I’m watching a porn film that goes like this: two strangers get into a lift. He immediately notices her scent, while she wonders if he’s a good kisser. They silently exchange tentative, fleeting glances as the elevator descends. All of a sudden, they’re kissing and it’s unclear whether we’re still in the realm of fantasy, or reality. What happens next is not something I can write about in the pages of ELLE UK. Suffice it to say, that both parties leave the lift extremely satisfied.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing so openly about my porn consumption, the answer is twofold. First, most of us watch it, despite the lingering stigma. According to a 2022 survey, half of adults in the UK consume porn, a higher figure than the number of British adults with a Netflix account. Second, this isn’t any old porn. The film I’m watching, Going Down, is beautifully shot, has a clear narrative and sits within the growing canon of ethical pornography. That might sound like an oxymoron, but what it means is porn that doesn’t pander to the male gaze or peddle the kind of gender and racial stereotypes that are so prevalent on mainstream sites. The actors are well paid and regularly tested for STIs, intimacy co-ordinators are on set and the content promotes a vision of sexuality rooted in agency and consent, meaning I don’t feel gross watching – or writing – about it.
My millennial generation are often maligned as social-justice warriors, but we grew up with unprecedented access to information about a myriad of issues and injustices. I try to live by my morals: I go to protests, recycle as best as I can and make ethical and sustainable shopping choices. And yet, for a long time, I had a blind spot when it came to porn. I would usually turn to free, mainstream platforms where, unlike the workers who sew my T-shirts or the supply chain behind my coffee, I rarely considered who made it or what messaging it promoted. But when I began scrutinising porn with the same questions I ask of fast fashion or a tired TV series (does this align with my values, or is it time for something new?), ethical porn emerged as an exciting alternative.
‘Porn forms part of a healthy sexual experience. It’s about taking the guilt away,’ says the director of Going Down, Swedish film-maker Erika Lust. We are speaking over Zoom, and it’s clear from her Barcelona apartment that she has an eye for interior design – something I’ve noticed in her films as well. Lust first began her career in traditional film production, before turning her hand to erotic cinema in the early 2000s. ‘I was thinking about film theory and the male gaze, and how to shift values. Porn can be pretty ugly, and it’s far from a lot of people’s expectations of sex and intimacy,’ she says. ‘[Look at] the language and the messaging: “Watch teen get destroyed”; “Two busty Latinas”. That gets into your head and you think, “This isn’t who I am, maybe it’s not what I should be watching.” Porn can also be artistic and beautiful.’
As with mainstream film and TV, Lust believes that increasing diversity on both sides of the camera is key for the erotic film industry to become a more ethical playing field. In addition to directing her own films, she has created a streaming platform, from £6 a month, which hosts the work of other creators who align with her values. ‘If you bring in more women and people of colour, more queer communities and non-binary people, you’re bringing in people who all have different experiences of life and of sexuality, and having them tell their stories.
Through the pornography that we’re making, we’re shifting values and helping people understand and respect other identities, sexualities and kinks outside of a very heteronormative, vanilla version of penis-and-vagina sex.’ Lust regularly receives positive testimonials from new audiences moving away from mainstream porn and its ‘standard message’, who tell her that her films have helped them explore their true sexual identity. Appetites are changing and, as more people become conscious about the porn they consume, a new wave of filmmakers and content creators are finding innovative ways to make guilt-free media.
Make Love Not Porn is a platform founded by women where members can submit user-generated videos, showing ‘real’ sex in a way that’s neither performative or exploitative. Podcasts are getting in on the act too, with the rise of ‘audio erotica’: apps such as Quinn and Dipsea that offer sexual stories in audio format for a monthly subscription. ‘Right now, Scottish accents are really on the up on our app,’ says Dipsea co-founder Faye Keegan. ‘Our listeners ask us for things and it’s like, “Cool. Let’s make more Scottish-accent content.” People are loving Lachlan.’ Lachlan, if you’ve not yet had the pleasure, is a gruff park ranger who meets a burnt-out literary agent from New York on a remote Scottish island.
Over 10 episodes, they both embark on a raunchy escapade involving BDSM and sex outdoors. It’s one of more than 1,000 audiobooks on Dipsea, all of which involve a team of professional writers and actors, and prioritise stories that are safe and empowering for its majority-women audience. Though the sex scenes can be pretty explicit, Keegan doesn’t categorise Dipsea as porn. ‘I think the question of what porn is, it’s a deeply challenging and philosophical one. In terms of the way people use the app, it can be similar, but I don’t think what we’re doing is any more pornographic than [the sex scenes in] Normal People or Game of Thrones.’
She says the original inspiration behind Dipsea was the romance novel. ‘They’re by far the highest-selling genre of literature, generally written by women and consumed by women. It’s actually a deeply feminist industry in a lot of ways, but with some outdated baggage – like the format itself.’ In 2023, 5.4 million listeners tuned into Dipsea. ‘There are people who listen for fun and there are people who have found it to be like therapy, helping them unlock a part of themselves they didn’t know they had access to,’ she adds. ‘We have users tell us it helped them work through trauma. I think it’s really rare to find content about sex and love, and about intimate connections and romance, that doesn’t have other darker or more upsetting themes,’ says Keegan.
California-based producer and director Nenna Joiner believes that ethical porn provides audiences a vital opportunity for sexual self-discovery. Like Lust, Joiner started out in film and TV before branching into erotic cinema, motivated in part by the lack of representation in mainstream porn. ‘I think a lot of queer porn goes straight into sex and there’s a lack of foresight in other senses,’ they explain. ‘People want to look at sex in a different way. In Hella Brown [one of Joiner’s films that features an all-queer cast of colour and won a Feminist Porn Award], we did a scene where [the characters] were in the kitchen cooking, the colours were very vibrant. For me, that’s a love language, a form of foreplay. Isn’t that the precursor to sex?’
According to a recent survey, 57% of women say porn has made them more open-minded on the topic of sex, while 72% of women say they find watching porn empowering. For many people, it can be a useful tool for both partnered and solo sex, offering a space to explore desires and preferences. And yet, alongside its potential benefits, there is a darker side to pornography. Explicit content has never been so widely available, with a survey finding that the average age at which children first see porn is 13. Compounding this issue is the non-consensual sharing and the weaponisation of explicit images (image-based sexual assault, or IBSA), which poses a growing threat to both adults and young people. While technological advances are evolving rapidly, successive UK governments have been slow to regulate the industry effectively.
Women in the public eye have been frequent targets of deep-fakes – images or videos that harness technology to digitally insert a person into content and make it look like an authentic original. ‘There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,’ US representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone. ‘As a survivor of physical sexual assault, it adds a level of dysregulation. It resurfaces trauma, while I’m […] in the middle of a f*cking meeting.’ In the UK, more than 250 British celebrities and politicians have been victims of fake pornographic images circulating on the internet.
‘There doesn’t even need to be an explicit image in the first place for someone’s likeness to end up in porn,’ says Elena Michael, co-founder of #NotYourPorn, a movement fighting to protect non-consenting adults, sex workers and minors from image-based sexual abuse. Michael got involved in the project after someone close to her had intimate images shared online. ‘There were some laws holding individual perpetrators to account, but it was super flimsy. The biggest gap was there was nothing holding companies to account – not porn sites or social-media platforms, nothing.’
Michael is now working on a campaign with law professor Claire McGlynn to create a comprehensive IBSA law that addresses gaps in the legal system. ‘It’s not just one person in isolation sharing. It’s the entire network ecosystem, which then proliferates that kind of abuse.’ #NotYourPorn runs workshops in schools designed to educate children about IBSA. Like Michael, sex and relationship therapist Bima Loxley emphasises the need for better education, alongside legislative change. ‘I don’t subscribe to the idea that porn or sex are addictive. If porn or compulsive sexual behaviours are a problem, then it’s usually because they’re being used in a way that takes away from our real lives. It’s not usually the porn that’s the problem, it’s the way people consume it and a lack of porn literacy.’
For Erika Lust, pornography actually represents a microcosm of society at large. ‘Like all media, it reflects the values that we have in the world. It isn’t just a big, monolithic, abusive, horrible, chauvinistic, sexist, racist thing, it can be many things. But unfortunately, these are part of the values we are dealing with today.’ Both Michael and Lust stress the importance of language and not conflating serious crimes like IBSA with porn in general. ‘There’s no such thing as revenge porn,’ says Lust, ‘that’s not porn at all: there’s no ethics. It’s image-based sexual assault and it is a crime.’ Michael agrees: ‘There’s a huge conflation between trafficking and IBSA and sex workers. All three of those can intertwine, but a lot of narratives can be very anti-sex-work, purposefully confusing what image-based sexual abuse is.’
The topic of porn is endlessly complex and constantly evolving. But what’s clear is that the growing stable of ethical porn media – rooted in consent, diversity and respect – prioritises desire and dignity, and represents sex in a way that feels real and doesn’t exploit people. Yes, there’s safety baked into it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exhilarating. Lust’s streaming platform is like an erotic Netflix, featuring everything from polyamory to pegging. Paying for porn means budgets are higher, so sets and sound design are better, while storylines and costumes are more engaging. You can get lost in a film rather than just fixating on ugly sofas or bad acting. Porn may be readily available for free, but you certainly get what you pay for.
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