How available creative content should be has been a concern for ages, and amplified by the internet’s existence. This question of who owns what and who can have it especially carries over to one of the most controversial industries of all, the pornography industry.
Before the internet, if you wanted to access adult films or images, you’d have to pay for a subscription to Playboy or risk shame by walking yourself down to the local sex store.
Now, corporations such as Pornhub, Brazzers, or XVideos have created mostly-free sites holding millions of downloadable photos and videos. To upgrade to the site’s premium features, it requires a small monthly fee, but for the majority of the sites, porn is free, abundant and easily accessible.
However, this is not a progressive step in the right direction. Call this a hot-take, but children shouldn’t be able to access pornography, especially at such a young age.
Children as young as elementary and middle school are gaining easier access to online pornography, which is concerning in such a developmental period of their life. What kids absorb and process during this time has monumental effects on the way they view relationships, sexuality and even just day-to-day interactions with other people.
The videos and images don’t exactly put good expectations on men or women either, and holds them to stereotypes that encourage a dom/sub dynamic when that type of relationship, sexual or not, doesn’t work for a lot of people.
What’s more is that until 2020, Pornhub allowed any anonymous person to upload images and content, making it a site ridden with revenge-porn, nonconsensual images, child-porn and even graphic rape scenes.
After The New York Times and other sites began drawing awareness on the victims behind these popular sites, Pornhub finally started to ban any unverified users from uploading content, but the damage had already been done. It took Pornhub 13 years to make this change, 13 years where, in the article cited, many paid the price for what people were accessing freely and without permission.
Porn has been around forever, and it’s not going to be leaving anytime soon. We shouldn’t get rid of porn, but we should make it more ethical and safe for everyone involved.
A solution to this is to start charging for porn sites. From a business perspective, Pornhub and Brazzers being free streaming services doesn’t make sense when they could be making bank off advertisers and subscriptions combined.
Video streaming platforms such as Hulu, Netflix, Disney+ and countless others all charge for their videos. What’s stopping Pornhub or XVideos from doing the same? When watching unlimited films for a monthly charge on Hulu, it’s key knowledge that you cannot download and privately own the videos, but you can watch them again and again – for a monthly subscription fee.
Pornhub making their site free is a publicity stunt. They purposefully want to make their content accessible, placing flimsy age-lock questions on their sites that any cognitive person can get behind. This is not an act of charity however, it is a ploy to target as many viewers as they can, and as young as they can.
Making porn easily accessible benefits no one. It creates harmful ideologies of what relationships and sex should be, jumpstarts porn addictions, places a negative stereotype on sex-workers and provokes rape culture.
Lately, sites such as OnlyFans have been stealing some of the spotlight away from free porn platforms. OnlyFans allows sexworkers the ability to upload their own content and to make their own money from it, without having to be in possibly damaging contracts working with corporations.
OnlyFans allows people to quit at any time, and to be able to have ownership over the videos and images being shown. Despite early skepticism, the site has done extremely well, disproving the idea that most people won’t pay for porn.
Pornhub and Brazzers are not doing the world a service by making their platforms free. They are taking advantage of and creating porn addictions, as well as hosting extremely graphic and abusive portrayals of sex on their site.
Charging viewers for the content they consume helps keep children away from porn, helps people be more mindful of their addictions before they start, benefits sex workers and creates the notion that yes, you should be paying for a product because it’s a service, not a right.
Changing the way we view porn is essential for creating and preserving healthy relationships in the future, and for creating a generation of men who don’t view sex as something that is entitled to them. The porn industry is ripe with large problems, and while charging can’t solve all of them, it’s a start.
Ondo
GA
Eliakim
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