Social Media = Porn !?

Hey all,

When it comes to 'triggers', sexualized images on social media seems to be the biggest, at least for me. Am I objectifying women, or are they objectifying themselves? Guess it takes two to tango! Anyways, decided to run a lit search around social media and it's association with pornography, and encountered this...

Sexualized Labour in Digital Culture: Instagram Influencers, Porn Chic and the Monetization of Attention (Drenten, 2019).

• Posting sexualised photos on social media has been related to wider cultural pressures that convey to women sexiness is both valued and a means of gaining attention. Today, what has increasingly come to constitute sexiness in online environments is ‘porn chic’ – a style that reflects the mainstreaming of the aesthetics of commercial pornography within Western societies. There is no single way that porn chic manifests in popular culture, although a core element can be understood as making women appear ‘fuckable’ to a (generally assumed male) audience. This fragmenting and blurring of pornographic imagery into traditionally non-pornographic forms of popular culture—also known as pornographication—has been heavily facilitated by the rise of the internet and associated digital technologies.
• An American Psychological Association (APA) report on the sexualisation of girls establishes sexualisation as synonymous with sexual objectification and explicitly separates sexualisation from sexuality.. As Davis states, sexuality is healthy and positive whilst sexualisation is objectifying and degrading.
• Moreover, as the self-commodification continuum unfolds, more overt sexual objectification and pornographication can lead to more attention and therefore more opportunities for monetisation. This objectification, while potentially harmful in and of itself, was also more likely to be associated with more intense sexual harassment / sexually aggressive comments, suggesting that there can be significant costs tied to the monetising potential of platforms like Instagram, for female influencers
• As pornified imagery has become the norm for ‘sexy’, and as ‘sexy’ has become increasingly demanded of women in online spaces, it has become impossible to completely untangle notions of freely chosen sexualised labour from a pornified aesthetic in digital contexts such Instagram.
• Conclusion: We argue for the consideration of possible modalities of sexualised labour that interrogate the relationship between ‘sexualisation’ and the shaping role of cultural norms in ‘managing’ women’s sexualised representations. In turn, this offers the possibility of greater precision about the context in which particular kinds of sexualised labour take place, and the underlying power dynamics that may underpin them.

Alrighty then...

Obviously there is a BIG MARKET for sexualized images via social media, and increasingly so. Yet, there is little understanding of the negative impacts that this trend will have moving into the future. Simply put, porn is everywhere. Objectification is everywhere. This makes abstinence from P damn near impossible!!!

What needs to change?