ABSTRACT
Whether as an explicit accusation, a sidelong swipe or a coy implication, reality TV has long been associated with pornography. From the moment that Endemol, the Dutch production company behind Big Brother, launched its ‘social experiment’ in 1999 to see what would happen when 12 ordinary people were confined together in a house under the watchful eye of mounted and manned television cameras, many commentators reached for the rhetoric and logic of pornography to express their fascinated revulsion. As a term that encompasses the simultaneously transgressive, shocking and enticing, pornography has been repeatedly used as a fitting analogy for reality TV’s own transgressions of staged visualisation, the word seeming to click effortlessly into place to describe the graphic exposure of intimate contact between real bodies that is common to both genres. But is this simply a metaphor, or does the modality of pornography offer insight into, rather than just condemnation of, the purpose and function of reality TV? The answer requires coming to terms not only with the definitional limits of pornography but also with its ambivalent metaphoricity, especially as it enters the mainstream and its reach extends to zones where mediation and pleasure overlap – and where ‘porn’ may well connote libidinally charged acts of looking at images that strictly speaking have nothing to do with sex, such as ‘food porn’ or ‘real-estate porn’. 1 At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that there is also a literal applicability of the term ‘porn’ to reality TV, given the numerous moments when cameras capture non-simulated sexual encounters in reality TV settings, even though such depictions ‘feel’ quite different from hardcore pornography. As I shall examine, this difference of feeling results from the way in which reality TV has reframed the definition and production of intimacy, which in turn has exerted considerable influence on the ways in which recent pornographic forms index realness (Patterson, 2004; Longstaff, 2013).
