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danfreefall asked: Question, because I'm woefully ignorant and honestly curious. If a woman wants to do porn is that bad? I understand that the porn industry itself is very insidious but I'm curious about what if a female of sound mind wishes to do it?

I really hate this question because what it does is ask me to participate in some exercise of imaginative pondering about a purely hypothetical situation, a situation that does not exist and upon which it would be a massive waste of time to dwell. People don’t often ask anti-capitalists (who are also anti-porn) “Well, what if some people want to work in sweatshops?” or “What if some people want to work in this exploitative industry or that exploitative industry for minimum wage?” Whether a few individuals working for a capitalist industry are doing fairly well, enjoy what they’re doing, are free to go whenever they want, etc. is irrelevant to class-based analysis, which must be applied when assessing the social, economic, and political harms of something.

Listen–go to my pornography, anti porn, and/or porn actresses tags and what you will read about is an industry so violent, abusive, greedy, and life-destroying that it will hopefully make you question whether such an industry is worth being salvaged. The porn industry uses “consent contracts” to avoid being prosecuted, lies and misleads about what they will have the performers do and how much they will pay, and gives the performers drugs and alcohol to get through scenes. Coercive conditions make consent impossible.

What happens is something like this: A woman signs a consent contract before she does her first scene. She can, theoretically, make a “no list” of acts she won’t perform or performers she won’t work with, but in practice she is really signing away her right to pursue legal action against the company she’s working for should she be violated in some way. When she arrives on the porn set, she expects to do a standard man/woman scene because that’s what her agent told her. However, there are 5 men on the set when she gets there, and the director tells her she has to have sex with all 5 men or she is not getting paid. She is also expected to do anal, and reminded that she signed a contract. She doesn’t feel like she can refuse, and most of all, she needs the money, so she does the scene.

This is rape, plain and simple.

Amateur, alternative, and """feminist""" porn companies all have the same problems as the mainstream companies. They are all driven by profit, the content they produce is often just as violent/hardcore because they have to compete with male supremacist, male-dominated markets, and the directors and producers do not care about the women who work for them.

You cannot buy enthusiastic consent. Even if you want to propose the best conditions, where the performers are treated well, paid well, not pressured to do anything they don’t want to do–conditions that absolutely no porn company on earth adheres to–the notion that women’s bodies and sexuality should be something men can buy, that it is acceptable to obtain a woman’s sexual consent that you would not get from her if you were on equal financial footing, is profoundly misogynistic and unethical.

This post sums up the problem with consent being something you can purchase:

on an economic level, if you pay women to have sex, there will be women who have sex not cos they want to but cos they need money. i don’t care if however many percent are supposedly economically stable women there by choice, if there is just one woman who isn’t then that is too many

on a social level, if you commodify sex, the resulting demands of the consumer will create standards based on what they want, and in a patriarchy those who make the demands are men, and so men control the sexual culture and women become and remain secondary participants

The sex industry cannot exist without rape, abuse, and human trafficking. There are simply not enough women who enter the sex industry “willingly” (as I’ve already highlighted that economic coercion is not consent, I use the word “willingly” loosely) to meet the demand that exists from male consumers, so pimps and traffickers find vulnerable women and children to help supply the demand.

Consider, for example, the case from a few months ago of Western porn sites buying videos of the rapes and sexual tortures committed against 280 Pakistani children. It’s easy for someone who knows absolutely nothing about the porn industry to dismiss this as a one-time occurrence of something really bad happening, but as a matter of fact, men upload filmed rapes and sexual abuse onto porn sites all the time. (See: revenge porn.) Since the rapes of trafficked women and children are sold to porn companies and the scenes that go on in “professional” porn studios are coerced and forced, there is no way around this fact: Porn is rape.

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