In the 1980s, the feminist movement became divided on the issue of porn. Anti-porn feminists argued that porn, as well as the industry that produced it, was fundamentally oppressive and dehumanising to women. Pro-porn feminists saw this position as aligned with the political right’s crusade against recreational sex. If the exploitative aspects of porn could be removed, they argued, porn could serve as a healthy expression of sexuality and as a tool for sexual liberation.
Current feminist attitudes are far more closely aligned with the arguments made by pro-porn feminists. In many ways, it may seem as though we are living in, or at least approaching, the sexually liberated future that they envisaged. It is widely acknowledged that many people consume porn and use it, not only for sexual satisfaction, but as a tool for their own education. Women, many of whom are feminists, consume porn too. For most consumers, porn is a source of genuine enjoyment.
However, is porn becoming the liberatory tool that pro-porn feminists dreamed it could be? Is it just another form of art? A way to express healthy sexuality? Even if we set aside the exploitative elements of porn production (which are important not to understate), I argue that it is not.
As political theorist Amia Srinivasan writes, “While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, lazy, dependent, codified.” The problem is not that porn fails to embolden its viewer’s propensity for sexual fantasy, but that it stifles what that sexual fantasy can look like. It programs its viewers with rote responses, conditioning them to seek out and reproduce sexual gratification in a way that is often objectifying and reductive. In short, porn is prescriptive about what sex should be.
This is unusual, particularly if we compare porn to other types of media that we engage with regularly. Engaging with books, films, television, and music expands our imagination. Why is it, then, that porn tends to stifle it?
One potential answer is that porn itself is an unimaginative representation of sex. Historically, this has been one of the most common arguments feminists have forwarded in their attempts to reform our engagement with porn. Porn is homogenous — it too often focuses on heterosexual male pleasure, objectifies women, and fetishizes difference. If we could supply people, the logic goes, with porn that earnestly depicts female pleasure and a diversity of body types and sexualities, it could improve the understanding of sex we gain from it.
However, this argument is becoming increasingly uncompelling. Of course, diverse porn is important, and we should continue to expand its ability to be produced and accessed. But, in our current context, where porn is free and accessible in boundless volume, it is reasonably easy to source porn that is realistic and representative. Porn is diverse — the problem is often that we do not consume the diverse versions of it that would best represent us.
Although it is true that a lot of porn offers a misogynistic depiction of sex, other art that is also produced by a male gaze does not necessarily bear the same detrimental effect on its consumers’ imagination. The overwhelming majority of films are directed by men, Hollywood routinely fails to cast diverse actors, and most literature historically has been dominated by the perspectives of men. However, we still find ways to use this media to expand our imaginative capacities. Women, for example, commonly enjoy books written by men, often with the acknowledgement in mind that the perspective they are reading need not be authoritative.
Moreover, audiences actively seek out and engage meaningfully with diverse representation where it does exist. Of course, porn consumption habits are often moulded by corporations and the algorithmic categories that drive their profits, but this is also true of almost all other forms of art. While we are good at seeking out television, literature, and films that represent us, we are far more willing to settle for porn that is formulaic, unrealistic, and misogynistic. None of this is to say that the lack of diverse representation that exists in other forms of art is trivial — it is impactful, and we should certainly be doing more to address it — but it does not constrain the imagination quite as profoundly as porn does.
Perhaps it is more likely, then, that we are unimaginative consumers of porn.
Part of the problem is that we are not equipped with the necessary education to consume porn in the way that we consume other media. Education systems tend to be good at teaching the value of critical responsiveness and personal interpretation across a range of disciplines. By contrast, sex education routinely fails to promote skills which allow young people to safely incorporate porn into their sexual development. Increasingly, experts advocate for the teaching of ‘porn literacy’. If we want to engage with porn that allows us to be more sexually imaginative, we need to know how to approach it. Particularly given the sheer volume of porn that exists on the internet, we need to develop the skills to navigate it and to critically evaluate our viewing experiences.
Developing education in service of this goal, however, faces a number of hurdles. In his 2022 book, What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research?, Professor Alan McKee argues that even the study of porn itself has historically been monolithic, treating all pornography as if it were the same. It is hard to teach students to engage with porn imaginatively when academic research itself is often unimaginative. Additionally, education programs which seek to improve porn literacy are often constrained by restrictions on the kinds of material that can be shown in classrooms.
Not only is developing more robust porn literacy curricula a far-off goal, the lack of this specific kind of education does not fully explain the imagination-stifling impacts of porn. Even without explicit education about how we should consume other media, most people are intuitively able to engage with it relatively healthily. Books and films, for example, expand children’s capacity for imagination long before they are taught to critically engage with them or to critique their content. By contrast, from the moment we begin consuming it, we often afford porn undue authority — we are inclined to view its representations of sex as instructive, and we often expect them to be replicated in private. Srinivasan describes talking to her students about the impact of porn on their lives: “My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex… my women students talked about the neglect of female pleasure in the pornographic script, and wondered whether it had something to do with the absence of pleasure in their own lives.”
Although increasing porn literacy education would certainly be a step in the right direction, our obsession with viewing porn’s representations of sex as authoritative suggests that resolving the imagination-stifling problem of porn is not simply a question of being taught to navigate it well. The impulse to view porn as authoritative is very different to the impulses we bring to our consumption of other media. Almost no one, no matter how inexperienced they are in consuming art, would so obsessively expect it to be replicated in their personal experience. We don’t see Ibsen, for example, as the authority for how we should engage with our own families, or Love Island as the authority for how we should approach dating.
But porn does not depict just any experience. It depicts sex — a topic about which we naturally face confusion and seek affirmation.
It is regrettable that sex education remains almost universally inadequate. Even in jurisdictions where sex education is mandated in schools (although, notably, the push to mandate this education has been a relatively recent phenomenon which faces staunch opposition in most parts of the world), its actual delivery remains highly varied. Teachers are seldom equipped with the training to supply their students with useful guidance and students are seldom comfortable asking questions that would lead to robust discussion. People often seek out porn as informal sex education. Michelle Fine describes porn as providing a “discourse of erotics”, offering instructions on how to initiate and carry out sexual activity that we struggle to find elsewhere.
In an op-ed in the New York Times in 2018, porn star Stoya wrote, “I didn’t want the responsibility of shaping young minds. And yet, thanks to this country’s non-functional sex education system and the ubiquitous access to porn by anyone with an internet connection, I have that responsibility anyway. Sometimes it keeps me awake at night.”
Where heteronormative sex education is lacking, queer sex education is non-existent. Young queer people often rely on porn for its educational function and, in the process, similar problems appear. Moreover, the homogeneity of the academic study of porn makes it harder to address the specific nuances of queer porn and its impact.
Not only are we poorly educated about the practice of sex, but we often lack education about its broader sociocultural meaning. Indeed, Australian academic Kath Albury questions the extent to which adding a critique of porn to existing sex education programs would be effective if other areas of the curriculum do not directly address questions of power, gender relations, and sexual negotiation. Despite its entanglement with political issues, sex often feels tangential to classroom discussions of politics and power, and educators feel uncomfortable including it.
Outside of the classroom, the taboo surrounding sex also looms large. Even after years of advocacy in favour of normalisation, we still struggle to talk about sex. We often feel that it is unacademic or uncivilised or we feel embarrassed to admit that we don’t fully understand it. Even in more progressive circles, narratives which seek to preserve people’s privacy often produce the undesirable side effect of discouraging people from asking any questions about sex at all.
Our inability (or, perhaps, our unwillingness) to talk about sex is incongruous with how much it means to us. Most people attach significant personal and cultural significance to sex. Sex is intimate — it connects us not only to other people, sometimes even as an expression of love, but to our own bodies. Sex can also be socially validating — we perceive that it confirms our sense of attractiveness or prowess in a way that is deeply intimated with our self-image.
I would argue that what stifles our imagination is not just porn illiteracy, but a broader illiteracy surrounding sex itself. It is rare to care so much about something, for it to be such an important part of our lives, and to not be able to talk about it. By the time we come to porn, we are willing to grant it authority because what it offers us is so rare. Awestruck and relieved by the opportunity to think about what sex could be or mean, we have no natural defences against how porn depicts it — we welcome it with open arms and, in the process, relinquish our ability to be imaginative.
It is important to note that one of the biggest contributing factors to the enduring persuasiveness of the arguments made by pro-porn feminists was the advent of the internet. In this context, the eradication of porn that anti-porn feminists dreamed of became impossible, and pro-porn feminists’ willingness to engage with the possibility of its improvement became far more persuasive. This is undoubtedly for the best. Porn will, most likely, always exist and be viewed widely — it is important that feminists consider how this can be transformed into a tool for liberation. Additionally, attempts to legislate against porn often harm the women who make it and depend on it for financial security — the logic of pro-porn feminists offers the best chance of granting these women safe and ethical work practices.
Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that feminists engage with porn as an artistic and educational tool, at least in part, out of necessity. Far too often, people assume that porn itself should be the logical site of reform, but this is inconsistent with many of the reasons that we have had to embrace it. Improving the ability for porn to be used as a tool for sexual liberation is an ongoing battle, and requires a far broader effort to reform our consumption than what exists currently.
While their proposed solutions may no longer be tenable, it is worthwhile revisiting the concerns expressed by anti-porn feminists. Feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin saw pornography as a tool of the patriarchy, which violated women’s civil rights by ordering attacks against them. They argued that porn robbed women of agency by forcing them into symbolic roles from which they could not escape, and that it trained men to see the violation of women’s bodies as an act of sex in itself. All of this, they argued, became an exercise carried out for profit.
None of these concerns suggest that the act of filming sex, or watching filmed sex, is a problem, but that the conditions under which we would do so are problematic. Given this, the hope that the harms of porn could be resolved simply by widening the scope of content that porn delivers, or through simple sex education, is a false one. Porn is not consumed in a vacuum — it is a small piece of a broader picture, and it is not solely responsible for its own failure to expand our sexual imagination.
The legacy of anti-porn feminists is messy. Many of the claims made by feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon have translated poorly to the current realities of porn and, indeed, have been invoked in support of policies that shame and exclude sex workers. I want to be clear that these are not the claims I suggest we revisit or endorse.
Nevertheless, anti-porn feminists’ concern that porn could stifle the sexual imagination remains a pressing one. In 1987, Dworkin warned of the danger of allowing porn to consign the sexual imagination to “a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses”. Banning porn is not a viable solution to make porn less imagination-stifling; we must be more imaginative in solving its problems.