Pornification

Pornification, as Ruti deploys it in Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings, names a biopolitical and ideological process by which the conventions of heteroporn are internalized by subjects — particularly women — as a normative template for sexual self-presentation and desirability. The concept captures a double movement: subjects actively labor to conform to pornographic codes (to "pornify themselves"), yet this labor does not deliver the promised sexual or relational reward; instead it leaves them "pornified yet deprived." Pornification is thus not merely an external representation but a technology of subjectivity — a set of disciplinary injunctions that shape how subjects inhabit their bodies, perform desire, and position themselves within the masculine/feminine, subject/object binary that heteropatriarchy reproduces.

The concept carries a specifically Lacanian-political valence: pornification functions ideologically not by imposing explicit propaganda but by operating through libido, pleasure, and the fantasy frame. It instrumentalizes jouissance — redirecting the body's enjoyment into forms that reproduce a misogynistic distribution of agency — while simultaneously foreclosing critique by anchoring itself in the discourse of "sex-positivity." The result is that the subject who complies with pornification occupies a structurally impossible position: she takes up the place assigned to her by the pornographic fantasy yet finds that very compliance insufficient to produce what the fantasy promises. The gap between the normative demand and its non-satisfaction is the hallmark of an ideological operation that sustains itself precisely through failure.

Pornification appears once, in mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life, and sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. As a technology of subjectivity, it is most directly an extension of Ideology in its Lacanian-Žižekian sense: it does not operate through conscious false belief but through jouissance and behavioral enactment, confirming the canonical principle that ideology's deepest mode is libidinal rather than epistemic. The "unqualified sex-positivity" that forecloses critique mirrors the canonical account of cynical distance — knowing that porn is "just porn" is itself the ideological gesture that sustains the real of enjoyment while neutralizing any symbolic check on it.

Pornification equally engages the canonical concepts of Fantasy and Desire. The pornographic scenario functions as a collectively circulated fantasy frame ($◇a) that instructs subjects — especially women — in how to desire and how to be desirable; it assigns coordinates of desire in exactly the sense that Fantasy does in the canonical definition. Yet crucially, Ruti's analysis shows the fantasy failing: subjects who pornify themselves remain "deprived," which marks the gap between fantasy's promise and the non-existence of the sexual relation (Feminine Sexuality) it is supposed to bridge. The concept also articulates with Objectality and Jouissance: women are positioned as objects of the masculine gaze/drive rather than subjects of their own desire, and the libidinal surplus (jouissance) generated by porn is captured and recycled by a heteropatriarchal biopolitical apparatus — connecting pornification to the Biopolitics of Sexuality. Pornification is thus Ruti's specification of how these interlocking canonical mechanisms operate at the level of lived, gendered, everyday suffering.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (p.118)

Sometimes they lose even when they do their best to pornify themselves, which is how they end up pornified yet deprived of sex.

The phrase "pornified yet deprived" is theoretically loaded because it captures the constitutive non-coincidence at the heart of the concept: the subject successfully inhabits the pornographic signifier ("pornified") yet the promised jouissance or relational satisfaction is withheld ("deprived"), exposing pornification as an ideological demand whose fulfillment produces not reward but a structural remainder of lack — exactly the logic by which ideology, in the Lacanian frame, sustains itself through the very failure it engineers.