Tensions

At a book launch for Jiz Lee’s Coming Out Like a Porn Star, Australian indie producers discuss the risks of coming out to family and friends, and the emotional labor they do in managing other people’s fears, stigmas, and responses.

What constitutes “good porn” depends on who you ask. Producers, performers, consumers, and regulators all have different considerations, from content to working conditions. This chapter argues that creating distinctions between “good porn” and “bad porn” inevitably reinforces porn stigma and risks creating new hierarchies and regimes of criminalization. Iterations of good porn are often based on aesthetic taste, concerned with respectability, and distance themselves from “mainstream porn.” The project of identifying good porn lends itself to diversity washing with a focus on visibility over structural change. It can involve slippage between terminology such as “ethical” and “legal,” conflating them as if legal status is an indicator of ethics. Lastly, the chapter asks, isn’t there pleasure to be found in “bad” porn?