Want to consume better quality porn that is ethically sourced and inclusive of all people? Here are some recommendations to get you started.
All this week on The Spinoff we’re talking about porn. Click here for more Porn Week stories.
Over the course of this week, The Spinoff has been examining New Zealanders’ relationship with pornography from a number of angles. We’ve looked at the unrealistic expectations of sex in porn, how it perpetuates patterns of colonisation and how basically all popular porn online is owned by the same big scary company. We’ve interviewed people that have been studying porn habits for years, industry leaders who are carving out feminist spaces and OnlyFans creators who are taking the power back.
Something that has come up throughout these conversations is that porn users need to take some responsibility when it comes to what they are consuming. “I would really like to ask people to be more conscious when they are surfing for porn online,” says producer Erika Lust. “Can you learn anything about the owners of that company? Who’s working there? What are the values? How do they make their films? Can you watch interviews with the performers?”
To save you some research time, we rang around those in the know and asked them where to find the most ethical porn on the market. Here are their expert recommendations, complete with some extremely, extremely, extremely not-safe-for-work links.
Pay
Top tip: if you are in a position to do so, pay for your porn. “Please support the people in the industry, don’t support the biggest of the corporations who don’t really care about about sex workers or porn,” says Erika Lust. “These are real people – they have kids and they go to school, and they need to pay for their apartments and their food. That’s the reality.” That might mean paying an ethical production company for their content, or going straight to the creator on a subscription platform like OnlyFans.
“It’s like the farmers market concept,” explains Cathasaigh, a local independent producer and sex worker. “The fewer the steps between you and where the porn has grown, the better the chances of it being ethically sourced and sustainable.”
Auckland adult content creator Damian says that subscription platforms like OnlyFans can be a really good place to start your ethical porn journey. “You’re paying for content that someone has made themselves and put their time and effort into rather than a big faceless entity,” he says. “That money goes to the creator themselves and so you know you’re directly benefiting someone.” Sites like Patreon also offer similar direct-to-creator payment plans.
Watch
We have to start with Erika Lust, the queen of ethical porn, who offers both award-winning independent feature films through her production company Lust Cinema and crowd-sourced fantasies via X Confessions. Inviting user-generated stories from all around the world and selecting the best to be made into high quality short films, there’s thousands of short stories to read and hundreds of short films to dig into across an extremely wide range of preferences.
But wait, there’s more. Afterglow is an ethical porn site with a focus on sexual wellness, including partner and solo exercises. Bellesa is keen on authenticity and the female gaze. CrashPadSeries casts real-life queer couples. CockyBoys makes ethical gay porn that blends arthouse film with mainstream genres. Kink.com started back in 1997 and prides itself “in the authentic reproduction of fetish activities enjoyed by those in the BDSM lifestyle”.
Read
During the making of Chris and Eli’s Porn Revolution, the team surveyed 250 people about their porn habits and a whopping 35% said they read their erotic content rather than watched it. The local titles that have been recommended to us time and time again include the Aotearotica journal of erotic writing (you can read more about that here), Daylight by Elizabeth Knox (sexy vampires), and Please, Call Me Jesus by Samuel Te Kani (who features in episode three).
The Women’s Bookshop has a great selection of anthologies if you put “erotica” into their search box, while Amazon provides a lot of samples of erotic writing if you want to have a cruise and see what genres and authors work for you. If you don’t want to splash your cash, secondhand bookshops and opshops can harbour hidden gems, and we’d be remiss not to mention the acres of raunchy reads from Mills & Boon and Harlequin Desire.
Listen
If theatre of the mind is more your thing, Dipsea promises to “unlock your sensuality with a subscription to an ever-growing collection of sexy audio stories, wellness sessions, and dreamy sleep scenes”. Dipsea was founded by two women who “wanted to hear stories that felt like they were made for us, for our friends, and for all of the women who felt like erotica didn’t really connect with their lives and experiences.” Sssh also is one of the longest-running porn sites run by women, and has a huge repertoire of audio erotica content. Most recently it jumped on the ASMR trend and now offers a suite of fully-whispered erotic stories.