The world’s largest porn site is at it yet again with another attempt to normalize pornography and make people forget how harmful it really is.
Perception Isn’t Reality
The site recently introduced an “Amateur Model” program, where it tells visitors that they can “earn up to $5,000 for a month’s work.” It lists such incentives as “fame, fun, fortune” and “show[ing] the world how hot you are.”
If this isn’t one of the most prime examples of the concerning porn culture in our society, we don’t know what is. Pornography is being labeled as normal, healthy, natural, and fun. But what people don’t realize is that perception is not reality; science and research are proving that porn is harmful.
The Truth About Coercion and Porn
As exposed in the raw documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, the amateur porn industry is a negative result of today’s internet/social media obsessed porn culture. Countless young people are turning to doing porn for the easy money, while ignoring—or not fully realizing—the very serious ramifications on their personal lives.
In porn, the question of consent can be tricky (and this growing phenomenon of amateur porn makes it even trickier). For example, if one of the participants doesn’t know there’s a camera running, then the porn is not consensual, even if the sex is. Right? What if a person consented to be filmed, but not to have the film shown to anyone else? What if someone manipulated their partner into being filmed in the first place, like making him or her worry that they’d blackmail them if they didn’t cooperate? Or what if she agreed to have sex, but in the middle, he suddenly started doing something she didn’t expect? Did she still give consent?
The point is, when you watch porn, there’s no way to know what kind of “consent” the actors have given. You can’t assume, just because someone appears in a porn video, that they knew beforehand exactly what would happen or that they had a real choice or the ability to stop what was being done. And you can’t assume that just because someone sends in their amateur video to this sick scheme to exploit young women, that they were given the opportunity to understand the ramifications of their actions of having sex on camera and publicly posting it.
It’s Not Worth It
We’re not claiming that all porn is nonconsensual. We’re just pointing out that some of it is and some of it isn’t, and when you watch it, there’s no way to know which is which.
So, would you buy from a company if you knew that some, but not all, of their products were made with child labor? Would you support a store that abused some, but not all, of their female employees?
How can it be ethical to say that “porn is okay because participants give their consent,” when we know for a fact that some—probably much more than you think—do not?
Needless to say, porn is not worth it, at any price. If we don’t take a stand and expose these harmful traps set by the porn industry, things will only get worse for our generation. We need to be the generation fighting for love, not looking for it with pixels on a screen.
What YOU Can Do
Spread the word on the real harms of pornography. SHARE this article to speak out about how pornography is not normal.