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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 171
entertain her, take her out to dinner. He walked in with the pizza.
She was waiting and eager and hot for him’ (Nitke, cited in
Kaufman 2005: 57). Nitke’s account illustrates how social porn’s
images are hyper-realistic in terms of visual detail but deeply
unrealistic in the sense that they are completely lacking in any more
meaningful social context (the full political consequences of which
are addressed in the next chapter). It is this simultaneous explicit-
ness of depiction but lack of any symbolic content grounded in an
authentically specific social context that makes social porn the most
recent manifestation of the culture industry’s constant attempts to
profit by abstracting from the particular to the general.
In ‘Debbie does salad’, Kaufman (2005) describes the close fit
between the filming techniques used in pornography and television
cooking, pointing out how the filming of Giada, a female cook in a
tight-fitting top, highlights the natural affinity between the two
genres: ‘this kind of caressing camera going over the food, back and
forth and up and down. One of the things that makes it extremely
porny is the repetition. You’ll see the peach, and the camera going
over those peaches again, then Giada, then the peach, then Giada,
then the peach. And so this is very similar to how porn works’
9
(Kaufman, in Gladstone 2005: n.p.). Together in the Food Network
studio, Kaufman relates how he and Nitke, watched Tyler Florence,
‘a handsome, sensitive hunk’ interact with a female gastroporn
partner:
a desperate housewife stared at sturdy young Tyler. Could his
arroz con pollo quench her flaming desire? The camera zeroed in
as Tyler expertly spread raw chicken breast across a cutting
board. ‘That is the quintessential pussy shot,’ Nitke said. ‘The
color of it, the texture of it, the camera lingering lovingly over
it.’ Tyler gingerly rolled the glistening lips of chicken breast
into a thick phallus, which he doused with raw egg. ‘I feel a lot
of love right now,’ Tyler told his transfixed acolyte. ‘This is a
sexy dish.’ … ‘This is the pizza man,’ declared Nitke. ‘There’s
the helpless woman who can’t do it for herself. In walks the
cute young guy who rescues her.’
(Kaufman 2005: 57; original emphasis)
Here, Nitke is vividly describing the collapsing of distance in
Baudrillard’s obscene and of which Part 1’s key thinkers could only
trace the early stages. In Levi-Strauss’s anthropological terms of the
raw and the uncooked, gastroporn perfectly represents Banality TV’s
reversal of the ‘cooked’ into the ‘raw’ achieved through the removal
of the barriers (Baudrillard’s scene/stage) that create symbolic cul-
tural meaning through seductive interactions. By providing such close
visual detail, the camera: ‘returns us to the innocence of the beasts.
Here, we may watch fornication with no sense of the profane, may

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