Imagining Alternatives: Production Values and Ethics

At a time when intimacy coordinators are increasingly hired on film sets to ensure the safety and well-being of actors, porn performers—who have long been practicing intimacy facilitation—are developing innovative visions and processes for best-practice ethics on intimate sets. In the absence of formal codified workplace health and safety (WHS) standards or industrial protections, indie pornographers are creating their own blueprints, pioneering and role-modeling ethical processes from recruitment through to production, marketing, and distribution. These ethics go far beyond the WHS concerns expressed by regulators. They build from key bodies of knowledge, including sex worker rights, HIV activism, feminist care ethics, disability justice, anarchism, and anti-capitalism. In conversation with local and international social movements, the experiential knowledge of performers influences their approaches to labor organizing, collective decision-making, accountability, consent culture, privacy, and sexual health.