I appreciate sexiness. I enjoy feeling sexy, looking sexy, looking at men and women who are sexy, listening to sexy music, watching sexy movies. Much of this doesn’t have to be explicitly about sex at all—it’s usually not. I personally often feel sexiest in a sundress, wearing light makeup, hair pinned half up. I could just be going to the grocery store.
But I am also a woman who is particularly online. (To be a writer today largely requires it.) I have no qualms about extending this appreciation of sexiness, including my own, to the digital sphere. And so, if I’m dressed up for the grocery store, I may well post a selfie before I go.
Lately, it feels as though sexiness is under threat. Nothing, it seems, can be sexy anymore—it can only be porn. While movies include sex scenes at the lowest rate in decades, people still voice complaints that all media is drifting closer to porn. Meanwhile, as I and many other women have experienced firsthand, so much as wearing a tight-fitting top or having cleavage is grounds for accusations that you’re sharing smut.
Of course, so much of the Internet is bonafide pornography: on sites like PornHub and subreddits like r/gonewild, or in the viral videos that are often not-so-covert advertisements from OnlyFans creators. Then there are the growing subcultures of people who get off on masturbating to everyday content that isn’t pornographic at all. There is more porn in more places than ever—PUSSY IN BIO—and even content that shouldn’t be interpreted as porn is being used that way.
Because there is so much porn, and because some people will use non-porn as if it were, anything sexy or sensual or even just pretty is viewed by some through a lens of hostility and suspicion. To appeal to a male gaze at all is to openly welcome—even encourage—the treatment of your image as if it were in Hustler. Together, we’re in an era that is somehow both Puritanical and pornified.
Of course, if you're on the internet, there's a good chance that someone is treating your image that way. On both Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), there are several communities of men who have made masturbation or “gooning” their primary hobby and source of online community. Here, participants routinely post photos of women they know—mundane, everyday photos that look as though they were posted on Facebook for everyone’s grandmother to see—and share it as though it’s porn. They even encourage other people to masturbate to it. One X account, for example, posts group photos of normal women almost daily with some variation on a caption like “Which one are you picking? #wankbattle #goon” The photos all originate from fellow X users, who submit the photos for the account owner to post. Some even claim to be sharing photos of their own family members, as was the case for since-banned subreddits like r/WouldYouFuckMyMother.
Even if our photos aren’t shared in such an extreme way, the bookmark functions on X and Instagram have made women in particular acutely aware of the possibility that someone who sees our pictures could be using them to masturbate. Both sites allow users to bookmark a post to save it in a private folder, visible only to the account holder. While you can see how many people have bookmarked your own posts, you can’t see exactly who these people are—but you can guess. “Considering the motivations one might have when privately saving a tweet, these ‘bookmarked’ collections could potentially be ‘spank banks,’” KnowYourMeme wrote when X launched the feature.
But just because people use women’s rugby videos and professional headshots this way doesn’t mean this type of imagery should widely be considered porn. People have long masturbated to things like the Victoria’s Secret catalogs—Norm McDonald joked about being “so old” that he had to physically go to a Sears to jack off. These things didn’t become porn just because they were occasionally used toward these ends. Sure, there could be something titillating—maybe even intentionally erotic—about images of women in bikinis or bras, but the primary purpose of these images was still to sell bikinis and bras.
It’s nothing new that the perviest portions of our population can masturbate to just about anything, but what’s changed is our attitude towards it. Over the last few years, we’ve emerged with a new litmus test: anything is porn so long as someone, even just one person, uses it as such. Meanwhile, there are men who literally orgasm to pictures of trash bins.
Bizarre niches like this have created a sense of suspicion about all kinds of strange content online. I’m thinking of the “cooking” videos where something gross and nonsensical happens. For example, in one “cake hack” video I saw, an attractive young woman places Zebra Cakes into a waffle iron and over-covers them in caramel sauce. As she closes the iron, the sauce spills out the sides of the iron in a droopy, sticky mess. This alone could be vaguely erotic and carnal, but it gets far weirder. While she waits for the cakes to cook, she begins dry shaving her arms in the kitchen. Nobody in the video says a word about it—it just happens.
“Why is she doing this? I mean, I know why, but why?” asked one woman in a reaction video. These strange little actions mixed in with mundane cooking must be meant to fulfill a kink. What kink, exactly? Nobody seems to know. Yet, everyone in the comments seems to recognize that something is off here, and the assumption is that it’s sexual.
Much of this is likely just an attempt at virality. The weirder it is, the more likely people will comment and share in a quest for answers. But some of this perceived sexual overtone is accurate. In 2022, writer Katherine Dee identified these bizarre videos as part of a “post-porn” trend, wherein people have become so overstimulated by traditional pornography—Pornhub is, after all the fourth most-visited website on the internet after Google, YouTube and Facebook—that it no longer provides the same hit.
In all likelihood, though, there are very few people actually using this content as porn—far fewer than those who masturbate to regular selfies. The narrative that it’s strategically designed for fetishists is a lot more interesting than it being weird simply to grab your attention. But again, the knowledge that someone out there is masturbating to something so odd is enough. Surely, by this logic, if a cooking video is porn, so is a selfie. Who needs a sex scene when you can unwittingly find porn on Facebook?
Even if someone once used a Sears catalog in pornographic ways, it was never confused for actual porn. It was openly mailed to your house, left out on kitchen tables, displayed next to check-out counters and filled with images of lawn-mowers and dining sets. Porno magazines of the era, meanwhile, were sold in sex shops, wrapped in censoring plastic and hidden between box springs and mattresses. They were treated differently because they were different. The same cannot entirely be said today. Seemingly every tweet receives replies from porn bots. Instagram serves ads for AI step-sister role play. And all the while, we’re acutely aware of the potential for anyone to masturbate to just about anything. This seems to have scrambled many people’s interpretation of what porn is.
This spring, in an essay for The Atlantic, Jane Coastan wrote about the phenomenon of porn spam appearing across social media. This spam, she said, embodied “the nudes internet: a space in which everything—every ad, meme, and argument—is reduced to sex. Not actual sexual intercourse, mind you… Rather, on the nudes internet, sex means power and worth, and the goal is to accumulate it, for no reason but to have it, like an expensive couch that is impossible to sit on. Thus, the procurement of sex, the display of sex, sex as a competitive market place, sex as an economic vehicle, sex as a cure-all, sex as a moral cudgel—the nudes internet is less about sex itself and more about what it symbolizes.”
Coastan is right that there is little sex behind this pornification, but I disagree with her belief that this process is more about what it symbolizes. I’d argue, instead, that this current moment is marked by the pervasive belief that sexuality symbolizes nothing at all. The problem with everything being labeled as porn isn’t simply that it often sexualizes people without their consent, or that we’re overexposed to porn in places we shouldn’t be, but that with it distinctions about sexuality as a whole have been lost, too. Sexiness no longer signals power or worth or beauty or intrigue. Now, be it through the bots or the gooners or the people who suspect others of appealing to both, it only signals porn.