Abstract:
Over the last five decades the landscape of pornography as a medium, and the way that pornography is researched and discussed, have shifted. In the first instance, the migration of pornography to more powerful delivery networks has created predictable waves of anxiety about pornography’s ubiquity, content, and consequences. However, in the second instance, the focus of these concerns have changed over time, from protests against pornography on political and sociocultural grounds, to become a battle of the pathological individual. In this thesis, I argue first that this shift represents a convergence of discourses, as old political agitation has given way to a sterile language of expertise and medicalisation. At the same time the unease which underpinned protests against pornography have remained, giving rise to an oxymoronic contemporary tension between pornography as both risky yet ubiquitous and largely unmoderated. Hereafter I argue that the concept of pornography addiction serves a reconciliatory function, as a way of delineating between acceptable and unacceptable pornography viewing. In turn, I argue that pornography addiction offers individuals – and society at large – a scapegoat upon which the excesses of pornography can be divested, while a widespread tolerance for pornography viewing remains intact. As I will explore, the actual experiences of viewing pornography rarely fit into the neat formula of addictive or not, leaving pornography viewers suspended in a discursive gulf between the promise of pleasure and the threat of pathology. Indeed, while viewers of pornography present a peculiar cohort – contradictorily stereotyped as both perverts and sexually adventurers – the experience of pornography viewing as complex, challenging, and ambiguous is rarely considered or investigated. Utilizing media and social media analyses, survey responses, and interview data, this thesis drills down into the ways that pornography, addiction, pornography viewing, and “Pornography Addiction” are made sense of by its viewership. Here I argue, not only that vague understandings of pornography as addictive have created a confusing environment for researchers and pornography viewers alike, but that such pervasive sense-making is fertile ground for the contemporary flourishing of the very pathology being described.