The Good, the Bad, and the Kinky: Unconscious Porn Reporting from the New York Times

Porn is such a prickly fish. On the one hand, both in polite company and in the news media, pornography is considered the essential representation of the dark underbelly of human sexuality. True it’s increasingly mainstream, but we’re still supposed to understand that porn is our unattractive true face, the strange and embarrassing sex we have behind closed doors, or fantasize about having behind our own closed eyes.

On the other hand, porn has become the most acceptable sex topic to cover in news media (with teen sexuality always running a close second), and few papers have done as much to lend credibility to its mainstreaming and simultaneously profit from it than the New York Times. I’m not suggesting this is a bad thing. I love it when “serious journalists” write about sex. I just wish they would take it a bit more seriously.

The Time’s most recent example is a decadent 5,000-plus word piece in this weekend’s magazine about the on line porn company Kink.com.

There are lots of things to recommend the article. It’s engaging and, as far as I can tell, surprisingly lacking in factual errors. It offers just a little bit of the fascinating history of the early years in on line pornography and does a good job of accurately representing research on pornography.

But there are the predictable misses also. The piece has the well worn air of superiority towards the content produced by pornographers. It also has the required faux shock that people with post-secondary educations are involved in porn. Finally the piece engages in the cornerstone of mainstream media coverage of porn; a hypocritical take on porn and pop culture that misses the point of what the mainstreaming of porn actually means.

Here’s a good example of what I mean. About half way through the piece the author takes a moment to wax poetic on the state of porn, comparing it to the building recently purchased by Kink.com that has ignited some local protest:

In a way, the armory, the titanic building itself, embodies the circumstances of porn these days: it is an exceedingly conspicuous presence in the community but also thoroughly sealed off and opaque.

Now, this doesn’t sound particularly insightful, and what’s worse it’s simply untrue. With literally dozens of documentaries produced each year, airing on everything from HBO to ABC, and with more than half a dozen behind-the-scenes reality style programs currently airing or in production, it’s hard to imagine porn as sealed off or opaque. Finances aside (porn companies are largely privately owned and getting information on the business side of porn is notoriously difficult) I can think of few forms of entertainment that are as open to public scrutiny as pornography.

Documents like the Meese Report on Pornography, television shows like Porno Valley, and movies like Boogie Nights, have all added to the mainstreaming of porn, while simultaneously exposing the various sides of the porn industry, and to a lesser extent the people engaged in it.

This piece in the Times adds yet more square footage to porn’s place in the public sphere. Again, this isn’t a good or bad thing as far as I’m concerned. Really the only complaint I have is how unconscious their coverage is.

Read more - New York Times Magazine: A Disciplined Business