Does ethical porn exist?

It’s hard to separate violence and sex in lots of today’s internet pornography. Easily accessible content includes simulated rape, women being slapped, punched, and subject to slews of misogynistic insults.

It’s also harder than ever to deny that pornography use, given its addictive, misogynistic, and violent nature, has a range of negative impacts on consumers. First exposure to internet porn in Western countries takes place before puberty for a significant fraction of children today.  A disturbingly high proportion of teenage boys and young men today believe rape myths as a result of porn exposure. There is also evidence suggesting exposure to violent, X-rated material leads to a dramatic increase in the perpetration of sexual violence.

Before we can answer questions about the ethics of porn we need to address fundamental questions about the ethics of sex.

It is also difficult to deny that the practices of the porn industry are exploitative to performers themselves. Stories such as the Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted depict cases of female performers agreeing to shoot a scene involving a particular act, only to be coerced on the spot by the producers into a more hard-core scene not previously agreed to. Anecdotes suggest this isn’t uncommon.

While these facts about disturbing content and exploitative practices lead some people to believe consumption of internet porn is unethical or anti-feminist, it prompts others to ask whether there could be such a thing as ethical porn. Are the only objections to pornography circumstantial – based in violent content, exploitation or particular types of pornography? Or is there some deeper fact about porn – any porn – that renders it ethically objectionable?

Suppose the kind of porn commonly found online:

• Depicted realistic, consensual, non-misogynistic, and safe sex – condoms and all.
• Was free of exploitation (a pipe-dream, but let’s imagine).
• Performers fully and properly consented to everything filmed.
• Regulation ensured only people who were educated and had other employment options were allowed to perform.
• Performers did not have a history of sexual abuse or underage porn exposure
• Pristine sexual health was a prerequisite for becoming a porn performer.
• The porn industry cut any ties they are alleged to have with sex trafficking and similarly exploitative activity.

If all this came true, would any plausible ethical objections to the production and consumption of pornography remain?

Before we can answer questions about the ethics of porn, we need to address fundamental questions about the ethics of sex.

One question is this: is sex simply another bodily pleasure, like getting a massage, or do sex acts have deeper significance?  Philosopher Anne Barnhill describes sexual intercourse as a type of body language. She thinks that when you have sex with a person, you are not just going through physically pleasurable motions, you are expressing something to another person.

If you have sex with someone you care for deeply, this loving attitude is expressed through the body language of sex. But using the expressive act of sex for mere pleasure with a person you care little about can express a range of callous or hurtful attitudes. It can send the message that the other person is simply an object to be used.

Even if not, the messages can be confusing. The body language of tender kissing, close bodily contact and caresses say one thing to a sexual partner, while the fact that one has few emotional strings attached to them – especially if this is stated beforehand – says another.

We know that such mixed messages are often painful. The human brain is flooded with oxytocin – the same bonding chemical responsible for attaching mothers to their children – when humans have sex.  There is a biological basis to the claim that ‘casual sex’ is a contradiction in terms. Sex bonds people to each other, whether we want this to happen or not. It is a profound and relationally significant act.

Porn consumption can become a refuge that prevents people otherwise capable of the daunting but character-building work of seeking a meaningful sexual relationship with a real person.

Let’s bring these ideas about the specialness of sex back to the discussion about porn. If the above ideas about sex are correct, then there is cause for doubt over the idea that it is the sort of thing that people in a casual or even non-existent relationship should be paid for.  So long as there are ethical problems with casual sex itself, there will be ethical problems with consuming filmed casual sex.

So what should we say about porn made by adults in a loving relationship, as much ‘amateur’ (unpaid) pornography is?  Suppose we have a film made by a happily married couple who love each other deeply and simply want to film and show realistic, affectionate, loving sex.  Could consumption of such material pass as ethical?

Maybe it could, but many doubts remain. Porn consumption can become a refuge that prevents people otherwise capable of the daunting but character-building work of seeking a meaningful sexual relationship with a real person from doing so.  Porn (even of the relatively wholesome kind described above) carries no risk of rejection, requires no relational effort and doesn’t demand consideration of another person’s sexual wishes or preferences.

Because it promises high reward for little effort, porn has the potential to prolong adolescence – that phase of life dominated by lone sexual fantasies – and be a disincentive to grow into the complicated, sexual relationship building of adulthood.

Based on this line of thinking, there may still be something unvirtuous about the consumption of porn, even that was produced ethically.  Perhaps the only truly ethical, sexually explicit film would be of people in a loving relationship, which is seen only by them.