The first time I heard someone refer to food photography as "food pornography," I thought it was kind of funny. It made some sense, since porn's purpose is to stimulate your sexual appetite and food photography's purpose is to stimulate your ingestive appetite. But as I began to hear the term a lot, it bothered me a bit. Something about the connotation just doesn't fit to me. Maybe it's my puritanical New England upbringing that makes me feel shame at the suggestion that I might enjoy any sort of porn. Perhaps the more liberated among us would think that the term food porn has a positive association, of pleasure and excitement.

But I don't think so. It seems to me that this is just another example of people finding ways to dismiss any art that actually attempts to be affecting. Sure, it is manipulative, if you choose to see the negative side of things, but all good art must induce an aesthetic reaction in the viewer. If we feel nothing, why bother? The same is true for cooking, which is a kind of art, or craft, if you prefer. There is a strongly visual element to the eating experience, and good cooks always consider the message that the diners' eyes are going to send their stomachs.

Any good writer, filmmaker, painter, or poet will do the same. They are writing with the hope that they will get to the reader, hit them on an emotional level. So when I read this passage today in an op-ed by Meghan Daum about "Brokeback Mountain," I was annoyed by the further descent into cynicism that it represents:


Though what "Brokeback Mountain" amounts to, in effect, is female-targeted emotional pornography, both sexes of all inclinations could learn a thing or two from it. By acting like men but emoting like women, by embodying both sides of the divide, Jack and Ennis cover all the bases of the romantic equation. This makes more conventional movie characters — male or female — seem woefully one-dimensional by comparison.

A breakthrough called 'Brokeback' - Los Angeles Times


Although I agree with her that it was a great movie and her overall assessment of the characters, I just don't like the implication of the term "emotional pornography." This is a plea: Let's stop using pornography metaphorically, especially to belittle genuine art by dragging it into the realm of cheap fuck flicks designed to provide visual fodder for male masturbatory exercises.
Watching "Brokeback Mountain," I was not jacking off my emotions. I was thinking and feeling. Please don't try to make that into such a cheap and gratuitous experience.