New Pornography

On Britney Spears' new OnlyFans account and the future of celebrity pornography.

Leaked images from behind the scenes of Sydney Sweeney’s photoshoot for her lingerie brand SYRN.

Dear subscribers,

The following is an experiment. For almost all my life I have had a mental block that has told me any piece of writing under a thousand words does not deserve to be made public. It is not a “piece.” It is for the notebook, or incorporation into some future, larger work. I have a complex that tells me I have to make all things “major.” But perhaps minor pieces can be “major.” Perhaps I am too tied to a single form of essay, which hinders me and prevents me from being productive. I save up so much that when I add it into a large amalgamation the finished product sometimes becomes overlong and obtuse and too tangential.

So this is a very small piece. The kind I write in a notebook during the day, or envision as a Tweet and save as a draft. I want to see if you respond to this kind of writing, shorter and more frequent than my long pieces which I spend far too long trying to perfect. It’s an experiment, so feel free to share your thoughts. They will not all be about pornography. They will be spontaneous. This just happened to develop within me at a cafe, listening to an old woman talk about her grand-niece making lots of money on OnlyFans.

Here’s the first one.

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Norman Mailer recorded the following “highdea” in his Liptons Journal from the mid-50s, the journal wherein he documented his experimentation with marijuana-psychoanalysis, only recently published by Arcade Publishing. (If you crack it open past midnight with total concentration you will feel high reading his stoned cerebration. Many of his insights, whether true or not, have a little of the glow that comes with the stoned shock of a new connection.)

Doesn’t the great dancer wish to dance in the nude, and don’t we wish to see him or her that way? Doesn’t the great actor or actress wish finally to act before an audience the fuck itself, and indeed the great actor or actress always gives a sense of the fuck? (Marlon Brando, Tallulah Bankhead, Laurette Taylor.) Doesn’t the great painter wish to convey the outside and then the inside of the act? Renaissance fabrics and textures and landscapes and nudes, and our modern non-objective art which is concerned with the variations of the soul in the act. Doesn’t the great novelist always seek for ways to communicate his amazing knowledge of the sexual act?

But, now look, society prevents all these expressions in everything but the most degraded form. We are only allowed strip-teasers for the dance, whores for the circus act, cheap drawings for the art, cheap pornography for the literature. Only in perversion is the sexual and creative soul of man allowed to express itself.

This split between purity and degradation has happened too in “metaphysics.” In the early 20th Century -physics became so complex and complicatedly unresolvable (the failed marriage of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, the abject failure of String Theory) that it conclusively outstripped the metaphysician and perverted philosophy. It then went so deep underground in America's Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAP) that it outstripped and perverted the physicist. The frontiers of new knowledge about the nature of reality raced away and the metaphysician could not measure the distance of the gulf. This left philosophy — at the precipice of generating new ideas on the instant man pierced the webbing of the moon with rockets— with only the meta-, ie the degraded state of late 20th century postmodernsim and critical theory, and an impossible leap to make back to -physics. Thus, we have no public ontology for the 21st Century, and the perversion of philosophy has left us to think, among other terrestrial concerns, with sex.

Britney Spears has started an OnlyFans. Developments in culture often announce themselves first as psychosis, and from the direction of “low culture,” and then are normalized in the proceeding generation. This is how Christianity spread in Rome, amongst the barbarians and then the low plebeians and only then the elite. Now, you’ve read this sentence about Britney Spears and believed it. I did too when I first wrote it. The news first went viral on Twitter until several days later a Community Note verified the OnlyFans account was an inactive parody. But we believe it because of the public psychosis of Britney Spears, the degradation of American celebrity, and the plummeting curve of our culture. Of course the logical extension of 21st Century celebrity is pornography. Whether this story about Britney Spears is true or not this trajectory is true.

We are fast approaching a moment where we will call all pornstars “great artists.” There may be some genuine artists among them. I don’t see it in the current generation, but all it will take is a rising generation of actresses and “musicians” to make and sell pornography on OnlyFans parallel to their acting careers (not before fame like Kim Kardashian), and the merging will be irreversible. There is probably no way around it: AI porn will force the celebrity’s hand, bringing this into existence whether celebrities actually partake or not. The law will not be able to stop the distribution of, say, a realistic Sydney Sweeney in a twenty-eight minute porn, just as it could not stop children of my generation from illegally accessing infinite amounts of internet porn for free. This will then open the doors for the pornstar to enter Hollywood. They have already entered reality television; newspaper articles when they’re spotted at courtside basketball games with comedians (Sky Bri); cameras cut to them at college football games (Abella Danger). They are right there on the other side of a thinning wall.

ESPN cut to pornstar Abella Danger multiple times during the National Championship college game.

Sex already exists beyond the event horizon of the actor’s mask — it is part of the subconscious attraction to celebrities, it is what the libido is there to think of during the movie, or during their striptease-simulated-sex concerts. It is not imaginable that 21st Century Man is going to consume less porn going forward, and so if the celebrities themselves won’t do it, 21st Century Man will find a way to fabricate it through AI himself. Add to this the fact that we already call performers who have their songs written for them by ten or twelve people “artists,” an archetype the pornstar is not so far from as we may think, and it is almost certain pornstars are hurtling toward this new category. Many of them are just as globally known and recognizable as, say, Taylor Swift, or Sydney Sweeney. So what shall we call that fame?

Hark at how Bad Bunny walked around in “symbolic solidarity” with supposedly all of Central and South America against American imperialism (even though the majority of, say, Venezuelans welcomed the Imperial arrest of their dictator Nicolas Maduro), a hero at that moment of the left, singing these words over and over at the Super Bowl:

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (Push it in)

Pu-pussy with dick, dick with ass, yeah (Push it in)

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (Push it in)

Yo-Your tits rubbing my nipples (Push it in)

The fact this was sung in Spanish and many Americans enjoy the song without understanding the words shows what a hairsbreadth lies between us and the future of total pornography. Then again, this is the ubiquitous style of modern pop. It is already hard to tell a new “musician” from a new OnlyFans star. The names, aesthetic and fashion, end product (and talent) is roughly identical: that of pornographic plausibility.

Porn has already become a genre of pop music. Children on school buses with Beats headphones Neuralinked to their skulls will soon be putting their headphones on their friends heads to show them the new hot song they can’t stop listening to. The song will merely be the isolated audio of hardcore porn, “Fuck! Fuck me! Fuck my tight little pussy! Oh daddy, fuck!” Yeah, that one’s good, the friend will say, but have you heard this? “Oh my God, you’re so much bigger than my boyfriend. He can’t know. Oh shit, go slow. Oh, oh! I’ve never been fucked like this before!” And the two seventh graders will get off the bus and sit down in class and open their glowing tablets for Algebra class, and their teacher will be a Jeffrey Epstein-escort qua Melania Trump-approved robot named Plato (who pimps like Epstein think never physically wrote — but that’s a different piece about illiteracy).

This image appeared originally in PBS. Melania Trump laid out a future where children will be taught literature by robots named Plato.

But will this future of celebrity pornography bring humans real sex, or the widening Imperium of solipsism and fantasy that is external and cybernetic in origin? For indeed the “addiction” to porn is an addiction to cyberneticism. Will the last people left having sex in America be the pornstars themselves, before a recording camera or cellphone? What will happen when the projection and fantasy of sex amongst our celebrities is no longer a mystery, when the vanity lingerie brand is but a supplement to the OnlyFans account and career in Hollywood?

So much of art is built on the metaphor for sex. Many of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, amongst the most beautiful lines ever written in English, are about convincing his love to have a child with him: that is, to have a lot of pro-genitive sex until she becomes pregnant. And then do it all over again. This is being a bit crude but there is some truth in my crudeness, and the sex of fertility is the most beautiful and erotic form of sex. Because the entire act is in a sense a metaphor for the Creation of a new human. But the pornstar does not whisper, “I want you to make me pregnant.” If she did it might be art. Still, the erasure of metaphor leads to the erasure of Creation.

Mailer jotted his observation about art and sex in 1955, before the dawn of the nude sex scene in Hollywood. He said of Marilyn Monroe two decades later, in a 1973 post-Last Tango in Paris world, that Monroe’s sexual mystique lay in the “look of a good woman who has just been well laid.” Thus, “one felt a sense of accomplishment in looking at her, not the nervousness of anticipation.” (Why do I have this feeling, this American feeling, that it is somehow more dangerous to quote this and to cogitate around pornography than it would be to blast Bad Bunny or, say, “Wet Ass Pussy”?) At any rate, fifty years later the libidinal tension of our century is not in sex, but in masturbation. 21st Century Man does not imagine what it will be like to have actual sex with an actress, but in imagining what they will be like in porn. And I do mean will, for this future is coming.

Imagine updating Mailer’s description of Monroe for next-gen onanism (the red typo-squiggle appears under “onanism” as if it did not exist!): “She has the look of a good woman who just been well masturbated to. One feels a sense of masturbatory accomplishment in looking at her, not the nervousness of anticipating masturbating to her.” And where shall we be fifty years hence? Is there a fractalization of the individual beyond masturbation?

Perhaps after absorbing the shock of this development, the pornstar as great artist, the pornstar as Oscar nominee, it will have a leveling effect on society. There is the parabolic arc of tragedy, but even decline and fall has its boundary and eventually civilization pulls upwards against gravity. Maybe after an extreme paucity of art, metaphor will come back in to replace the former sex mystery, and sex becoming so saturated as to lose its modern edge of taboo, actors and actresses will act “the fuck,” as Mailer puts it, within great artworks. Not as the main event or as ornamentation, but simply as a facet of an artwork. True sex, real sex. Merry Clayton was pregnant when she sang on Gimme Shelter — perhaps future generations will watch talented actresses become pregnant in a film. Perhaps we will have less Puritanism and less pathology because sex will not be so hidden, so private, and it shall return to a healthier magnitude in the deep future. The pre-Christian sex of the Ancient West — of the Ancient Rome that was on the cusp of the steam engine before morality nearly did it in. (Remember that handful of centuries called the Dark Ages?) After two-thousand years we are still exorcising the pathology this morality introduced.

Regardless, we will achieve a reconciliation between sex and art before a reconciliation between meta- and -physics. A pornstar will be in a Hollywood film before we discover the reality of another inch of the experience of consciousness after death. America will boast major celebrities on OnlyFans before legal prostitution and a new ontology. I would wager my savings on this prediction in Polymarket.

These images from behind the scenes were more titillating than Sydney Sweeney’s finished, glossy photographs for her lingerie brand SYRN, because they had the modern pornographic aesthetic of the cellphone camera — the mode of consuming and making pornography becoming a new fetish within pornography.