The Internet is for "porn"

One of my favorite songs from the musical Avenue Q says that “The Internet is for porn!” Even the most straight-laced Catholic would have to agree that porn, indeed, is one of the main things powering the online industry. These days, however, the term “porn” is now gradually being used to refer to other things hedonistic, or, at the least, equally pleasurable. 

The most popular term to have evolved is “food porn,” which can be used to refer to, both sarcastically or in a tongue-in-cheek manner, “to a spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, cooking shows or other visual media (i.e. movies such as Mistress of Spices, Like Water for Chocolate, etc.), foods boasting a high fat and calorie content, exotic dishes that arouse a desire to eat, or the glorification of food as a substitute for sex (Wikipedia).”

I haven’t encountered any blatantly sexual food presentations, nor do I have any desire to, as anybody who’s seen Nigella Lawson on TV would realize naked women are not the least necessary to make melted mozzarella sexy.

Many of my online contacts have taken to posting links or sharing pictures of delicious things they’ve found while trawling the Internet for their food porn fix. Apparently, there is a growing universe of food porn aficionados and they’ve found each other in websites, blogs, email groups, and various social networking communities.

Foodporn.com, by virtue of its domain name, is one of the most popular sites. It’s funny, though, as like real porn sites (or so says my brother—haha), you have to click on a huge number of images before you find one that really, er, whets your appetite. What amusing about this site is that it uses real-porn terminology for food-porn categories. Recipes, for example, go under the tag “Self-pleasuring,” while merchandise sells under the tag, “Exhibitionism.” Guess what’s under “Barely Legal” and “Celebrities”?

As always, the best stuff can be found in user-powered sites. TasteSpotting.com is the perfect example. There, you can find glistening sugary palmiers, dark and luscious homemade peanut butter cups, and lots and lots of different food decorated with sexy melted cheese! 

I’m trying to lose weight, though, so I’m abstaining from temptation. Recently, I’ve discovered some other form of porn that’s equally stimulating: “pen and paper porn.” Who would have thought there were websites dedicated to the love of stationery? Then again, if you’d ever collected stationery when you were a young girl, it would be easy for you to understand.

Prettyprettypaper.blogspot.com and Ohjoy.blogs.com are just some of the sites that I occasionally visit for my paper fix. I’m on perennial declutter mode, however, so, just as I do with food porn, I only look.

The subject of decluttering brings us to the kind of porn that’s got me hooked: “productivity porn.” This term sums up the entire industry of maximizing productivity. I’ve been subscribing to RSS feeds of websites that purport to teach me how to get things done, downloading free ebooks on making time work for me, and whatnot. My most favorite guilty pleasure, however, is looking at pictures of decluttered work spaces featured on Unclutterer.com.

Every week, Unclutterer shows reader-contributed pictures of before and after pictures of their work spaces, accompanied by an entry of why it’s the week’s chosen one and how it was done. Oh, but wait, there’s more! Other contributed pictures spillover to Unclutterer’s Flickr pool, where, with just one click you’re instantly immersed in a world of beautiful, amateur, professional images of sublimely clean and organized work spaces. As in the case of real porn—or so my brother says—less is definitely better.

I just wish I could also kick start some real-life action.

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