Before you write me off as a total pervert, I should define weather porn. It's images of really bad storms wrecking houses, smashing things, ripping towns apart. It gives you a rush to watch this stuff. Though I suppose the weather porn rush is different from the porn porn rush.
In some ways, weather porn, somewhat like regular sex porn, is morally problematic. Sex porn is exploitive, making objects out of the people depicted in the smut. Though many of those people chose to be in the porn films.
Weather porn is maybe exploitive too. Victims of severe weather almost always are not doing something that some would raise moral questions about. I avoid the weather porn that shows victims crying over destroyed houses, or worse, relatives that had been killed by the storm.
But I do enthusiastically watch the videos of houses blowing away, or a tornado chewing up and spitting out a town.
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| In a classic weather porn money shot, a Texas tornado flings tractor trailers around in April, 2012. |
Like sex porn, there are professional weather porn producers who make slick productions of tornadoes hitting their chase vehicles, or flood waters washing through a neighborhood, or hurricane force winds shredding Florida palm trees.
In the age of YouTube and social media, there's also an explosion of both amateur sex porn and weather porn. I indulge in making amateur weather porn myself, filming storms that roll through Vermont and posting them on YouTube, or taking photos and posting them to this blog or other sites.
Because Vermont isn't necessarily the epicenter of epic events like tornadoes and hurricanes, most of the weather porn I produce is soft core. The storms I film are fairly dramatic, but also relatively harmless, causing little damage and not hurting anyone.
I do get lucky sometimes, though and get a money shot, like a very close lightning strike.
However, in the past couple of years, Vermont has experienced some extreme weather, so I've been able to dabble in hard core weather porn, with epic flooding from Hurricane Irene, record high Lake Champlain flooding smashing shoreline buildings and roads, and flash flooding chewing its way through roads and neighborhoods.
You can see one of my weather porn videos above, taken in Colchester, Vermont during a record Lake Champlain flood in May, 2011
Like a sex addicted porn afficianado, I'm going to stay hooked on weather porn for the foreseeable future. It's getting out of control. I actually find myself hoping for a severe thunderstorm, and hoping I can position myself in the path of these storms.
I obviously don't want another Hurricane Irene disaster, or anything else that destroys homes and lives. I don't like watching that kind of suffering.
Even though it's not as great a rush as the hard stuff, I would still probably prefer to stick with the soft core weather porn.
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