Postmodern Theory and Internet George Ritzer

Industrial Pornography 

Alan Kirby

It’s the early 1950s, or 1850s. You are walking alone through a wood on a mild 

spring or summer day. From a distance you espy a couple. They are having sex. 

What do you actually see? Or try this. It’s the 1900s, or 1940s. One afternoon, 

alone, you glance from your window. Across the way the drapes are almost 

wholly drawn, but there’s a gap, and from the angle you’re looking along the 

gap leads in to a mirror on a wall, and as chance would have it the mirror 

reflects slantwise a couple on a bed having sex. What actually do you see? And 

in both cases, suppose the couple is averagely self-conscious, neither furtive nor 

exhibitionist. And that you feel nothing: not curiosity, or shame, or disgust, or 

excitement. Your eyes are a camera. What do they record?

On one level, the answer is self-evident: you see a couple having sex, of course. 

More precisely, you probably see a conglomerate of limbs, a mass of hair, a 

jerking male behind, a quantity of physical urgency or tension. On another 

level, the question is paradoxical, because the total situation here of viewer and 

viewed (people being watched having sex) structurally replicates the ostensible 

reception and content of industrial pornography; but the glimpsed actions 

probably wouldn’t resemble those of porn at all. Why wouldn’t they?

Industrial pornography is a product, it would seem, of the 1970s; its origins 

lie in the heartlands of postmodernism. Yet its textual and representative 

peculiarities make it both emblematic of postmodernism and a precursor of 

digimodernism; indeed, it has shifted into the new era much more smoothly 

than have cinema or television. We don’t need to waste too much time on what 

differentiates industrial por11ography from other porn, from “erotica’’ or “art;’ 

and so on; these are essentially legal battles. Three points are unarguable: that 

there exist texts whose principal or sole aim is to stimulate sexual excitement  

in their consumer; that some of these texts manifest a standardization of 

content and a scale of distribution that can be called industrial; and that, as a 

generic label, “industrial pornography” is in places as smudged in its definition 

as, say, “the war movie” or “the landscape picture:’ The label suggests the vast 

scale of pornographic production and consumption over the past thirty years 

or so, along with the (relative) openness of its distribution and acquisition. It 

therefore excludes material aimed at niches, some of which, involving children 

or animals, is more accurately classed as recordings of torture; “pornographic” 

performance is, by definition, exchanged for money.

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond ………………………………………………………… Alan Kirby

Alan Kirby, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern andReconfigure our Culture. New York, London: Continuum, 2009, pp 75–80

1/5

---

Above all, industrialization manifests itself here as a standardization of product. 

It is always the same poses, the same acts, its performers made to converge  

on a single visual type. Everything nonsexual is rigorously cut out; the “actors”  

or models are identified solely with their sexual attractiveness or potency.  

The predilection of early hard-core movies like Deep Throat for a detachable 

plot arc was wiped out by industrialization, which made it hard to differentiate  

any one title from the next. Buy a random industrial porn magazine and you  

will see a seemingly endless array of similar-looking individuals in the same 

positions; rent or buy a random industrial porn film and similar-looking people 

will work through the same acts methodically, systematically, with a soul-

crushing repetitivity. In both cases, models and scenes are separated off by 

extraneous material (articles, “acting”) placed there to distinguish them from 

each other, and famously ignored.

From a postmodern perspective, industrial pornography is hyperrreal, the 

supposed reproduction of something “real” which eliminates its “original:’  

The reason for the dates given in the first paragraph of this section is that 

industrial pornography has transformed the sexual practices of many individuals 

in societies where it is prevalent, recasting them in its image. Increasingly,  

“real” sex tries to imitate the simulacrum of industrial pornography. Moreover, 

its staging is often either explicitly or implicitly self-referential in a recognizably 

postmodern way: it has a strong sense of its own status as a representation of 

sex by paid performers; magazines discuss their models’ lives as professional 

models, film actresses gaze at the camera, and so on. The third postmodern 

element in this material is its frequent reliance on pastiche or parody (especially 

of Hollywood), as a source of ironic clins d´oeil which also help to achieve 

a minimum degree of product differentiation.

From a digimodernist point of view, what characterizes industrial pornography 

is this: it insists loudly, ceaselessly, crucially on its “reality;’ on its being “real;’ 

genuinely happening, unsimulated, while nevertheless delivering a content that 

bears little resemblance to the “real thing;’ and what distorts it is its integration 

of its usage, of the behavior of its user. Take a soft-core magazine photo spread 

of a model. As the eyes move sequentially across the images, she appears to 

gradually disrobe, turning this way and that, finally placing herself naked on all 

fours or on her back with her legs apart. Very few of the poses derive from the 

“natural” behavior of women eager to attract a man; and yet these images will 

excite many men. The spread as a whole creates, for the regarding male, the 

illusion of an entire sexual encounter: the most explicit images set the woman, 

in relation to the camera, in positions she would only adopt seconds before 

being penetrated. Consequently, for the regarding male, the photographed 

2/5

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond ………………………………………………………… Alan Kirby

Alan Kirby, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern andReconfigure our Culture. New York, London: Continuum, 2009, pp 75–80

---