[imagesource: ThePotatoMasher]

People have a tendency to fetishise what scares them. It’s a way of regaining some control over, and injecting pleasure into, what appears to be an uncontrollable situation.

What isn’t often discussed is how this translates into porn.

Yes, like everything else, trends in porn are socially constructed and driven by the times.

Following World War II, the fetish scene was overrun with leather and military-inspired gear. The financial crash of 2008 ushered in the rise of the ‘findom’, or financial dominant, who would, at the behest of a submissive partner, control their finances.

Now we’re facing a global pandemic, climate change, civil unrest, and economic uncertainty which can at times feel like the end of the world and, once again, there’s a porn genre to match it.

VICE explains:

Like giggling at a funeral, getting boned up during the apocalypse feels taboo but ultimately, uncontrollable. Much has been written about how the COVID-19 lockdown has fucked with our sex lives: under forced cohabitation or isolation, we’ve all gotten a little screwy.

But there’s a long tradition of being turned on by the end of the world in porn. As scholars and sex therapists I talked to assured me; and even when we’re faced with the apocalypse, feeling these things is as human as it gets.

Let’s take a stroll through a brief history of what has come to be called ‘apocalypse porn’, not to be confused with ‘disaster porn’ which is the compulsion to gawk at ruin – ‘like watching a trainwreck’, as they say.

There are true apocalypse adult films, like the 2007 film Crescendo 2012, where the premise is that people fuck like there’s no tomorrow, because there won’t be. Outside of porn, these scenarios are everywhere in pop culture. Britney Spears’ video for “Till the World Ends,” for example, while not pornographic, falls into this category of world-ending orgy fantasy.

So does Prince’s “1999.” Melancholia, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Armageddon, Last Night—the list of world-ending movies with a sex or romance plot goes on.

If you search ‘apocalypse’ on Porhub, you’ll be confronted with mixed results, most of which seem to draw inspiration from the film Mad Max.

Then there’s post-apocalyptic porn like the 1987 film The Load Warrior, a parody of the second Mad Max film, The Road Warrior. In Load Warrior, men are cows to be milked for the world’s most scarce and precious commodity: semen.

Within the category of post-apocalyptic porno flicks, the 1982 avant-garde Café Flesh is a favorite of Laura Helen Marks, porn scholar and professor of English at Tulane University. It’s set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic future where almost everyone gets violently ill if they have sex, and those who don’t are put on stage to perform live porn theatre for the rest.

Café Flesh is on YouTube if you’re interested:

It looks like a bit of a mixed bag to the untrained eye, but Laura Helen Marks, porn scholar and professor of English at Tulane University, claims to have identified two unique trends.

“In the former case, there is a good deal of desperation, barter, and primitive economies, which can provide a certain level of danger and excitement—a sense of ‘who gives a fuck,'” Marks said. “In the latter case, the films offer a contrasting sense of being controlled or restricted, which similarly augments sexual fantasy though in the opposite direction—toward strict regimes and containment.”

As for why we’re drawn to apocalyptic porn, it has a lot to do with how we’re processing the state of the world at the moment. Here’s Kristen Mark, director of the sexual health promotion lab at the University of Kentucky:

“We’ve noticed in our data that sex lives are, for the most part, being negatively impacted in terms of frequency. But for those who are remaining sexually active, they tend to be more open to trying more adventurous sexual acts. This might be offering distraction from the world around them, something that makes them feel good, the novelty can be helpful.”

In the process of working out how people feel about each other, the state of things and the future, apocalyptic stories and porn can bring some clarity – or at least some distraction.

“Porn has proven to be an interesting site for such ideas because on the one hand, of course porn is going to grapple with a scenario that relates to sex, but on the other hand most visions of sex in the future are sterile, lacking in intimacy, or couched in some kind of outlaw economy,” Marks said.

These kinds of conflicted porn movies are the ones I find particularly interesting, though, and they can sometimes generate an unexpected and surprising level of eroticism, even when simultaneously bleak.”

As long as what you’re watching isn’t harmful to others, or illegal, the sky is the limit.

You do you.

[source:vice]