What Red State College Students Really Think About Porn
Aurora Snow gave a guest lecture on the adult industry at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Afterwards, she spoke with the students and learned quite a bit.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to students studying advanced criminal law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. I was there to humanize the polarizing topic of sex work—pornography specifically. Though billions of people a year flock to tube sites streaming explicit content, many harbor conflicted feelings about what they’re consuming, in part because the business of adult entertainment is less well-known than its historically-seedy reputation. Due to the nature of the work, it’s also complicated to study, and what few studies do exist are often biased propaganda that play into stereotypes.
Speaking to law students about the realities of the adult business grants an opportunity to our future prosecutors, judges or policymakers to ponder the validity of the sex business employing consenting non-coerced adults for the purposes of entertainment. Choosing to do something others may find morally repugnant, like sex work, should not detract from the legitimacy of that individual’s choice. And yet it does. We live in a society that continues to grapple with why women get into the adult industry, often assuming they’re naïve prey to the capitalistic derelicts who lure them with drugs and money, victims of the patriarchy, or worse: coerced and trafficked. Despite these nagging concerns, the ingestion of porn continues to grow, with approximately 115 million visitors a day to Pornhub alone in 2019.
Few of these consumers are as comfortable talking about it as they are watching it. So I was surprised when several students volunteered to speak with me after the seminar had ended about their preconceived notions concerning porn. They waited patiently as the Q&A wrapped up and then chatted with me individually and well out of earshot of one another, excited to share something in return.