Can the Porn Industry Teach Consent?

Consent Is a Huge Topic Today. But How Is the Porn Industry Approaching It?

Consent Is a Huge Topic Today. But How Is the Porn Industry Approaching It?

We all know the porn tropes.

The blushing ingenue on the ‘casting couch.’ The sexually aggressive MILF who catches her son’s best friend staring at her cleavage and schools him in the ways of love, calling the shots at every stage. The massage session that wordlessly turns sexual. The ‘free-use’ stepsister who’s available to please at a moment’s notice, day or night.

Lots of porn seems to consciously represent everything consent isn’t — the fantasy of absolute power for a lover to do anything you want without having to announce your intentions, let alone ask.

But the fact that contemporary porn features precious little consent negotiation doesn’t mean the people producing it aren’t thinking about the topic; the American porn studio Adult Time launched a PSA in 2023 called Consent Is Sexy, and many scenes these days do show women expressing enthusiastic consent before things get underway.

Despite any seeming contradiction, in one sense, porn is the natural place from which to promote consent. Though there’s an important distinction to make between porn and sex ed, it’s hard to deny the power the adult industry has over cultural conceptions of what sex is and how it looks.

So what makes porn the place to do so, and can it really make an impact?

The Role of Consent in Porn

The conversation around consent has changed massively in the past decade, so it’s no surprise that pornographers are thinking about it too.

“Our mission is to do porn differently,” says Bree Mills, creative director of Adult Time. “We live that mission not just in what we put online but in how we run sets, work with our community and positively influence adults who watch our content.”

“And one of — if not the — most important subjects is the relationship we cultivate using consent between ourselves, crews and performers, it’s a big part of our lives.”

She adds the Consent is Sexy campaign was also part of an ongoing effort to let consumers peek behind the curtain, which is critical to getting them thinking about real issues surrounding sex — in no small part because informed consent now forms a big part of the pre-shoot work that porn performers engage in.

“People need to be educated that [the porn clips they watch] are fantasies,” says Mills, “and if they see the work that goes behind them, it helps them realize the difference between the fantasy and the people making the fantasy.”

It’s also not lost on Mills that the work of her industry is many people’s first exposure to sex, saying she feels a “tremendous responsibility.”

“We’re not accountable for being sex educators, but we’re definitely where a lot of people go to as their first reference point,” she explains.

As such, she wants to use the medium to positively influence the way people view sex, sexuality, sexual communication and what intimacy is, saying; “I’ve translated that feeling of responsibility into the work.”

But Mills’ sentiment isn’t universal in the industry.

Adult content creator Sugar Love, for instance, says, “It’s not for me to control whether parents are letting their teens [view] adult content.”

And while that’s true, it may be in part a factor of their roles — running a studio can mean a greater sense of responsibility than being a stand-alone performer.

Can Porn Teach Viewers About Consent?

For porn viewers now accustomed to skipping through the traditional set-up scenes of the customer asking with a purr if there’s some other way she can pay the pizza delivery guy, consent education scenes may be likely to be met with little more than an eye roll and the scroll button.

And that’s not just conjecture. After polling her 300,000 followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, Sugar Love says 75 percent of them skip or fast forward through scenes.

“Most users also said they lose interest in anything over 10 or 15 minutes,” she says. “Unless you save the ‘script’ for mid-scene during all the action, you’re unlikely to have good results.”

However, doing consent education after the sex has already started is somewhat akin to closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. The whole point of consent negotiations is that they should happen before the action in question, not during or after.

Fiona Vera-Grey, author of the 2024 book Women on Porn, says while it’s good that some content makers like Mills are talking about consent, it’s not going to work if it’s a sideline to the content they’re producing.

“Most people go to porn to masturbate and the education they get from it is secondary,” she says. “I’m not sure a separate project is going to get the clicks… so it’s probably more important to get the message both subtly and explicitly into the content of films.”

Mills is as conscious of that fact as anyone.

“The job of a writer and director is to find ways to ‘Trojan horse’ important messages that don’t feel like a public service announcement, but show good behavior within the content,” she says.

Having two performers in a scene establish basic, enthusiastic consent in a way that feels natural can go a long way towards modelling this behavior for younger or less experienced viewers, for instance.

However, Cindy Gallop, sex positive campaigner and the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, isn’t sure that these scenes along will fix things — there’s only so much porn can do to change the conversation about consent, she believes, because the issue starts so much further back.

“The issue isn’t porn, the issue is that we don’t talk about sex in the real world,” she says. “So many things are laid at porn’s door that should be laid at society’s. The porn industry is not responsible for education about consent. Society is.”

To Gallop, several problems about real world people and real world sex conspire to make it far harder to define and establish consent. Just one is that most situations where consent is potentially problematic are likely to be where men are pressuring women to have sex.

In fact, for that crucial reason, she believes making consent sexy should be a message given to men by other men (and she notes there’s only one male performer in the Adult Time PSA, somewhat reinforcing the idea that consent is a ‘womens’ issue’).

Another is that many people find it very difficult to communicate about sex. Despite our feminist age, she says the majority of women may not be confident enough to spell out exactly what they want done to them in bed.

“[Messages about consent] aren’t landing because people think consent means going ‘Is it OK if I do this? Is it all right if I do this?’, and the Adult Time PSA reinforced it — one of the speakers says it’s really sexy when partners go ‘Is it OK if I do this?’” but Gallop thinks that kind of approach is a “total killjoy” and not realistic.

To her, the overarching problem isn’t only that few people realize consent starts much farther back than the bedroom, it’s because nobody knows what consent really looks like in bed.

“The only way you educate people about great, consensual, communicative sex is by watching people actually having that kind of sex. We all know you can withdraw consent at any time but again, people have never been exposed to seeing what that means in the real world.”

She says that’s what MakeLoveNotPorn is all about. With a focus on real people having real sex you see plenty of coitus interruptus thanks to a partner saying they’re just not feeling the role play, a sudden leg cramp or pets running into the room — but most importantly, you see good sexual values and behavior in action in the real world.

That last part is not incidental; Gallop says she designed the site specifically to promote the concept of good sexual values.

She makes the point that while parents aim to bring children up with good values, nobody ever teaches us how to behave well in bed — where empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, trust, respect, etc matter as much as they do do everywhere else.

Though they may not see it the same way when it comes to the potential impact of adult content, Mills agrees with Gallop’s point about the paucity of consent education in our culture.

“We don’t talk about the importance of consent in society very much,” she notes, “so even a lot of people who come into the industry don’t realize how important it is to set boundaries and communicate.”

Should Porn Have to Educate Its Viewers?

Try as they might, Vera-Grey thinks there’s only so much Mills and other well-intentioned purveyors of adult content can do.

“They’re at least trying to do something different, which is good, but they’re in a wider industry that really isn’t trying to do that and mostly is doing something opposed to that, and their content — and audience — is situated in a wider context.”

That context is what we know about porn’s place and use in society. Mills refers to the tendency of opponents (religious, political, etc.) and the simply uninformed to assume the word ‘porn’ means little other than the extremely heteronormative, mostly male-targeted fantasy of a sexually permissive woman who’s up for anything.

In truth, contemporary porn is a diverse mix of content produced by everyone from complete amateurs to big studios, hosted on free tube sites or subscription-based platforms, catering to as many different desires and fantasies and fetishes as one can imagine. In short, it’s anything but a monolith.

While that variety has its benefits — there are trans performers, disabled performers, fat performers, old performers and more — it can also mean that it’s hard to reform porn’s worst tendencies, since there will always be new purveyors popping up looking to satisfy the audience’s basest instincts.

Then, the best-meaning producers are often held responsible for the medium’s impact as a whole.

“We don’t hold the Fast and the Furious responsible for car crashes or Call of Duty responsible for gun violence,” Mills says. “The adult industry gets treated as pariahs for all the content being exploitative, but if you get beyond that single piece [naysayers] have as a reference, we do have a spectrum in content.”

“As long as the content is safely filmed, depicting consent amongst adults, promoting themes that are legal and fall within our guidelines, sure, you can have that more traditional male gaze-type porn,” Mills says, “but you can have really progressive, thought-provoking content, too.”

Is Consent Really the Issue?

“Part of the challenge whenever you do an initiative like [Consent is Sexy] is being open to criticism from the public in terms of what else could have been done or done better,” says Mills. “In the end, we can only speak for ourselves and our community and hope these conversations can spark conversations in others.”

And after all that, Vera-Grey suggests the reason messages like Adult Time’s PSA will or won’t land is partly because we’re looking at the whole problem wrong.

“In some ways I’m not sure consent is the problem,” she says. “We did research back in 2012 with young people and found the vast majority knew the law on consent and knew when something wasn’t consensual; the problem was they just thought some forms of non-consensual sex were acceptable.”

To Vera-Grey, that means we have to challenge the acceptability of non-consent, not just the definition of consent. Instead of ‘consent is sexy’ campaigns, she says we almost need to flip it on its head and normalize ‘non-consent isn’t sexy.’

But ultimately, that kind of messaging — one where guys are asked to step into the shoes of their sexual partners, of women, of people having their consent violated — is not especially compatible with the exciting feelings people come to pornography to experience.

All of which means that the question of consent education is, like so many others facing us, important — but far from resolved.

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Source: AskMen