Gloria Steinem and a group of women’s rights activists protested a Pornhub pop-up in New York last week, saying all porn is violence against women.
Located in SOHO, the pop-up features sex toys, books, t-shirts and a bed in front of a camera where customers can live stream onto Pornhub’s website.
According to PIX11, protesters said that that Pornhub “sexualizes violence against women,” made their way into the store, and called the industry out for alleged coercion, for luring people into the industry with fraud, and for rape, physical and mental abuse.
Pornhub responded by saying it has a zero-tolerance policy toward nonconsensual content.
Parts of the feminist movement, and Steinem herself, have a long history of being anti-porn, dating back to the 1970s when thousands of protesters took to the streets, saying images in pornography of women being bound, gagged or tortured were like “rape on paper.”
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The campaign became a crusade to make pornography illegal, which eventually divided feminists, with some accusing anti-porn groups of being irrational and siding with “traditional moral conservatives.”
Attempts at anti-porn legislation ultimately failed. (You can read all about it in this excellent piece on Splinter.) And by 2015, the global porn industry was worth about $97 billion, according to Kassia Wosick, assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University.
Today, many women who work in the adult entertainment industry take issue with such characterizations of their profession. None were quoted in the article about the protest, so I reached out to model/actress Minnie Scarlet. Here’s what she had to say:
“With mainstream artists like Lana Del Ray having lyrics like, ‘He hit me and it felt like a kiss,’ and Rihanna saying ‘it beats me black and blue, but it fucks me so good and I can’t get enough,’ the audacity to blame the porn industry for sexualizing violence against women is insane.”
“As for the corruption being referenced, corruption and rape culture exists in every single industry. Ask most women (who are not sex workers) about their experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace and you’ll quickly learn this is not an isolated problem that was [created] by pornography.”
“Porn is a form of media. Just like movies, magazines, etc., most media is a mirror of the society it was made in. So maybe if we are noticing problems with porn, we should look at what is permeating our society that seeps into the media that is being made.”
The pop-up started on Black Friday and lasts until Dec. 20.
If you’re interested in the topic of adult entertainment, here’s an older video in which I interview women about their opinions of porn:
