This Is Why You Should Pay for Porn (Self Magazine)
Read the full article by Sophie Ouellette-Howitz at SELF.com
The first time I watched porn, I was 18 and sitting in the common room of Scales House on the Smith College campus. A house-wide email had informed me of this tradition—“porn and pizza”—so there I was with my newly-minted best friend, trying to appear blasé. After some discussion among the more established members of the house, a senior popped in a DVD featuring hot girl-on-girl action. One woman wore glossy black latex gloves and had fingernails like stilettos. The other perched on the rim of a bathtub, legs spread. I felt my cheeks getting hotter and hotter.
When Sinn Sage, an AVN award-winning porn performer and sex educator, started working in the adult film industry in 2003, she mostly booked shoots for DVDs like the one that flustered me. But by the time I was watching that DVD in 2008, things were different. “Tube sites, torrents, and streaming, all that has drastically changed the business model for anyone in porn,” Sage tells SELF. Basically, it became very easy for casual porn viewers to watch what they wanted, when they wanted, for exactly zero dollars.
Sage and other performers used to earn the bulk of their income from shoots with production companies, but with rates dropping and shoots becoming less and less frequent, she now also shoots and sells her own content, including custom videos tailor-made to buyers’ requests. “Now you have to be the product you’re selling,” she says. Feeling a personal connection can be the factor that convinces someone to pay for one of your videos, rather than pirating it.
I won’t lie, I’ve watched porn for free before. I also understand that having money to spend on entertainment of any kind is a luxury. But here’s why I think the choice to pay for the porn you watch matters more than whether you pony up for an HBO subscription or search for a bootleg version of the latest release: The people who create porn are already marginalized by the work they do, making it that much harder for them to get paid fairly for their labor in the first place.
It’s also harder for creators of adult content to enforce copyright. “I recently read a case saying that they didn’t want to go after people who illegally downloaded porn because it would be humiliating for those people,” Lorelei Lee, an adult film performer and writer, tells SELF. Insert facepalm emoji here.
The stigma around watching porn can be especially oppressive for women. A recent study of 24,000 women who watched content on one of the largest adult video sites found that 54 percent don’t talk to their friends about their porn consumption, and 51 percent would be ashamed if their friends knew they were into it. Maloney believes a lot of our hang-ups around porn stem from the fact that we blur the lines between what it is—fantasy fodder designed to stimulate arousal—and what it isn’t—your actual sexual reality.
It’s absolutely worthwhile to put time and thought into finding porn you can feel good about getting off to, and supporting ethical practices by paying for porn from producers who treat and pay their performers fairly. But that won’t radically alter the porn industry as we know it. Better labor conditions for porn performers, Lee says, depend on reducing the stigma associated with sex work. A simple, meaningful, completely free way you can do that? Talk about the fact that you watch porn.