What Is Pornmaxxing? "Love Island" and the Performance of Desire |
A generation is learning to perform desire and re-enact porn scripts, and the costs are serious.
The scripts are learned early and reinforced constantly, not just from pornography itself.
Platforms like "Love Island" gamify the porn scripts and reward performed desire with votes, fame, and prizes.
This post was co-written by Stephanie Boye and Cheralyn Leeby.
Joy, 19, is having sex with a boy who has his hands around her throat, calibrating her performance, moaning louder than the pressure warrants so he won't press harder. "I know they want to see me struggling to breathe," she says.
She is not enduring this. She is optimizing it for his pleasure, not her own.
There is a word for this; we call it pornmaxxing. Pornmaxxing borrows from looksmaxxing, the online practice of optimizing appearance to maximize perceived attractiveness. With pornmaxxing, young women suppress their own desires, dress the part, and perform pornified sexual behaviors to earn male attention. As one young woman said, "You have to be the porn star to get the guy."
The Shift No One Is Talking About
Typically, boys are the focus of any alarm about pornography and the aggression they might replicate. That worry is warranted. But it has crowded out a parallel story we have heard for more than a decade from young women.
A generation ago, women were devastated to discover their partners watched pornography. Pornmaxxing represents a profound inversion of that moment: the shift from resenting the porn actress to aspiring to become her.
The Scripts Get Absorbed Early
Anne was 9 years old when she first found pornography. "It was like a dictionary," she said. "I was trying to understand what sex was." By 15, she was reenacting scenes she watched with her boyfriend. Eventually, her........