Problems with P0RN

I defend our right to buy and rent pornography if we want to, but I do have one serious complaint about the porno industry: most porno is shit. The shelves of the average adult video store are full of unimaginative, poorly produced garbage which promotes arrested-adolescent ideas about how all women secretly want to be sexually dominated by rude, uncouth men. A lot of porno movies depict women who don't really appear to be enjoying themselves. But rather than proving the need to "crack down" on porno, this actually demonstrates the need to bring it out into the open. Pornography is not perceived as a mainstream product; since most consumers of pornography are males who keep it a secret from their wives or girlfriends, it is used not as a device for mutual entertainment, but as a release valve for sexual repression, frustration, or aggression.

If a man doesn't try to keep pornography secret from his wife, a lot of interesting things happen. First and foremost, he will be inclined to keep or rent only pornography which she would not find objectionable, thus giving more money to the people who produce good pornography and less money to the people who produce bad pornography. One might argue that he might start keeping "good" porn where his wife can see it and "bad" porn where she can't, but watching porno with your wife is far more enjoyable than watching it by yourself, so it's much more likely that he'll start learning what kinds of porno will turn his wife on.

If millions of couples learned to watch porno together, the purveyors of "raincoat porn" would find their income stream drying up, and their type of porn would disappear not because of censorship, but because the public simply used its buying power to push the industry in the right direction. Moreover, women might even find that they like it, particularly if they become a market force and push the shitty porn producers out of the limelight. But most importantly, it would be one less secret between couples, and you don't need a PhD in psychology to know that secrets between lovers are a relationship killer.

Unfortunately, the scenario I describe above is atypical. The majority of porno sales go to men who will watch it alone and in secret, and that's why a lot of it sucks. The Max Hardcore movies, for example, are downright awful; the women are treated badly, and Max himself is an asshole. Lots of other series are similarly bad, so it's not at all easy to find pornography that one can watch with a partner.