Words of the Month - Competence Porn

         Some people love to watch dumpster fires or train wrecks, relishing the dysfunctional dramas in reality shows or the disastrous crashes in car races.  I can’t stand that; I prefer to watch people doing things well.  At the Olympics I want every athlete to perform to the best of their abilities, and in fiction I want to see characters do amazing things.  I like competence porn.  I was reminded of this term recently when it was raised at a panel I attended at Boskone about the lure of heist stories.  One of the reasons people enjoy heists is for the pleasure of seeing all the members of the team perform their amazing special feats to pull off the seemingly impossible task: mastermind, hacker, con artist, safe cracker, thief…  When they do their jobs well it’s competence porn.

        Since this is a Words of the Month post, let’s look at the derivation of the term.  Competence comes from Latin roots meaning “meeting together, agreement, symmetry,” which feels particularly appropriate for those heist teams, but the word actually has a somewhat tangled back story.  In the sixteenth century the word competence had two definitions, both now obsolete.  One was “rivalry,” deriving from compete, which feels particularly appropriate for the Olympics.  In other words, that root of “working together” could be taken to mean either striving together on the same side of an issue, or striving together on opposite sides.  But at the same time the other definition was “adequate supply,” as in competency, pulling on the idea of things coming together in a fitting way.  In the early eighteenth century we got the legal definition of “capability or fitness to testify in court,” and by the end of the 18th century that sense had broadened to the definition I’m talking about today: “adequate ability, sufficient skill” for whatever task.  By this definition competence is more like a minimum threshold, however.  In today’s term competence porn we’re referring to things done not just adequately but done masterfully well.

        Porn, of course, is short for pornography, the abbreviation not appearing in print until around 1960.  (However, who knows how long people had been using the term in the sorts of conversations that didn’t get published!)  Interestingly, the first pornography - to be called by that name, anyway - was obscene paintings in the ancient temples of Bacchus.  This was around 1840, and English got the word from French which had borrowed it from the Greek word meaning “depicting prostitutes.”  You can see the -graphy root that shows up in so many other words for writing, recording, carving, or describing things.  It wasn’t long before the word  pornography was applied to certain French novels, but apparently not until the early 20th century was it applied to pictures other than those original murals.  In 1964 we got the famous Supreme Court opinion in which Justice Potter Stewart said that he couldn’t define “hard-core” pornography, “But I know it when I see it.”

        Recently, however, the word porn seems to be acquiring a broader and generally more benign sense, starting with the term food porn.  In 1977 Alexander Cockburn wrote “True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes,” in which statement the parallel is drawn between alluring food photography and provocative sexual photography.  In this instance it’s less about any specific connection between food and sex and more about the ways the presentation of each can be made to appeal to the sensual and even to the voyeuristic allure of potentially “illicit” unhealthy foods.  By the early 2000s, however, the sense of the “porn” in food porn was ameliorated still further to mean simply “material presenting something desirable in an especially aesthetically appealing or sensational manner.”

        The term property porn appeared in 2005 to describe the luscious and alluring photos of desirable luxury properties in glossy magazines, and various other “porns” have been used, although I certainly have no intention of searching for porn on the internet in order to find you more examples.  (I do hope the writing of this post won’t get me attacked by the wrong sorts of algorithms!)  And finally we get to today’s term competence porn, which was coined in 2009 by John Rogers about the television show “Leverage,” which he created.  So yes, heists are in fact the quintessential example of competence porn.

        I don’t love this term or this usage of the word porn because in general I dislike the linguistic mushing together of positive and negative, healthy and unhealthy, such as “sick” or “wicked” meaning “good” or “ kill” or “slay” meaning “to do a good job.”  (On the other hand, you can read about some other examples of linguistic amelioration in my prior post Scary Good.)  But I do absolutely enjoy seeing advanced skills performed with exceptional proficiency, so while I might wish for a better name for it, I still say “Bring it on.”

[Pictures: Okuda Sadaemon Yukitaka, woodblock print by Ogata Gekkō, 1902 (Image from The British Museum);

Detail from Ninja, woodcut by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1814 (Image from Artsy).]