Scarleteen

So I couldn't really find much about this on the site. I know a lot of people say a lot of different things about this issue. I know that pornography can create unrealistic expectations. I know that it can become an addiction. I also know that manufacturers, producers, and big companies typically do not run the business in an ethical way. But let consider porn in it's purest form, like indie porn that is firmly based on consent. My question is whether Pornography in itself is somehow immoral or unhealthy? Just want to open this subject up for discussion.

Hi flowersinspring,

The act of making or consuming porn isn't inherently harmful. There's nothing about viewing images of other people having sex that's going to automatically be bad for the person (there's also the fact that there are different types of porn, including written porn, that people tend to leave out of the conversation about porn). The unhealthy effects tend to come when that's someone's only source of sexual information, or if the person believes that sex between an off-screen couple should look like what they see in porn (or when porn is used to reinforce stereotyped ideas about things like race or gender, but goodness knows it's not the only form of media that does that). Does that make sense?

Something I always find helpful when thinking about the realities of making and consuming porn is to read accounts by people who work (or have worked) as performers, like this interview we did with Jiz Lee: http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/sam_w/in ... th_jiz_lee