This past week, Matthew defined “Wellness Pornography”, working from the ideas of C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams in their essay “Moral Outrage Porn.” In this bonus episode, he asks:
How do we measure the violence of wellness pornography when it becomes clear that it fuels vaccine hesitancy?
When wellness pornographers directly indoctrinate people against public health, are they, like the sexual pornographers eviscerated by Andrea Dworkin, violating civil rights to security and safety?
If we start to see the death concealed by wellness pornography, will we also see through the ads for pickup trucks to the ecocide they conceal? Will that help?
What will we do with all of this rage?
Show NotesThe Wellness Pornographers. Gamifying intimacy, abusing public… | by Matthew Remski | Aug, 2021 | Medium(PDF)Moral Outrage Porn — Nguyen and WilliamsKohut and the self-objectAndrea Dworkin’s Testimony to the Attorney General On Pornography (all trigger warnings)Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty by Susie Orbach
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
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Wellness Pornography as Abuse Hello, listeners.
For this short-ish bonus episode, I'm going to take you behind the curtain of a recent essay I published to the Conspirituality Report on Medium.
It's called The Wellness Pornographers, and I'll link to it in the show notes, and you might want to pause here and give it a read, although I'll start with a summary.
I had two main influences for this essay.
One that I cited, but one that I didn't.
When I get to the second, I'll explain why.
So the inspiration I did cite came from philosophers T. Nguyen and Becca Williams on the concept of generic porn, which they had to define for an article called Moral Outrage Porn, which I've done another bonus episode on, and you can look that up in the show notes.
Moral outrage porn, in general terms, is the phenomenon of engaging with morally outrageous content for the pleasure of it, and without having to worry about the in-real-life implications of the issue at hand.
The result, Nguyen and Williams say, is a narrowed and cheapened moral posture that deprives the discourse of gravitas.
The political or cultural issue is used and eventually obscured by a kind of social masturbation.
But to get to moral outrage porn, they had to define this thing I mentioned before.
Generic porn.
And they do it really well.
I'm just going to read from the top of their paper here.
Most academic discussion about pornography has focused on the term in its, shall we say, classical use, pornography of a sexual nature.
But right under the nose of the academic discussion, a secondary usage has evolved.
Examples include, but are not limited to, food porn, closet porn, and real estate porn.
This usually refers to photographs, but also sometimes films and textual descriptions, of exquisitely prepared food, carefully arranged closets, and beautifully decorated apartments and homes.
These representations are typically found and consumed via magazines and online sites dedicated to such images.
Often, these images are of the kind of thing we would rarely be willing or able to get for ourselves, like photographs of meals at vastly expensive restaurants or airy Manhattan apartments far out of our economic grasp.
Sometimes, these images are of things that we can obtain, but feel vaguely guilty about consuming, such as glistening, artery-clogging burgers.
In other cases, they are perfectly ordinary things, but we enjoy looking at pictures of them anyway for some reason.
Close-up photos of a juicy steak, or interior shots of other beautiful houses in our neighborhood that we could have purchased, but did not.
Perhaps this usage began as a metaphor or a joke, but it has quickly come to have a life and meaning of its own.
Consider, we could introduce a new application of the term without further explanation and anybody who trafficked in modern colloquialisms would know exactly what we meant.
For example, I was up late last night looking at headphone porn.
Or, have you seen that new site of high-end Japanese raw denim?
Great fading porn.
I'm feeling sad.
Everybody please cover my Facebook with baking porn.
More importantly, we think this neologism captures something very important about the way that we sometimes relate to and use representations.
The usage, we suggest, adapts a part of the traditional concept of pornography, a part that is conceptually separable from sexuality.
In using representations as sexual pornography, food porn, or real estate porn, we usually have no intention of engaging with the conveyed content of the representation.
When we engage with pornography as such, we are not aiming to actually seek out sex with the porn star, actually go to that restaurant, or actually buy that house.
Rather, we are using the representation itself for immediate gratification.
The first task of this paper, then, is to offer a conceptual analysis of this new use of porn in the generic sense.
Our account will be loosely that a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the repressed content.
We can engage with sexual pornography without the need to find and engage with a sex partner.
We can engage with food porn without worrying about the cost or health consequences.
We can engage with real estate porn without having to clean and maintain all that spotless gleaming wood.
Our claim is not specifically about the nature of sexual pornography, nor are we attempting to claim any new insight into that concept.
Rather, we think the new generic usage has seized on a usefully exportable part of the cluster of ideas that surrounds sexual pornography and cleaved it off.
This conceptual analysis of generic porn is useful, we take it, because it draws our focus to a distinctive form of relationship that we have with certain representations.
I really love how fluid the writing is.
And naturally, I read this while haunted, as I typically am these days, by the wellness influencers that we study on this podcast.
So, my essay's nut graphs are as follows.
We engage with wellness pornography by consuming attractive images and beguiling ideas of personal well-being for the sake of pleasure, without having to engage with the complexity of biological sciences or the social determinants of health, and without having to be responsible for the negative outcomes of fashionable wellness ideas.
So, who are the wellness pornographers?
They are influencers who present their looks, lifestyle, intimate lives, relationships, and children as representations of health and well-being while offering little or no actionable interventions to help their followers.
Without training and credentials in the medicine or psychology that would make their products evidence-based, they must monetize themselves.
They are their own representations.
They are their own evidence.
So, in the essay, I go on to define and discuss the terms a little bit more.
And then I present brief snapshots of how, in my view, influencers like Kelly Brogan and Sayer G, Bernard Gunter and Laura Matsu, Stephanie Sibio, professional asshat J.P. Sibio, Sears, the raw meat aficionado Josh Goldstein, and red-pilled freebirther Yolande Norris-Clark all produce wellness pornography.