Pornography

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Episode Warning

0:30Heads up that this episode will involve some discussion of sexual violence and sexual assault.

0:52Welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two philosophers talk about big ideas in relation to everyday life. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I'm David Peña-Guzman. As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. I have a lot to talk about in the bonus segment, as well as in the main episode today.

Defining Pornography

1:14Of course, if you are listening to this episode, you probably already have a sense of what porn is. And if you somehow found yourself here as an 8-year-old and you don't know what that is, then maybe you should stop listening now. However, in order to make sure that we're all on the same page, even though I think our listeners come to this episode with a sense of what pornography is, let's give a little dictionary definition. Merriam-Webster defines pornography as the depiction of erotic behavior, as in pictures,

1:46movies, or writing, intended to cause sexual excitement. Okay, that's really interesting because when I think about porn, and I think when most of us think about porn, we tend not to include erotic literature. We don't include writing, even though technically it counts on this definition. We often think about videos and images on websites like Pornhub, you know, or images on Playboy.

Social Association of Sexuality

2:13And so we really don't think about erotic novels, even though those very much fall under the definition here. And I think the reason for that- I know, even though they're very popular. Yeah, they're very popular, large market for them. But I think the reason for that has to do with our social association of sexuality with visuality. We think of porn as images in film or in magazines. So it's like photography and film specifically. That's right. And given how increasingly digital our culture has become in recent decades, there's also been a massive spike in porn viewership, in the viewership of videos and images.

2:48I mean, there's also been like, yeah, the increasing popularity of erotic novels, as we mentioned. But I think when you're talking about the sort of emphasis on the visual in our culture, like a lot of that has to do with the proliferation of websites.

Proliferation of Porn

2:59The philosopher Amiya Srinivasan writes in her book, The Right to Sex, that when she teaches on porn in the philosophy classroom, she finds that it is among the topics that gets students talking the most. These students have a heightened sense of the power of porn because through their access to the internet, it's something they encounter from a very young age and very frequently. In fact, a lot of them learn what sex is through porn. She writes, sex for my students is what porn says it is.

3:30Most men in her classroom first learned about sex through porn, and most women either learned about it through porn or through a boy who learned about it through porn. And we can't overstate the fact that the current generation is the first to have come of age sexually in a world in which porn is ubiquitous.

Catherine McKinnon's Question

3:51And this reminds me of Catherine McKinnon's question that, you know, if you primarily learn about sex through porn, what does that say about how you actually approach sex once you find yourself there, especially if you're a teenager, right? Like you start performing these tropes. But I think the question of accessibility is really important because porn is more accessible now than it has ever been. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 15% of kids report that they first saw pornography before they reached the age of 11. And 20 to 38% of kids aged 11 to 17 years old report seeing pornography online in the last

4:29year. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons for the accessibility of porn to younger generations. One of them is that porn consumption is less taboo now than it was before. And so there are changing social attitudes. But another main variable that we're all very familiar with, of course, is access to the internet.

Access to Porn

4:50I mean, I remember that I could access porn websites in the public library in my small town in Nevada when I was a teenager, right? So I was in in the early 2000s. I would go to the public library and I would turn down the volume on the computer in the public library all the way down. And then I would make the browser window super, super small into the corner of the screen so I could hide it by hovering my body over it. And I would watch pornography because I was a curious teenager and my family did not have

5:21a computer at home. And so it was either this or nothing. And so that library really needed to up its parental controls. Oh, my God. Well, and I was so thankful because remember that moment in the early 2000s when a lot of public libraries had those privacy screens where you can't look at somebody's screen from an angle. You can only see what's on the screen directly in front of it. So I felt very protected in my little creepy, kinky watching porn in front of a bunch of other people in the library. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I guess this is like pretty gendered, but I had a very different relationship to

5:56porn websites. I didn't look at any when I was a teenager at all. You were reading the erotic literature. No, I mean, I wasn't doing I wasn't doing that either. Like I was a pretty prudish teenager. And the first time I remember seeing porn was like one of those softcore HBO shows where a few of my high school friends and I were watching, I don't know, some HBO show, probably Sex in the City. And then afterward, Real Sex or one of those other HBO shows came on. And it felt really strange to be watching that with friends because it was very clear

6:31that even though the show that we'd just been watching, if it was Sex in the City, which I think it likely was, is about sex, there was very different kind of relationship that the viewer was encouraged to have between the two shows. And so I think, you know, that also speaks to the line between porn and representations of sex, which we will, you know, I imagine likely return to later. So both of our experiences with pornography were in the presence of others. But like mine was a little bit friendlier. Yeah, yeah, maybe so.

7:01And a lot less dangerous because I did have a constant panic of being found out by the librarians.

7:10Today, we're talking about pornography.

Discussing Pornography

7:13Does pornography express a system of gender domination? To what extent should porn be understood as a performance removed from its conditions of production? And how are new technological developments changing the landscape of porn and sex in general?

7:34Pornography became a major topic of debate in feminist theory in the 1980s with what has come to be known as the sex wars. This essentially was a debate between feminists who thought that pornography was harmful and those who thought it was not really such a bad thing. And this is a really complex and very rich debate with lots of fascinating positions within it. And we're not going to have time within this episode to do justice to the full spectrum of views that feminists expressed during this war. But one thing to note about this debate is that it took place on very different grounds than

8:09another debate about pornography, which is the debate about whether or not pornography is obscene. So, feminist sex wars, not about obscenity. We know that many religious conservatives will reject pornography because they see it as morally wrong. Sex, nudity, and everything related to it are sacred from a religious perspective. They are meant to be confined to the privacy of the home and within the bonds of a Christian marriage.

8:40And porn violates those things and their sacredness, I guess, by making them public and by making a spectacle out of them. And therefore, pornography should be banned. And so the religious view is that porn is bad because it violates the sanctity of sex and marriage. Now, the feminists who lobbied against pornography in the 1980s and 90s were doing so on very different grounds from that religious agenda. And I think it's important to clarify that about this debate from the very beginning.

9:13Yeah. And I think clarifications are so important here because in the so-called feminist sex wars, the positions get drawn in a way that already stacks the deck against the people that were going to be discussing in this segment because the two camps are labeled the pro-sex and anti-sex camp by history, you know, pretty much ever since. And so the feminists that were anti-porn, as you mentioned, on very different grounds from

9:44the sort of conservative religious standpoint, very often get caricatured as anti-sex. Construing the sex wars this way involves the parties into a supposedly pro-sex camp. These were people who defended pornography mainly on the grounds of free expression and as potentially liberating and an anti-sex camp who condemned pornography as inherently damaging and wrong. But I think calling the latter an anti-sex camp is unfair. So I want to spend some time thinking about why some feminists were so concerned about pornography,

10:19whether or not, you know, we ultimately agree with them, their view at least is not able to be boiled down into like, they hate sex. And I want to start here with Andrea Dworkin, who I think is a feminist who has been so vilified and associated with like kind of anti-sex approach, but whose work has been the object of renewed attention and interest in recent years. Dworkin was a radical feminist who began writing in the 1970s. And her basic view is that pornography is a system of male dominance.

10:51It expresses and consolidates men's domination over women. She argues that porn is primarily about male power. It reveals that pleasure for men is tied to victimizing, hurting, and exploiting women. Porn, and this is like perhaps one of the most controversial claims that she makes, reveals a hatred of women that is cruel, violent, and basic to the way our culture sees and treats women. And so porn is like reflecting and shoring up the system of male dominance. And although this

11:24might seem like a pretty, you know, out there claim at first, like this is why she's been tarred with this sort of anti-sex brush as a radical feminist, but think about so many of the basic tropes or scenes in porn today. Some of these include bukkake, double penetration, gangbangs, choking, rape fantasies, and so forth. In many of these scenes, humiliation and shaming of women are central. Dworkin mentions snuff films, which is a genre popular in the 1970s that ended with their female protagonists getting

11:56murdered. Sadism, hatred, and ownership of women are not accidental to porn. They are central to it. And they're also central to our gender system altogether. Even if these scenes are not real, in the sense that the women performing in them are not really being killed and may not even be being humiliated or shamed, Dworkin thinks that the scenes speak to how society sees women, that is, as subordinate. And for her, the increasing acceptance of pornography is an acceptance of an

12:28extremely messed up gender system that we should actually be working tooth and nail to overthrow. And Dworkin is really influential for articulating how porn objectifies women, because pornography turns women from subjects into objects. And the result of that transformation is a devaluing of women to such a degree that violence against women in the real world is not even seen as cruel or as problematic. And so these representations ultimately have this hemorrhaging effect where they bleed onto the real world and actually change gender dynamics for the

13:04worse. Yeah. And so the stakes here are very high. Pornography is a system of dominance and submission that she puts on the same level as historically real torture and punishment. It reveals for her that male pleasure is tied to slavery and murder and makes this somehow seem okay. Well, and this goes back to the point you mentioned earlier from the book The Righteous Sex about how so many people's first experience of sex is through porn. And so if what porn is depicting are these scenes of humiliation, degradation, and domination that get eroticized, then it's only natural that those of

13:41us who consume that imagery come to associate erotics with subordination and hierarchy. Yeah. And there have been a lot of responses encouraging a more nuanced view of what's going on in porn, even though it is undeniable that a lot of the main genres and tropes in porn involve the humiliation and shaming of women. Sometimes people will say, well, there is a difference between visual representations and kind of fantasy and imagination and real world practices such that we can't just naively assume that if people are watching violent porn, they're going to act

14:14violently towards women in real life. You see similar arguments being made about single-player shooter video games and so forth. And although there are some empirical studies, at least I'm thinking about the video game ones in particular, which are a little bit different, but suggesting that there isn't a clear line. A causal connection. Yeah. I do think that we should still be troubled by the prevalence of these kinds of humiliation and shaming tropes because they very obviously speak to a sort of generalized view of women as inferior,

14:46whether or not we agree with Dworkin that this kind of devaluation is on the same level as torture or punishment. Yeah. And maybe we don't want to say it's a clear, direct one-to-one causal relationship, but to say that there is no causal relationship also just goes against everything that we know about human psychology and the power of images, right? It's to deny, for instance, the power of advertising. The reason that we know advertising works is because if you subject people to certain images and messages, it ultimately shapes their behavior in subtle and not so subtle ways. So we do have to take, as you said, a more nuanced position here. And to go back to this

15:21sex wars in the 1980s and 90s about the status of porn, another figure that is really important to consider is Catherine McKinnon. And Catherine McKinnon met Andra Dworkin in the late 1970s. They met in 1977 and they started collaborating. And so they formed a kind of feminist duo on the anti-porn side of the debate. Now, Catherine McKinnon is a very prominent American lawyer, feminist activist, and legal scholar who at the time in the late 1970s was working on a book about sexual harassment.

15:58And I'm going to return to the question of sexual harassment because it's intimately connected to her criticism of pornography. But she meets Dworkin, they become friends, and then throughout the 1980s and 90s, they start collaborating and writing things together on pornography. And McKinnon took very seriously Dworkin's claim that sex is not just a difference, it's actually a hierarchy. So it's a difference with a power differential built into it. And that difference is rooted in what I just

16:28described as the eroticization of inequality, where, you know, what we think is sexy is actually imbalances of power. And she also agreed with Dworkin that pornography in particular is one of the principal mechanisms for actualizing and maintaining that hierarchy. So pornography expresses the hierarchy, but also helps reinforce it in the real world. Now, where McKinnon takes the debate a little bit further than Dworkin, or gives it her own spin, is that she offers a critique of pornography

17:03that is anchored in anti-discrimination law. And remember, she's a lawyer, so it makes sense that she takes it in a legal direction. And she argues that the problem with pornography is not, again, that it's immoral or obscene, that's the religious critique of pornography. Her concern is that pornography violates the rights of women as a protected class. So it's essentially a civil rights argument against porn. And I'm glad we're talking about this because similarly to Dworkin, McKinnon is often misread and

17:37caricatured. And again, like whether you end up agreeing with her position or not, I think it's important to understand like what they actually thought about this. So let's get into this argument. To understand McKinnon's position on pornography here, we actually have to take two steps back. First, we need to move from sex to race. And then we need to take a detour through her position on sexual harassment. And that will allow us to really make sense of her position on pornography. So first, let's go to the question of race. We know that in the U.S., the separate but equal

18:12doctrine was established at the end of the 19th century by the Supreme Court in a case known as Plessy versus Ferguson. Basically, the idea was that racial segregation is OK as long as the services that we give to whites and blacks are separate but equal, right? Separate bathrooms, separate classrooms, separate water fountains. This was then overturned in 1954 in the very famous case Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, which said separate but equal is actually inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, because if it's separate, it's never really

18:46equal, not in practice. And so even if you can say that, oh, well, the water fountains are identical and there is no difference between them, it's the separation itself that's socially and legally problematic because it puts blacks in a second class position, right, in the position of second class citizens. And so it violates the rights of the African-American community as a group. So that's the essence of that part of the argument. And this is what then led, of course, to the wave of integration in the 1960s and also to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which officially outlawed discrimination based on various identities,

19:22including race. Exactly. And now in 1979, McKinnon published a book entitled Sexual Harassment of Working Women, A Case of Sexual Discrimination, where she says that sexual harassment is to sex what separate but equal was to race, meaning that sexual harassment in the workplace should be seen as a violation, not of the rights of individual women who have to deal with this bullshit from the men in their workplace, but it's a violation of women as a protected class. And so she's trying to make

19:56that analogy between separate but equal and race and then sexual harassment and sex. And remember that in the 1970s, sexual harassment was not a legal concept yet. It wasn't illegal. Men could be pigs in the workplace and it was dismissed as a boys will be boys situation or as something that each individual women needed to learn to deal with on a case by case basis. So McKinnon's argument was not only original, but it was also very successful because now society agrees with her. You can report a man for sexually harassing you in the workplace

20:30and there are mechanisms to deal with that. It's not just like a case of an individual bad actor and an individual victim who happens to be a woman. These mechanisms, of course, aren't not always perfect, but they do exist. Yeah. And to that extent, we could say that we live in a McKinnon world when it comes to sexual harassment, because now we all agree that sexual harassment should be banned and it should be banned on the grounds of civil rights legislation. And so when a man harasses a woman, it's not just a woman who becomes the victim. In a sense, it's all women who are victimized because sexual harassment props

21:07up a system that maintains women in a position of second class citizens. And this is when we get back to the topic of pornography, because McKinnon makes the same argument about porn. She argues that it harms women as a class and locks women into a position of social inequality. And it does so by eroticizing the abuse, the humiliation and the domination of women. And for her argument to work, she has to

21:39establish that pornography is harmful to women. So that's like the key to this argument working legally, especially. And so in a lot of her publications, McKinnon goes to great lengths to identify how pornography actually harms real women in the real world. And she identifies three different kinds of harms. The first one is harm to the women and children who appear in pornography. So everything that you see in a porn video, right, like the bukkake, the spitting, the humiliation,

22:14the double penetration, all of that, it's not just happening to like images, it's happening to real actresses, it's happening to real people. And sometimes it's happening without their consent, given what we know about how problematic the porn industry is. So real women are actually being harmed in these films. The second harm is harm to the women and children who are not in the pornographic images or scenes, but who are nonetheless subjected to those images against their will. So she points to

22:49all this research showing how husbands and fathers and brothers often use pornography as a tool of abuse, especially in the home, right? Like they force pornographic representations onto women who don't want to look at them. And so even if those women are not in the porn, they are being harmed by the way in which porn circulates. And finally, she talks also about the harm that pornography causes to the women and children who are affected by how porn ultimately shapes men's psyches and behavior more generally.

23:27So this is where she harnesses empirical evidence indicating that men who consume porn are less likely to treat women as equals. They are more likely to condone rape committed by other men and are also less likely to believe rape victims who are women. And not only that, but they're also statistically more likely to engage in rape themselves. And so looking at all this evidence, she concludes that just as sexual harassment turns the workplace into a really hostile and harmful

24:01environment for women, pornography turns both the private space of the home, but also the public space, like school, like the public plaza, everywhere where women go out beyond the home, into a hostile and harmful space. And I like the way she puts it at one point. She says, porn turns the world into a pornographic place. Yeah. And I've been thinking about this in relation to the Epstein files, because I think there is no clearer indicator that power in our society is masculine coded and that that masculinity

24:40itself is shaped around, conditioned by, and sustained through the abuse of women and girls. The prevalence of what we call rape culture is, in McKinnon's view, deeply tied to the proliferation of pornography, which, again, going back to Dworkin, perpetuates and upholds a system of male dominance. As I lean into my post-tenure era, I'm trying to think about classic, cool professor looks for

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OnlyFans and Porn

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27:18kind of sex as the sex we have in real life? Or is it an altogether different kind of thing? One of the ways in which people differentiate between pornographic sex and quote-unquote real sex is to say that sex in porn is art. It's a form of free speech. Maybe it's just a performance. Now, Catherine McKinnon points out that this is how porn has been interpreted in the American court system. So whenever there are court cases involving pornography, the courts have interpreted

27:50porn as a form of speech. And so they have interpreted it through the lens of art. And they argue that that construction of porn as performance is a bad faith argument because it's a way of rationalizing the ongoing exploitation of women and propping up male supremacy. But people who have worked in pornography often reject that interpretation because they do want to emphasize that the kind of sex that they have on camera is fundamentally different from the sex that they have in real life. Because the

28:23sex on camera is indeed a performance, it is a form of art, and we ought not conflate that with the sex that they have in their private lives when the cameras are off. Yeah, I read a memoir by the porn star Oriana Small known as Ashley Blue for this episode that addresses this. Small became famous in the 2000s for extremely hardcore porn films, especially involving anal sex and double penetration. A lot of these scenes involved the kind of straightforward subjugation that Dworkin and McKinnon were so concerned about.

28:56But Small maintains that the sex she performed on screen wasn't dehumanizing. She writes, quote, it actually made me feel more of a human being while simultaneously connecting me deeply to an animal world, end quote. She really enjoyed performing in porn. She says that from the first time she did it, she felt really joyful doing it. She was performing, to be sure, but in a way that felt expressive of her sexuality. She calls doing porn the ultimate kink experience for her. And what I found particularly interesting about Small's account is that she distinguishes the sex she's having on screen

29:31from what she is actually getting paid to do, which is to create a film. So she says, I wasn't paid to have sex. I was paid to make a movie or a product. There is a difference. And at the same time, she's really enjoying the sex that she's having for the camera. So she's simultaneously sexually enjoying herself and working for the camera, which is the money part. But those two things are sort of happening in different registers for her. And there's also a distinction that she

30:04draws between the sex itself that she enjoys on camera. It's obviously still sex and it is still sexually exciting, but it's distinct for her from the sex that she enjoys off screen. Even when doing the same positions or acts, she says that porn and other forms of sex are completely different forms of sex. So I just found this to be a really nuanced account where she's not saying I was just performing for money. She's saying I was performing for money while also having really fun sex. But then the really

30:35fun sex that I had on screen was different from the really fun sex I had off screen, even when the actual positions were the same or the activities were the same. Yeah, it's almost as if the nature of porn, it changes the reasons why we enjoy the behaviors that we're performing in front of the camera, right? Even if they're still sexual reasons. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, like it's I still enjoy it sexually, but for a different reason or in a different way. And I really like that. And I think in general, this raises really interesting questions about the specular aspect of pornography,

31:09because pornography is technically defined as images and text that are created to like make you horny. But we don't often think about text. We often think about images. We think about photography. We think about film. And so that has to do with this connection that exists in our imaginary between sex and visuality. And the thing about vision, this is something that we talked about in our vision episode from a while ago. The thing about vision is that it's an inherently distancing register of

31:44perception. Vision requires a gap between the eye that sees and the thing that I see. And in that regard, it's very different than other senses like touch, right? Like I need for touch, you need the closing of that distance. And so in a sense, when we're thinking about pornography, we're thinking about something that is performed for the visual pleasure of another subject, and it introduces that distance. And I think that that visuality slash distance already makes it different than the kind of

32:16sex that we have when porn is not involved. So I do worry about the rise of viewing porn as contributing to a primarily visual sexual culture a lot, actually. In such a visual sexual culture, people are more concerned about what others look like and what they themselves look like while having sex than they are about how things feel. Like vision is important to sex for many people. And I don't think there is inherently a problem with being turned on by how your partner looks or by how you

32:47look. But I don't think it is as important to sex. I really, yeah, I'm just gonna say I don't think it's as important to sex as touches. And I also worry about the way that the visual medium escalates what is seen as sexy to more and more extreme and often violent acts. Oh, how come? One direct answer to this is because so much porn is violent, people see it and are interested in trying it out, whether or not it actually appeals to them or not, right? So there's like a kind of visual mimicry that happens.

33:19But I think like a more nuanced and actually to me more compelling answer would be in the distancing nature of vision, there is a proclivity towards alienation that you don't experience so much as in touch. So I think vision as a medium kind of ups the ante on specular drama, and encourages people to find like more and more extreme ways of living out their sexualities, whether or not that's like, actually

33:53pleasurable. To go back to Small's book, I want us to think a little bit about how porn actors experience the porn that they create, to what extent is the visual medium in which they're working, automatically putting them in the space of performance, right? Like, it seems to me like this, the visuality of porn makes every pornographic act carried out by an actor, inherently a performance, right? It puts it in the domain of

34:25acting. Now, I'm wondering, if we want to say that porn is performance and it's art, then what kind of art and what kind of performance is it, right? Like, we could easily say that it's a kind of acting. But there are other ways of interpreting the aesthetics of porn. I'm here thinking about the work of a French author by the name of Ovidie, who has written extensively about porn, sex, and desire. And she has a degree in philosophy, but then became a porn actress. And she wrote a piece for The Guardian in the early 2000s about the reasons why she went

35:02into porn. And she says, look, I didn't really do it for the money. To be honest, there's not a lot of money in porn. And she says, I was already upper middle class, so I really didn't need the money. I also didn't do it for the sex. She says, I'm not an exhibitionist. I'm not a swinger. I don't get off on being seen by others having sex. So why did I go into porn? And she says, first and foremost, because when I started watching porn for the first time more seriously, I realized that the story I

35:35had been told by feminist writers from the 80s and 90s about porn being inherently dehumanizing, you know, maybe she was reading Dworkin and McKinnon, who knows, just didn't fit with what I was seeing. On the screen, I was seeing women who were empowered and liberated. And so that was a point of attraction. But beyond that, the reason she went into porn is because she already had an interest in dance and choreography. She was a dancer and a choreographer. And so she saw porn as an extension

36:06of both of those. And this is a quote from that piece in The Guardian where OVD says, I see a pornographic scene as a piece of choreography that involves the whole body in which one must show the emotions by moving, by tensing one's muscles, by trembling and by letting go. It's a very interesting exercise in physical expression, end quote. And so she does associate it with art and performance, but specifically with a kind of choreographed dance in front of the cameras.

36:39Yeah. And when you think about it that way, you might realize that our kind of too quick conception of the difference, colloquially speaking, between art, like a sex scene in a film, and porn really seems to me to hinge on two things. One is kind of the explicitness that's involved, right? And so the idea is that like, yeah, you can have making out, you can have like nudity, et cetera. But if you actually see something like penetration, that tends to make us think that

37:12something is like meant to titillate or excite and therefore, you know, is porn rather than art. And also the second thing is actually basically related directly to that, which is what is the purpose of this art? Is it to sort of provoke kind of some kind of detached aesthetic response as in film, or is it meant to sexually excite? And I actually think the distinction between those two last things is probably indefensible other than by appealing to some sort of like purity culture,

37:46right? If I go to a romantic movie and I get excited, whether sexually or just like, you know, asexually, but romantically by a makeout scene, that doesn't seem to be different in kind from the kind of arousal that somebody would have when they're watching porn. Of course, like the activity that that viewer undertakes is likely to be different. Like porn is consumed by and large for the purposes of getting people off. But I don't think that there's really like a difference in

38:17kind there that we can justify other than by like a kind of appeal to purity culture, which is not itself a justification at all. No, I agree with you. And here it all depends on how we use pornographic or pornographic adjacent materials, right? So the pragmatics of porn have to step into the foreground here. Because if I were to watch a romantic movie like Titanic in the privacy of my bedroom and used it to get off. Heated rivalry much? Yeah, no, it doesn't do it for me, actually. I'm more likely

38:49to do it to Titanic. Yeah, yeah, you are most secretly heated rivalry haters, but nothing hotter than the scene of Leonardo DiCaprio dying and sinking into the bottom of the ocean to get me there. Yeah. Hey, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever floats or sinks my boat. But you're wrapped that you're alone on. Yeah. But, you know, you see how the pragmatics here is really important. And the inverse of that is that I could look at a classically pornographic

39:20image in a different context. Like I could look at it in a museum or in a textbook, perhaps. And if it doesn't have the same function, then it wouldn't be pornographic. So the pornographic is a relationship between us and the material. It's not an inherent property of the material. I think that's a really good point about the relationship of viewer to work and that sort of being a better way of drawing the line between art and porn, if we even want to draw the line at all there. To take us back to the experience of the porn actors that we're talking about, we have on the

39:55one hand this idea that doing porn is a performance, which we saw both in Ovidi and Small's narratives of their own work. And I think you really see frequently in the testimonies of people who work in the industry. And in thinking about it in that way, there's a conceptual difference between your own sexual pleasure and your role as performer or actor in a scene. Although Small really emphasizes that she had a lot of sexual pleasure from doing her performances. You could also, you know, think about a porn actor who maybe doesn't get sexual pleasure directly through doing porn. But, you know, that

40:29distinction is just present in a different way because like they're still performing in the scene. So I think those two are actually really compatible views. On the other hand, I think that sometimes defenses of porn on the grounds that is merely art, especially when that trades on the kind of free speech narrative that you mentioned earlier, very much overlook the troubling conditions on the ground of the porn industry itself. So I mentioned that Small doesn't say that the sex dehumanized her. In fact, she found it really empowering. But that claim actually comes

41:00in the context of saying that the porn industry did dehumanize her. Although she had really affirming experiences on camera, off camera things were very different. She found herself in abusive relationships with other porn actors, producers, and directors. She was constantly being coerced into doing things that she didn't want to do, sometimes through financial manipulation, other times through drug use, and still other times through sheer assault. And she even had assaults filmed and posted online as

41:31porn. So there was one case in which she was almost strangled to death. And the guy who filmed it posted it on his porn website. And she notes that what was strangest of all about that scene is that there was actually nothing sexual about it, other than that she was naked. She said, it just looked like I was being attacked because she was, but it was treated as erotic. And so I think we can see there, you know, some of the concerns from a McKinnon or a Dworkin reemerge, even though it's not as simple as the

42:04narrative they offer. Well, I don't even think it's that their narrative is simple is that their narrative is still applicable. Because McKinnon's point at the very least is that once our perception of sex is molded by porn, especially porn that eroticizes power imbalances, we become unable to tell the difference between abuse and mere performance, right? Because that distinction is never thematized in the porn that we watch. In fact, it's explicitly erased, where what we get off on

42:35is the inequality. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that the horrifying conditions that she's describing suddenly being uploaded to a website would be experienced by a lot of people watching it as porn, because that's what a lot of porn is, like materially speaking. I think a question that emerges here is that even if we should embrace a conceptual distinction between porn as performance and porn as sex, if the material conditions speak to male dominance, then are McKinnon and Dworkin to some

43:10extent right, that that line gets blurry. And in particular, that the blurriness of that line shores up the system of male dominance. And one of the things that I noticed in reading Small's memoir is how few women she interacts with. She is surrounded, especially in the first third of the book when she's entering the industry, almost entirely by men. Men are the directors, men are the producers, men are by and large, you know, the other actors that she's working with, of course. And even when women enter the

43:43scene, it is very much mediated through the power and control of and by men. Well, and this is also why McKinnon worries when American courts, especially the Supreme Court, define pornography as art, performance and speech. Because they're saying, look, you are protecting the right of men to express the domination and abuse of women as a viewpoint that is protected under the First Amendment. And when we live in a society where the First Amendment is seen as an absolute

44:17protection of speech, except under very few conditions, it just gives the green light to a really abusive industry continuing to thrive. The porn industry has changed a lot in recent years, most notably with the rise of social media and more recently, OnlyFans. Of course, internet porn has been around for as long as the internet has been around, and it's still a gigantic industry. But recently, OnlyFans has begun to shape not only who can make porn, but also what kind of porn is being made

44:53and consumed. Yeah, this is a really interesting moment where things are changing so much, not only for viewers, as we talked about earlier, but also for creators. Before we get into the details of these changes, I want to quickly explain what OnlyFans is and how it differs from regular internet porn websites. When it was created, OnlyFans was not originally an exclusively pornographic platform. It was just a website for anyone to sell subscriptions to photo and video content. But during the pandemic, pornographic content quickly rose in popularity and OnlyFans revenue increased by 500%. You know,

45:29we're all kind of like moving remote online, starting to watch videos, be on Zooms constantly. So OnlyFans becomes increasingly popular and it then quickly shifted to being a huge player in the porn industry with a unique platform-based model. Basically, OnlyFans creators sell monthly subscriptions to access their self-produced content and the company takes 20% of a creator's monthly earnings. Like, not that different from platforms that you and I have used or currently use, like

46:00Patreon and Substack. The platform also includes ways that creators can generate extra income, such as tips, pay-per-view messages, and exclusive content. The model of OnlyFans has been really, really successful. Now, there is a big difference between how many people go onto this platform and how many people actually rake in a ton of money because the average creator makes relatively little money on OnlyFans. According to their statistics, the average creator earns only about $150 to $180 a month for uploading this content and making it available

46:34through this subscription model. Not nothing, but not going to pay your rent in this economy. It's definitely not going to pay for much. But the thing about it is that it has been very attractive at pulling in creators. So now there are over 3.2 million creators on this website in total. And the interesting thing is that it's not just average people. Sometimes you also have celebrities who then make this turn to porn. You have YouTubers, you have streamers, you have other internet content creators, as well as sometimes now there is this pipeline from the reality TV world

47:10to the OnlyFans world, where if you become really big in a reality TV show, you can open an OnlyFans account and make pretty good money. And those people, the celebrities, can make millions and millions of dollars on the platform. And not surprisingly, of course, there is a huge gender disparity in this website. I obviously would have expected this, but I didn't realize how extreme the imbalance is. 97% of

47:40OnlyFans creators are women. And the most represented age bracket is the 18 to 24 years old group. And of the 240 million users, like all the people who subscribe, 69% of them are men, mostly married men between 35 and 44 years of age. So it's mostly married men in their 30s and 40s consuming content produced by 18 to 24 year old

48:11young women. Yeah. And we're like, there's no relation to broader social dynamics. No, I don't think about people are actually saying that, but it is obviously a complex situation here. I'm actually surprised that only 69% of the users are men. I would have thought it would be more. Well, you know, there are the women who are consuming that 3% creators who are men. So maybe the men are like the men creators are also raking it in. Who knows? Just because there are so few of them for such a large demand.

48:41That's so problematic. That assumes that all of the non-men are women and that all of the women are straight. Okay. We're going to let that one go. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Wow. All right. Yikes. Not David being extremely heteronormative, but so I want to think a little bit about this in the context of the various harms to women that McKinnon criticized, because it's clear that the shift to

49:12OnlyFans has some real positives while it also, I think we can say has some negatives. So on the one hand, a huge positive is that OnlyFans gets rid of a major source of harm for porn actors, which are the material conditions of the industry that we discussed a little bit ago, right? Like if Oriana Small were coming up nowadays and had access to OnlyFans, she would have been able to much better protect herself from the assaultive harms of the industry. You don't need to work with often abusive men in positions of power in order to produce or direct porn. You have a lot more self-direction in

49:48the creation of porn. On the other hand, and this is a problem with like the rise of gig work in general, OnlyFans model essentially means that creators are responsible for their own promotion to survive on the platform and become popular. So whereas Oriana Small could do her performance and then like go out and enjoy her life and the film would be distributed, you know, by like the people who are responsible for that and show up in the video stores. Nowadays, the creators have to promote themselves. And so as anyone who's been on X lately knows, I myself haven't been, self-promotion on X or

50:23Twitter is really crucial. 62% of OnlyFans traffic comes from Twitter. Then you've got 12% from Reddit, 12% from Instagram and 6% from YouTube. So you have to promote across different social media platforms and drive engagement. And this creates a huge vulnerability for children and adolescents who are also on those platforms. You know, like they have an Instagram account, they have a Twitter account, they have a YouTube account. We've already talked about how this can be harmful, especially as more and more kids use social media prior to having proper sex education.

50:55There's also another downside to the OnlyFans model that I think is really important to think about, which is the social ramifications of being an OnlyFans creator. So in the traditional porn industry, it was arguably somewhat easy to maintain a separation between your professional life and your personal life, right? Of course, there's always the risk that once you go into porn, people will find out about it, somebody will see it, and it will spread by word of mouth. But in theory, you can imagine being a porn actor for your job and leading a life in which the majority of people

51:29in your social network are not aware that that's the kind of work that you do, either as your primary or secondary source of income. Now, with OnlyFans, because of the cross-pollination with social media and places like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc., it's really impossible to maintain that separation. And I've seen a lot of people talk about on social media about how the social lives of OnlyFans creators can be totally changed once people find out about their accounts because they're all sort of linked,

52:03right? Like if you go to their Instagram, you might be rerouted to their Twitter, you might be rerouted then to their OnlyFans page, and anybody can become a paying subscriber. And so there's always this risk. And I've seen interviews with a few women OnlyFans creators who say, look, I actually found out that people in my social circle knew that I'm an OnlyFans creator when I realized that my stepfather had registered for my OnlyFans account or that my brother had registered or that my neighbor had

52:36registered. And so it does introduce a social vulnerability that is kind of peculiar to it because it is tied to the social media world. Well, and I think that kind of context collapse is just one aspect of a broader problem, which is that OnlyFans also makes the porn star much more accessible. They're not the unattainable superstars of the movie studio or even, you know, of the video store when Oriana Small's videos were first being popularized. You have a personal

53:09connection to them. Like if you're paying for their content, I think viewers are also likely to feel more entitled to them. And so that's like a new kind of vulnerability too, which is wrought by the sort of parasocial nature of the relationship. But the parasocial relationship feels so proximal because you're paying directly for their content. Well, and I do think this enables us to talk about a transformation in the figure of the porn actor, where before it was an unattainable figure on a pedestal. But now it's somebody on your social media that you pay directly to, as you mentioned,

53:41but who in theory might also follow you back, right? Like you might follow them, they might follow you back or they might follow people that you know. And so it does bring them into your social network in an unprecedented way. And I think some OnlyFans and just like porn content creators online have actually capitalized on this transformation of the porn actor by tapping into these direct-to-consumer, engage-the-fan kind of work. I'm here thinking about Bonnie Blue, who is considered the most famous

54:12porn actress of the moment. And she became huge online precisely by tapping into like social media and going on podcasts and things like that, but also by doing stunts where the fans, who typically are just consuming her work from a distance, are brought into the performance. And so, you know, her very, her most famous stunt was having sex with like a thousand men, many of whom were her followers who were told where to go and they appeared in her video. So the fan can become a

54:46porn actor and can attain that previously unattainable figure. And so like also the, the merging of porn with like stunt YouTube culture is really interesting to me. And it is what some people have said propelled her to international fame. Well, it definitely is what propelled her to international fame. And, you know, as we're talking about the kind of context collapse here and some of the vulnerabilities that in, that that engenders, I also want to bring in how AI is shaping this and

AI and Deep Fakes

55:18move away a little bit from OnlyFans creators, because what we're finding today, and this was discussed a lot in the Laura Bates book, The New Age of Sexism, how AI and emerging technologies are reinventing misogyny. Increasingly, children and adolescents are using de-clothing apps to see what classmates look like or would look like using AI technologies. And deep fakes obviously are a huge problem here too.

55:49And one of the things that Bates says is that intimate image abuse of women makes up around 96% of all deep fakes. So one of, and we're not, I'm not just talking like sexual deep fakes, deep fakes in general. So in our public discourse, we're really concerned about deep fakes of politicians saying things that they don't believe or, you know, things that are, um, fake news. Fake news. Exactly. And obviously like fake news is not, not an issue as we've talked about in other

56:20episodes, but her point is that actually the center of the deep fakes conversation needs to be about intimate image abuse of women because it makes up about 96% of all deep fakes. And she writes that deep fake pornography is a new form of abuse, but it's underlying power dynamics are very, very old. You can see this in the fact that so many of the videos include women's faces being ejaculated on or portray them in hyper submissive positions. Some depict women being raped. It is all about putting women in their place. It's all about power and control. It's not just about sexualizing them.

56:54It's about subjugating them. So I think there we see, you know, a new version of what Dworkin and McKinnon were so concerned about. I am flabbergasted by those statistics, Elliot. But another maybe equally shocking statistic that I ran into while doing research is that Grok generates roughly one non-consensual sexualized image every single minute. And so like, you know, think about that. Grok needs to be stopped.

57:25Well, and like, you know, the problem is that you can just like go on Twitter and just ask Grok to produce an AI deep fake and it does it right away. And Musk has talked about how Twitter is going to punish users. And he has also joked about it multiple times in, you know, his like typical way. But the company hasn't actually taken any steps to ensure that this is curbed or regulated in some way. And in general, I think the question here of the regulation of deep fakes in connection to porn has to be central because I'm thinking about the fact that in October,

57:59OpenAI announced that they plan to release an adult mode. That's what they're calling it in 2026 that allows erotic and pornographic content only for quote unquote verified adults. Although it's really unclear what that very verification process will actually look like in practice. And Sam Altman made this very questionable claim on Twitter. He said, now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools,

58:29we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. So, so, you know, like now that questions about mental health and abuse are a thing of the past, let's fully deregulate this space that is not raising any red flags whatsoever. Give me a break. Okay. AI psychosis, just a blip. Now we're good and we can proliferate all of this sexual deep experience. Okay. So I will say when it comes to not deep fakes or declothing apps and things that are abusing real life existing

59:07women, there is of course an argument to be made that the proliferation of AI porn could actually mitigate material conditions for porn workers. Right. And so if somebody has like a very violent fantasy and they want to get off to that, they can have an AI video of that. You know, it's like easier to make than an animated video of it that actually doesn't like potentially put a real woman in the way of harm. So I do think that there is a way that AI porn is drawing us a little bit closer

59:42in the visual register to the conditions for erotic literature, which doesn't have the same material conditions as like actual visual work that involves real actors. At the same time, I do worry a lot about what the proliferation of AI porn will mean for the treatment of women and girls who are real. And in particular, like if people are already learning kind of bad lessons about sex before they even have it through watching porn, how much worse could it possibly get? And I do think it could get worse

1:00:13if they're learning that from like porn that is not even embodied by real human people. Yeah. And I think it's just another iteration of how pornographic content, in this case, AI generated images are not just images, right? That's the thing about symbolism, that they are real symbols moving in real social space. And I do wonder about how this contributes to what McKinnon described as the pornogrification of the world, how it turns the whole world into a pornographic scene.

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