The word “porn” used to describe one specific thing. It first drifted outside that meaning in 1977, when the New York Review of Books coined “gastroporn” to describe a lavishly illustrated French cookbook — a jab at how the photography seemed more interested in seducing the reader than feeding them.
By 1984, critic Rosalind Coward had sharpened that into “food porn” proper, a term that stayed mostly confined to media criticism for the next two decades.
Then social media arrived, and the hashtag did what hashtags do: it took a pointed, slightly academic critique and flattened it into an aesthetic category anyone could apply to anything. Today “food porn,” “real estate porn,” “travel porn,” “car porn,” aren’t critiques anymore. They’re genres.
What actually happened in that shift wasn’t really about food, or houses, or vacations. It’s that “pornographic” stopped meaning explicit and started meaning simply intensified — anything shot, lit, and cropped specifically to trigger a want rather than convey information.
An underwear ad and an adult film both do exactly that. They’re both engineered to produce desire on contact, using nearly identical formal tools: skin, proximity, a body arranged for maximum visual pull. The only real difference left is what happens next — whether the desire ends at a shopping cart or somewhere more private. Strip that ending away and look only at the image itself, and the line gets hard to find.
That’s what these four collages are quietly arguing: three are underwear advertising, one is adult film, and the fact that it takes effort to sort which is which is an accurate report on where the culture’s visual grammar has evolved.
None of this is a complaint about explicit content existing, or a complaint about advertising being seductive — both have always done exactly what they’re built to do. It’s a smaller and stranger observation: that the aesthetic vocabulary built specifically for one has become the default vocabulary for the other, until an entire visual culture, food included, runs on the logic of arousal whether or not arousal was ever the actual point.
Now back to the collages, which one is sourced from an adult film?
Does it matter? All four could sell underwear.
— Behan
