Sexuality at a Distance: A Mediational Ontology of Pornography

Philosophical debates about pornography usually begin with harm, objectification, artistic status, free speech, or intended arousal. These approaches address important normative and aesthetic questions, but they frequently presuppose an answer to the question of what kind of object pornography is. This article develops a mediational ontology of pornography grounded in an anti-exceptionalist ontology of sexuality. Sexual desire is treated as a basic psychophysical drive: it is not a metaphysically unique force but shares with hunger a general structure of tension, object-salience, directed activity, temporary satisfaction, and recurrence. Its distinctive character lies not in a separate ontological category but in its ob- ject and existential direction. Hunger directs the organism towards what sustains its present embodiment; sexual desire directs embodied existence beyond its self-enclosure towards an- other body, bodily signs, or sexual possibilities. The body of another acquires exceptional salience because it is encountered as homologous alterity: a body of the same kind as one’s own, yet not one’s own. It is therefore both recognisable through one’s lived body and available as a field of comparison, aesthetic appraisal, and sexual orientation. Pornography arises only when such bodies, bodily signs, or sexual acts are transformed into a display through a medium. A medium is not merely a recording device. It is any representational, transmissional, or performative structure— including language, photography, film, sound, live-camera transmission, virtual environments, and the stage—that institutes a participatory distance between what is displayed and the subject who apprehends it as a spectator. In a restricted extension of McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message, the medium is constitutive here because it reorganises sexuality from an embodied event into an addressed display; this does not make sexual content irrelevant, but explains why content alone is insufficient. On this account, direct nudity and direct sexual encounter are not in themselves pornography, whereas a live-camera transmission or staged performance may be pornographic despite temporal or spatial co-presence. The article defines pornography as a mediated display of bodies, bodily signs, or sexual acts that institutes participatory distance from direct embodied encounter and organises what appears as an object for sexual desire. It distinguishes this view from Michael Rea’s use-based definition, Michael Frank’s ontology of the pornographic image, Jerrold Levin- son’s release-oriented aesthetics, and Mari Mikkola’s social-ontological account. The resulting theory explains recorded, literary, sonic, live, staged, virtual, and synthetic pornography within a single framework while distinguishing pornography from medicine, accidental nudity, voyeurism, private embodied intimacy, and idiosyncratic sexual use. It further argues, through Frances Ferguson’s analysis of pornography in sexual harassment, that participatory distance can be imposed: a representation remains a representation while its forced presentation becomes an action directed at an unwilling spectator. Pornography, in its most basic form, is not sex but the graphy of sex: sexuality made available through distance.