Ask Lemmy

Would like there to be less stigma around sex work.

As with all work, I want better work protection. Unions. All that.

Specifically, I'm really tired of the "step-" stuff that the major free sites seem to push a lot. I don't know why it's trending but I don't like it.

I think in a couple years ai is going to be good enough to make video, and that's going to be weird. Like today you can type "big tit redhead" and hope you get results that do it for you, but in the future it'll probably be able to create results. That will open whole new fronts in ethical debates.

Sex work needs legislation and job regulations like every other job. That's what helps sex workers the most and reduces sex trafficking. Porn industry the same. We should stop treating it any different than other jobs. The time to be silence about it are long gone, everyone has Internet and most consum internet pornography. Hiding and criminalizing makes things worse, always has.

It's huge and diverse so hard to generalize about. I think it has many serious issues and much of it could really use more regulation. There's a lot of very unethical people involved. It's maybe not as bad as the old days but it's also a much larger industry now so the scale of the issues are much larger now too.

I honestly don't understand how they make any money. Outside of whales paying for parasocial relationships on onlyfans, who is buying porn?

I'm a bit biased, because I know some people that were involved in both porn, camgirl, and OF work, so their opinions largely shape my own.

Surprisingly, "normal" porn is still viable as a career, with camgirls and OF creators often having an agency behind them to do shit like promote, book studios, hook them up with other girls for collaboration, etc. Some of it extends into porn too, and while I don't know how much my friend was making from a mix of all three, she drives a BMW in the UK despite having a day job as a volunteer at a pet charity, so she's probably doing fine. The way she described camgirl work was basically no different to call centre work.

It was all still thriving as an industry because people have their favourites, and (weird or not) some people like to find their creators so that they do more stuff.

Honestly, seeing how porn is (still) thriving has radically changed my view on legal prostitution. While I don't know anyone inside that industry, my friend knew plenty of OF girls that were also on sex work websites, and it was crazy how many of them would pick up "extra work" to make more money - with basically zero protection that they would get from their agencies because they don't want any involvement or knowledge of what's going on.

Don't get me wrong, the internet is constantly changing the industry, but it's an industry that everyone assumed would die out for 20ish years now, and it's stronger than ever. I think "traditional" porn will still be strong a decade from now.

I think that it almost all looks and sounds so fake that I couldn't find it sexy if I tried. I mostly find amateur performers that I like and follow them. Sometimes if they gain a following it starts getting fake, too. :/

Sex work is work. Decriminalise it, legislate it, create a sex workers employment category and taxation, require licensing and health checks, give copyright protections to content creators, to their images and likenesses.

To me porn is no more fantastical than acting is.

I like it.

My favourite is stacked up Russian midgets or Japanese girls puking in each other mouths.

It makes me cum litres.

I have no problem with porn, at least in theory.

The reality of the industry is that large swathes of it are built on abuse, trafficking, and use of drugs for coercion. Not a fan of that. But I don't think criminalizing sex work has done anything to help, and generally I don't like taking economic opportunities away from people who are already historically disadvantaged.

For individual workers, there shouldn't be any stigma sround for them, they should be respected as much as any other worker. And the industry itself should become less predatory and workers should be protected more, I hear workplace sexual assault is common in the industry and people should be protected against that. Also another question in my mind is "If people depend on money to survive and if that money is made trough sex than is, sex work, rape trough coercion?"

I think it's like a lot of things in life. Especially when capitalism is concerned.

There's a seedy, underground section of it. Women get trafficked and forced to make videos. It's disgusting and something I don't ever see going away. If it's not porn, it's prostitution. Sex trafficking makes a ton of money, and a lot of rich people are sociopaths.

However, outside of that, it's fine. Watch it in moderation. We're human. Most of us like sex. We like watching other people have sex.

As it currently exists it is awful, but it doesn't have to be. If sex work was recognized as legitimate work with pay, benefits, and regulation it could be great.

I will preface this with I worked for an adult website in an infrastructure support role for several years. I really don't have any problems with streaming camgirl sites or porn videos if the performers are doing it of their own free will. Camgirls can set their own schedule, it's safer than doing the same in person, and there's more privacy for them as well.

That said, many people get forced into doing things they don't want to do when it comes to porn. The industry is rife with abuse and human trafficking. I'm pro regulation, taxation, and ensuring that things are above board with independent audits. The same goes for sex work.

It’s an industry that has inherent public drama. I think it can be a voice for positive societal change when it comes to sex. It’s also easily abused as we have all seen with CSAM on pornhub. If it weren’t for the humans it’d be a positive industry lmao

I'm a hypocrite but I do watch porn I also see why it'll cause issues with loneliness, or it being used as a quick dopamine fix while doing little to improve ones life. Also the industry can be grim

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

--Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

I think that there's probably a lot of exploitation, ranging from human trafficking, to exploiting people who have no other options, to roping people into pseudo-pyramid schemes, to garden variety encouraging potentially harmful conduct stemming from untreated psychological issues (which can apply to both porn actors and porn consumers).

But I also think that for any possible harm that a legal and properly regulated sex industry could do, an illegal and stigmatized sex industry is a thousand times worse. So the key is to recognize that there is an undeniable demand for porn, so we might as well do everything we can to minimize the potential for harm for all possible parties involved.

Also some of those Rule34 artists are just... they're both some of the most amazingly talented artists and some of the most depraved perverts on the goddamn planet, sometimes at the same time. Bless their weird little hearts.

I am surprised it is a thing really. People are paying for porn? People are looking at free porn without ad blocks, incognito mode, and a VPN?

Erotic fiction makes even less sense. You can get way more than you would ever have time to read for free and yet people are still buying it.

Porn that is geared to women with foreplay and women-initiated encounters like Bellesa is hot as fuck and should be the direction the industry takes. Obviously fake moaning from a woman being jackhammered by a hideous man with a 10 inch rod borders on self parody.

I mean it’s capitalism so what do you expect? Then again I think most people know extremely little about the industry and have opinions based mostly on puritanical views on sex. So I usually don’t like to feed that nonsense by extra criticism when there are many other industries that are far more worthy of criticism.

Not much worse than hollywood