Source: Adult Industry News
By: Rich Moreland
Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals on Ethical Porn, By Rich Moreland
Recently I’ve become involved with the burgeoning interest in ethical porn.
When I first heard the term, it appeared to be an oxymoron. Not surprisingly, the average person on the street reflects the seeming disconnect between ethics and porn as I found out in an article I wrote for the ethical.porn website.
To get a better understanding of how to negotiate this apparent contradiction, I turned to Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals whose finger is always on the media’s pulse when it comes to the adult industry.
So, I posed the question of what is ethical porn.
For starters, the sociologist says, “The idea of ethical porn is a mainstream concept that is now passing down into the industry.”
From my personal view, it seems to be a bit like feminist porn as I learned during a seminar at the Adult Industry Expo last January. In fact I chatted with Chauntelle, who moderated the panel, before the seminar began.
She agrees there is a feminist porn/ethical porn paradigm, but it has its limitations.
“It doesn’t fully replace feminist porn for women or queer porn or any of that. Those spaces are obviously still there,” she says. “but you’re starting to see more ‘we can watch porn ethically’ on sites that a year ago would have been porn for women and now they are ethical porn.”
Sounds like semantics to me which is understandable since everything in porn is fluid.
Chauntelle continues, postulating that ethical porn will become “a back slider term because almost all porn is professionally produced” which defines it as inherently ethical. What separates professional from amateur porn is the set, performer consent, and waivers like 2257s and Std testing, she points out.
“You’re paid for the work you agreed to do. That’s what ethical is,” Chauntelle says.
Conceding that “nowadays the language and the lexicon shifts so quickly,” trying to pin down any terminology is daunting. What’s important is “the next way to see porn that is acceptable or resonates” with the media, she believes.
Chauntelle does think that the industry’s ongoing battle with piracy and tube sites is part of the kaleidoscope of what ethical porn represents. Regrettably, the media doesn’t know it’s abetting unethical practices when it criticizes the industry through referencing online porn.
“You’ll read these articles about ethical porn and they will have a link to a pirated tube site or tumblr porn site that has stolen content from producers and performers. So I don’t think they (the media) really understand what ethical actually means, nor do they understand the structure in the industry,” she says.
“If you want to know about the adult industry, don’t visit pornhub,” Chauntelle remarks, adding unfortunately, “people don’t know any better.”
It’s evident that the Porn Valley studios support the ethical porn concept, but what about the rise of the cam girls like those on Chatturbate who seem to be all over the internet? Are they engaging in ethical practices?
“Sure. It’s consent and it’s a professional workplace. Chatturbate is highly ethical,” Chauntelle declares.
“When the models sign up there are a series of forms, payments, age verification, ID verification, things that they go through to insure that they are over the age of eighteen,” she says.
Chauntelle mentions there are a handful of major networks that sponsor cam girls who have lots of choices within a regulated environment.
The models are active when they want to be. Their times are flexible so viewers can log on when they wish then go to a model and see if she is online.
“It’s up to them. They are contract laborers and they work when they do their job” at the times they choose, Chauntelle adds.
Now that’s a fair amount of freedom, I’m thinking, so is cam work the new porn? Perhaps what we see with the studio product is what we now can call the “traditional model” of delivering porn.
Here’s Chauntelle’s view.
“Cam work is interpersonal work, more like a bartender. It’s a service occupation, a nurse, flight attendant, a server. Face to face interaction,” she says. “How well can you do that?” becomes the measure of success.
Of course, traditional porn is a closed set, no bantering with the customer.
To break away from those restrictions, Chauntelle says, “Many porn performers also cam and dance.” In fact there are “some cam sites now featuring former porn performers” whose primary professional pursuit is camming.
How right Chauntelle is. Times are changing as I discovered when I interviewed veteran Briana Banks at the AVN show. She is now adding cam work to her professional resume.
After concluding my talk with Chauntelle, my feeling is the ethical porn concept may increase public understanding of what professional porn really is, thus putting a damper on opinions that porn purveyors are slime balls who use drugs to sex traffic underage girls, turning them into crack whores for profit.
And as we all know, there are still plenty of people out there who believe that’s what you see when you watch pirated porn on the internet. Trouble is, they never bother to talk with anyone in the industry or listen to an informed source like Chauntelle Tibbals.
