Aporntheid – How I Experience Discrimination Because Of My Work

I went to a concert the other night. It was a solo artist, playing guitar and singing songs about reconciliation. She lit up the small stage and was given much applause. She talked about the artistic project she’s been doing for the last three years and was lauded for her efforts.

I went to a film festival a couple of weeks ago. The films on show were almost always funded by government grants. The filmmakers got up to speak about making their films and were were lauded for their efforts

Over the last few weeks we’ve been building a business website for a friend. They’re in the building trade. We’ve seen the site appear on the first page on Google and have encouraged them to join Google Plus and get listed on Google Places so that they can get traffic and grow their business.

I mention these things because all of them have made me aware of how many doors are closed to me because I choose to make films and websites about sex. Creating porn – even if it’s ethical, feminist porn – dooms me to working in the shadows, spurned, unsupported and pushed off into an online and offline ghetto. An “aporntheid”, if you will. I am discriminated against because I make porn. I thought I’d write about some of the ways in which this occurs.

Before I do I need to say that I’m a white middle class woman and I do not mean to diminish the oppression of people of colour or other minorities by comparing my experiences to apartheid and racism. It’s not that bad. Nonetheless, it’s occurred to me that there are similarities in the way I get treated because of my work and also in the creation of a society that is determined to keep me apart and keep me in my place.

Some examples:

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• There is a popular idea of who pornographers are: exploitative, devious, only interested in money, possibly linked to organized crime.  And male, always male. Before any conversation begins I need to establish my “separateness” from that stereotype to gain credibility.
• If I ever seek to get a “real job” in the future, it’s quite possible I won’t be considered because I’ve worked in porn. I’m tainted by association. Certainly I won’t be able to use my unused teaching qualifications because the assumption is that my work with porn makes me untrustworthy around children.
• I must work under a censorship regime that is inconsistent and largely irrelevant yet it potentially yet has the power to put me in jail. I do not know where I stand legally in the creation of my content (what do “reasonable adults” find offensive?) and it means I must work in a constant state of uncertainty.
• As a filmmaker I do not have access to grants or government funding to make my films. I do it all with my own money. I also don’t have the benefit of existing institutions and structures that exist to help films get made. If I want to make films I need to rely on a very small network of like-minded people who can help with locations, crew, equipment and casting.
• Politicians the world over are constantly seeking to filter or ban my websites and films.
• Banks and financial institutions make life difficult for my business. Many banks refuse to deal with porn stars/porn creators. Paypal refuses to process for adult, as do a number of other major companies.  To conduct business online I need to use a third party processor, pay high processing fees to them and also pay annual “risk” fees to the major credit card companies, simply because I make adult material. To get paid I have to use porn ghetto services like Payoneer – all of whom are pretty unstable.
• I cannot use crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Pozible. Instead, there’s Offbeatr, the porn ghetto alternative
• I cannot sell my films on iTunes or make adult apps for iPhones. Apple bans adult material, even though their products are almost ubiquitous now. I also cannot make use of Vimeo’s new video on demand service as a way to sell my films. They do not allow adult. Meanwhile, Amazon hides adult products from its search results.
• I am not welcome on social media. Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus have bans on adult material. Vimeo and Youtube do not allow content that breaches “community guidelines”. Twitter is looking at censorship. Tumblr has just reversed its porn ban but I suspect this will quietly change again in a few months’ time.
• Google’s panda algorithm considers porn to be inherently spammy and ranks adult sites lower because of it. It is also ranking Google Plus profiles higher in search results. This is a problem as they won’t allow me to have a pseudonym-based Google Plus profile, effectively banning me from this aspect of search.
• Google will not allow adult ads on Adsense which serves ads across millions of websites.
• In fact, Google is clamping down on porn in almost all of its services. This is a problem since Google has now spread its tentacles across the web to such an extent that a porn ban is essentially a form of internet-wide censorship, the likes of which politicians can only dream of

As a pornographer, I have to sit at the back of the bus and do business in the porn ghetto. I think it’s fair that I should ask why that is.

Certainly there’s the fact that adult material is meant for adults. We’re all pretty much in agreement that kids shouldn’t look at porn because they’re too young to process its meaning. That’s fine and I do think it’s reasonable to expect that porn should have labels and warnings that allow it to be filtered out if required.

This is different from the large scale desire to banish adult material from open society. What causes the ongoing push to exclude porn from public online spaces, from spheres of business and even from the houses of consenting adults – even in 2013?

I see a number of separate causes. The first is the lingering influence of religious “morality”. This is the ongoing belief that open expressions of sex and sexuality are inherently wrong and that any depiction of sex outside the patriarchal, heteronormative paradigm of monogamous sex within marriage (with the man in charge) is dangerous. Combine this with the stigma of shame that surrounds sexuality and pornography. Religion wants people to feel ashamed of porn use. To admit to enjoying porn is to lose status in society.

The second is almost an extension of the “morality” thing: it’s the idea that porn causes harm. This is where anti-porn feminists align with fundamentalist Christians and “sexualization” campaigners. All are firm in their belief that porn causes individual and societal damage. Most start from this ideological stance and then seek out “research” to back up their belief. Porn makes men rape. Porn ruins childhoods. Porn is always sexist, exploitative and negative. There’s also the pseudo-medical concept of “porn addiction” thrown around to back up these arguments.

The anti-porn lobby is part of a wider ongoing trope within our society that all porn is inherently bad for us, helped along by a compliant media, eager to sensationalize and exaggerate the “porn problem”. The underlying assumptions behind the idea that porn is bad are rarely analyzed and the entire issue is often presented in simplistic, black-and-white arguments.

At this point, let me say: I think we need to have discussions about the sexism in porn, its ethics and what effect it may have on people and society but I firmly believe it should be based on solid scientific evidence. At this point, the jury is out; there’s no real research that shows that porn causes harm. What experts do advocate is education, not censorship.

The third issue can be summed up in one word: commerce. The real reason porn is ghettoized and shunned is because advertisers and big business don’t want to be associated with it. Thanks to the societal shame and negativity surrounding the depiction of sex, business views porn as a commercial problem. Being seen anywhere near porn causes branding problems; advertisers are horrified at the prospect of a consumer backlash from conservative customers. Sure, it’s OK to advertise next to an article that expresses horror about the “porn problem” – that’s seen as morally acceptable and socially responsible. Having your ad next to actual porn can be read as an endorsement of that and businesses aren’t prepared to go there. Nobody wants to lose market share because the One Million Moms started a Facebook campaign. Hence, the way Facebook and Google and all the big companies are refusing to allow adult content.

And there’s also the ongoing stereotype of porn being made up of shady characters who deal in dirty money and who can’t be trusted. Hence the automatic “high risk” category that Mastercard and Visa inflict on adult companies. This is still an extension of the need to distance business from the “shame” that is inherent in porn.

For me, the frustration of this discrimination lies in the fact that these assumptions don’t reflect reality. I’m not a “shady character” and nor are any of the feminist pornographers, performers or people I’ve worked with for the last 13 years. And thanks to the growth in internet porn, more and more people are comfortable with pornography as a concept, they’re not ashamed of using it and they don’t see the need for censorship. We’ve had over 15 years of unfettered porn access and society hasn’t disintegrated; the harm of porn is still an unproven hypothesis.

And business is often hypocritical in its shunning of porn; it’s not afraid to use sex and sexism to promote itself when required.

I don’t accept that porn is inherently bad. I don’t believe that inspiring arousal in the audience automatically renders a film, photo or story unfit for public consumption. And I certainly don’t believe that porn should be behind a wall, ghettoized and forever considered risky, untrustworthy or harmful.

I believe that sex is a legitimate subject for artistic and creative exploration. I believe that depicting sex in a positive and feminist way is a political act, one that seeks to expand our conversations about sexuality, relationships and what it means to be human. Thus, I believe that adult material deserves a place at the table along with all other media. People who make porn should be treated the same way as any other artist, worker or business person. There’s no legitimate reason to put us at the back of the bus.

I realize I’ve been repeating myself over the last month or so, talking about this ongoing discrimination. I’ve put up with it for 13 years now and certainly I’ve been able to make my way well enough in spite of the various restrictions. And I’m probably being a bit over the top, comparing this situation to apartheid and The Berlin Wall. It’s just that now it feels like the censorship is being ramped up and the wall is closing in. I feel trapped and angry, frustrated by the fact that censorship is worse now than when I started out in 2000.

I’m also feeling the urge to spread my wings with regard to what I want to write and film. I’m feeling a certain jealousy about other people’s artistic freedoms. I want to hire a studio, make a big budget production, submit my films to festivals around the world. I wish it was easier to do what I do; I feel creatively stifled by the restrictions I see all around me.

Alas, it’s not likely to change any time soon. Indeed, I think it’s going to get harder for me and all the other people who are trying to make porn better.

Pic is from here