You're actually not going to get a whole lot of argument from me here throughout most of this except to say that the problems you mention here aren't exclusive to—or more predominant in—porn, though I look forward to any book suggestions you may have. Sincerely, I'll read them with an open mind. You've given me a lot to think about so far.
Let's get into the philosophical weeds a bit.
Capitalism is a ruthless beast that can never be fed and supply-and-demand a cold, omnipresent tyrant. The price of society bonding over professional sports is a rough life for the athletes. They're often Black, plucked from some of the poorest neighborhoods in America. It's play-or-poverty, while the NBA and NFL reap most of the benefits and those athletes are sometimes left with lifelong injuries. The solution isn't to ban sports but to get people out of poverty. Banning sports would be a band-aid over poverty's necrosis.
Moreover, without concrete numbers demonstrating specific harms, it's all conjecture whether it's porn or sports.
"No economist sees a rise in commercialized sex trade and concludes: this is good, people are more dignified and less exploited now," might be true, but I can do this with anything and it neither makes them correct nor morality's bastions. Asking 1,000 DEA agents how dangerous marijuana was to human health, all thousand might score marijuana 10/10 on the danger scale. Doesn't make it true. Marijuana is relatively benign. It's still conjecture.
This proves a point: that harm metrics need to describe tangible, objective harm—not normative harm. Terms like "dignity" and "exploited" and "dehumanizing" require such. It's one thing to say coffee farmers in Latin America are dehumanized and exploited, it's another to say they do backbreaking work in the sun 16 hours per day, sustaining 200% more injuries and 400% higher skin cancer rates than the general population, all for $2 per day. That's real the price of a cup of coffee, so I seldom drink it.
Does porn cause lasting mental health problems in a majority of performers? Does it cause physical injuries in a majority? These questions need answers.
Thankfully, we have some research we can point to on the subject.
You mentioned the harm caused to porn performers, not women generally, so I’ll start there and I’ll skip the consent checklists mentioned in the original article.
In a New York Times Opinion piece, former porn performer Jennie Ketcham argued that “porn does lasting harm to performers,” in her eponymous 2012 article. (1) She argued that because adult film performers fake enjoyment, the inauthentic experience and getting paid to do it lessens sexual enjoyment.
Thankfully, the idea that porn performers are harmed by, faking the enjoyment from, or really not enjoying the “sex” they have filming porn is disproven by existing data.
Sexologist, psychologist, and creator of the Sex and Psychology podcast, Dr. Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D., covered this for Cosmopolitan using surveys of performers. Researchers asked performers how much they enjoyed the sex they had while filming using a 1-10 scale, 10 being they loved it, 1 being they hated it. The majority, a full 69% of porn actresses, chose 10. “Fewer than 2% selected five or less [on the scale]” (3)
The male actors gave “very similar” ratings when asked.
The average was 8.4 on the 1-10 scale. While not a perfect 10, it’s extremely close and these data certainly show that women are enjoying the filming process. Not only are performers not harmed, they’re actually enjoying themselves 8.4 times out of ten. You’d be hard pressed to find any other industry where 84% of the people enjoy what they do.
The article’s author, Hannah Smothers, writes:
“So while every single orgasm may not be totally real, the odds that the actors and actresses you're seeing gyrate on screen are actually enjoying what they're doing are fairly high, at least according to these surveys.”
There’s also a myth that an abnormally high number of porn performers are or have been the victims of childhood sexual abuse that led them to porn. Some have called this the “damaged goods” theory of porn actresses (I find the term distasteful) and it says that otherwise normal, healthy women would never voluntarily sign up to be in porn unless something was wrong with them. More normative moralizing!
This is the argument that porn is dehumanizing inverted. Instead of porn causing some nebulous harm that goes unproven, porn is a consequence of it, therefore, we have to prevent women who were abused as children from entering porn.
The data on this says 36% of porn actresses have experienced childhood sexual abuse, which is, sadly, average. Study researchers write: “The incidence of child sexual abuse among porn actresses was within the range experienced by the general population.”
While 36% of women in the general population experiencing childhood sexual abuse is disgustingly high, there’s no link with porn. Like the sports example, banning porn won't make this problem go away, either.
This reveals something about people who think porn is inherently dehumanizing: they often have different ideas of what "dehumanizing" means from porn performers, who average 75 sexual partners offscreen, in their personal lives. The national average is orders of magnitude lower. (6) It seems performers don't see a problem with sex, even on camera, while others do.
Former performer Amber Lynn warns that porn performers are having a mental health crisis and that a lot are dying by suicides. (5) But not for the reasons we think. She says:
“Back in the day before the Internet, if you had a fan who didn't like you … they couldn't access you in real time and start tearing you down, or belittling you, or making fun of you.”
The Internet and social media are driving the problem, in her view, not being current or former porn performers. Licensed marriage and family therapist Kate Lore specializes in working with porn stars and she agrees:
“A lot of times people have the tendency to think, 'Oh well a porn performer killed themselves because they're a porn performer,' …. when a lot of times they're killing themselves because of media…if they say something outspoken just about political views or something they believe in, sometimes they get hit with hundreds of death threats a day every day. That would make anybody really struggle. So if you have panic attacks, or chronic pain flare ups, you could easily structure a schedule performing in adult films, or a schedule escorting around your pain, or around your depression in a way that is workable for you … I think in some ways this flexible job can be a haven for us." (5)
Ask sports stars and child actors, this is a consequence of fame.
Let’s turn back to Jennie Ketchum’s anti-porn piece in the New York Times saying that faking enjoyment in porn scenes for money does lasting damage to performers. Against porn, Ketchum argues, about performers:
“Because she frequently repeats an inauthentic sexual experience, she begins conditioning herself. When valued only for sexual prowess and youth, she begins to believe the hype.”
The idea that you would “condition” yourself and stop enjoying sex is an unconvincing, assumptive argument. I’m a professional writer and have been for years. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy writing. I very much enjoy writing, both for work and as a hobby. I find it fulfilling. Just because I’m writing about subjects that aren’t me and just because I do it daily for money doesn’t automatically mean I no longer enjoy it.
Ketchum is also repeating a mantra that, when she published her piece, was widely believed to be true and has since been disproven. She's a self-identified "sex addict" that she blames pornography for. Science and medicine recognize no such condition.
It seems your problem is with capitalism, not porn.
What all of this evidence shows is that:
1. It’s not as simple as just saying, “Performers have problems, so it must be the porn.” Performers suffer from everyday things that we mere mortals who aren’t in the porn industry suffer from.
2. The data is thin but clear, showing the opposite, that porn actors, far from being harmed, actually enjoy their lines of work, enjoy the sex they have, are unionized, have consent checklists to minimize boundary violations, and are required to both get STI tests and wear condoms when they have sex by law. If new data comes out, I'll gladly check it out.
I’ll close by saying that in today’s world, messages of fear, panic, and abuse sell. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real abuses out there happening every day that must be addressed. There are and they do. It just means that a lot of the messages about these things, like porn addiction or the harm to porn performers, are either overstated or untrue, and we should instead focus our efforts on the 36% of the general population who are being sexually abused as children. That’s really who deserves our attention. Not porn performers who overwhelmingly love their jobs and enjoy worker protections that I and swathes of others don’t have.
Thanks again for reading.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/11/does-pornography-deserve-its-bad-rap/pornography-does-lasting-harm-to-performers
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ketcham
3. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a57151/how-much-do-porn-stars-actually-enjoy-sex/
4. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201409/the-main-difference-between-porn-actresses-and-other-women
5. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adult-film-performers-say-the-state-of-mental-health-in-the-industry-needs-more-attention/
