Presuming Porn Guilty

If ethical porn exists, it's swamped by abuse

This week, we’re discussing the exploitation baked into our pornified culture. On Thursday, I’ll share your reflections on being fans and supporters of athletes who were shaped by abusive systems.

Content note: This week’s essay discusses ethical questions about pornography. I don’t describe any graphic content in my own piece below, but some articles I link to do describe specific sexual or violent acts.

Earlier this summer, Liz Bruenig wrote a thoughtful piece for The Atlantic on the prevalence of pornography and ways people, both pro- and anti-porn, have tried to prepare teens to navigate a world that endlessly invites them to indulge in it. Her piece was prompted by a particular controversy in a school that offered a porn-literacy class, but she makes the case that all schools and parents need some kind of answer to the modern pornapalooza. Bruenig writes:

Many digital natives who pride themselves on a certain kind of ennui likely far underestimate exactly how difficult it is to be an ethical user of pornography, or even to begin to judge how to be such a person, given the dark, circuitous routes porn travels before it arrives as a thumbnail on a streaming site. And parents who imagine porn-literacy courses like Fonte’s to be little more than crash courses in en vogue libertinism seem entirely unaware of how dire the stakes are. The risk isn’t that their children may be exposed to something “dirty” or politically incorrect, but that their children may well be exposed to things that are brutal, cruel, vicious, even genuinely criminal—the sort of material law-enforcement agents carefully train themselves to encounter—all without a sense of how to distinguish the authentically violent from that which only masquerades as such.

Liz is right that the question of whether pornography is ever acceptable (and where its boundaries lie) has become tangled in another question: Even if some forms were all right to make and watch, how could a prospective porn user be confident they weren’t instead watching (and aggravating) a sexual assault? Pornography and sex work is rife with abuse and exploitation.

As Liz put it on Twitter, when someone asked what made this question different from any other question about ethical consumption, e.g. buying clothes made in a sweatshop:

I think the moral difference between watching a video of a person who is in fact being raped and purchasing a product that was manufactured in a sweatshop is that in the second case, the misery of the godawful labor conditions is not *the product itself*

I have similar questions about nudity and racy scenes in film and TV, even if they fall short of our current boundaries of pornography. It’s hard to believe I haven’t seen scenes that chronicle real abuse, even if I haven’t seen Game of Thrones or Frida—two works where actresses have spoken out about feeling coerced into filming scenes they were uncomfortable with. In the case of Salma Hayek in Frida, the violation of taping a sex scene that Harvey Weinstein forced her to include was as much about him controlling her and taking away her voice as about other people seeing her body.

I don’t believe any films enjoy the benefit of the doubt for their nude or sex scenes. Intimacy coordinators and changing norms may make a difference for work going forward, but I work with the assumption that most existing work should be presumed to be exploitative.

That doesn’t always answer the question of whether to see the work or not—Hayek doesn’t want people to ignore Frida, despite the wound within it. But it does shape my response and means that the scenes are jarring, making me think of the actress, not the character.

In a previous conversation, reader Magdalen wondered if the most ethical form of pornography or racy material is the kind that doesn’t involve real bodies:

By these, I mean pornographic content that does not use actual actors performing sex acts—so things like animated porn and erotic fiction. They're not totally divorced from the conversation on pornography, since they can certainly contain content around nonconsent, degradation of women, etc. But at the same time, it's much harder to argue that they are wrong if they can be consumed in a way that doesn't affect someone's actions with real women or men. One question that I don't really know how to answer is whether it's possible to consume material like that without creating adverse affects—and I have to be frank here that my sexual ethic would say if it's true, then I should not consider it wrong to view such material. Distasteful or risky, perhaps, but not truly wrong.

I think she’s right that this pushes the conversation closer to the question of whether pornography is bad for the consumer rather than being bad because it deepens harm done to the subject. For my part, I believe a large part of the argument against pornography is simply that it makes people consumers of sex and intimacy, rather than participants, offering the full, vulnerable gift of self. Sex is relational—it can’t be packaged and distributed without ceasing to be sex.

If you are a parent, how have you broached the topic of pornography with children?

How have you talked to friends about these ethics, including how to take a step back from destructive defaults?

If pornography is something you struggle with, the Angelic Warfare Confraternity is a prayer community devoted to supporting each other in chastity. I also have friends who have found accountability tools like Covenant Eyes helpful. One friend was grateful for the service, not just because it helped him step back from his addiction to pornography, but because it deepened his friendship with his accountability partner—suddenly, the two men had a standing appointment to catch up and care for one another.