The Problem with Podnography

Podnography is the simple act of recording sexual sounds combined with the relatively complicated act of making them available for automatic download to the portable MP3 players of eager listeners via RSS or Really Simple Syndication encoding technology. Now, you’ll find no conservative outcries against it here. The FCC can’t and shouldn’t regulate it. After all, it’s old fashioned peer to peer file transfer, but in this case it doesn’t even infringe on intellectual property rights as Napster and its ilk used to.

So, from the perspective of a libertarian leaning podcaster like me, what’s the big problem? It’s not the “podno.” It’s the “-graphy.” There’s nothing graphic about it, at least not in the literal sense of the word. It’s all audio. Now, I’m comfortable assuming that like print, movies, television and the web, once sexual content is included in podcasts, it will remain included until either the end of time or the introduction of some kind of draconian government attempt at prohibiting it. Given that intractability, podnography requires a more accurate name.

Sam Sugar, the adult industry blogger who coined the term would no doubt welcome some alternative suggestions, since anything which keeps podno in the public ears makes him more money and that, by his own friendly admission, is what podnography is all about. My name recommendation is a variant on anthroposemiotics, the study of human communication. Audiosexiotics and maybe sexiotics for short, besides sounding much sexier than podnography, would be a more meaningful description of this kind of podcasting. In the same vein, sexual recordings of other species would be zoosexiotics and recordings of humans and animals would be… absolutely illegal almost everywhere in the world, besides the Netherlands, so just don’t worry about it. I’m content leaving that one to Sammy.