Ethical porn: does it exist?

“Not everyone can have a monster schlong,” said senior Lucas Nguyen. 

This may seem obvious to some, but in the world of online porn, it may not be as apparent as it seems.

For teens and preteens, the widespread accessibility of porn means that 73% of those age 17 and younger have consumed pornography, according to a 2022 study published by Common Sense Media. Among those, 15% said they were first exposed to online pornography at age 10 or younger, with the average reported age being 12.

“Being exposed to porn is just a given from being online nowadays,” said sophomore Ash Adams. “You could just look it up, and they’ll have a ‘click this box to make sure you’re 18.’ They don’t know if you’re actually 18. It’s not anything actually secure and kept away from children’s hands.”

Especially amongst impressionable teens, nonconsensual and exaggerated depictions of sex often found in pornography can create distorted perceptions of sex, leading to harmful attitudes and behaviors in real-life interactions.

“Is it good for a young girl to hear the boys in her class talk about a porn star, or talk about explicit acts?” said senior Michela Peccolo. “When I was growing up, I feel like because a lot of people in my middle school, or at least the boys, were consuming pornography, it sexualized a lot of my peers … It’s not a good thing for people to view others as sexual creatures, because it creates this type of one-sided interaction, where you’re basically using that person as a sexual commodity.”

“You have people with fake genitalia, implants or surgery, and none of it’s real”

The effects of observational learning become especially concerning when taking into account the normalization of aggression and violence in porn. A study on over 4,000 videos from Pornhub and Xvideos, two major pornographic sites, found that on average 40% of scenes contained at least one act of physical aggression, including spanking, gagging, choking, and slapping. Among the targets of aggression, 97% were women.

Additionally, porn can create unrealistic body standards. 

“You have people with fake genitalia, implants or surgery, and none of it’s real,” said senior *Brad. “[People] look at it and feel insecure of themselves. Men can look at women and be like, ‘oh, you’re not good enough.’ Same thing with men. You get gigantic dudes who are incredibly buff with giant [penises], and suddenly, women are comparing the men they see in porn to their real-life partners, and that causes tensions in the relationship; it enforces toxic masculinity.”

The effects of the porn industry don’t stop at its consumers. Take Pamela Anderson, former Playboy model and Baywatch star. In one of the first instances of leaked celebrity sex tapes, hers was stolen from her house and leaked onto the internet. In less than 12 months, the tape made an estimated $77 million ion legitimate sales alone, with hundreds of thousands of VHS and DVD copies manufactured and spread nationally. Relatively nothing was done about it beyond a civil suit.

“We think about women who leave the pornography industry, whether that be underneath their own worker license, and they’re still haunted by it,” Peccolo said. “Big name stars like Mia Khalifa, [for example]: she’s banned in certain countries, or she’s harassed as she’s walking across the street. Even if the ethics of porn in that instance, when the content was being filmed, existed, now it’s a negative to her life.”

The process of making porn is also an important step to consider ethically. 

“If someone has [sexual] trauma from a young age, and because of that, they ended up in the porn industry, even though it was … their own choice, I wouldn’t really consider that ethical,” Nguyen said. “It [serves as] an outlet for their trauma, which I wouldn’t really say is healthy … The only way I see it ethically made is if someone has no long history of trauma, they don’t have any outstanding [monetary] needs that they’re doing it for, and they’re recording either themselves or their partner because they get true enjoyment from it.”

While ethical porn, such as fair-trade or feminist porn, does exist and aims to promote consensual, realistic, porn, it may not be the silver bullet to the porn industry.

“It’s depicting a consensual [relationship], but that’s the bare minimum,” said senior Rachel*. “It’s not … like we’re all going to watch this fair trade [porn] … It’s great that it’s there, but bad that everything else is also there.”