Mike Sholars
Editor-in-Chief
Porn is not for everyone. It’s wrong, however, to make porn a scapegoat for individual mistakes or for what’s wrong with society.
Porn does not automatically ruin the lives of those involved. Not every single porn actor or actress is forever haunted by their past, nor are they coerced or misled into the industry.
Some people are tricked into porn, or go into it for the wrong reasons. The same can be said for your average McDonald’s employee, or even for your average undergraduate student at York. But to say this is a universal truth is insulting to the countless men and women who (gasp!) made the conscious, mature decision as adults to go into porn of their own volition. Porn is a business, and not all of its employees are happy.
“What industry is not an exploitative industry? […] Most of the girls and guys in the industry are making a choice, they’re not being forced or kidnapped,” says Lee Roy Myers, a popular porn director who catapulted to fame with his XXX Parody series. “This is their job; they choose to do it.” If the performers are consenting adults of sound mind and body, what’s the harm?
Every anti-porn argument boils down to one central conceit: that porn—and in turn, sex itself—is inherently shameful.
“When you make sexuality into taboo, you have more control over people, because their fundamental desires are now off limits,” says Lux Alpatrum, Editor-in-Chief of Fleshbot, the biggest porn industry blog online. “Everyone wants sex; it’s always going to be a powerful tool.”
Porn, like the rest of the entertainment industry, often deals in stereotypes and less-than-progressive messages. It is geared towards the heterosexual white male experience, which means lots of zoomed-in shots of white guys penetrating blonde women with implants.
Judging the entirety of porn on its mainstream output, however, is like judging all films by the latest Hollywood blockbusters: they don’t represent the whole landscape. There are excellent, sex-positive pieces of pornography out there. Female directors are making films that aren’t just about money-shots. There are entire studios devoted to porn flicks about couples in committed relationships. Every orientation, body type, and ethnicity is tastefully represented by a studio or director somewhere in the world.
But porn never was an accurate look at the average person’s sex life—if it was, I would have become a pizza boy years ago. It is sex as an athletic feat, a visual fantasy. Like any other fiction, it should be seen as entertainment.
If there are serious issues within the porn industry, shouldn’t we bring these problems to light and help those being taken advantage of? What do we gain by writing the whole endeavour off as taboo?
“We’ve set things up so we don’t talk about sex, and the main sex experience people have is through porn,” says Alpatrum.
“Sex is this great, wonderful thing that you can’t take a picture of.”
