Students, Porn, Hell, Paving Stones and Good Intentions

By Coleen Singer at Sssh.com Porn For Women

A column published this week in The Badger Herald, which describes itself as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “premier independent student newspaper,” offers advice on “how to watch (and) create porn safely and ethically.”

It’s a well-intended piece, seemingly designed to assure UW-Madison students that watching porn doesn’t automatically make them foul, disgusting, misogynistic creatures. Many people disagree, but I think this is an important thing for young people to hear, if only as a counter to the all the shrill “The evil of porn is destroying our youth!” shrieking coming from various corners of human society.

Having said that, we all know what they say about good intentions, paving stones, Hell and the relationship they share, and sure enough, this well-intended piece goes on to give its readers some truly dreadful advice.

“Porn gets an awfully bad rap,” the article states, painfully accurately. “People claim that it objectifies women, abuses performers and promotes false depictions of sex. It is true that some pornography sucks, but ethical pornography is out there, too.” 

So far, so good; I couldn’t agree more – especially considering the fact I’m employed by a porn site which goes to great lengths to ensure its products are produced ethically, and that the company’s business practices, in general, adhere to a rigorous ethical standard.

“Ethical pornography features consenting adults who take part in the sex industry without coercion or manipulation,” the article states, offering a somewhat incomplete, but hardly objectionable, definition of “ethical porn.” 

Further disputing the “porn = bad” axiom, the article notes that porn offers people “the chance to explore their desire in a safe way without requiring a partner,” adding that it’s “especially helpful for people with unrealizable fetishes” such as a centaur fetish.

Again, you’ll get no argument from me on that one. So, where does the article go wrong? Unfortunately, things get badly off track as soon as it gets more specific about where ethical porn is to be found.

Invoking Rule 34, the Badger Herald then celebrates the scope of material available on sites like Pornhub and Redtube – sites which, by their very nature, cannot possibly vouch for the ethics of the porn offered therein.

Yes, ‘tube’ sites like these “allow users to browse…. everything from orgies to hardcore to Hentai” as the Badger-Herald relates, but what the student paper doesn’t appear to appreciate is such videos can be uploaded by anyone, whether or not the uploader owns the copyright to the video, or has any idea whether the performers depicted are, in fact, “consenting adults who take part in the sex industry without coercion or manipulation” as the Badger-Herald’s own definition of “ethical porn” requires.

While the article makes another questionable decision by endorsing similar tube sites as good places to upload your own homemade pornography, I don’t have a problem with the ‘how-to’ advice offered for filming self-made porn. The article omits the legal necessity of obtaining and storing age-verification documents for anyone appearing in the homemade porn (which, I think most lawyers would agree, is a fairly major oversight), but other than that, the pointers on creating porn are far more sound than those involving where to watch porn, particularly if one is actually concerned about the ethics of porn production.

In some ways, the Badger-Herald article’s failure is a predictable one, given the generation at which it is aimed. There are few things young people care less about today than intellectual property law, after all, as evidenced by their collective comfort in downloading illegal copies of everything from hit songs to Photoshop to brand new Hollywood movie releases. As such, I don’t suspect any amount of lecturing on the subject of how tube sites like Redtube are built on copyright violation would have any effect on the willingness of college kids to frequent such sites.

If college kids do care about the other ethical considerations involved in porn making – things like age and consent of the performers – then tube sites are the last place they should be surfing for a guaranteed ethical-porn experience. To find the ethical porn they seek, they are going to have to take an added step and consider not just the nature of the product, but the nature of the platform they use to access porn, as well.

In other words, as a journalism professor often admonished us back when I was a journalism major, college students in search of ethical porn need to consider the source.

Until and unless they do, determining the ethics of the porn they’re watching is going to be guesswork, which is no basis on which to evaluate ethics – yes, even in the realm of porn.

About Coleen Singer:

Coleen Singer is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen), where she often waxes eloquent about Female Friendly Porn, sex, pleasure products, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. She is also the editor and curator of EroticScribes.com. When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.

Visit Coleen at Sssh.com for more sex news, commentary and hot porn for women and couples!