Porn Drift: Semantic Discord in the World of Gonzo

Legal Porno is only one of a few fairly new studios from Europe that provides currently the biggest output on real old school gonzo porn. . . . And I’m talking here from gonzo porn that means scene contains: ATM, DP, DAP, TAP, Face Fucking, Balls Deep, Merry Go Rounds, swallowing multiple loads, cum gargling, etc. Why can this work in Europe and not in US anymore? Otherwise I would suggest the American girls to visit Europe if they wanna experience some real hardcore poundings. —ultimate_sperminator, “US Porno is Softcore Compared to Legal Porno,” Adult DVD Talk, October 11, 2015

While ultimate_sperminator, in the epigraph to this essay, is by no means the most articulate member of the fan forum Adult DVD Talk, and indeed was taken to task for the loosely defined terminology in this post, his query regarding Legal Porno handily elucidates the focus of my discussion here: the semantic drift in porn terminology. While many fans responded with questions about what he means by “gonzo,” ultimate_sperminator’s understanding of this term, among others, reflects a larger shift mobilized by industry and fans. Legal Porno specializes in extreme, hyperbolic sex acts—that is, double and triple anal penetration and other so-called circus acts. Not only do fans deploy “gonzo” in fluid ways; Legal Porno itself uses rhetoric in scene titles such as “Jessi Empera is back to Gonzo with DP, DAP & triple penetration [in scene] SZ1826.”¹ Contrasting and ambiguous uses of “gonzo” are suggestive of an emerging attitude mobilized by fans and producers that replicates Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous 1964 definition of hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it.”² Scholars often invoke this definition with wry humor when explaining the difficulties of defining pornography. Indeed, the history of pornography might be said to be a history of legal definitions, popular terminology, and social taste that shape and determine what constitutes the genre in a constantly evolving way.³ Indeed, pornography highlights the intersection of genre, legal status, language, and consumption in a way that renders the study of adult film history an academic beacon for understanding the visual arts more broadly.

In the years since Stewart’s decision, academics have comfortably settled on an understanding of hard-core porn rooted in industry and fan jargon—that is, constituting unsimulated sex, typically depicting penetration of orifices (whether by a penis, finger, or toy) and ejaculation (male or female, although it is male ejaculation that has come to be seen as a staple of hard core). Meanwhile, gonzo has traditionally been understood as a format popularized by John “Buttman” Stagliano in the late 1980s—a type of cinema verité porn in which the performer(s) acknowledge the camera and typically interact with the cameraperson or director.⁴ Yet more recent fan and industry usage of the term “gonzo” indicates an understanding of this subgenre as a style—one that connotes extremity, hardness, and, to use antiporn scholar Gail Dines’s phrase, “body-punishing sex.”⁵ For while the standard definition of “gonzo” porn is indeed simply the filmmaking form, the term is routinely deployed by porn studios, fans, performers, and (usually antiporn) scholars to signal a particular, heteronormative, and rather nebulous sexual aesthetic characterized variously as “hard,” “extreme,” or “nasty.”

At some point over the past decade, fan and industry discourse has drifted away from static academic terms that at one time mirrored industry language. This drift has left an awkward chasm in which academics tend to retain a semantic definition rooted in the moment of the terms’ origin while fans and industry producers are merrily conversing with a more flexible set of terms that carry a rather different meaning. The result is semantic discord in discussing pornography that reflects a larger anxiety over the distance between scholar and fan, between those inside and outside of the ivory tower. In this piece, I explore the semantic sphere of this discord with a specific focus on the changing meanings of “gonzo” in the Internet era. A meditation on the word “gonzo” might seem so myopic as to be irrelevant even...