Porn has never been easy to define with words. We’ve long relied upon “know it when you see it,” or the abductive reasoning of the duck test: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. This made sense for thousands of years, whether the medium was cave drawings or HD video of people fucking. But today, the distinction between porn and not-porn doesn’t feel quite so obvious. Particularly with social media posts that don’t feature outright nudity or sex, many viewers seem to be missing the fact that an obvious sexual narrative is at play. To others, posts that simply feature an attractive woman doing something banal are seen to be clearly pornographic. Altogether, there is a contemporary inability to distinguish porn from anything else, and it proves just how deeply embedded porn is in our daily lives.
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In October, right-wing Internet personality Isabella Marie DeLuca shared a video of herself baking a brown butter caramel cake. She made the video in the style of many cooking TikToks, using her front-facing camera placed to capture her head and torso as well as her mixing bowls and ingredients on the counter in front of her. She wore a fitted gray crewneck T-shirt and gold cross necklace. Deluca is a beautiful, large-breasted woman, and the video makes that naturally apparent. For some reason, however, the video went viral again this weekend with the common accusation that the video was pornographic. “Holy cow lady, get yourself an apron… It will preserve the spectacle of those giant ta tas for your husband,” @Rach4Patriarchy, another conservative Internet personality, quote-tweeted. “Drop your OF link for the simps while you’re at it e-girl,” @tomhennesy69 replied.Does the camera seem to focus a bit more on DeLuca than the cake she’s preparing? Certainly. Are viewers drawn more to DeLuca’s appearance than the actions she’s performing? Sure. Was DeLuca aware of all of this when she posted it? Almost definitely. But that still does not make it porn.
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As of late, tons of seemingly unsexual content has been slapped with a similar label. This particular cake incident arose on the tail of a similar discourse surrounding beer brand Ultra Right’s “Conservative Dad calendar,” which featured pictures of prominent right-wing women like Ashley St. Clair and Josie the Redheaded Libertarian in relatively tame but vaguely sexy shots. Josie the Redheaded Libertarian, for example, is shown staring doe-eyed for the camera standing in the kitchen wearing stilettos and a short, apron-covered dress, one leg kicked back, holding a pie with a large cross behind her. This, many people said on X, was pornographic, too. It’s not just the right that’s experiencing this, though. Non-political and left-leaning women on X and TikTok have made a common trend of accusing men of being “porn brained,” often based on appearance alone. For example, a cute video of a couple in a photobooth where the woman tells the man she loves him for the first time went viral on X in late December. A quote tweet of the post saying “You can just tell he watches an obscene amount of porn” got over 10,000 likes. Similarly, videos of uncredentialed young women detailing “signs of porn addiction” in men with traits like “dead in the eyes” have millions of views. And maybe there is some truth to all this. Maybe some men do view cooking videos as pornographic, and maybe that’s because they are actually addicted to porn, like the young women of TikTok are accusing them of being. Moreover, many of the supposed signs of porn addiction are harmful, whether they’re correlated to porn or not, like trying extreme things during sex without consent. And in the case of photos like Josie the Redheaded Libertarian’s, there is indeed a specific sexual fantasy to be read. Not only is the lighting, kitsch costuming, and setting akin to something out of a studio porn production, her posing and direct gaze at the camera all suggest that the image is intended to evoke an erotic narrative for consumption.
But that people are even making these suggestions at all, particularly with more innocuous posts like DeLuca’s, points to a problem in and of itself. Whether something is or isn’t porn, whether someone does or doesn’t have a porn addiction, porn remains at the front of our minds. PornHub is viewed a billion more times per month than TikTok and X combined. Porn really does increasingly dictate how we view the world, and many now broadly define porn as anything that seeks our attention. Nothing can be sexy, it seems, without being pornographic. While these beliefs are coming from a place of criticism toward porn, they do little to actually address the impacts of real pornography, the kind we’ve always been able to recognize even if we couldn’t quite describe it. By calling everything porn, we’re not really making any sort of point. We’re just making more porn.