In her 2021 book Porn Work, Heather Berg calls “the assumption that sex should be private and free” foundational to “patriarchal capitalism.” Indeed, the feminist insistence on this pillar—that sex must be neither commodified, nor its image bought and sold—belies the totalizing reality that sex and its attendant imagery are already commodified under our current iteration of privacy-less, data-driven late capitalism. To insist that something should be private and free when the conditions make such descriptors patently impossible is to play into the impossible demands of patriarchal capitalism—the fallacy that we have on time and off time; work time and home time; internet time and private time; and that sex should always remain firmly in the latter, damned to invisible pockets of time that don’t, ultimately, exist.

I digress. Lately it feels like every time I open Twitter, I see a semi-viral tweet bravely decrying the evils of misogynistic or violent porn, drawing a direct causal line between the ubiquity of men watching pornography and the ubiquity of violence against women—as though the genre’s only relationship to women is interpersonal, mediated through the watching of porn by men. This discourse is exhaustingly one-note. It’s not that the ubiquity of porn, or particularly violent or misogynistic porn, has no effect on the breadth and scope of sexual violences committed against women; it certainly could, particularly when we are speaking on a range of experiences, from being treated as disposable after fucking, to having sex that feels almost imperceptibly bad or rote, to suffering assault. But any individual pretending to know that in every instance correlation is indeed causation—that pornography has an innate property ascribed to no other media, the power to give primarily men permission to behave badly in ways they otherwise wouldn’t, or wouldn’t with such frequency and zeal—is speaking with a certainty I can’t pretend to have.

At base: I do not care what feminists think about porn. I care about my relationship to porn, and the relationships of my friends and my loved ones to porn. The difference is this: My friends’ and my loved ones’ relationships to porn are largely mediated through the lenses of labor and money, and the feminists’ positions on porn are rarely mediated as such.

“A lot of people I know sell porn. We speak about sexual labor the way we speak about other forms of labor: our annoyance at having to do it; trading tips and warnings; ‘Has anyone ever said this to you before?’”

The porn wars have been relitigated over and over. We’re a half-century past their beginnings, and yet, the conversations remain the same. I don’t have faith that women attached to their own oppression as women—the, as Zoé Samudzi puts it, “(middle class) cis white women’s to the death attachment to the fixity of womanhood as both familiar category and reflection of their own relation to power”—will ever relenquish their simultaneous attachment to porn as the site of prescriptive heterosexual sex which is, to them, synonymous with prescriptive violence against women. But we have entered a profoundly insidious moment of this debate, in which liberal and left feminists know well enough to include, amongst their revisitings of the writings of second-wave feminists who abhored, simultaneously, sex workers and trans women, statements acknowledging precarious sex workers as the people “invariably” harmed most by legislative attempts to eradicate the sex trade and the market for pornography.

Amia Srinivasan’s much-anticipated book, The Right to Sex, dedicates a chapter to, in her words, “Talking To My Students About Porn.” Srinivasan’s exploration into the porn debate hinges upon her Oxford students’ horror, to her surprise, at porn: “I imagined that the students would find the anti-porn position prudish and passé… [but] they were riveted. Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said.” She clarifies that men and women in her classes alike felt this way; they believed that porn was prescribing and thus ruining not only their sex lives, but also their relationships to their own sexualities and desires, period.

This feels both reactionary and hysterical. I’m not saying it’s untrue—I don’t doubt that undergraduate-age students who have chosen to take a course on feminism at Oxford do, in fact, find pornography culturally abhorrent and personally damaging. I don’t doubt that they’re having bad sex and trying to figure out why; sex when you are 18 is, usually, bad. But I doubt that there is much value in dissecting these opinions as though they might offer some newfound insight, in a book positioned as, no less, a radical intervention in feminist thought. After all, Charlotte Shane writes, “Before I was a sex worker, I was a fresh feminist who didn’t like sex work. Or rather, I thought I didn’t like sex work—I don’t think I was entirely clear on what sexual labor could entail. But thanks to second-wavers like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Susan Brownmiller, I knew pornography was bad… [and] patriarchy incentivized women to either accommodate degrading lust or else be forced to.” Many young collegiate feminists pass through this phase; some remain in its snare, while others move beyond it, often as the realities of endemic workplace exploitation and sexualization become more apparent in their daily lives. Srinivasan, for her part, assures the reader, “Not one of my students, in the now several years I have been teaching seminars on porn, has suggested using legislation to mitigate its effects.” But this statement belies the current conditions of the porn industry, and the sex industry writ large, in which new legislation is consistently introduced in attempts to “mitigate its effects.” Perhaps the students do not need to suggest this, because it is already, to materially detrimental effect, happening.

OnlyFans announced plans to ban adult content this past August, only to reverse course within a week, after extensive social media outcry against a now familiar choreography content platforms employ: casting sex workers aside as soon as hosting sexually explicit media becomes too inconvenient legally or culturally, but only after having successfully built their business model on the backs of these same workers. Following the reversal, the New York Times published Catherine MacKinnon’s incoherent, unsubstantiated dogwhistling: “We are living in the world pornography has made. For more than three decades, researchers have documented that it desensitizes consumers to violence and spreads rape myths and other lies about women’s sexuality… There is no way to know whether pimps and traffickers are recruiting the unwary or vulnerable or desperate or coercing them offscreen and confiscating or skimming the proceeds.” (There is no way to know, as in, there is no proof that wage theft—a problem in every industry—is particular to the sex industry.) In October 2021, regulations imposed by Mastercard took effect, forcing porn sites to verify the age of anyone whose image appears on their site via the uploading of legal identification—a huge privacy imposition on performers who, understandably, need or want to remain anonymous given the stigmatized and sometimes criminalized nature of their work. Sex workers and porn creators are routinely banned from using payment processors like PayPal and Venmo, regardless of whether or not they use such processors for industry transactions. Legislative and corporate efforts unite to edge those in the sex industry out of society’s digital commons, year after year.

“People make porn to make money. Women make porn to make money. Making money and thus avoiding the perils of life with no money… supersedes the desire to avoid any other perils, like a changed relationship to one’s sex life.”

Still from the forthcoming trailer for Boss Gives Employee Facial by Mara McKevitt featuring Ripley Soprano and Vita Haas.

My relationship to the aesthetics of sex is a peculiar one. I don’t make or sell porn, though I do other forms of work which involve presenting myself as sexually exceptional in a way that is legible to consumers of porn and the like. A lot of people I know sell porn. We speak about sexual labor the way we speak about other forms of labor: our annoyance at having to do it; trading tips and warnings; “Has anyone ever said this to you before?”; showing one another nudes and clips and texts for the purposes of soliciting advice, compliments, or catharsis. I do not think that any of this work, nor internet porn’s ubiquity itself, has impacted my sex life any more than any other myriad dystopian condition under late capitalism—Instagram and parasocial, vaguely-erotic-but-not-monetized sexual relationships have arguably impacted my view of myself in sexual scenarios much more.

Nonetheless, a false binary between those who are pro-porn and anti-porn, sex-positive and sex-negative, is erected, tended to, and watered. The focus is entirely on positions. Michelle Goldberg writes in an op-ed, also published by the Times, “But sex positivity now seems to be fading from fashion among younger people, failing to speak to their longings and frustrations just as anti-porn feminism failed to speak to those of an earlier generation… Somehow, as sex positivity went mainstream and fused with a culture shaped by pornography, attention to emotion got lost.” Commenting on an exposé of a serial abuser, Jessica Valenti writes on Twitter, “I’ve heard from young women about how violence has become an expected part of sex—choking, slapping, etc and those who aren’t interested are called “vanilla”… It’s so distressing.” Jill Filipovic quote tweets her: “The real story here is the ubiquity of extremely violent and misogynistic porn but the Great Feminist Porn Wars of the ’70s and ’80s have left most of us unable to have any conversations about porn in a productive way.” These claims, though all different, center around feelings—around social framing of sexual feelings, around porn’s impact on the current state of sex, around the porn debate itself. The answer to the reality that misogynistic porn is, of course, everywhere, is not to exclusively mine how we feel about that, nor to argue over who can say what about how they feel about that, nor to return to a social maligning of porn, nor to champion only porn deemed feminist or ethical; the answer is to turn to questions of labor. Because why do so many women make porn, after all, if porn is ostensibly so bad for women?

People make porn to make money. Women make porn to make money. Making money and thus avoiding the perils of life with no money—lack of housing, food, healthcare, stability, anything else—supersedes the desire to avoid any other perils, like a changed relationship to one’s sex life. There are a lot of options for young feminists who hate porn: don’t watch it; form consciousness-raising groups; become lesbian seperatists; weed out potential dates by asking if they, themselves, watch porn, and leave if they say yes. There are not a lot of options for those, particularly in this pandemic, who need to earn money from home. A lot of people would rather fuck their boyfriends or girlfriends on camera and sext with customers for tips, than host at a restaurant or do any other type of service work in which they’ll be badly treated, sexually harassed, and paid a pathetic hourly wage.

But words are not enough. I believe Srinivasan is right about the potency of images—that we should “take seriously… the power [porn] has—not as speech, but as film.” We can do this without ascribing it a uniquely totalizing power, instead playing with its potentialities as a medium. The filmmaker Mara McKevitt agrees: She argues, “The most suggestive state of mind is a person turned on.” McKevitt is currently in production of a feature-length pornographic film, Boss Gives Employee Facial. Written and directed by McKevitt and produced by Val Breeder, the film depicts a futurist dystopia in which Liv, a young woman, enters into contract as a receptionist at a housing complex, paid for her labor in rent reduction. The housing complex surveils every resident, livestreaming their activities to paying viewers, promising a new and even more authentic mode of entertainment—including sexual entertainment—to those who can afford it. Liv moonlights as a camgirl to earn spending money, as her receptionist job pays no wages; her masturbatory performances are sold twice—once by her, and once by the housing corporation watching and recording her. McKevitt upends myriad gendered and critical expectations within the film; the movie’s villain is a girlboss, a corporate she-wolf who can only orgasm through raping her underlings. And further, the film is hardcore: McKevitt is not making a commentary on porn—she is making porn. Unbeknownst to Liv, her boss has entered her into a pilot program in which she experiences other people’s orgasms, a technology the corporation is finetuning before putting it on the market. Thus, when her boss rapes her, Liv orgasms too, in that she experiences her boss’s orgasm. The premise is disturbing and hot. Finding McKevitt’s work provided the first new take on porn I’ve encountered in a long time. She explores what should be central in porn discourse—labor—through the medium itself. She does not shy away from the medium’s capacity to impact its viewers’ thoughts and desires; she simply wants them to think about working conditions while they come.

“The difference is this: My friends’ and my loved ones’ relationships to porn are largely mediated through the lenses of labor and money, and the feminists’ positions on porn are rarely mediated as such.”

An extended short cut from the longer film, Liv’s Contract, was on view at Château Shatto gallery between September and October in Los Angeles. Liv’s Contract stars the meme-queen-cum-actor Bianca Perez, a.k.a. @yung_nihilist, as an HR representative reading a fifteen-minute-long contract to Liv (shot from Liv’s POV, she is not pictured). There are clauses like: “The Contractor has no set hours of work”; “All lived experience within the property is subject to be recorded and sold… All content made by you and your associates…recorded during the time of your residence is owned by the Recipient in perpetuity”; “If the Contractor understands and consents to all terms of this agreement, she shall look into the camera and nod three times.” Viewing Liv’s Contract, on display, is itself an erotic and unsettling experience; Perez’s voice is at times overlaid with unintelligible moans, as the viewer holds in their hands the very iPad, in its horrifying, cutsey pink butterfly case, that Perez reads from. We are the contractor nodding back at the iPad three times; we are consenting—albeit with a gun (the need to make a living; the need to participate in social life) to our heads—to our private activities, encounters, and experiences being extracted and monetized for corporate gain.

And we are! McKevitt’s vision of the future—set in 2029—is easy to imagine. Call me cynical, but I do believe we are moving toward a world in which the middle man is cut out—in which Big Porn moves fully into the mainstream, in which Two Trees Management and Pornhub partner on a new development, wherein security cameras in every bedroom in the complex upload directly to the site, providing constant, real-time amateur porn, straight to the browsers of those with a certain tier of membership. And if this is where we are heading, isn’t the discussion on porn-as-medium’s impact on our own sexualities a bit, if not passé, at least—beside the point? Why not talk about, instead, what impacts our sexual imaginations and freedoms most: housing instability and the looming threat of evictions during a global pandemic; the gig economy’s imperative to never fully extricate oneself from work time; the alienation of mass death combined with spectacular governmental incompetence; not being able to afford to see the doctor you want, or to get the birth control you want; the attacks on gender-affirming care; the serotonin drop when you post a selfie or a joke that doesn’t hit the way you want it to. Perhaps it’s time we simply see porn for what it is, as Mckevitt does: as a tool and a weapon, one that can be used for or against us—but one that is, regardless, here to stay.