Porn Cocktail: A Guide to Pornography

I don’t believe porn is misogynistic.

The rule of thumb I use when choosing which piece of pornography to watch is whether the people (or person) involved look like they’re having fun. Amateur porn is by far the best place to find this kind of pornography. YouPorn and RedTube are two excellent free sources. They both contain a mix of professional and amateur videos but it’s pretty easy to differentiate between the two.

In terms of professional versus amateur porn, the benefits of amateur porn - people actually having sex instead of performing sex, a more realistic reflection of the bodies and sexual practices of people, smiling - far outweighs the shoddy camera work. Which is why there’s been a rise of ‘professional amateur’ videos, where amateur footage has been collected into one place.

Concerns about misogyny can be further addressed by paying for porn that you like. The bi-directional causal loop of industry and consumers will ensure that if you pay for something, it’s more likely that similar products will be made. So support the porn you like. If we use consumer power to show the industry that we want porn with happy, smiling, sexually fulfilled people then we’re more likely to get it. However, the abundance of good, free porn means that unless you have particularly strong feelings about the issue it’s not going to affect your viewing happiness too much.

On an ethical level, if an actual crime has been committed in the process of production, then by consuming the final product you become complicit. Sex trafficking, underage prostitution and rape are all problems that affect the porn industry. If you start watching a video, or reading a website and realise the actors or models look too young, look scared, look ill, or even look bored then leave the site or turn off the video. It’s pretty easy to discern whether something is dodgy. You can report sites to the Internet Watch Foundation at www.iwf.org.uk.

The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin once said that men learn about women through porn, that even the best men are influenced some way by it.

I would answer that women can unconsciously believe what pornography teaches about men too: that they only care about their own orgasm, that they are selfish lovers, that they don’t know how to eat a girl out. This isn’t necessarily true, but it’s worth recognising the different things we might be learning from porn about sex, sexuality and each other. And recognising the difference between sex in porn and sex in real life (although you hardly need to be told that).

The idea that porn influences our sex lives can be seen in the rise of anal sex among heterosexual couples, which has gone from being a shameful or ‘deviant’ act to a mainstream occurrence. No bad thing in my opinion. There are some less positive results of pornography, but that’s for another article.

Overall though, I like porn. It has a lot of problems but none of them are insurmountable. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our consumption of it, but we should be aware of the ethical issues underlying our choices. Watch good porn and the porn will get better.