On the dangers of house porn, and my progress in recovering from addiction to it...

I am grumpy about the word “porn”.  On the old blog, my most googled post was entitled “Martha Stewart and Porn”.  It got, like ten times the hits of all the other posts combined.

I am sure this led to many disappointed googlers.

I didn't mean “porn” as in “image of sex”.  I mean it as in “image of idealized moments, which can take over our minds and turn lives-that-could-be-spent-living into lives-spent-watching-others-live”.

I used to take in a lot of House Porn.  I spent many hours leafing through images of gorgeously clean and organized houses thinking that I was absorbing inspiration and education, when in fact I was absorbing intimidation and unrealistic expectations.

Porn teaches us to focus on the image, not the experience.  Sex porn (at least, the common crappy stuff) teaches us to look for certain shapes and sounds in sex instead of focussing on connection and sensation.  It teaches us to think in terms of the photogenic image, rather than the lived experience.  Experiences like the joy of finding a fun new thing.  Or of sharing a secret yearning and having your vulnerability met with warmth and acceptance.  Or the shy excitement of shared exploration.  Or the joy of just being together, chatting about intimate things with your head resting on your lover’s thigh.  

Sex porn teaches us to ignore those moments, in favour of imitating scenes that are not our own.  Sex port teaches us garbage about human sexuality and how it actually works and what really makes it joyful.

Body porn—available widely in everything from magazines to after school specials to Weight Watchers commercials—teaches us to look for shapes and styles in our bodies, instead of rejoicing in how they work.  We should be paying attention to the way fuzzy socks feel against our skin or the rapture of our taste buds awash in warm tea, but body porn wants us to see our bodies from the outside.  

Body porn teaches us to exercise in ways that revolve around manufacturing a certain body, rather than around the way movement can joyfully be woven into living.  Body porn teaches us to do three sets of twelve reps, rather than to dance and plant flowers.  It teaches us to run intervals, rather than glory in the way our legs on the path in the woods unlock mile after mile of adventure.  It teaches us to eat like chemists, experimenting on our own flesh to find the right formula.  Rather than eating like people.  Like people who are passionate about fresh tomatoes and who know how to make smoothies that fill our cells with vitamins and that taste like sunrise.  

Homemaking porn is just as toxic.  Those magazines taught me to look for the wrong things in my home.  They taught me to focus on tidy and shiny.  On life that photographs well.  Life in which the entry has colour coordinated stencilled labels for each coat hanger.  Life that is measured by image, not by living.

I am not against cleaning or organizing.  Masking tape labels, to me, say “let’s put stuff back where we can find it so that when it's time to GO FOR AWESOME ADVENTURES we are READY!”.  But colour coordinated stencilled labels say the opposite of the masking tape ones.  They say “let’s spend all our time stencilling and studying the colour wheel and putting all the stuff neatly on the pretty shelf.  When it is time to GO FOR AWESOME ADVENTURES we will be busy stencilling stuff".

This is fine if you love doing the stencilling and organizing (just like if you love reps at the gym you should do them!).  But it’s terrible—heartbreakingly terrible—if these images represent some price you have to pay to feel like your home measures up.  If they translate into weekends and evenings spent trying to get the wrinkles of living neatly botoxed away so that your home is “good enough”. 

I want to see images of homes that frown and grin and sometimes giggle so hard that milk comes out of their noses.  I don’t want a house that looks like Martha Stewart Living, because we all know it’s actually Martha-Stewart-Acting-Out-Living,  I want GrootJames Family Living. 

There would be photos.  So many photos.  Photos of the Peter Rabbit tea set with all the cracks in it that the boys and I had bedtime tea in until the gold was worn off and Eric was 14 years old and six feet tall, delicately pinching a miniature cup in between his thumb and forefinger.  Photos of the bathtub we got from the Re-store for a hundred and fifty dollars and stuck just outside the back door.  There it sits, with no surround or faucet, looking for all the world like the discards of an abandoned bathroom renovation.  Until warm, clear winter evenings when we run the hose from the kitchen sink to fill it with hot water and bathe in our tiny slice of heaven under the night sky.

GrootJames Living would have articles, too.  There'd be a whole spread on “party philosophy”, for one thing.

My party philosophy involves throwing parties no matter what state your house is in and inviting people you love and who love you and sometimes when they arrive they help unpack groceries and get ready.   The article would include a montage of images of things like Nazeem tactfully removing warm-from-dishwasher-but-still-not-clean cutlery from the table, washing them, and putting them back.  There’d be a shot of ten year old Anthony attempting to sneak a sign that says “Fruit plate made by Kai and Anthony but mostly by Anthony” onto the buffet table.  And helpful how-to tips, too.  Like how when guests arrive and ask what they can to do help, you can say “pretend you live here, and offer drinks to whoever arrives next”.  

The thesis of the article would be that it's all in the mentality.  I've said to Gary that the trick is not to think of people so much as "guests" but as "staff", but this is an exaggeration.  The trick is not to think of them as "audience".

Also, there would be gardening section.  Featuring the "Weeds are a Social Construct" sign.  And also a full page spread on Erica's yearly tradition of attractively arranging dollar store rickrack all over her front lawn and declaring on Facebook that she's just "gotten her garden planted this weekend".

There would be sections on cleaning and organizing, too, because that work is the work of living. But they'd be sections on which music blares best on the speakers during family dish time and how if you only have three pairs of pants per kid they keep their laundry done naturally with no nagging.  They'd be real world tips, not measure-ey tips.

Because I don’t measure my home anymore, to see if it is good enough to qualify me to have friends over, or to “earn” me a whole weekend unproductively flopped in front of the fire listening to books on tape with my kids.  Just like I no longer measure my body to see if it qualifies me to wear certain pants or go to certain dance classes.

I refuse to treat things this wonderful, wrinkly, loved and lived in and sacred like they are to be evaluated and judged.  Bodies are for living.  So are houses.