Pay for Your Porn: It's Time For The New Normal

We are bringing conscious and ethically-minded decisions into many aspects of our lives – we buy organic food if we can, we try to avoid fast fashion, we pay for our music and our movies, but how do these ethics affect our porn consumption habits? Most people enjoy porn yet would never expect to pay for it. After all, the internet is overflowing with free porn so why bother?

There is a fact that many people choose to ignore when they watch stolen porn from a tube site – the people in the movies they are watching, the performers, are there because it’s their job and they are trying to pay the bills just like everyone else.

When people don’t pay for their porn, they suggest that sex work is not a real job and that there is no value in adult entertainment – after all, it’s not worth paying for. These people probably don’t know any adult performers (or at least don’t think that they do) and they exploit porn actors by watching their content for free because of the bad reputation the industry has. You wouldn’t go into a small independent vegetable shop and steal their produce, so why are you stealing from adult entertainment creators?

The tube sites, torrents, and online streaming sites drastically changed the industry and created a market in which nobody feels like they have to pay for their porn. Now, sexual labour is so undervalued that it’s a never ending uphill battle to get an audience to pay for something that they’re used to getting for free.

Today I released a short video that was made during the lockdown, Pay For Your Porn: The New Normal. During the pandemic it has become more evident than ever before that we must be responsible consumers and pay for our adult entertainment. As porn productions around the world ground to a halt, freelance performers were hit hard and both crew and cast were, and still are, struggling financially. As a company, we have taken measures to try and help out industry professionals during this difficult time – from donating to relief organisations and emergency funds, to employing performers for lockdown projects.

For this short video I asked a group of performers to join me for this important message: pay for your porn. You can see the full video on my Youtube channel or below.

And if you’re still thinking, but why should I pay for my porn? Here are 8 reasons why…

1. Paying for your porn shows that you think that the adult industry is a legitimate industry and that you think performers have worth and value.

2. The people who create porn are already marginalized by the work they do, making it that much harder for them to get paid fairly for their labor in the first place. When you pay for your porn it means that directors and producers have enough money to focus on on fair wage and labor practices for their performers.

3. When you pay, you’re supporting the actual people who have created the product, and essentially enabling that site, company, or person to continue to create more porn.

4. If people started paying for pornography, more money could go to the performers, giving them more agency to decide what they do and don’t want to shoot.

5. When you support the work of producers who care about the physical, emotional, and financial health of the performers they work with, you make it more feasible for others to do the same.

6. Paying for pornography that adheres to your ethics and reflects what you want to see sends a message to mainstream production companies that this is the kind of content they should be making, and if enough people send that message then we will start to see massive advancements in the industry.

7. When you steal your content for free, you give more money to the people who do not care about the adult industry or any of the people in it. Every time you visit Pornhub (or 80% of the other tube sites) you are giving more money to MindGeek – the tech company that infiltrated the industry, bankrupted companies and people, and put many people out of jobs.

8. Finally, when you pay you’re more likely to get a higher quality movie with more cinematic qualities and less disturbing ads and pop-ups!

So, remember to please pay for your porn. It’s the new normal.