However, Lilly Sparks, founder & CEO of the ethical porn site Afterglow, says that while there’s a lot of overlap, there are differences. This is often used interchangeably with ethical porn. Now, you may have heard the term “feminist porn” before. “Producers who create ‘ethical porn’ focus on fair wages, bodily autonomy, communication, and consent,” explains Sarah Melancon, PhD, a sociologist, clinical sexologist, and resident expert at The Sex Toy Collective. You might be making smut (and society might hate you for it), but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to offer fair wages to actors and to depict sex acts that center around female (trans, non-binary, and all genders) pleasure. This (kind of) newly emerging market strips away the stuff that’s wrong with pornography (like the fetishizing of people of color, the endless punish f*cking of women, and the lack of lube) all while allowing it to retain all its amazing hotness. Porn? And ethics? There’s an ethical way for me to watch a woman be turned into a human chandelier by a harness that’s considered ethically above board? Enter: Ethical porn.
