"Traditional mass media has failed to depict sex work and the porn industry in a non-judgmental way. With titles like The Dark Side of Porn on BBC and Porn: America’s Addiction on CNN Headline News (now HLN), television tends to depict pornography in a moralistic and sensationalistic manner, relying on illicit subject matter to titillate the viewer while hypocritically casting judgment on the industry as a whole. Small-scale independent documentaries likeLive Nude Girls Unite! are among the few pieces of traditional media that have explored sex work in a nuanced manner.
But if documentaries like Becoming Belle Knox become the new norm in a changed media landscape, the Internet might finally give us the fresh perspective on pornography that our culture so desperately needs. From the GOP’s 2012 attack on pornography in their official platform to new Christian propaganda like the bookPorndemic, conservatives are continuing to to criminalize and villainize pornography....
1) Sex work isn’t work.
"But in Becoming Belle Knox, Weeks clearly states that pornography is work. “Porn is like any other job,” she reminds us. “It’s labor.”
Like any employee working in any industry, Weeks likes parts of her job and dislikes others. On the one hand, she enjoys the clear-cut boundaries of her work. “It’s a deal,” she says, “It’s a transaction.”
2) Emotional connection and sex have to go hand in hand.
Not only do we live in a culture that still considers sex to be the emotional endpoint of a traditional romantic trajectory, we also associate women with emotion to such a degree that it seems inconceivable that a woman could have sex without intense emotional investment. Slut-shaming, in part, functions to reinforce the idea that women should only want to have sex within the confines of a romantic relationship with a man...
3) Porn performers can’t be empowered if they have emotional trauma.
In Becoming Belle Knox, Miriam Weeks is open about the fact that she has been raped—as she says, “I’m a porn star, ex-cutter, rapevictim”—but she is clear that her past experience “has nothing to do with why [she] joined porn at all.”
In fact, after her difficult past, Weeks reports that she has finally found her sexual agency in porn. The porn industry reportedly makes her feel like “a strong independent woman.”
“With porn,” Weeks argues, “everything is on my terms. I can say no whenever I want to. I can do what I want to. I can do what I don’t want to. I’m in control. I like the assertive, passionate person that I’m becoming because of porn.”
See the entire article @ slate