Abstract
Pornographic moving images centered on LEGO are phallic and phallocentric, but their phallicism is exaggerated and ironic. The culture surrounding this YouTube-based form of amateur filmmaking is ambivalent, generally perceiving the work to be hilarious and/or deeply perverse but not particularly meaningful. However, as author Shannon Brownlee argues, LEGO porn attests to pornographers’ ability to express sexual curiosity and knowledge through bricks, as the subgenre is partly grounded in the direct analogy between sexual penetration and the penetration of one LEGO brick by another. It also attests to their knowledge of pornography from multiple eras. Ultimately, the anti-realism and self-referentiality of LEGO porn can prompt us to reflect on the phallicism and inequities of both this and more mainstream forms of the genre.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jade Nauss for sharing her extremely insightful comments, expertise and great sense of humor with me. Her comments about polymorphous perversity and childhood sexual play were especially helpful.
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Brownlee, S. (2019). LEGO Porn: Phallic Pleasure and Knowledge. In: Hains, R., Mazzarella, S. (eds) Cultural Studies of LEGO. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32664-7_9
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