Saxony promotes the founders of a portal that recommends fair porn – and triggers outrage. A cultural scientist says: The idea of ethical porn without any form of payment is “absurd”.
96 percent of men have already done it. 79 percent of women too. The vast majority of people in Germany watch porn. This was the result of a representative survey on adult sexuality.
“Porn is everyday practice, that cannot be denied,” says cultural scientist Madita Oeming of the German Press Agency. In many minds, however, porn is still something else: a shameful topic, even a danger for young people. Or simply “dirty stuff,” as the Saxon AfD faction put it in June on Platform X, formerly Twitter.
In the article, the party complained about funding from the state of Saxony: As part of the “InnoStartBusiness” program, the two founders of the site porn-better.com will be supported for a year with 25,200 euros, as stated in the state government’s response to a small Request from the AfD MP Martina Jost is available.
Mainstream porn is not meant to be demonized
Public funds for working on a porn platform – anyone who hears something like that, says Oeming, quickly thinks: “Oh God, now my taxes are already being spent on porn.”
In fact, there are no sex videos on Luna Heine and Esti Krüger’s portal, only recommendations for internet offers beyond xHamster or YouPorn. On such mainstream sites, it is often not even clear whether the films were uploaded with the consent of all those involved, and there are also racist or sexist depictions, criticized Esti Krüger in an interview with the German Press Agency. “Luna and I didn’t feel picked up by such sides, we had the feeling that somehow it wasn’t made for us.”
The two founders expressly do not want to demonize mainstream porn, but to make alternatives known that rely on fair and ethical films. What does that mean specifically?
“Similar to fair trade products, the idea of fair porn is about focusing on the production process,” explains Oeming, who is currently publishing a non-fiction book on how society deals with pornography, “Porno: Eine outrageous analysis”. has. This includes, for example, consensus on the set, fair payment and full transparency about which practices are filmed with which performers and where the result can ultimately be seen.
“What we don’t click won’t be produced anymore”
But with the production and with very practical points – “Are there enough breaks from shooting, enough lubricant and after the shoot the opportunity to talk?” – be it not done. “Part of ethical porn is also ethical consumption. And that’s completely missing from the consciousness of most people,” says the expert.
Each and every individual has massive consumer power to influence the porn industry. “To put it briefly: If we don’t click, it won’t be produced any further.”
According to Oeming, instead of “just always pointing to the bad porn makers,” we should be more concerned with the origins of sex films – and be willing to spend money to do so. “Free sites aren’t very transparent. You often don’t know who uploaded the clips and whether it’s staged voyeurism, for example, or someone was filmed who didn’t know it. Short clips are often stolen from larger professional productions. On pay sites there has to be an imprint, so you can find out who is behind it,” says the author.
“We can never have a guarantee that everyone on the set was fine. But there’s no such thing in a single Hollywood film either.”
Silence, shame, ignorance
Oeming states that to this day no satisfactory answers have been found to many of the questions that have arisen since the mass appearance of free porn on the Internet at the end of the 2000s. “Porn is taboo in society at large, where silence, shame and ignorance prevail. This is evident not least at the political level, where misguided decisions are made.”
For the scientist, this is reflected in a lack of investment in sexual education and education about pornography on the one hand and stronger attempts at regulation on the other. In March 2022, for example, the media authorities of the federal states decided to block the website xHamster: Its freely available pornographic offer violated the protection of minors because there was no age verification of the users, according to the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media. Shortly thereafter, the site was available again with a changed subdomain. So the blocked de.xhamster.com became simply deu.xhamster.com.
A failed attempt at youth protection, which Oeming regards as regressive and frightening anyway. “With such measures, you stick to a dangerous discourse about pornography. The negative effect on young people has not been empirically proven and the study situation on this is much more ambivalent than the public debate.”
It makes more sense than bans and blocks, which technically fit young people know how to circumvent, is the teaching of pornography skills. “The better young people are able to distinguish between porn and reality and the less they compare themselves to these images, the lower the possibility of negative consequences,” says Oeming.
“Porn driver’s license” for teachers
Because pornography is completely excluded from teacher training, she helped start the “Teach Love” project at the University of Flensburg and developed a “porn license” for teachers. “Young people come into contact with porn, both intentionally and unintentionally. That’s why we have to teach them how to deal with it.”
It should also not be that the fantasies and exaggerations that can be found online would take over the enlightenment. “But that’s not the problem with porn, but that of the state, which doesn’t manage sexual education,” Oeming clarifies.
Even in 2023, the perception that porn is “always something bad and harmful” still prevails. According to Oeming, progress is limited to small parts of the population, for example 25 to 30 year olds in urban areas, for whom porn is “more normalized”. Esti Krüger from better-porn.com also has this impression.
Several hateful comments accumulated under articles about her site: “It bounces off me, my colleague not so well. In between we were really scared. If the AfD tweets about you, you’re glad if your address isn’t in the imprint. “
In the case of the porn recommendation site, the public funding related solely to the work of the founders and not to content. In the eyes of Krüger and Oeming, films themselves could also be worthy of funding. If only because that would make the producers more independent: they could show a wide variety of people and preferences and would possibly do without search engine-optimized titles with sexist or racist words, as Krüger explains.
“It seems to be a human need”
“There are only two options: either we pay for porn or it is encouraged. The idea that nobody pays for it and it still becomes an ethical, fair product is absurd,” says Oeming.
Above all, the scientist is building on increasing awareness in society. “Basically, porn is a form of cultural expression. Why do we rate it so differently from literature, which also comes in different qualitative forms? And yet nobody would say: ‘I’m anti-literature’, but: ‘There are things that I like and don’t like – and things that are problematic”.
It’s about a neutral assessment of pornography, because: “We’ve always depicted sex and looked at it. It seems to be a human need.”
Study on porn use in Germany