That women in porn are usually there because they lack other options is a well-known fact – one that even pro-porn feminists don't deny. In a documentary called After Porn Ends, pornography apologist Nina Hartley admits: “They don’t know how to do anything else. They don’t know how to do retail; they don’t know how to do Excel spreadsheets. Many people [in] adult entertainment… are not suited for nine-to-five work.”
Instead of asking why some women are so disenfranchised, pro-porn feminists seem happy to leave these women where they are – at the bottom of the barrel.
The word “pornography”comes from the Greek porne, meaning “female sex slave” and graphos, meaning “writing” or “sketching.” In Ancient Greece, porne referred the lowest class of prostitutes, one that was considered utterly vile and there for the taking.
The word “pornography” literally refers to “the depiction of women as vile whores.” If pornography is often assumed to neutrally represent sex, it is only because there is an already widespread perception of women’s bodies as filthy and available for male use and abuse. The violence in pornography may be extreme, but the hatred of women depicted in it could not be more common.
It is this fusing of sex with cruelty that defines pornography as a genre. And it is the reason why pornography is so effective at changing men’s attitudes towards women and sex for the worse.
In an early study conducted by psychologist Neil Malamuth, healthy men with no criminal history were exposed to ten minutes of hardcore pornography. After the exposure, they were asked to answer questions about whether or not women ever “deserved” or enjoyed rape. The men who had watched the pornography overwhelmingly agreed with rape myths in a way that the control group did not.
Countless studies have since shown that exposure to pornography desensitizes men to violence against women, often shaping their sexuality in such a way that they become unable to experience arousal without some element of dominance or violence.
If “feminist porn” only meant small, independent studios making queer pornography, it still wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of mitigating the harms of a $100 billion a year misogynist industry. But so-called “feminist pornographers” partnering with the mainstream industry shows what this is all about: money.