Postmodern Theory and Internet George Ritzer

woman appears to be moving ever closer to intercourse with him. And yet-here 

is the digimodernist point-within the logic of the photos she doesn’t actually  

get closer to sex with anyone at all, there’s no one else there anyway, there’s 

only an increasingly unclothed and eroticized woman. And nothing in the 

images explains why her appearance and conduct are changing that way. The 

images then are only intelligible, both in their content and their sequencing,  

by inserting into them the sexual habits of their male consumer. Otherwise,  

they look almost bizarre.

This process is found in hard-core movies in even more dramatic form. Here, 

sexual positions are adopted solely that someone can watch the performers who 

are adopting them, and clearly see their genitalia. Couples copulate with their 

bodies scarcely touching, or contort their limbs agonizingly, or favor improbable 

geometries, solely in order that penetration be made visible. Male ejaculation 

occurs outside of the woman’s body purely in order that a viewer can watch it 

happen (nothing in the text explains such a pleasureless act). The mechanics 

of hard-core industrial pornography suggest an unreal corruption, a slippage 

from sex as it is done and enjoyed to sex done so that someone else can enjoy 

seeing it, and this corruption generally has the unspoken effect of diminishing 

the participants’ pleasure. Such positions, the ejaculation shot, and the rest are 

staples of industrial pornography not because they yield unrealistically fantastic 

sex but because they permit unrealistically visible sex. While deformation of 

“known reality” for creative purposes is all but universal in the arts,·its function 

is doubly peculiar here: first, since the unique selling point of hard core is its 

documentary sexual factuality, the distortions simultaneously betray the genre’s 

raison d’etre and furnish its necessary cast-iron proof, making them both 

structurally crucial and self-destructive; and second, every one of the changes 

here stems specifically from the systematic and crude sexual demands of the 

watching consumer, not from the artfulness of the creator.

This is equally apparent in the narrative logic of industrial hard-core porn 

movies, which integrates their consumption, constructing itself out of the 

circumstances of their viewing. If viewing here is the chancy reception of 

sexual images, then the circumstances of the encounters seem correspondingly 

impromptu, the sudden couplings of virtual strangers (the pizza delivery boy 

or the visiting plumber and the housewife) both in their narrative context and 

in their presentation to the watching gaze. If viewing is voyeurism with the 

consent of the seen, then encounters tend to exhibitionism, sex breaking out 

on yachts or hilltops, in gardens, by pools, such that the viewer’s “discovery” 

of naked copulating bodies is mirrored by the performers’ “display;” both to 

the viewer and narratologically, of their nudity and their copulation. If viewing 

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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

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means “happening” on other people having sex, then performers do it to fellow 

cast members too, accidentally entering rooms to find sex in progress, and 

joining in or watching. Indeed, the proportion of encounters watched from 

within the scene as well as from outside is striking.

Its alloyed digimodernism marks off the hard-core industrial porn film from 

any other movie genre, even those, like comedy or horror, which also aim to 

stimulate a visceral or physical response. In turn, no genre excites as powerful 

a reaction in its viewer, an impact that derives less from its ostensible content 

than from its digimodernist construction. While experienced perhaps most 

acutely by fans, hard-core porn tends also to have a fairly overwhelming or 

engulfing effect on those who find it disgusting or tawdry. That engulfing, that 

outflanking of the viewer is recognizably digi  modernist and shared to a great 

extent by videogames and reality TV; each short-circuits, in a way that elicits 

inappropriate notions of “addiction;’ a deliberate, controlled response. We will 

come back to this issue later.

Its digimodernism also means that industrial pornography should be primarily 

seen as something that is “used” rather than “read” or “watched;’ employed  

as an ingredient of a solitary or shared sexual act outside of which it makes  

no sense or. appears ludicrous. However, it’s undeniable that, for many 

reasons, the viewer whose feelings, actions, sightlines, and rhythms are so 

efficiently uploaded into and visually integrated by industrial pornography 

tends to be male. There is little universality about the use of porn. Women, 

research suggests, initially find hard-core films as arousing as men do but lose 

interest much more quickly, and this may be because the movies are textually 

invested, in their content and sequencing, with the sexual practices, habits, 

and responses of an expected male viewer. It is women whose pleasure is 

most visibly articulated (men’s is self-contained) or whose fellatio is in all 

senses spectacular; it’s the woman’s body that is waxed and inflated to become 

something it had never previously needed to be: exciting to stare at during sex. 

However, textual conventions (regular, monotonous) must be separated here 

from their possible reception (perhaps wayward, unexpected): ·it is not because 

industrial pornography reinvents lesbianism solely as an object of male regard, 

for instance, that some straight women don’t find it exciting. This discussion  

is about textuality, not consumption.

The digimodernism of industrial pornography is doubly partial: it coexists with  

its postmodernism (an interesting contribution to debates about their relationship);  

and the viewer (textually male) does not determine or contribute to the content 

or sequencing of the material by any conscious act. His sexuality, abstracted 

4/5

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

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