Make Porn Not War

I

“Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting.” ¹

Rif War (1920–1927), Chinese Civil War (1927–1949), Chaco War (1932–1935), Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936), Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), World War II (1939–1945), Greek Civil War (1946–1949), First Indochina War (1946–1954), Arab-Israeli War (1948), Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), Korean War (1950–1953), Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Suez Crisis (1956), Cuban Revolution (1953–1959), Vietnam War (1955–1975), Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961), Indonesian Confrontation (1963–1966), Six-Day War (1967), Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), Cambodian Civil War (1967–1975), Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), Yom Kippur War (1973), Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989), Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), Falklands War (1982), Invasion of Grenada (1983), US Invasion of Panama (1989–1990), Gulf War (1990–1991), Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), Croatian War of Independence (1991–1995), Bosnian War (1992–1995), Kosovo War (1998–1999), Rwandan Genocide (1994), First Chechen War (1994–1996), Second Congo War (1998–2003), War in Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq War (2003–2011), Second Chechen War (1999–2009), War in Darfur (2003–present), Gaza War (2008–2009), Syrian Civil War (2011–present), Libyan Civil War (2011), Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present), Annexation of Crimea (2014), War in Donbas (2014–2022), Yemeni Civil War (2014–present), Second Libyan Civil War (2014–2020), Tigray War (2020–2022), Nagorno-Karabakh conflict (2020), 2021 Taliban offensive (2021), Russo-Ukrainian War escalation (2022–present), Israel invasion of Palestine (2023–present).

II

“War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.” ²

In ancient and biblical art, suffering was often portrayed as a consequence of divine or human wrath, with little focus on suffering from natural causes or accidents. Classical antiquity provided rich sources for such representations, exemplified by the statue group of Laocoön and His Sons, which depicts the agonising death of the Trojan priest and his sons as punishment from the gods. Similarly, Christian art has long focused on the Passion of Christ, portraying the intense physical and emotional agony endured by Jesus. These early works aimed to move, excite, and instruct viewers, often invoking a sense of moral contemplation and empathy.

As art progressed from the mediaeval period to the Renaissance, gruesome scenes of suffering remained prevalent. Biblical massacres, such as the Slaughter of the Innocents, and classical mythological punishments, like those inflicted upon Prometheus, were common subjects. These depictions did not necessarily carry a moral charge but were intended to provoke viewers, testing their ability to endure the sight of such horrors. The dual pleasure derived from both looking at and flinching away from these images was a significant aspect of their appeal.

The seventeenth century marked a pivotal shift with the emergence of secular representations of suffering, particularly the anguish of civilian populations during wartime. Jacques Callot's "Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre" (1633) stands out as a groundbreaking work in this regard. Callot's etchings depict the atrocities committed against civilians during the invasion and occupation of Lorraine by French troops, offering an unprecedented focus on the savagery of war and the plight of both victims and destitute soldiers post-conflict. This secular approach to depicting suffering highlighted the human cost of war in a way that had not been seen before.

The early nineteenth century saw further transformation in the depiction of suffering with Francisco Goya's "Los Desastres de la Guerra" (The Disasters of War). Goya's 83 etchings, which record the brutalities of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, stripped away the spectacular elements of earlier representations, focusing instead on the raw horror and suffering inflicted by war. Goya's work represented a moral turning point, emphasising the viewer's emotional response to suffering and underscoring the universality of human pain.

By the time of the First World War and subsequent conflicts, the depiction of suffering had become more immediate and visceral, with photography playing a crucial role. The advent of war photography brought the reality of modern war horrors into sharp focus, providing a new dimension of authenticity and urgency to the representation of suffering. Photographs of battlefield casualties, bombed cities, and the anguished faces of civilians challenged viewers' capacity to look and invoked a sense of voyeurism or helplessness. This shift suggested that only those who could alleviate the suffering or learn from it had the right to view such extreme depictions.

III

“We now know what happens every day throughout the whole world. The descriptions given by daily journalists put, as it were, those in agony on fields of battle under the eyes of readers and their cries resonate in their ears.” ³

During the Bosnian war, in the middle of bombardment or sniper fire, it was not uncommon to hear a Sarajevan yelling at the photojournalists: “Are you waiting for a shell to go off so you can photograph some corpses?”

The inception of war photography can be traced back to the Crimean War (1853-1856) with Roger Fenton, often recognized as the first war photographer. Fenton was commissioned by the British government to counteract negative reports about the war and present a more favourable image. His photographs, which excluded the dead, wounded, or suffering, depicted war as a dignified endeavour, focusing on the daily lives of soldiers and military camps.

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Mathew Brady and his team, including notable photographers like Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, took war photography to new heights. Unlike Fenton, Brady's team captured more graphic scenes, including the aftermath of battles with dead soldiers. These images, though often staged for compositional purposes, aimed to reveal the harsh realities of war, providing a stark contrast to the glorified portrayals previously seen.

The early 20th century saw significant advancements in war photography, especially during World War I (1914-1918). Photographers like James Francis Hurley documented the war with a level of realism that brought the horrors of trench warfare and battlefield carnage to the public's attention. The interwar period and World War II (1939-1945) further cemented the role of photography in shaping public understanding of war. Iconic images, such as the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal, became powerful symbols of national resilience and sacrifice.

In the Vietnam War (1955-1975), war photography took on a more critical role, often highlighting the brutality and moral ambiguity of the conflict. Photographs like Nick Ut's image of a naked, napalm-burned girl running from her village became iconic, provoking public outcry and influencing anti-war sentiment. This period marked a shift towards more unflinching portrayals of war, where the focus was not only on the battlefield but also on the civilian suffering and the broader human cost. The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to new tele-intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.

IV

"Unreal," "surreal," "like a movie." ⁴

Technological innovations have meant that the way images of the victims of war and other categories of body horror are procured and disseminated has changed. Soldiers in theatre may record what they witness, and upload this material online. Terrorist groups have staged the executions of hostages for the camera and distributed this imagery via the internet. Thus, the circulation of body horror is enabled in ways that evade the prerogatives of the mainstream press to produce news which accords with notions of “taste and decency”, using practices which protect publics from imagery which may cause harm yet also often map with a propagandist function to conceal the carnage of war from public view.

For its cruelness and brutality, albeit organised, the space of war is a highly contended and emotionally loaded landscape. Over the past few decades the fascination with the phenomenon of war, its space and in fact even with its cruelty – manifested in a desire to make suffering visible – permeated political and social discourse. War is no longer a distant affair affecting only those ‘on the ground’ (and the families of the wounded soldiers), through television and media war became a virtual and an entertaining phenomenon (Der Derian 2003). From the Vietnam War where media turned into an unwelcome partner on the battlefield via the First Gulf War when embedded journalism became an integral part of a military-complex, to the most recent soldier-driven accounts from the battlefield (Kozol 2012), media and reporting from the frontline radically reshaped public perception of war. Not only is there a desire to see more, further and to a greater detail, but also, when there is nothing to see, an expectation (to see, create or produce) persists.

The scandal at Abu Ghraib showed that modern armies are full of people with digital cameras who will document everything they see, no matter how shaming it might be in the outside world. Some of these pictures are far worse than anything that came out of the prison but they show the same tangle of lust for flesh, power and killing. This tangle has since only escalated, developing into a whole new genre of uncensored, mostly Telegram and TikTok based, “Pornographie de la guerre,” as described by Jean Baudrillard in 2005.

One of the most striking images from the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a picture, taken by the photojournalist Tyler Hicks, depicting a dead soldier sprawled on the ground in front of a disabled tank, his body covered in a sheet of fresh snow. The photograph ran on the front page of the Times on February 26th. Its caption noted that both the soldier and the armoured vehicle were Russian and that the photo was taken in Kharkiv, the city in northeastern Ukraine where some of the most intense fighting has been taking place. Another equally arresting document of the war’s beginnings is a TikTok video, posted on February 24th, showing phone-camera images and video clips of missiles falling over the city of Kyiv like fireworks. A line of text reads, “The capital of Ukraine at the moment.” The video is set, with breathtaking incongruity, to “Little Dark Age,” a song by the indie-pop band MGMT, whose lyrics have become something of an audio meme on TikTok: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away.”

V

“Due to the prevailing rule of the world of making everything visible, the images, our present-day images have become substantially pornographic.” ⁵

Baudrillard concludes: “In reality there is no pornography, since it is virtually everywhere. The essence of pornography permeates all visual and televisual techniques”. We live in a society of spectacle. Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.

An expanding array of media representations has been labelled ‘pornography,’ though, raising concerns about the diffusion of a pornographic sensibility into various areas of social life. The application of this label encompasses the vocabulary, signifiers, metaphors, and affects typically associated with the ‘porn’ suffix. The Oxford English Dictionary (2015) defines pornography as the ‘explicit representation of sexual activity in literature, films, etc., intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.’ However, this definition is increasingly inadequate as the ‘porn’ suffix is applied to a broader range of visual representations. The growing cultural repository of media newly labelled ‘porn’ has begun to displace the erotic, altering our conceptualization of the pornographic altogether.

This understanding of ‘war porn’ falls in line with the proto-pornographic forefathers of pornography such as de Sade, where sensual gratification is displaced in order to privilege a radical political message.

VI

"I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others." ⁶

Two centuries after his death, Sade (1740-1814) remains a figure of controversy. On the one hand, his name is associated with the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille, on the other, with rape, sexual terror and torture. During his lifetime, Sade was found guilty of sodomy, rape, torturing the 36-year-old beggar woman Rose Keller, imprisoning six children in his chateau at Lacoste, and poisoning five prostitutes with the aphrodisiac “Spanish fly”. Simone de Beauvoir defended Sade in a 1951 essay entitled: “Must We Burn Sade?”. She argued that his novels’ exploration of the idea that “in a criminal society, one must be criminal” was never more relevant and that his life story and increasing perversity in his fiction was a symptom of society’s increasing attempts to control him.

In principle, of course, the allegorical potential of pornography is just as great as for any other type of text, and the academic reader will have little difficulty in articulating it. Only, the masturbator does not interpret so much as inhabit the discourse at hand. Such a reader makes no attempt to translate the literal sense into some spiritual signified, but enjoys it as if it formed an alternative, phenomenally self- sufficient, reality, which makes no real attempt to say anything about reality, but is quite content merely to cater to the reader’s desire that the world be there for me.

The question of abusive violence, whether on the set or in the viewers’ responses, has long framed outsiders’ discussions of sadomasochistic pornography.

VII

“This has nothing to do with violence at all. Violence is about hurting somebody. Nobody here wants to inflict any real damage on anybody else. What you want—what you’re trying to do— is to give them the ride of their life.” ⁷

This paradox of representation is particularly evident in the realm of bondage pornography, which makes visible the very real suffering of a body in pain. Its appeal hinges on the authenticity of the depicted suffering; the scenes are not staged. However, practitioners and consumers of bondage pornography eschew what they define as real violence. This paradox can be situated within the broader context of horror cinema, especially with the emergence of the term "torture porn" to describe certain films that explicitly thematize their erotic appeal. In bondage pornography, the suffering is genuine; in horror films, the constraints, pain, and blood are simulated. However, the fantasy presented in horror is non-consensual by definition, and the viewer's pleasure derives from imagining real damage being inflicted or at least threatened. There are no safewords in these scenarios. As Carol Clover illustrates, the audience's thrill oscillates between identifying with a truly terrified victim and her or his murderous persecutor. Thus, while horror films are fundamentally about violence, bondage porn centres on sexuality.

The genre of bondage pornography, as it exists today, can largely be attributed to a single individual: Brent Scott, known as P. D. on set. Scott, originally a performance artist and university instructor, turned to creating bondage porn after being denied tenure. In 1997, he launched Insex, a website dedicated to maximising the interactive possibilities of the web. The site featured non-narrative vignettes that began with a fully clothed model verbally consenting to the forthcoming activities. Over the next three hours, she would be subjected to increasingly elaborate forms of bondage, culminating in intense pain administered through various means. Throughout the scene, the focus remained exclusively on the model, while the handlers administering the pain stayed outside the shot. The session concluded with a post-scene interview where the model, often bruised and incoherent, reflected on her experience.

Scott’s approach highlights the critical distinction between consenting and acting in bondage pornography, a distinction that underscores the genre's unique reality compared to horror cinema. The welts and bruises we see here are real, as are the screams and tears.

VIII

“It was something really different, something more intense, something more real, more genuine. And I felt honestly in my heart that I could say . . . that it wasn’t porn.”⁸

The question of what constitutes “sex” in pornography becomes complex when considering scenes like a woman writhing on a metal dildo, manipulated by the keystrokes of distant viewers. Leo Bersani suggests that such extreme experiences may clarify the concept of sexuality, echoing Freud’s observation that intense emotional experiences, including terror and pain, invoke a sexual response. Bersani argues that sexuality shatters the structured self, and instead of escaping this shattering, individuals often seek to repeat and intensify it. Thus, limiting our understanding of sex to its reproductive function denies its radical dimension, which detaches sexuality from specific objects and organs.

Linda Williams, in her seminal study "Hard Core," addresses the question of violence in pornography through the lens of cinematic realism. Realist theories, rooted in André Bazin’s essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," view photographic images as more than mere depictions; they manifest the world itself. This understanding has led to misconceptions, such as the belief that the 1976 film "Snuff" depicted an actual murder. Williams argues that despite these misconceptions, responses to the "Snuff" hoax reveal legitimate concerns about the potential for pornographic films to document real sexual violence. However, in sadomasochistic pornography, violence, aggression, and pain are often vehicles for staging dramas that enhance or substitute for sexual acts. Williams asserts that pornography stages fantasy rather than emulating or recording reality, distinguishing it from documentary violence.

This distinction, on the other hand, can be inverted and put to work to substitute real war violence with the real, but pornographic violence. As Woollf understood perfectly, men like war. But she might have been wrong in why. Men like war for pride and glory, but also for the horror and pain and after war crosses a certain point, there is no more pride and glory, but rather only horror and pain and its continuance (and escalation) is based on the man’s natural “degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.” Can this degree of delight be satisfied through hardcore BDSM pornography? Imagine a world where all the pain and suffering we need would be performed on consenting subjects and stream into the world as a flag of peace. Making love instead of war obviously didn’t work out, maybe making porn will.

IX

"Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be," ⁹