The Internet's "Shock" Therapy: On Sabrina, Lorde, and Bonnie
"I do not think that taking a sexually submissive photo leads to one experiencing spiritual decline."
The inside flap for the vinyl edition of Lorde’s latest album contains an image of her “vagina” (it’s really just her pubic hair). This is tonally aligned with her current album’s clinical-but-sexy, gender-fluid persona rebrand: the album is titled Virgin. Her single is titled “Man of The Year”. The lyrics of her song “Current Affairs” expand on her dogshit takes on Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape. The album’s cover image is a pelvic x-ray, complete with requisite IUD.
A PinkNews article titled “Lorde’s ‘Virgin’ vinyl packaging features a picture of a vagina” opens with a record-scratch, did-that-just-happen-ass tone: “Let’s all take a breath and reexplain that.” How else does this need to be explained, though? What else is there to parse? It’s a nude, and a relatively chaste one at that. Very little is visible except for her mons pubis beneath the zipper of some plastic pants. But this image of Lorde’s “vagina” elicited various responses. Many of these were shocked and icked out. It’s all in line with the Internet’s tendency to freak the fuck out over deemed-to-be too transgressive sexual images and acts, to be convinced in a mass delusion that a clinical photo of some pubic hair is too far.
Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover — a photo of her on all fours with a man’s hand clutching a fistful of her hair — has birthed such endless discourse that you can shop for whatever slightly-variant-but-basically-the-same responses you like. There’s an illusion of discoursal choice that actually usually only leads down three prescriptive paths: some people declare the photo daring, some people declare the photo anti-feminist, and lots of people declare that they will not be partaking in the discourse, like they are politicians or literally anyone asked.
Carpenter and Lorde are, at the least, easy for balanced people to slot into the tradition of pop stars who push the sexual envelope. They will not be harmed by the shocked responses to their artwork. If anything, they will be helped. This is an old song. If precedent is what is required to interpret these images, one can turn to essentially any major female pop star. Madonna’s SEX book was released in 1992. People were shocked then, and people are shocked now. Or it sometimes feels, rather, that they are “shocked”. A desire to act startled as a pathway to shame as a pathway to ensure that you yourself do not align with photos of “vaginas” (some barely there pubic hair) and campy sexual submission. You can also, of course, endlessly parse apart the complexities of consent under capitalism: What does it mean to sell sex to sell your work? Does consent to a certain sexual performance actually mean that you want to do it? Or that you like how you market yourself? We won’t know for certain from any singular image or video if something is borne of pure pleasure and artistic expression versus an act tainted by socialization or capitalism.
But I don’t think that an interest in being or appearing sexually submissive, or even just naked, is inherently anti-feminist, in the same way that I don’t think it’s necessarily inherently empowering. Some of these pop stars certainly feel obligated and exploited, some of them certainly actually feel sexy (or, in Carpenter’s case, seemingly playful and even a little silly). I don’t think images or acts of sexual submission artistically and personally should be banned simply because misogyny exists.
The notion of sexual exploitation, submission, and the body become a little more complicated in the very reactionary space of pornography. If our current discourses come in threes, perhaps our most reviled current example of “too much”-ness is porn star Bonnie Blue. Blue has made a name for herself through headline-inducing sexual stunts: “barely legal” shoots, an ongoing competition with fellow adult performer Lily Philips to see who can gangbang the most men in a day, and most recently, her “human petting zoo”. Blue’s “petting zoo” stunt plan was to get naked, tie herself to a glass box, and let a group of men do whatever they wanted. (Like most professional pornographic videos, the fantasy is different from the administrative reality — there are IDs to be checked, waivers to be signed, proof of sexual health testing to be confirmed. “Anything they want” isn’t true. Even though these stunts have been accused of being poorly organized before, there is still a legal baseline to be met.)
While much vitriol has been thrown at Blue (some non-porn-career related critiques are deserved: Blue’s desire for controversy has her doing things that are definitely anti-feminist, like hanging out with Andrew Tate), the petting zoo plot was the final straw for her formal platforming. After a massive online backlash, the streaming site OnlyFans banned Blue from their site, citing a disapproval of “extreme challenges”.
(There’s a whole other essay to be written here about the slippery definition and highly profitable nature of “extreme challenges”. Should Mr. Beast be held accountable for the falsified and extreme challenges he presents as documentaries to a young fan base? Especially when the only barrier to gorging on his videos is an Internet connection? If Phillips and Blue put a vague legal warning before their videos that these were stunts done by professionals, a lá Johnny Knoxville, would people be appeased? Or is it that it has to do with the female sexual body that we are so quick to draw lines?)
The notion that this “petting zoo” gangbang content is some of the most extreme that a porn site or distribution company has ever platformed is objectively untrue. If precedent is needed here, too, there’s plenty. One only needs to look to Annabel Chong, who was known for her pornographic film The World’s Biggest Gangbang in the late 90s, or, as written about in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son”, the work of Jasmin St. Clair, who dethroned Chong by starring in The World’s Biggest Gangbang 2 in 1999, with a count of 300 men.
I find OnlyFans taking a “moral” stance (read as: based on the whims of the public) to Blue’s work off-putting. The sensation of personal dislike, even personal repulsion, is not objectionable to me. Knowing what you like and dislike is good. I am regularly grossed out by other people’s sex acts, by musicians’ art, by certain pornography. But I do think that shaming the very notion of nudity or sexual play, acting through means of patronizing, savior-based involvement, and taking punitive financial recourse based on subjectivity and declaring a sex act “too far” is moralizing, puritan, and far more misogynistically conservative than what these women are doing.
There’s been one tweet I’ve been thinking about more than any other comments toward Lorde, Carpenter, and Blue. In a response to Carpenter’s album cover, someone wrote, “The soul rot this must cause, I almost feel bad for her.” They follow up by saying, like some wizened, sorrowful preacher, that “some women just can’t be saved.”
I do not think that taking a sexually submissive photo leads to one experiencing spiritual decline. Nor do I think taking an image of your vagina for album art causes that, nor do I think having sex in a glass box or fucking a hundred dudes in a day on camera causes that. I am sure these acts can cause exhaustion. I am sure if you feel coerced or exploited they can be emotionally painful. But I don’t tie any sexual behaviors or acts to “soul rot”. Doing so is pilgrim-like to me, in that it feels disturbing to read on the modern Internet.
The soft, tender, perverted part of me believes that even if our desires come from socialized and squicky places, we can embrace the nuanced complexity of sex enough to pursue pleasure even if it is subversive, transgressive, and maybe even flawed. The perverted dreamer in me thinks that there’s somebody, somewhere, who really just wants to post pussy, do sexual stunts, and crawl around on the floor. I don’t think we are going to be able to figure out from one photo or video if that is completely true or what, exactly, made them that way. Maybe in a vacuum these practices would not exist, in the same way that I may not have the sex I like having or enjoy acrylic nails. But we are where we are.
You’re welcome to freak the fuck out online if you please. It’s worth asking if accusing women of soul rot for the way they try to look hot or fuck on camera, or holding the belief of an abstinence-only sex ed teacher regarding the “change” of a vagina after a certain number of dicks in a certain scenario, or believing in deplatforming based on a subjective distaste for the type of sex being filmed (particularly from a site whose empire is reliant on women selling increasingly gimmicked and intense porn videos), is really helping us out.
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