An Analysis on the Impact of Ethical Porn Discourse on the Communication of Pornographic Content Online

Abstract: With the internet being more accessible and more faster than ever, online pornography have undergone tremendous change. The emergence of Web 2.0 brought porn tubes into existence, where enormous amounts of pornographic content were reached for free. At the same time, Web 2.0 enabled alternative pornographies to arise, ethical porn being one of them. Briefly described as pornographic content created ethically, ethical porn became an idea to gain increasing popularity. What was compelling about this idea was also the fact that consumers were required to pay for their porn. In academic circles, on the contrary, ethical pornography found itself a limited place. In awareness of this gap, this study aims at exploring the online ethical porn scene through two research questions: a) How do websites including pornographic content that claim to be ethical communicate such content? and b) “How do ethical porn websites present themselves in regards to the idea of ethical porn?”. Informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis, the research was conducted via performing structural mapping analysis and qualitative content analysis answering the two research questions, respectively. The findings inferred from the reviewed 33 ethical porn websites suggest that the communication of content is organized under the logics of fair-trade business model and that the sample of ethical porn websites are very diverse. In regards to websites’ self-positionings, the results show business model and production process to be the two emerging clusters feeding the discourse. The common trait found out was the difference of association with the ethical porn discourse. Both in terms of communication of content and websites’ own positions, websites either operated upon the logics of discourse or superficially gave an account of the discourse without revealing the actual practice of production. Contributing to the intersecting fields of digital media and pornography, the research creates a basis for future research on ethical porn, upon which very little is said.