Why banning porn is not a solution
I have run several campaigns to try to reduce sexual violence in certain sporting institutions, as well as universities. I’ve always felt a responsibility through my work to do something that will help improve consent, and reduce sexual violence. That is the very reason that I started Freyja, because I saw a clear correlation between bad sex education, learning off porn and then copying it. It seemed evident that a safer porn site that had educational context, could help reduce sexual violence.
When I first started to work on Freyja I reached out to a lot of different charities to ask what they would want to see from a safer porn site from a performer and user perspective. A lot of charities did get back to me, and I had great conversations with them and still to this day have a working relationship with them. As I am an activist to reduce sexual violence, I assumed that these organisations would also want to get involved. I assumed wrong. This type of charity was the only one that did not get back to me at all. Likewise, I had also had other sexual violence activists take my photo, post it on social media and ‘shame’ me for promoting sexual violence because I worked in the adult industry. This was super shocking, and also felt kind of insulting given all of the activist work I’ve done over the years.
From some sexual activists point of view, they look at pornography as:
A form of violence/exploitation towards the performers
A direct cause of sexual violence in people’s own sex lives, as porn is ‘violent’
Let’s unpack this;
Point One:
A lot of people have bias towards porn. They consume content and then make assumptions on the industry based on that. Or, there are also people that never consume/interact with the content but they have assumptions about it anyway. This may be because of what they’ve read in the media (which takes a particular narrative for multiple reasons) and so they form an opinion that is not well-rounded.
One of the biggest assumptions that people outside of the adult industry make is that performers are being exploited, and that some porn videos are being violent towards the performers. Just like in ANY industry, there are employers who may exploit the employees.
However, one cannot make the sweeping assumption that all performers are exploited. Indeed, one thing that really frustrates a lot of adult performers is people assuming that they are exploited, or that the only reason they are in this job is due to a bad family background or coercion. This is far from the truth, and as a matter of fact a lot of adult performers make adult content because they want to. This kind of assumption is often rooted in taboo, shame, and a lack of understanding for the sex industry. If one wants to make a clear analysis of ‘exploitation’ in the industry then they need to actually talk to performers, see how the companies actually operate, and understand the regulation of the industry. Watching a netflix documentary doesn’t count.
Sex work is the oldest profession. And so, looking at banning porn as a solution for sexual violence and exploitation is not a sound argument because it will not make porn go away it will only make it go underground, lead to unregulated sites and then it will put performers and users in danger. Therefore, one cannot argue that banning porn is the solution if they are concerned with performer treatment/exploitation.
Point two:
A lot of people make the assumption that porn is nonconsensual. Yet, porn is all about consent. The issue is that consent on free tube sites is not always showcased, especially the concept of ongoing consent. Then you take into consideration the fact that a lot of people are using porn consciously or unconsciously as education then you have a problem when it comes to consent in real life sex lives. One cannot deny the connection here.
However, the solution is not to ban porn. The solution is for studios, sites and performers to show ongoing consent in their videos, and for adult sites to include educational resources.
One of the worst things to do would be to ban porn as people will always still try to find it, and when it’s not regulated then they will be finding far more problematic content than before. If someone is going to look at porn, wouldn’t you rather someone goes into a safer adult site rather than one on the dark web?
Overall, my issue with the ‘ban porn’ argument, is that it is not a well-rounded argument, and is often made by people that haven’t properly researched the actual issues in the adult space, and how the regulation works. They haven’t spoken with the companies, or with the performers. They just make an assumption with little to no information on the “problem”.
This is not to say that there are no issues in the adult industry, because like any industry it has its problems. However, even if you were to ban the industry you will never get rid of adult content from the internet. Therefore, it is not a solution to the problem, if anything it will exacerbate the issue.
I fully agree that more needs to be done to make the industry safer, to increase porn literacy and education to in turn reduce sexual violence. But, one cannot make a sweeping statement about a problem with no context, and offer no solution. We won’t get anywhere with just stating a problem, we need to look at how to put genuine solutions into action, and the best way to start on this is to increase performer KYC, change moderation practices, add more consent into porn videos (studio or homemade) and add educational content to these types of sites.