Porn | Transcript
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Alan McKee:
If you relied on the news media for your understanding of pornography, you would think that it is destroying a generation of young people, that it is full of rape and violence, and that does not match up with the reality of what people are consuming.
Hannah Witton:
Is porn warping our view of sex?
Jet Setting Jasmine:
I think the word ethical being put on porn has become like the way that we see organic label being put on food, right? It's not really clear what makes that thing organic or ethical.
Hannah Witton:
How can we as consumers of porn decipher what porn is ethical?
Billy Lore:
I'm an exhibitionist, it's fun, it turns me on. Artistically, video is my medium of choice. So if I'm gonna tell stories, I love telling them through video, and I love telling stories that turn people on.
Hannah Witton:
And what about the experiences of those who make porn? How does the stigma affect them and their work?
I'm Hannah Witton and this is Doing It. Over the course of this series, we're being unapologetically nerdy about sex, diving into some of the biggest taboos that impact our relationship with sex, our bodies, and the people in our lives. So far, we've explored sex therapy, disability, and money. And today, we're talking all about porn.
So, it's no secret that I watch porn. I'm very open about that online, and I'm very vocal about people consuming porn ethically, and we're going to dive into what on earth that actually means - “ethical” - later in this episode. My first introduction to porn, like for so many people, was free tube sites and videos that I honestly found more shocking than arousing. I didn't really... get porn. It didn't seem like something for me. I even remember googling “porn for women” in my early 20s when I was at uni in the hopes I would find something a bit more appealing. With mixed results.
I was also surrounded by all this messaging from the mainstream news about the dangerous and damaging impact of porn on young people and men in particular. And that messaging certainly hasn't gone away. Recently, I shared an Instagram post about ethical porn. Let me give you a flavour of some of the comments.
“Ethical porn is boring and vanilla.” “Why can't people just enjoy their sex life without having to watch strangers have sex to get off?” “All porn is evil, misogynistic, exploitative. There is no such thing as ethical porn.” “Porn is filmed prostitution. It's financially coerced sex.” “Porn is addictive. I was addicted and Jesus saved me.”
The comment section of that post between different people got heated, and not in a good way. So, why is porn such an emotive subject? Is porn actually harmful in all the ways people claim it is? And can ethical porn ever really exist?
In this episode we mention sexual violence, so please take care of yourselves whilst listening.
You're going to be hearing from some porn performers in a bit, but first it's time to grab your notebooks and get academic.
Alan McKee:
My name is Alan McKee. I'm a professor at the University of Sydney and for the past 30 years I've been studying pornography in all its glory, in all its forms, and most recently with a particular interest in the ways in which audiences relate to the sexually explicit images that they consume.
Hannah Witton:
Amazing. You are the person to talk to to answer all of my questions that I have.
Alan McKee:
Whenever a taxi driver asks me what I do, I say I am Australia's leading expert in pornography. Which always, always leads to an interesting conversation because every taxi driver/Uber driver is also an expert on that topic so they always have a lot to tell me.
Hannah Witton:
What do they tell you?
Alan McKee:
Oh, they tell me that it's much more violent these days than it used to be, and how it objectifies women, and how it's all sexist, and so on and so forth.
Hannah Witton:
And so how much of that is true?
Alan McKee:
We got together a team of people from different academic disciplines to look at the research that has been done and to try and pull it all together into one overarching story. And what we found was that a lot of the research that has been done has been looking in the wrong place.
A lot of it has been particularly from the more social side, ecological side - is quite sexually conservative. So it starts from the assumption that the ideal relationship to which everybody should aspire is a coupled monogamous loving relationship between two people of similar ages who are having sex not for money, not in public, only with people they love to express their love or to have children. And so then the research taking that as the starting point for what is considered to be healthy sexuality, then looks at whether people who consume pornography better or worse match up with that ideal.
The one line summary is that we know that people who admit to being sexually adventurous also are more comfortable talking about their pornography consumption. So sexually adventurous means people who enjoy polyamorous relationships, group sex, fetishes, BDSM, public sex. Those kind of people are more comfortable talking about the fact that they use pornography, whereas people who are more sexually conservative, who believe that you should only have sex within marriage or only have sex within a long term committed loving relationship, tend to report a much more problematic relationship with pornography.
Silva Neves:
If you really trace back where those narratives come from, they actually come from Christianity and they come from people who hold some religious beliefs.
Hannah Witton:
Remember Silva? You heard him in the first episode about sex therapy. He's a psychosexual therapist and one of his specialties is the treatment of compulsive sexual behaviours and problematic use of pornography. Those narratives he's talking about here are the discourse around porn addiction.
Silva Neves:
But now it's been distilled so much into all of the media and and a lot of the people that started those anti porn narratives from the religious belief, they're hiding their religious belief and they are trying to put words like dopamine into the narrative to make it scientific. Rather than to say, “I disagree from my religious belief,” they will say, “You must not watch it because dopamine is going to kill your erections” or “Dopamine is going to make you addicted to it.” That's the narrative. So because of that, a lot of people believe that this anti-porn narrative is true because it's wrapped in scientific language, but actually it is pseudoscience because most of the stuff that people say about it has been not proven in the first place or has been disproved with other scientific papers and definitely with the science of sexology.
Hannah Witton:
This also came up in Alan's research.
Alan McKee:
If you ask somebody if they're addicted to pornography, the variable that best predicts it is how religious they are, because the more religious somebody is, the more likely they are to say they're addicted to pornography, and that's not because they're using more pornography or using it in different ways, it's because they feel so bad about using pornography. It's a moral incongruence. It doesn't match up with what they think they should be doing, and so they understand it's a form of addiction, that it has power over them, and they cannot give it up.
Hannah Witton:
Clearly there is so much fear around watching porn, and your own personal values about porn will impact your understanding and experience of it. I wondered how Silva approaches clients in his therapy room who come to him because they're struggling with porn.
Silva Neves:
At the moment pornography is a very, very contentious subject with a lot of people disagreeing about it and it's a very emotive subject and because there's so much disinformation about porn being bad and porn being dangerous and porn causing so many problems that people get really, really shamed for liking to watch porn, but also really worried about it.
And from a contemporary sexologist's point of view, the way that we look at what is the problem with pornography is where the distress really is, and if the distress is actually about the pornography use getting in the way of the functioning of their lives, or if it's getting in the way of the quality of life. And most of the time clients will say that it doesn't have an impact on the quality of life because they can watch porn and they can also go to work and they can wake up on time and they can feed themselves and they can manage all the other obligations of life. It's just that they watch porn, you know, 10 minutes a day and they think that's too frequent and they feel shame about it.
And another common one is when they come to me when their partner caught them watching porn and it's often the partner's disapproval that is increasing the shame and all of that is really coming from lots of misinformation. Often it's in heterosexual relationships where it's the woman who is really worried and really upset that the male partner is watching porn. And that's because a lot of the, uh, narrative out there is like, “Well, if the man is watching porn and the man is watching a certain body type, it means that he's not going to like you that much anymore.” Or, “Porn is recreating relationship problems and porn is making your husband misogynist.” And actually all of that we have seen in studies on pornography over and over and over again and that porn does not cause any of these issues.
Hannah Witton:
So when people really dig into their values and experiences with porn, what tends to be the outcome?
Silva Neves:
Quite often people come to the conclusion that they enjoy watching porn because it's not actually about watching porn, it's about masturbation as well and ejaculation. So there is a pleasure element to it and then the shame bit, people start to realize that it is often to do with what they hear about it outside of themselves rather than what is right for them. So far we have found that porn is quite neutral. It does not cause any dysfunction, but if you don't watch it, it's not going to be bad for you either. So whether you watch it or you don't watch it, it's actually neutral.
Hannah Witton:
This is super interesting. So it's not the porn itself that is hurting people, but the shame around it. And yet still society demonizes porn, potentially further exacerbating that shame and causing more problems.
One common critique of porn is that it is unrealistic, and Alan and his colleagues did some research into what people actually mean when they say porn is unrealistic, and the insights he has to share are fascinating.
Alan McKee:
So we gathered together a number of reports and analysed them to see what specifically they said was unrealistic about pornography. The kind of things they said was unrealistic about pornography was that women were engaging in casual sex. That was unrealistic. Women were enjoying BDSM. That was unrealistic. Women were enjoying anal sex. That was unrealistic. Women were having group sex. That was unrealistic. And my favourite one was women were enthusiastically participating in sex. And that was unrealistic. So I think that a lot of the concerns with pornography is just very straightforward patriarchal heteronormativity.
It's saying that there is only one proper mode of sexuality in the world today, and that is that men are sexually dominant, women give it up grudgingly in order to get love, women do not enjoy sex but they bear it for their partners, and that is the way that things should be, and it's biological reality, and we just need to live with that. And pornography disturbs that because it shows a vast range of different forms of human sexual pleasure. And it emphasizes women's sexual agency in a way that very few other genres do. And I think that is deeply disturbing to a lot of people.
If you relied on the news media for your understanding of pornography, you would think that it is destroying a generation of young people, that it is full of rape and violence, and that does not match up with the reality of what people are consuming.
Hannah Witton:
Another really common critique is that porn encourages misogyny and male sexual violence against women. These are issues that do really concern me, and absolutely need to be addressed. So, does porn play a role here? Does it make men sexually violent?
Alan McKee:
There is no statistical difference in porn consumption between the men who are murdering their partners and the men who are not. The problem is heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is fundamentally flawed. When we look at the stories of the men who have murdered their partners, the one theme that keeps coming through is that the women have withdrawn from them or stood up to them in some way, and the men are completely incapable of responding to that in any way except through control and violence, and that has nothing to do with sexual pleasure.
There is a common position in public debates, in journalism, that pornography is misogynistic and violent, and that is supported by - not so much by the data per se. So Taylor Cohut led a project looking at data in America, which is a large scale nationally representative survey, and showed that people who consume pornography had slightly more positive attitudes towards feminism and women than people who did not consume pornography.
Hannah Witton:
Wow, what? That is not what I was expecting. So why do people think porn causes violence? Why is that what we keep hearing?
Alan McKee:
I read some work by Sheila Jeffries once, who's a radical feminist who's very strongly opposed to pornography, to sex work. And she was challenging us to rethink what sex is. We should think about sex as kind of holding each other, gazing into each other's eyes, giving each other compliments, rather than anything that was, for example, involved penetration, which she argued is necessarily a form of violation in patriarchal culture. And there's very little pornography that sticks to holding each other, gazing into each other's eyes, and giving compliments.
And so I think that pornography does tend to show more sexually adventurous, more casual sex. And so it does open itself up to this radical feminist critique, this conservative critique, that it is damaging women. Often when you see these kind of arguments, it's a particular kind of middle class feminism, particularly but not always a kind that is quite SWERFy - so Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism - which sees all women involved in pornography as necessarily victims, no matter to what extent the women involved in pornography might speak differently about that.
When we talk about the effects of pornography as a whole, I don't think you can do that anymore because the range of what is produced now is so vast. There is still a leftover shadow of the olden times mainstream porn companies - not many of them and not at the scale they used to be - but there's kind of still the shadow of them producing big, glossy, expensive, often rip offs of mainstream movies done as the porn version. That still exists, and OnlyFans at the other extreme exists, which is literally a person with their camera, with their phone, in their bedroom. And then there's a whole range of different things in between ethical porn and feminist porn and queer porn and a whole range of different niches. Just this incredible range of different sexual pleasures, which make it much more difficult now, I would say, to make generalizations about how pornography works.
Hannah Witton:
Speaking of indie porn, I want to bring in some amazing porn creators who can explain a little more about their experience of the industry, their experiences making porn, and what ethical porn actually is.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
I think the word ethical being put on porn has become like the way that we see organic label being put on food. Right? It's not really clear what makes that thing organic or ethical. It's sort of becoming a piece of branding that lets you know that your money should be spent here because we paid for an additional sticker that says ethical.
Hannah Witton:
This is Jasmine, a. k. a. Jet Setting Jasmine. She's the co owner of Royal Fetish Films and Blue Pearl Therapy and deals with all things sex entertainment, education, and therapy.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
What do you mean when you say that it's ethical? So for me, when I say that Royal Fetish Films is classified as ethical porn by my standards, it means that the folks that are there want to be there. That they are being paid and are compensated to their satisfaction with the work that they're doing. That the work that they're doing is not based on their brand or what people want to see them do, it's really based on what they want to do that day. So when we press record, that person wants to do that thing that day at that time, and they can change it at any given time. And that is unfortunately something that's really different about other ways that people make porn in the industry.
In order for us to consider our work ethical, it means that people had to have a safe space in which they were shooting. That means the physical space was safe. The people that were there were vetted and approved.
Ethical porn also means that our editors are not sitting for hours in front of material, that they are not emotionally able to manage. It's a lot to watch some of the acts that we do over and over and over and over again. So we have to take care of those eyes as well.
On the back end, the content that we've put out, we make sure that the first screen that you see is not jarring. We make sure that our DVD covers can - if your child stumbles upon it, it's just a really good looking couple on the front of them. It's not me like spread open, right? Because we know as parents or just people who have guests over that people like touch things or things get moved around and we don't want any of our work that comes out of Royal Fetish films to trigger, traumatize or upset anyone. I can't say that standard is being held to. to everyone everywhere that uses that label, so that's why I kind of make a big stink about it.
Hannah Witton:
As a consumer of ethical porn, it was so interesting to hear from Jasmine all the different considerations that she thinks about. The well being of porn editors hadn't even crossed my mind before. Won't someone please think of the porn editors?
But this really got me thinking about how I view what porn is ethical or not, and Billy Lore, a sex educator and porn maker, also had some things to say that have given me food for thought.
Billy Lore:
Ethical porn, I think as a marketing term, has really become a buzzword, and it feels like often people expect it to look a certain way. “I should be able to look at a video and decide that that is ethically made porn.” And at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to tell just by looking at a scene how it was created.
Hannah Witton:
So if I can't tell by looking at the porn itself if it was made ethically, and if lots of companies are using the term ethical in their marketing but have different standards behind the scenes, how do I tell if the people involved in making the porn I'm watching were all treated well and paid fairly?
Billy Lore:
If you are really, really invested in how the content you're consuming is made, go to the people that are making it and follow them on social media. See how they're talking about the different scenes they've done. See the stuff that they are creating on their own, in their house with partners that they're excited about, right?
The more in control of their work they are, the more likely they are to be excited about the stuff that they're doing. And what scenes are they just not super talking about a ton, right? Cause like, they may not be in a space to say “I had a really bad time on this set” or “I didn't super enjoy this” or, you know, to call out some big name act, right?
Like, you're like, “Wow, this person has shot for this company once or twice, and I've never seen them talk about it.” Maybe go to the other sites that they are more excitedly promoting, or their self produced stuff, that sort of thing.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
One of the things that I love right now is that we actually have, like, direct contact with who is involved in the content that we consume.
Hannah Witton:
Here's Jasmine again.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
So when it comes to porn, literally, like, you could go like, “Oh, that's Jet Setting Jasmine. I'm gonna go over to, what is it called now? X? Okay @jetsettingjasmine. Oh, yeah, she does like doing that kind of stuff. Oh, she even puts it out herself. Oh, wow, there she is promoting that film. She must have felt good creating it, right? Oh, let me look at the reviews for Royal Fetish Films. Oh, people are saying they love it. They loved working for Royal Fetish Films. ‘Oh, I can't wait to come back and edit for you guys.’” So there's some stuff that as consumers, we can get the pulse. of if this performer is happy with this piece of work.
And then as far as, you know, companies, they're all supposed to have this thing that says, like - if you remember anything, just 2257. That is the legal document that we have to complete. And when we complete that document, we have to show our ID that shows that we are of age, that we were there that day. And it's witnessed by someone that's not in the film.
So it also holds accountable that another person was there to prove that this person was there, of correct age, of name matches face, and no one is inebriated or under any illegal substances. So we can look for those little things on the back of our DVD or on the website. It should say 2257 and it should show where those compliance forms are being stored. If you do just that little bit, then you can go get the lube and ride out.
Hannah Witton:
I love this idea. “I just gotta do my ethical porn admin.”
Jet Setting Jasmine:
I always tell people, find a couple - like find three companies that you - that like give you a good, you know, diverse, a good range. Do your research, and then get yourself a subscription that feel like that it's in your pleasure budget. Then you have a nice diverse array of porn that you like, that you know you can feel good about, like you can have that orgasm and then you can actually have a good night's rest because you're still a good person.
Hannah Witton:
The 2257 document Jasmine talks about is a law that American companies have to comply with, so don't worry if you're not seeing that number on your fave ethical porn sites from elsewhere in the world.
But I think it's really telling that the two porn performers I spoke to for this episode both gave me the advice of going direct to the performers themselves, and seeing what they're saying about the work they are doing.
One debate that comes up time and time again when it comes to not just porn, but the sex industry in general is trafficking, which Jasmine had some really important things to say about.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
There's already an established line between sex and politics. And so if you go a little further and look at the porn and politics of it, one of the things that I am seeing currently is the conflation between porn and sex trafficking. Those are very completely different things.
Just the point of ignorance of not being able to make the differentiation between someone consensually signing off, agreeing to getting tested, providing their information, having a conversation about boundaries and limits and engaging in pleasurable sex for entertainment - versus someone who is being forced to do this. That is not the industry that I'm in. That's not the industry that my peers are in. And hopefully if you're buying your porn, you're not engaging in it either.
And so I really would like to help dispel that because what happens when we don't make that clear distinction is that people like myself who are doing consensual sex work and creating porn and creating really beautiful and educational and liberated examples and expressions of sex are being held to the criminality of sex traffickers. It is difficult for me to get banking. It is difficult for me to disclose this is where my income comes from. I have to think like a million times over, how am I going to explain this?
Hannah Witton:
These are challenges that Billy knows all too well. He shared his own experiences of how the stigma around porn affects his life.
Billy Lore:
Stigma is one of the huge challenges, right? Both interpersonally, there's the judgment from family or friends or people that you're interacting with, whatever. Going to dinner parties and they're like, “What do you do?” And you're like, “Ooh, do I want to be the most interesting guy at this party today?”
But at the same time, that stigma extends to problems with banking and like validating my income for rent and all of the other grown up things that you have to do, right? There are banks that won't allow sex workers to open accounts if they know that that's what you do for a living, right? There are all kinds of struggles that we encounter.
And, in addition to that, for the most part, we're self employed. So, you also get all of the struggles that come with that, right? There's a lot of stigma there to be up against, and if there is nothing drawing you towards this profession, I don't think you're gonna want to fight against all of that stigma and all of the other things.
I'm an exhibitionist. It's fun. It turns me on. I also, artistically, video is my medium of choice, right? So if I'm gonna tell stories, I love telling them through video. And I love telling stories that turn people on, right? Now it's the thing that I do for a living, which is fucking rad.
Hannah Witton:
It's so cool to hear Billy talk about the joy and literal pleasure he gets from his work, despite all the challenges. I wondered if there are any common misconceptions about porn performers that particularly get on Billy's nerves, and I was surprised when he mentioned dating.
Billy Lore:
The idea that folks who are in porn are not gonna have relationships, or no one's ever gonna wanna date them, or that even after, like, that you have to leave porn and then only certain people will wanna date you or whatever, which is not true. I mean, sure, there are people in the world who are not interested in dating people who do sex work or have done sex work.
It's a really good litmus test for how interested I am in someone, frankly. Folks asking me, “What do you do for work” and me having the opportunity to say I make porn and teach people about sex and kink tells me way more about them than anything else. Like, getting to see the way they react to that, whether they are uncomfortable with it, or whether they uncomfortably fetishize it, and think that that is an opportunity to immediately start talking to me about, sex and kink, like as if we're gonna have it right now, or something, right?
I know plenty of sex workers who are in happy relationships with folks who are in the industry and outside of it. Admittedly, it's a little easier for me to date folks who are at least somewhat involved in sex and kink, whether they are sex workers or whether they're just heavily involved in the scene, like my local kink scene and that sort of thing. They're folks who I just relate to more easily and have shared experience, shared vocabulary, shared comfort levels. They have thought critically about these things in the same ways that I do, which is a thing I find really satisfying and is a thing I look for in partners. But I don't have any problems dating because of my job.
Hannah Witton:
So Billy and Jasmine have shared some really important advice on how to look for porn that is ethical and prioritizes the well being of its creators. But I was also thinking about the wellbeing of people who consume porn. How does what we see affect us? And what should we be taking into consideration? Of course, Alan had some great research to share on this.
Alan McKee:
So the questions about the effects that pornography has on consumers - one of the key things that we now understand is that the kind of pornography that you're talking about is absolutely vital.
And so we recently put together an international expert panel of people who have different kinds of expertise on healthy pornography. And we asked them all this question and we got them to discuss it and share their ideas and we came up in the end with six criteria that there was some consensus on across the group. Not complete consensus, because they came from very different backgrounds and very different paradigms, but some consensus.
And the criteria that they came up with was, first of all, you have to know it's ethically produced. So you have to care about that, and find out about it.
Second thing was, you want a variety of kinds of people. A variety of body types, a variety of genders, a variety of races and ethnicities and abilities.
The third thing is, you want a variety of different kinds of sex acts. And one of the reasons for that is that, as a culture, we still have this idea that sex means putting a penis in a hole. And then the sex is over. And it's not surprising that only 60% of women say they're having an orgasm when they're having sex with their partner. So pornography that just shows that is not going to be paying as much attention to the pleasure of the women involved as pornography that shows a much wider range of sexual acts.
In the early 2000s, we did a project where we got the hundred best selling porn videos in Australia and we found at that time there was more than twice as much fellatio as there was cunnilingus. And I understand, of course, that there is a joy to be had in sucking a dick. I love it myself. Nevertheless, it is still telling that there was so much more fellatio than there was cunnilingus. So you want pornography that shows a range of different things, including things that typically give women more sexual pleasure than just the penile vaginal intermission. You also want pornography that, related point, shows sexual pleasure for everybody involved.
And then there's a couple of points where there's slightly less consensus that it would be good if there was porn that actually showed negotiation of consent. And similarly, porn that showed safe sex. Again, not all porn does that and it doesn't mean that it's unhealthy.
Hannah Witton:
So what happens when this criteria is not present? This made me think of something Jasmine said, which I actually found very validating in terms of the difficult relationship and negative reaction I, and I know others too, sometimes have to porn.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
Most of the mainstream porn sites are owned by straight, white, cis men, and they create work that is reflective of their culture. So for folks that look at that and go, “It's not for me.” It's not. You're right. You're right. You probably need to look somewhere else.
Porn is a microcosm of our society so if you're seeing these tropes in a very condensed fashion in porn entertainment and it grosses you out, you are right. You have every right to feel that way. And if it does trigger perhaps sexual trauma, generational trauma, sexual violence trauma, harassment - you're right, that, that, that is triggering and it probably has no place or space. So I just want to validate that people who have negative feelings about porn, there's probably a lot of truth and validity as to where that fear is.
I think that people that feel like porn is disgusting or it is scary because a lot of it is. I think historically it has been problematic. That being said, if this is an area that you want to feel less judgment towards other people that engage with it, then I suggest being open to our conversation here about that there is a way to produce porn in a way that doesn't touch any of those things that are illegal or immoral or unethical, if you will.
Hannah Witton:
It felt really good to hear Jasmine say that, because even though I want to help reduce the stigma around porn, I also don't want to fall into the trap of, “Weyhey, go porn! All porn is great!” Because that's just not the case.
So one of the criterias Alan reckons we need to make watching porn a more positive experience is diversity. Diversity in body types, in gender, in race, and in ability. This is something I really wanted to get Jasmine and Billy's perspectives on, both as performers and as consumers.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
What made King and I want to start Royal Fetish Films is really what we did not see in adult entertainment. And ultimately, I did not see myself represented in adult entertainment.
I did not come in as a quote unquote “young person.” I came in already as an established therapist, a mom. You know, a whole full resume of vanilla work. But I did have a strong inclination to bring liberation in sex and sexuality, specifically for Black women, especially over the age of 30 with children.
So I was really trying to find my own identity in sex and sexuality through entertainment, and I could not find myself there. I just wanted to see a, you know, mostly intellectual woman with a natural body around 30 having some really awesome kinky sex.
So as a consumer myself, I didn't find myself represented - to a point that porn was one of those things that I did feel yucky after I was done. You can still get wet and you can still be aroused, even though something back here is saying, “Danger, danger, danger.” And I think that was happening on a very, very, very low level. For me. That I was watching and engaging this material that was producing arousal, but there was something in the back that was like, “danger, danger.”
Even putting in the search words, what I would have to use to search people who look like me. I had to use language that I don't assign to Black women in order to find Black women. So this idea of like, anytime I'm looking up a Black woman, I have to look up the word “ebony.” Which - and you know, some people go by that and they're fine by that. That's fine. But ebony is a type of tree. It's a wood. It's a bark. And so then that puts me in alignment with an inanimate object. Which is exactly how we have been treated historically and even present day. So I don't want to engage in pleasure using a term that is so heavily loaded in our trauma.
“Big Black cock.” That's strange because that looks like five inches to me. So that's actually standard Black cock. This is no shade to anybody. That's not big. By average. So why are we labeling that? Because that creates that big, scary monster that is trying to rape little young white girls. That feeds that narrative. Or that Black men are aggressive and assertive and that they're big and they're scary. It's like, nope, you know, average size, nice guy, that's just here to get paid and have some sex, right? Why are we labelling that way? They're not even doing anything that is size oriented.
Another recent one was “hip hop anal queen.” And I'm like, “Hmm, can her butt rap? What does this mean?” And then you look at the exact same company, exact same setting. They have “anal princess” or “anal queen” and it's a white woman doing the exact same thing. So it's like those tropes that Black women are always dancing, hypersexualized, big booties, Black men, big, aggressive, scary, defiling, all of those tropes. I have to stay. away from them because in our regular society, those are the driving things that create violence against Black folks.
Use the right terminology, right? Describe the person how they want to be described. For us, we just use their name. Why am I watching a headless medium Black cock in this ebony piece of wood? Think about the way that porn can change your behaviour if you're not careful. Are you only engaged with people outside of your circle through the lens of porn?
Please understand that many times anyone that is marginalized, you're probably meeting their stereotype in porn. If they did not construct it themselves or if they were not a part of the development of it, you may very well be meeting mainstream's idea of this marginalized community, so just be careful.
Hannah Witton:
The fetishizing of Black people and limitations of search terms can trigger people when all they want to do is watch something sexy and have a wank. It's so important that people like Jasmine are making diverse porn that allow other Black people to see themselves in porn in a safe and sexy way.
I wanted to know what the people who watch her films were saying.
Jet Setting Jasmine:
They're saying, “Thank you so much for showing your stretch marks. Thank you for wearing your waist beads. Thank you for your head wraps.” To my partner, “I saw that you had Arabic writing. You're a Muslim that is, is sexually free. Thank you for existing. I don't think I could do that, but knowing that that's an experience that is available to us, if we're brave enough, thank you.” “I know you're a mom, but I see the way that you actually let yourself go when you're filming and it seems like you're not there anymore. I can't do that. How do you do it?”
That's like, “Oh my God, I didn't mean for that to happen.” But that that is what happens when you actually defy - we actually opened up the doors for people to see themselves, to see potential goals for themselves, even to see things that they don't like.[Like, that's awesome to be like, “The way you did that, I would never. But girl, I'm glad that you did it. It looked good for you.” That's actually meaningful. And so that is how I've seen our work have an impact.
Billy Lore:
People like Victor Belmont, and Crash Pad series, and a lot of like, the indie queer porn that was being made in the early 2000s is the kind of stuff that I was exploring when I was kind of discovering my sexuality and gender and that sort of thing.
Hannah Witton:
Here's Billy again, sharing his perspective of trans and queer visibility in porn.
Billy Lore:
And it was really fucking neat to see trans men doing things in the industry, even though there really were only a handful of them at the time. It's part of what is so important to me about the kind of stuff I make now. A lot of the scenes I film are with my real life partner, Dee. And a lot of the stuff we film is the kind of sex we would typically have off camera. And yeah, I love showing it on the internet cause I'm an exhibitionist, right? And because it makes me money and all of these things, but underlying all of that is also the fact that the sex I have most often is my partner and I, we’re both trans masc folks with bottom growth and our bits have grown enough that we can have penetrative sex just with our factory installed bits. Right? And, uh, That is not a kind of sex that I really knew was possible prior to doing it. I heard it through the rumour mill, right? I had never seen it. So to be able to put out there porn that shows that, like, this is even a possibility to folks who are now exploring their sexuality is really fucking cool.
Hannah Witton:
That is really fucking cool. I was also curious to ask Billy what the industry is like for him as a trans man, and if that played any role in him being an independent creator.
Billy Lore:
There is still vanishingly few production companies out there that are even willing to hire trans men. Most of the trans men I know who are getting hired for more mainstream porn gigs are getting hired because their scene partners are requesting to work with them. Cis women and cis men and even trans women who are excited about working with trans men are going to the sets and saying, “I want to work with this guy” and pushing for it. And that's what's getting us on sets. But for the most part, we are relatively overlooked in the porn industry. If I were trying to make my career just in mainstream sets, I would have ran out of money a long time ago.
I'm never going to stop producing my own stuff because I enjoy filming my own content. Yeah, there's absolutely draw to be doing things in a more mainstream way, in addition to the stuff that I am doing, and having access to a professional set with way better cameras than I'll ever have, and larger casts, and larger production teams, right? I could create bigger things, I could get bigger visibility, I could learn from a lot of people who have been doing this longer and have skills and that sort of thing.
Plus, I think the representation is important, right? Just like, not on a personal “I would like to be making movies kind of level” but on a ethical, moral, larger societal level. Trans men should have equal representation in porn as any other gender, and right now they don't.
Hannah Witton:
Why do you think that that is?
Billy Lore:
Transphobia? I mean, uh, I'm trying to think of a longer winded answer than that, but like, really, that sums it up. That's not to say that trans women aren't also, uh, experiencing transphobia in porn right there, getting fetishized in a very particular way.
If we take porn out of the equation, trans women are more visible than trans men in general. It is when folks think of trans folks, that is generally, the gender that they are thinking of. This is not a great thing, right? They also face increased violence and that sort of thing because of this. I think that visibility overlaps into porn, and a lot of porn creation, we assume, is driven by the desires of cis men. And there is a lot of fetishization of trans women around straight cis men. And by cis men, right? That's the whole thing.
I think men in porn in general are less - I mean, when you think of porn, you're thinking about women, generally. Right? Gay porn being one of the exceptions, but in general, there are so many resources that I'm looking at there for sex workers that are all “So, ladies.” Right? Because that is just the assumption.
It's not even that trans men are, like, deliberately being excluded. We certainly are in many cases, but I think a lot of it is just we don't get thought of as an option. And there's a lot of stigma in gay porn in particular. We hear things like, “We're trying to convert gay men because I have a pussy.” And that's ugh, I hate that word. There is a lot of pushback from gay porn specifically, and the transphobia rooted in there. So I think that is a place where a lot of trans guys could really thrive, but that embedded transphobia is making that a lot harder.
Hannah Witton:
Have you found in producing your own porn that there is a market for trans men in porn?
Billy Lore:
Absolutely, yeah. And not just me, like, I know tons of trans guys who are super successful. My friend Austin Spears was nominated for one of the male performers of the year in one of the award categories recently. But there are a lot of trans guys who are wildly successful in what they do, and they have markets with gay cis men, queer folks, other trans folks, trans women, cis women - like, we are fucking hot and people want to watch us have sex. And I, that's pretty much all it takes to have a market in porn, right?
Hannah Witton:
I loved hearing this from Billy. As well as working in porn, Billy is also a sex educator, so I wondered whether as a porn creator he feels a responsibility to educate through his porn work and include things like explicit verbal consent, or if he feels porn and sex education can be separate.
Billy Lore:
There has been a lot of conversation lately around the responsibility of erotic media to also serve as sex education with this lack of sex education out there. And I don't buy into that. I was having a conversation with my best friend on our podcast recently where we were talking about sex scenes in media.
And she basically said like, “Art's job isn't to portray a, like, perfect moral world or my idea of what morality should be.” So I don't think it is my responsibility as an erotic creator to make sure all of my porn is, like, perfectly educational, right? There are things that I play up in porn that, like, I may or may not do in my actual sex life because porn is... fiction. It's media designed to entertain and to turn you on, right? Our goal with art is to make people feel an emotion. With porn, our goal is to make people feel turned on. And that can look a wide variety of ways.
But part of the problem is that porn is sometimes the only explicit discussions or exposure to sex that people are seeing and the only opportunity for people to see people having sex and talking about it. So what we're lacking is a wider exposure to media that is actually designed to educate around sex. Discussions around what sex looks like and what conversations around sex look like. People are not coming for romance movies in quite the same way as they are coming for porn. But I think there's just as much stuff there that is just fantasy, that wouldn't happen in reality in the way it happens in movies, right?
As a society, we lack the media literacy to recognize what we're actually looking at as, you know, whether it is fiction or whether it is accurate depictions of these things that we're looking for. I have places where I put that information out in the world, and I don't make that stuff hard to find.
That said, if it fits in with the kinds of sex that I'm having, if I have an opportunity to, you know, leave in the moment where we're like adjusting in the middle of sex because I got a leg cramp and, “Ah shit, hang on, let's move this” or like I have the moment where I am like reaching across the bed trying to find the lube because, “Oh my god It's just a little more, oh my god - hang on,” right?
Like I'm not gonna pretend I don't use lube in my porn, right? I'm not gonna pretend that there aren't moments where I say, “Hang on, let's adjust this way a little bit.” I like including examples of negotiation and consent in what it looks like in practice and the ways that it can be sexy or at the very least unobtrusive, right? But I don't think it's my job. If it fits with the editing, great. If that conversation takes longer than I need it to or the flow is weird or whatever, sometimes I cut it out. It is an artistic choice more than it feels like a moral obligation.
Hannah Witton:
On this intersection of porn and sex education, let's come back to Alan.
Alan McKee:
The question about the effects of pornography on its audiences, and particularly on queer audiences, comes down to the question of what kind of sex education we would want people to have. And I always say that for young people, if porn is your only source of sex education, that is not giving you a fully rounded idea of everything you need.
Having said that, if school is your only source of sex education, that's not giving you everything you need either, because schools are notoriously bad at teaching about pleasure. And then imagine, even worse, imagine if your church was the only source of sex education you had. Then you're fucked. So, as we are growing up, and developing into sexually happy and healthy adults, we need to learn a whole range of things.
So you need to learn the basic biological stuff about sex, and schools tend to be very good at that. But then there's a whole range of other things that people need to know, like sexual pleasure. Schools are still terrible about that, culture is still terrible about that, particularly for women.
Pornography is, I would say, it's great in that it emphasizes that sex can be pleasurable, and increasingly pornography is paying attention to the sexual pleasure of everybody involved, which is great. What pornography tends to be really bad at is showing people how to negotiate consent. Porn is overwhelmingly a fantasy world, a world of plenitude and pleasure, where everybody reacts with delight to everything that happens to them, which is great as a world of fantasy. But if you want to learn how to negotiate in real life having sex with somebody, it doesn't even pretend to teach you that.
Hannah Witton:
So if porn is bad at depicting consent, might there be grounds to that argument that watching porn can harm young people?
Alan McKee:
A lot of people are concerned about, particularly young people, young adults, and whether being exposed to sexually explicit material harms them. Having spent a few years studying the data for the past 50 years, there's a simple answer and a complicated answer. The simple answer is no, seeing sexually explicit material does not in and of itself harm people. It's the question about what kinds of material are people seeing, in what context, with what support, for what reasons.
So the actual material itself sits at the heart of this very complicated nexus. of experiences and reasons and the kinds of material that they're looking for. And at the heart of it all is, are these images being encountered in a context where you have a young person who has had comprehensive, age appropriate sex education throughout their lives and who has strong, open relationships with trusted adults who they can go to if they are concerned about these things?
Because increasingly, I would say we're seeing that what is harming young people more is not the fact that they might see sexually explicit images, it's the way that they are being told by trusted adults that those images have damaged them, have soiled them, have made them impure, and there's a lot of guilt and shame going around masturbation at the moment.
If there are any young people listening, I would say please do not be concerned about masturbating more. Masturbate freely and enjoy it. If people tell you you're addicted, don't listen to them. The only point at which it becomes addiction is when you are so much invested in masturbating that you can no longer do your schoolwork or come down for meals. So long as you're doing those two things, even if you're wanking five times a day, that's not addiction. That's just entirely rational enjoyment of pleasure, and it's all gonna pay off in the longer term when you have a better idea of what you enjoy doing and how it works.
Hannah Witton:
Thank you so much for listening.
If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/hannahwitton, where you can also find ad free versions of the show and bonus behind the scenes episodes and extended cuts. You can find transcripts and shownotes over on our website, doingitpodcast.co.uk.
What is your take on porn? Does it worry you? Do you enjoy it shame free? I'd love to continue the conversation with you over on Instagram @doingitpodcast.
The themes of sex education and young people are going to come up a lot more in our next and final episode of this series, which is going to be all about sex positive parenting.
Marisol The SexEd Mum:
I think the big problem is we got that link between sex education and “the talk” and parents waiting for that moment in which suddenly they're gonna have a revelation that they have to have that talk
Marcelle Kosman:
One of the ways that gender affirming care for kids gets stigmatized is by people saying that we are sexualizing our children from a young age. Children are sexual creatures. That's what human beings are.
Hannah Witton:
This podcast was hosted and co produced by Hannah Witton, produced by Mia Zur-Szpiro , and edited and mixed by Anouszka Tate. Episode transcripts, show notes, and social media produced and created by Moog Florin.