The amateur porn industry treats females as a commodity that can easily be removed and replaced. This is a huge issue as it affects not only those involved in the creation of porn, but also the way all females and their worth are viewed.
Thousands of 18 to 20-year-old girls enter the amateur porn industry annually, according to the documentary Hot Girls Wanted. This is a widespread issue, but many refuse to see it as such.
While individuals argue that women want to work in porn, actresses in Hot Girls Wanted have a faux idea of what it means to be in pornography. They see porn as their way out of their small-town lives, not something they enjoy doing.
About 40 percent of porn features violence against women, according to the same documentary. Sites that depict grotesque violence against women, like “Facial Abuse,” average over 60 million combined hits monthly.
These websites, however, do not just promote violence; they also routinely use racial slurs and stereotypes. One video on “Facial Abuse,” as depicted in the documentary, shows a Latina actress being forced into giving a blowjob, which causes her to vomit. She is forced to clean up her own vomit and the male actor tells her, “I thought you Mexican chicks were good at this shit—cleaning up.”
Porn not only reveals people’s most depraved sexual fantasies, but it also normalizes them. With porn comprising 30 percent of the data transferred across the internet, according to the Huffington Post, it is safe to say that children are part of the millions of people who watch porn.
Having such appalling, graphic images of violence and hatred through sexual encounters with women is what makes porn so harmful.
Furthermore, about 40 percent of sexually active teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 say they have learned more about sex from porn than they have from school, according to the documentary television series, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On. This is extremely concerning; what teens are learning from porn is not how they should be learning about their bodies or sex
When young girls view porn, they are likely to think that degrading women is normal, and that violence is an common part of sex. Porn should not display negative sexual experiences for women because this content is highly accessible to vulnerable young females who use it to learn about sex. This can lead to distorted views on what is acceptable and to do during a sexual encounter and fail to educate women on consent.
People who rationalize the industry’s violence as nothing more than acting fail to acknowledge that these actors are people. They are not simply actors on a screen.
Porn actors are often traumatized by their line of work. One porn actor, Rachel who is 18, states in the documentary, “I was scared. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I could tell him no,” when she had gone to shoot a scene that was marketed simply as a blowjob scene, but turned into a forced scene.
There is little regulation in the porn industry, so actors can easily be put in positions where they are exploited and do not give consent.
It is easy to watch a porn scene and never have to think about the porn actor again. Unfortunately, for the actors being taken advantage of, this is not the case.
That being said, individuals do not need to stop watching porn to stop the exploitation of porn stars. Ethical porn, by definition, is porn that does not rely on the mistreatment of women to make a profit. In order to consume moral porn, people have to pay for porn, which allows for the female actors to make a fair wage.
Ethical porn will relieve the viewer’s cognitive dissonance, while allowing for the female actors to make a living without having to perform in degrading porn.