Can pornography be ethical?
by Ashley Johnson
I’m a feminist stuck somewhere in the middle of the porn debate. I agree with anti-porn activists that mainstream pornography is dangerous and with pro-porn advocates that censoring porn contributes to sex-negativity. Sex itself is a pleasurable act, not a bad thing, and censoring porn implies that sex is shameful. Regardless of where I stand, porn is a form of Constitutionally protected free speech, which renders the debate moot. People are going to—and have a right to—make and watch porn. What matters is the type of porn we choose to watch.
The moments we turn on pornography aren’t always the most thoughtful. But if we stopped to think about porn at times when there’s more blood near our brains, you’d think we would be conscientious about our choice of videos. Is it okay to watch porn if the actors aren’t there by choice? What if they’re unpaid? Children? If you don’t know whether the actors are consenting adults, why would you watch it? It’s easy enough to agree that porn should be ethically made. Porn is about pleasure; you shouldn’t be able to hurt people in order to make it.
On one side of the porn debate are those who equate pornography with prostitution. When you buy porn, you exchange money for sex. But most of us don’t pay for porn—we have the Internet. Porn is regarded as a public good, something we should have free access to at all times. An industry that gives away the majority of its products survives in part by exploiting its workers. According to gender researcher Abigail Bray, porn actors aren’t always guaranteed royalties for their performances, which means that “one act of prostituted sexual labour is reproduced indefinitely and put to work 24 hours a day, for an infinite number of years, across the world, without pay [emphasis in original].”
There are more ethical issues beyond the production of porn. We all recognize mainstream pornography is a performance, but it still impacts the way we understand sex. PornHub gets 44 million hits a day, and those videos have influence. How can we presume that this exposure to pornography doesn’t affect how we think about sex? Porn is more than a fantasy; it’s sex education.
Porn teaches us that sex is supposed to happen in a specific way. The average person’s first encounter with pornography is at age eleven, and it teaches them how to have “pornsex,” sex that imitates porn. We treat the porn fantasy as the kind of sex everyone wishes they could have. Porn as the ideal leads to “pornification” of real world sex. People watch porn, then have porny sex. It’s the script that we follow, because it’s the only sex we can observe. We’re taught our turn-ons, and that’s a shame.
Pornsex is not how sex ought to be and it’s problematic for everyone. We measure our sexual prowess against the metric of porn. Men are made to feel inadequate when their penises are “too small” or they ejaculate “too quickly” compared to men in porn, writes Gail Dines, the world’s preeminent anti-porn activist. Women must have impossible-to-attain bodies and always be available and excited for sex. In the mainstream, lesbians are straight women performing for male viewers. Black women are cataloged under “ebony” and embody a hypersexualized jezebel stereotype. Sex ends with the male orgasm, usually on someone’s face.
Porn doesn’t represent real-world sex, but it does have real-world effects. According to Robert Jensen of the University of Texas, “We live in a pornography-saturated culture in which women are routinely targets of sexual violence and intrusion. We live in a rape culture that is increasingly pornified. Pornography is a form of propaganda for a rape culture.” When pornsex represents actual sex in the public consciousness, we internalize its messages. When women in porn are presented as sexually available and unrapeable objects, the message is that real women are the same way. One in six women will experience rape—a startling statistic made palatable by the prevalence of pornography. When images that degrade women and hold men to an impossible standard are everywhere, we become desensitized.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! Porn can be a vanguard of consent, portraying realistic orgasms and myriad body types. Sexy isn’t one thing. We have been told what to find arousing. We walk around with some- one else’s fucked up fantasy in our heads. It’s a fantasy where men always have giant, rock-hard cocks, women’s breasts defy gravity and are always called tits, and sex ends the moment he cums all over her face—which she always enjoys. Fantasy can be healthy—it allows us to escape and imagine a world different from our own— but that release doesn’t have to happen at the expense of another person’s safety or well-being.
The feminist and ethical porn movements emerged in response to the pornification of real-world sex. Feminist porn is an attempt to treat sex the way that it actually exists in the world and to counteract the message that the predominant eroticism of sex is the degradation of women. This is the side of the debate that sees porn as opportunity to send sex-positive messages that say, “Hey! Doesn’t this consensual act look like fun?” In feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino’s definition of feminist porn, “female desire, pleasure and orgasm are prioritized and celebrated. When the sex on screen represents the experience of the performers (no one is ‘faking’ anything) and that experience is set up to be positive and supportive, sex is presented as joyful, fun, safe, mutual and satisfying.” The downside to feminist porn is that it’s a niche market, meaning it’s not always free. Most sites, like Indie Porn Revolution, Crash Pad and We Love Good Sex, require subscription fees. But that’s where we come in. We have power as consumers.
Our only course of action is to be better makers and consumers of porn, which is really in our best interest. Nothing kills the mood like the feeling of being complicit in sex trafficking. Making porn shouldn’t hurt anybody. Watching porn shouldn’t contribute to an ideal of sex that doesn’t exist, nor to real life sexual violence. Making and watching porn is your right in this country, but if you choose to exercise it, do so responsibly.