What Is Good Porn?

This CNN piece reeks of smarm.  Does “good porn” even exist? asks the headline.  The assumption is that most porn is “bad,” whatever that means.

Good porn turns out to be “sexually explicit internet material” — as apparently the author and his colleagues normally call it — that respects everyone’s rights, pays decently, and doesn’t leave empty Coke cans lying around on set.  This is already the industry standard.  Performers’ unions are coming in.  There is virtually no real violence on set, although bdsm shows a lot of fake violence.  Models are respected much more than previously, and the heavy-hitting directors and producers are very mindful of the actors’ professionalism, if only because they want to get good, enthusiastic performances out of them.

Mediocre Porn Videos

There is a bit of incoherence here.  The author apparently opposes Pornhub videos because they are “mediocre.”  Well, yeah.  The production values of none of the porn vids are very high.  But people are not watching this stuff because they want “art.”   They are watching to get off.  They want to be stimulated, not entertained.

The author evidently opposes amateur porn on the grounds that his patients are searching for something “real.”  But amateur is real!  That’s why it sells.   Porn with pros has a certain sense of unreality, if only because the actors are so good-looking, there is no foreplay, and they go to anal within the first nine seconds.

The author quite rightly recommends porn to his clients who want to spice up their lives.  Porn will expand their sexual imaginations, expose them to new concepts, and possibly even break up their marriages (once the woman discovers that she really like bondage play . . . with other women).

Sanctimonious Discussions of Porn

The piece shares the sanctimoniousness that characterizes many media discussions of porn:  I thank god that I am not like those awful porn addicts with their taste for dehumanized sex.

The only standard for judging porn should be whether it creates desire (and doesn’t involve children or animals, and was fully consensual in the making).  Value judgments such as “good porn” and “bad porn” are out of place.