porn has been around a long time. Pioneered during the Great Depression in movies of opulence and glamour, it was industrialized for the first time by the likes of Robin Leach, and by now the cultural landscape is rife with people essentially famous for living wealthily, and people becoming wealthy by selling their lives in order to finace ever-more eye-popping lifestyles.

Not so long ago, the sellability of economy porn - specifically, financial scare porn, brought us that glorious year, 2008. (HGTV's specialty, selling homes beyond the means of buyers, indubitably deserves credit for marketing tie-ins.

We've come to a place of generalizing this last variety, to where FEAR PORN all by itself is an engine not merely of lifestyle, but now commands politics worldwide.

Tantalization  is meant to be cruel.

The world is populated with scab-pickers. It hurts. We shouldn't. We do.

Ow, ow, ow. Do it again.

Selling the pain of fear clearly works. Fear the crime rate: ignore real-world statistics; just fear crime, fear that The Other is coming to murder you in your bed. Fear The Other: forget that immigrants are mostly children and their mothers; just fear that *some* of them are men who by dint of their color, or religion, or both, are terrorists. Fear that others' advantage is your disadvantage. Fear everything ... except those most stridently crowing about FEAR.

For them, please vote. Early and often. Leave facts, or facticity (*), to them; only fear, and come to them for protection.

Fear porn. Because it sells. And it's making somebody money.


(*Having not checked the copyright on "truthiness", I coined this term as a pointer to the many statistics and explicit/specific/blatant lies we are being sold of late. But alas, it turns out to be an actual word! Even though spell Czech gives it the red-squiggly underline. Well, durnit.)

All links - which are the same link repeated, involve the language of domination. Hover over the link to read the URL and decide whether you are too sensitive!