There isn’t one definition for ethical porn, but generally, it’s porn that upholds the rights and fair working conditions for the cast and crew, celebrates consent and sexual variety, and often avoids insensitive representations.
Take Pinklabel.tv, for example—Shine Louise Houston’s platform for emerging and independent pornographers—which features “PL” ratings for “nudity, sexuality, pleasure, consent” and “porn with good taste.”
Press play, and a statement appears: “All performers were 18 years of age or older at the time of production.” Some films boast a proud row of prizes from the Feminist Porn Awards and erotic film festivals. You can buy or stream the films at a cost, and viewers are assured the director/studio earns a cut of that.
Pornhub paints a different picture. The phrase “3 HOURS OF GIRLS GETTING DESTROYED” greets you on the landing page, offering no explicit guarantees about the performers’ ages, consent, payment, or pleasure. It’s a free video compilation featuring at least 100 performers, which generates ad revenue for the uploader. (The average pay rate per 1,000 views of free videos was $0.64 in 2018.)
Since Pornhub is currently the ninth most visited website in the world, it’s worth considering what porn consumers have come to expect from these tube sites.
Tube sites are porn platforms with interfaces similar to YouTube, where content is user-generated. They’re the websites Google’s algorithm prioritises when you search for “porn.”
Piracy is a significant issue on tube sites, where paid content is often uploaded for free. In reaction to this and in an attempt to diversify the content available, a movement towards more “ethical” porn has emerged.
“Porn sites often rely on insensitive language in categories and contexts that are offensive to people of colour and the transgender community, assuming a narrowly straight, cisgender white male audience,” reads the Pink Label bio. “PinkLabel.tv exists because we want a site that is a better fit for our films and those of other filmmakers, as well as our audiences.”
Let’s park representations to the side for the moment; that’s the murkier water in the “ethical porn” debate. Standards in production and distribution are the more clear-cut concerns.
In Australia, it's actually prohibited to produce material likely to be classified as X18+ or Refused Classification everywhere except for the Australian Capital Territory.
According to the Eros Association, our adult industry body, many of the small number of adult media producers in Australia choose to film their content overseas or act in non-compliance with existing laws. Eros has created its own minimum ethical standards for the adult media industry. These standards are binding only for Eros members but are also meant to guide the Australian adult media more generally. Some include:
- Performers have the right to decline any requested sexual act they do not feel comfortable with.
- Performers have the right to producer-provided supplies and safe sex products such as lubricants, condoms, enemas, douches, baby wipes, and any other applicable product.
- Performers have the right to producer-provided snacks if the shoot is expected to last up to six hours.
- Valid photographic identification of age must be obtained before the shoot to confirm the performer is over the age of 18.
You can find similar self-regulated standards on “ethical” porn production company websites worldwide. Over at Erika Lust, a production company creating women-led adult cinema in Barcelona, they have a dedicated page on their website outlining their values, including a downloadable Performer’s Bill of Rights.
Enforcing such standards on a tube site is challenging, as nearly anyone can upload content.
Pornhub does have its own terms of service, prohibiting the posting of any content without documentation proving the performers are over 18 (or older in locations where 18 is not the minimum age). Their terms also ban copyrighted content, revenge porn, impersonated material, or actual depictions of rape, torture, death, violence, incest, racial slurs, and hate speech, among other things.
This sounds good in theory, but in practice, Pornhub is failing to regulate everything that goes up, including non-consensual and underage material. This is no surprise, given that over 6.83 million new videos were uploaded to Pornhub last year, according to the website’s data.
When you’re on a reputable ethical porn site, or accessing content directly from performers themselves on platforms like OnlyFans, you can likely feel more secure knowing you’re not inadvertently watching revenge porn or child abuse material.
Nevertheless, there is ongoing debate about who can claim the “ethical” label and what that actually means.
“Just putting a label of ethical/honest/feminist on something without a clear understanding of what that label means in practice for the people it’s meant to protect is simply advertising,” says Vex Ashley on her porn site Four Chambers.
Ashley is a porn performer herself and created the “deliberately ambiguous” project Four Chambers, which rejects the reduction of labels like “ethical” or “feminist” to mere buzzwords.
“It can mean that it plays into ideas about divisive respectability politics, adding more shame and layers of hierarchy to an already stigmatised community,” the Four Chambers transparency statement reads.
With Pink Label and Erika Lust Films defining their work in opposition to mainstream content, and Four Chambers refusing to draw that line, it can be hard to discern what’s ethical and what’s not when it comes to porn.
This genre doesn’t have hard and fast rules. But in summary, if you want to consume porn, there are steps you can take to reduce harm to others and improve your experience:
- Pay for your porn. It’s labour. Yes, free porn can pay in ad revenue, but the rates aren’t as high.
- Avoid tube sites. They host stolen content and don’t regulate user uploads effectively.
- For production companies that claim to be ethical, seek out their policies and rates to make informed decisions.
- Follow performers and buy their content from the platforms they direct followers to.
- Explore various sources of porn to discover what you enjoy, rather than settling for what’s on the first website Google provides.
Finally, we recommend doing this research before sticking your hand down your pants, ready to go. There’s even more out there than you may think.