Undergraduate Highly Commended paper in the 2026 National Uehiro Oxford Essay Prize in Practical Ethics. By Leela Kainth.
Mainstream pornography refers to conventional, mass-marketed, sexually explicit material produced at commercial scale, typically for consumers to masturbate to. This is distinct from so-called ‘feminist pornography’, which self-consciously aims to resist these norms through alternative representations and focus on production ethics. By mass market, I mean in the narrower sense of pornography, particularly modelling off sites such as Pornhub, where large scale production and distribution is aimed at an anonymous consumer base. This essay argues that pornography, both ‘feminist’ and mainstream, cannot be feminist in a mass market economy. Throughout this essay, claims about the ethical impermissibility of pornographic practices are made within a feminist normative framework; a practice is unethical insofar as it violates feminist commitments to autonomy, equality and non-subordination.
I first discuss Eaton (2017), who argues that feminist pornography can reshape erotic taste in egalitarian directions; Mikkola (2019) claims that with the right production ethics and representational diversity, pornography can be politically and morally rehabilitated. I argue that both positions misunderstand the structural conditions of pornographic consumption. Mikkola’s account is closer to the right approach, in my view, but her claim that even Consensual Non-Consent (CNC)-inflected pornography can be ‘liberatory’ fails once we consider scale and the empirical link between violent pornography consumption and misogynistic attitudes. If pornography functions as a social technology that shapes sexual norms, then producers and consumers bear ethical obligations regarding what is circulated.
Eaton claims that she aims to seek a bridge between the divide in antipornography feminism and ‘sex-positive’ feminism but fails to do so. She construes erotic taste as broadly including a person’s sexual taste (e.g., preferences for particular types of sex acts or orientation), but it also extends to one’s general sense of what makes a person sexy or attractive. Our erotic taste is socially shaped and saturated with gender norms, meaning we often eroticize practices that are tightly bound to these gender norms, such as male dominance and female passivity through everyday scripts (e.g., tall men are sexy; petite women are ‘cute’, etc.). Erotic dispositions are also politically powerful: they activate behavioural tendencies with social consequences. Pornography, for Eaton, plays a distinctive role in shaping this collective erotic landscape because of its vividness – pornography’s visual immediacy and emotional intensity make it potent. She adopts an Aristotelian model of habituation, where engagement with representations, repeated over time, cultivates dispositions to find similar things erotically compelling in real life.
According to Eaton, since mainstream pornography habituates audiences into eroticising inequality, female subordination and male-orgasm centrism, feminists should not reject pornography outright but produce counter-representations (‘feminist pornography’) that fight rigid gender roles in pornography. Such pornography would involve ethical production and avoid non-consensual violence, contempt for women, and ‘money-shot’ male orgasm centric narratives; she argues it can include BDSM only with explicit, contextualised representations of consent, as seen in Taormino’s Rough Sex series. Her seven criteria of ‘feminist pornography’ are: (i) women as subjects of desire, not objects; (ii) female pleasure & orgasms as central; (iii) men objectified by women; (iv) male bisexuality; (v) gender role reversals (men submissive, women dominant); (vi) strong, powerful women, and finally (vii) realistic bodies, eroticized without thin stereotypes. She concludes feminist pornography can be morally superior to mainstream porn and erotically compelling, and that feminists should embrace it as a tool for reshaping collective erotic taste in egalitarian directions.
I think Eaton’s project is a shallow, marketplace feminism, badly disguised as sexual radicalism. Her entire argument presupposes that because pornography can shape desire, feminists should strategically intervene by reshaping erotic taste in egalitarian directions, but this rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of sex, capitalism, and the consumer. The question of who counts as the consumer is itself politically loaded – drawing on Nancy Hartsock, pornography is structured around the standpoint of a dominant male class whose control of the production and circulation undermines consumer-based appeals to reform. This mirrors Marxist critiques which say that exploitation of workers persist not because workers choose wrongly, but because labour is organised through capitalist relations of production that prioritise profit over human flourishing – similarly, pornography’s organisation around profit and dominance means its harms cannot be corrected through ethical branding or reliance on the preference change of an individual consumer. If sex is already a site of commodification, then erotic taste is not a free moral arena but one governed by market demand and algorithmic optimisation. There is little reason to think a profit-driven pornography industry – or its consumers – would voluntarily cultivate egalitarian dispositions, especially on platforms that reward click-through rates rather than justice.
Further, pornographic consumption is neurobiologically salient in a way that matters for practical ethics. Pornographic stimuli elicits strong activations in reward regions of the brain, more so than other reward types like gaming or money, indicating high reward value and extreme conditioning potential (Krikova et al., 2024). Conditioning is a process whereby repeated associations between explicit content and a reward (the dopamine release that occurs with climax) leads the consumer to seek out similar material to gain the same reward. I do not think it is unreasonable to caution that the user might become aroused by similar pornographic material. This process is thought to be deterministic, meaning pornography is unlike other media; repeated exposure does not simply convey sexual ideas but conditions arousal. This process is not fleeting, it can rewire reward systems in the brain (Khun & Gallinat, 2014). This mechanism parallels Fraser’s (2018) account of ethically troubling metaphors as generating looping effects that restructure shared concepts. Just as rape metaphors do not just describe but subtly reconfigure concept networks surrounding sexual violence, pornographic representations repeatedly paired with sexual reward restructure cognitive associations attached to sex, dominance and consent. The harm is not ameliorated by conscious belief, it arises from the way embodied reward systems sediment meaning over time. Thus, this neurobiological reward may condition the consumer to seek out the same content repeatedly, thereby entrenching existing tastes rather than opening them to counter-habituation. Under mass-market conditions optimised for maximal arousal rather than ethical reflection, these looping effects predictably reinforce existing hierarchies that come with mainstream porn.
We might offer a more generous, normative reading of Eaton’s project, interpreting her as claiming not that consumers will reshape their desires, but that they ought to, in line with Srinivasan’s (2018) call to interrogate unjustly socially shaped desires. However, even this strengthened reading fails; moral obligation cannot do the work Eaton requires in an environment designed to reinforce existing patterns of desire. To treat pornography as a site of ethical self-cultivation under these conditions collapses the distinction between moral obligation and practical agency; the fact is that even if people ought to reshape their erotic desires, a mass market economy frustrates their ability to do so.
Eaton’s framework also wrongly centres feminism on ‘shaping desire’, which misidentifies the political aim. Feminists seek respect grounded in personhood, autonomy and equality, and from a Kantian viewpoint, this is a framework which means we would treat others as ends in themselves, rather than as objects of use. Erotic desire, by contrast, is instrumental; it involves wanting something from another, ultimately sex. While desire itself is not morally impermissible, it risks collapsing the distinction between valuing a person and valuing what they can provide. To make feminist progress depend on the reform of erotic taste therefore risks treating women’s moral worth as conditional on their desirability, rather than recognising it as unconditional. Even in theory, habituating audiences to find different kinds of bodies or sexual scripts attractive does not secure moral recognition; it redistributes desirability. In practice such recalibration is undermined by the reward structures of capitalist pornography markets.
Mikkola’s account reads as marginally preferable, though it still argues that ‘feminist pornography’ is a possibility, and that the answer is to change pornography, not eliminate it. Under the conditions that pornography is permissible, though I argue it is not under a mass market economy, I agree with Mikkola that production should be safe, fair, and shaped through genuine collaboration with performers. She also says that we should use explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, race, age, body type, etc. This will help us explore desire, agency, and beauty within and across inequality, and should help dismantle any false premises about women and their role in sex. She rejects tropes like ‘money shot’ and aims for pornography that recognises that not everything goes.
However, Mikkola discusses the Toronto International Pornography Festival awards as examples of feminist-pornography celebrating arenas, whereby criteria for award winning films include quality, ‘it factor’, ‘hotness’ and inclusiveness (of marginalised sexualities, kinks, Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism (BDSM), and Consensual Non-Consent (CNC)). Porn that incorporates CNC and is accessible to the wider consumer network is in no way, liberatory, as she claims. Once we incorporate simulated non-consent into a market that eroticises women’s subordination, it becomes extremely unclear how these representations resist patriarchy rather than repackage it with better lighting and performer interviews. People who produce CNC cannot control who views it, so there is no way to control, or even monitor, the way it is internalised by its consumers. Some might argue (such as Eaton) that we should include performer interviews at the start of these videos, explaining how this is consensual, and that to conduct CNC in practise involves agreeing it with a partner first – the obvious counter would be that people interested in masturbation will simply skip past these sections.
I understand the distinction between depiction and endorsement, but this is exactly where my objection lands: in pornography, especially at scale, this line collapses. Some might argue that producers are not morally responsible for how violent, misogynistic men interpret or misuse sexual content – if we followed the principle ‘content becomes unethical if bad actors misread it’, then queer media would be banned because homophobes misread it, and so on. Ethics cannot operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis. So, they might argue that producing and consuming CNC does not cause misogyny, their misogyny causes their misogyny. But this type of ‘viewer responsibility’ defence collapses in high-risk domains like pornography. Pornography’s scale, reach, anonymity and accessibility, and the neurobiological salience of masturbation make it far too dangerous to tip-toe the line between depiction and endorsement. We regulate self-harm portrayals or extremist content – because misuse by even a minority produces widespread harm. Given empirical links between specifically violent pornography consumption and misogynistic attitudes/endorsement of sexually coercive behaviour (Schuster et al., 2025; de Roos and Ferrando, 2025), and the fact so many boys use it as de facto sex education, the idea that we should not moralise based on harmful viewers becomes naïve. Pornography is not an artwork consumed by connoisseurs, it is a mass behavioural technology, and the stakes are far higher than ‘feminist pornography’ advocates and CNC defenders acknowledge. CNC pornography does not represent a neutral fantasy, it feeds into an existing cultural script that encourages violence, debasement and subordination of women. Even if it is consensually made, CNC carries a cultural meaning shaped by patriarchal background conditions, and this fantasy cannot be easily disentangled from real world structures.
In conclusion, the aims of Eaton and Mikkola fail because they presuppose a pornographic and social environment that does not exist. Desire is not reshaped by enlightened consumers; it is conditioned by reward loops embedded in a capitalist pornography economy. Ethical production is desirable but not sufficient when consumption occurs through massive sites such as Pornhub, whose algorithms work on the basis of click-optimisation, not ethical consumption. The representational risks of CNC and violent tropes cannot be quarantined in a mass, algorithmically distributed sexual marketplace where meaning is controlled by viewers, not creators. For this reason, feminist pornography is not simply difficult to achieve, it is an oxymoron within our current social structure. One may produce pornography ethically, but it cannot be consumed within a mass market economy that is structurally disposed to reproduce inequality.
Bibliography
Eaton, A. W. (2017) ‘Feminist Pornography’, in Mikkola, M. (ed.), Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fraser, R. E. (2018). ‘The Ethics of Metaphor,’ Ethics, 128(4), pp. 728–755.
Mikkola, M. (2019) Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schuster, I., Tomaszewska, P., Krahé, B. et al. (2025) ‘Violent Pornography Use and Acceptance of Sexual Coercion in Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Risky Sexual Scripts and Low Sexual Self-Esteem,’ Sex Res Soc Policy
de Roos MS, Ferrando E. (2025) ‘Moderating Effects on the Link between Violent Pornography and Sexual Aggression’, Arch Sex Behav. Jul;54(7), pp. 2671-2684.
Srinivasan, A. (2018) ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’, London Review of Books, 40(6), 22 Mar.