Planet Porn: An Alien Looks at the Ethics of Our Most Enduring Renderings

from 'A Report to the Galactic Overlords on the Terran Cultural Practice of Depicting Sexuality'

Ever since homo sapiens sprouted opposable thumbs some two million earth-years ago, and thereby became able to use fine-motor tools and mix rudimentary pigments, they have been tireless in their attempts to make representations of their sexual organs and their quaintly varied methods of congress of said organs.




Image pixilated for discretion 

Some of the earliest daubs smeared on the walls of their burrows reveal crude, primal attempts to render and represent what they might easily notice if they simply looked down at themselves. Early stages of what we might recognise as ‘developed civilisations’ saw a refinement of the aesthetics of this practice, evident in an increasing sophistication in the skills and materials of rendering; however this only served to encourage the practice further. Even everyday dining and storage vessels in the early civilisations known as ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ were often festooned with figures bearing (quite without regard to the realities of physics or biomechanics) swollen, truncheon-like phalloi and mammary glands the size of our landing craft. Such artful exaggerations were not intended as lampoon, but evidently intended to further increase the pleasure quotient of the shaved, thumb-bearing apes that viewed them.

Objects in the mirror may be larger than they appear

The helpful introduction of bodily shame by new cultural influences from certain desert tribes did nothing to suppress this apparently ingrained compulsion in the species to artificially represent 3 biological subjects and actions on 2-d surfaces. On the contrary, what had by now become referred to as ‘pornography’ gained psychodynamic energy from its very  suppression, and sophisticated practitioners successfully blurred its identification (and moral censure) by conflating it with suggestive artistic nudes. Thus, when a male member of the urban bourgeoisie was bested at cribbage or business, for example, he could lift his gaze to his study wall, there to find in a rendering of an ample-prowed washer-woman, say, or a clutch of cream-skinned shepherd youths, confirmation that his functional masculinity was intact.

This is 'art'

At their current stage of development, having mastered the rendering capabilities of the electron and photon, the planetary electronic library known as their ‘internet’ now groans under the specific gravity of pornographic mass. At our last estimation there were only three remaining ‘websites’ that did not depict some manner of sexual content. Judging from the traffic and uptake, no member of the species (of any age) able to afford ready access to the ‘internet’ has not, at some point, sought to view such fleshy illusions. Some simply cannot refrain from doing so. If any were to deny this, they would probably be trying to save face in what remains of moral censure from their fellow viewers and a God they no longer believe in.

History suggests they will find a way

It is all very difficult to make sense of, especially within the limits of this report. However, more worrying than the futility of gazing at 2-d illusions to compensate for what their urges compel them to do in 3-d actuality, is the overlooked fact that (thanks the verisimilitude of the new medium) pornography now requires other humans to offer themselves as objectified images—bared, splayed, often in a rictus of face-contortion—for their entire world to gaze upon at their leisure. To turn themselves into objects, in short. Worse, these hapless beings allow their objectified selves to be packaged and traded as commodities for internet advertising revenue for complete strangers.

Soylent Green is people

One is left to wonder at the empathic disconnect in this otherwise compassionate species, that they have become so bewildered by the real-seeming quality of their own rendering technology, they lack the awareness that the internet image they gaze upon had its origin with some young girl, or boy, in a warehouse in an undesirable suburb of Los Angeles, in front of a camera, having what was probably one of the worst days of their lives.

The mechanics of commodification

Further study is required. Please forward hi-speed internet apparatus to enable research.