Learn the ropes
Choose your side
The idea behind the Rift is simple: for each topic of debate, we provide you with an expertise based on a pro-con approach, written by competent and legitimate experts. We want to help you make your own opinion, and guide you on first steps to civic engagement.FOR
Ethical porn exists and isn’t new: you just didn’t know about it
Bertoulle Beaurebec
Artist-performer, author, sex worker, Afrofeminist pro-choice activist
Popular, so-called “mainstream” pornography is used as a scapegoat to explain societal ills when they exist in an institutionalized way. The popular film industry has always created narratives that normalize rape culture, justify misogyny, fetishizations of racialized women, racism, ableism, classism, queerphobia. This is true for family, horror, romantic, and adventure films.
It would be hypocritical to expect popular pornographic films to be the only ones that exist outside of these discriminatory norms by holding them responsible for systemic oppressions that predate modern pornography.
Because sexual fantasies are often stripped of moral principles, it would be counterproductive for popular pornography to sell only pseudo-romantic sex images. No capitalist enterprise whose sole purpose is profit can be considered ethical in a society so deeply unequal.
However, in the lesser-known independent pornography, performers choose their partners, the practices performed and filmed, and the conditions of filming. The remuneration for the performance and the transfer of image rights is also higher.
There is such a thing as ethical pornography. To consume it, you have to look for it, you have to admit that pornography has a culture, various sub-genres and a history like any other film genre.
The priority is no longer to generate money but to spread a positive and empowering image of many sexualities in a society with binary sexual norms and overall misinformation about human anatomy, sexual practices, and gender identities.
This pornography is queer and militant, sometimes educational, always inclusive of diverse morphologies, genders, sexualities (cf: Carré Rose Films, Lustery, Fours Chambers). This pornography is guilt-free, moving, funny, soft, intense. In the image of our sexualities. In the image of our lives. It empowers performers, especially when they host it themselves on platforms like Mym, Manyvids, or Onlyfans, and benefit from the entirety of the revenues generated by their content.
There are two realities taking place simultaneously. The one perceived by the dominant ones, lowering their disdainful eyes towards the others, ignoring their approaches, and despising their experiences. And there is one of the othered people. The experience of systemic oppression has allowed queer people to create a movement of ethical, humane, empathetic pornography and the representation of their sexualities, ignored by popular pornography.
There is such a thing as ethical pornography. To consume it, you have to look for it, you have to admit that pornography has a culture, various sub-genres and a history like any other film genre.
AGAINST
There is no such thing as “ethical” porn
Caitlin Roper
PhD candidate and Campaigns Manager, Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation
The pornography industry is built on men’s sexual violence, domination, cruelty, humiliation and degradation of women. Radical feminist theorists define pornography as the graphic form of women’s subordination and inequality.
It is impossible to transform an industry that relies on the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies and sexuality, which turns women into things for men’s use and abuse, into an ‘ethical’ or ‘feminist’ practice.
While so-called ‘ethical’ or ‘feminist’ porn is pitched as the solution to violent, misogynist mainstream porn, people don’t seem to be all that interested in watching it. ‘Ethical’ porn is statistically irrelevant. It comprises a tiny corner of the industry, and it’s not ethical porn keeping the nearly $200b industry flourishing.
The bar for what constitutes ‘ethical’ porn is incredibly low, and typically only refers to conditions of production, such as fair compensation and labour conditions, representations of diverse body types and sexualities, consent and authenticity. The actual content of ‘ethical’ porn is often indistinguishable from sexist and violent mainstream porn.
It is impossible to transform an industry that relies on the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies and sexuality […] into an ‘ethical’ or ‘feminist’ practice.
In Rebecca Whisnant’s critique of the work of Tristan Taormino, a so-called ‘feminist pornographer’, it was noted that depictions of violence against women, such as gagging, choking, slapping or misogynist name-calling were still prevalent. “Either it is ethical and honourable to ‘play with’ and promote the dynamics of humiliation and violence that terrorise, maim and kill women daily, or it is not,” concluded the report.
Torture porn website Kink.com – where women are hogtied, hung upside down and caned, and subjected to ‘water bondage’ among other human rights abuses – is touted as another example of ‘ethical’ porn – even with a number of actresses having alleged abuse.
We must remember also that women are harmed not just in the production of porn, but in its consumption too. Eroticising and normalising men’s sexual violence against women has serious real-world complications for women, even if performers consent and are paid.
If we support women’s rights, if we believe in women’s humanity and object to men’s violence and abuse of girls, we cannot ignore the abuse of women that is pornography. It’s not enough to merely improve the conditions of this abuse – we must abolish it.
Caitlin loses this debate because of 2 words: amateur porn. There are no doubt millions of amateur porn videos that were filmed ethically, between a real-life man and woman couple, where no violence, abuse, or degradation occurred. Caitlin only discusses mainstream porn made by studios or other organizations – she ignores the huge world of amateur porn.
Although there may not currently be ethical porn in studio-produced porn, there are thousands and perhaps millions of amateur porn videos that are ethical. Many of these were created by a real-life husband-and-wife couple, or boyfriend-girlfriend, where both people wanted to make the video and agreed after filming that it was consensual, loving, and respectful. So there definitely IS such a thing as ethical porn. There are thousands or millions of examples.