Self-exploration and sexual desire is an integral part of the human experience, and porn is an industry that profits off this very notion. With porn an aspect of our lives that isn’t disappearing anytime soon, I want to explore how this multimillion dollar industry can be improved; as a woman, as a feminist, and as an advocate for a healthy sex life.
First of all, porn is inherently and unabashedly misogynistic. Women serve as only f*cktoys, pleasing men’s fantasies and whims with no action taken towards the woman’s own desires and pleasure. I mean seriously, in most scenes the woman goes down on the man, but rarely does the man ever go down on the woman reciprocating the pleasure. Or if they actually do then it looks something like this: no effort, passion, or desire whatsoever.
This is mostly due to the fact that they don’t want to block the camera from seeing everything, but really is that how you pleasure a woman.
Also, as Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti pointed out,
“Porn should depict woman as sexual collaborators with men, rather than sexual conquests of men”
Porn shapes sexual culture today, thus it would yield great benefits to finally showcase women as equals to the men in their scenes. Women should be depicted as fellow humans who also possess pleasure, have limitations and turn ons, and are engaging for their own enjoyment as well; rather than being just orifices and a pair of tits.
Even when it comes to “rough” scenes, it’d be exponentially better if more scenes were crafted as Tristan Taormino’s Rough Sex series which shows that these types of scenes can still be explicit while not being degrading. She begins each scene interviewing the performers, even asking why they prefer rough sex, and viewers are left understanding that each performer has given full consent and that the fantasies portrayed even derive from the woman’s mind as well. This stops the perpetuation of rape culture, and offers the underrated perspective of woman’s sexuality and desire.
I’m not saying that porn needs to transform into something boring and “vanilla” to be approved, but I do think that there are a lot of things that can be done to improve the quality of porn today to make it more pleasurable for both sexes and be more accurate to viewers.
Although porn is still an industry riddled with stigma and issues, it is a representation of how the world surrounding us today depicts sex.
With this in mind, I think that it’s about time that women are represented as fellow human beings, and about time that sex is depicted as a consensual act of equal pleasure.
If you want to discover more, check out movies that have won Feminist Porn Awards, explore feminist porn reviews at FemPorn, and read porn reviews for women and by women at Hot Movies for Her.
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