The Pornography of Poverty: Celebrities’ Sexual Appeal at Service to the Poor?

 ABSTRACT

The mid-ninetieth century witnessed a dramatic rise in celebrity culture. Celebrities from all walks of life popped up everywhere in the industrialized world and -through media- flew to underdeveloped nations. As celebrity itself is a construct, smart publicists started to look for new ways of enhancing celebrities’ reputation. Among many ways, humanitarian work proved to have had a decisively positive effect on celebrities’ place in the public eyes. Henceforth, we have witnessed celebrities intervene in different spheres of professional work like relief, medicine, education, gender equality, public policy, etc., in which they have no expertise. This paper argues that celebrities’ engagements in different spheres of action is designed to serve celebrities themselves, and not those who are in need. As a result, we can increasingly see that some celebrities publish adds appealing followers to donate in exchange for nude photos of him/herself. Since celebrities work to serve themselves, they resort to images and image making, instead of dealing with the problem of poverty itself; this culminates in a situation in which we the audience concentrate on the celebrity, and not the problem he or she claims is trying to solve. I, therefore, call this pornography of poverty.  

 

Keywords: Pornography of Humanitarianism; Celebrity Culture; Pornography of poverty; Iconoclast

 

 

Introduction: The Image and the Pornography

We have been bombarded by images of all kinds for more than a century, but the past two decades have witnessed a big surge in image production and distribution. It is now too hard to avoid the influx of images, whether on the screen of our cellphones or the electronic billboards, big mal monitors, bus stop boards, or even taxi seat monitors. The more prosperous a country is, the more its citizen will have to deal with this influx of images. One recurring kind of image that we see these days, is celebrity images. Most brands now are well aware of the value celebrities have to us and therefore, on most ads, a celebrity is smiling at us and invites us to buy something -or some idea. 

Western philosophy, however, has been always pessimistic towards “the image.” In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato presents most of his major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually:

And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice? (The Republic, 360 B.C.E, quoted in Jowett, 1991, 258).

 

In 330 B.C.E Alexander the Great took Persepolis and his soldiers burned this monumental city, but not before they made sure faces of most sculptures were destroyed. They might have known that in ancient Iran the king was in the likeness of God and hence a prince who had a scar on his face could not become a king (Shahghasemi and Tafazzoli, 2013). These incidents happened four centuries before Christ, but the pessimism towards the image remained even after the spread of Christianity. 

Icons (Greek eiko ̄n, ‘image’) were originally small paintings of Christian Read More . . .