Pornography — a universally loved and hated industry now worth $100 billion. The initial driving force behind the proliferation of new technologies like the printing press, photography, video, and the internet.

My friend recently sent me an article about a young female student at Duke who had chosen to go into the porn industry to cover her $60,000 tuition. She consequently faced a barrage of bullying, harassment, and slut-shaming both online and in person. Pointing the finger at patriarchy and the cultural norms that tie abstinence / sexual restraint to feminine morality, the woman asserted her right to agency in a legal line of work that she finds personally fulfilling.

While I understand the gut reaction arising from the American collective, much of this is informed by anecdotal evidence and uncontested cultural norms. It’s easy to reject pornography on impulse, as its impact on our society is difficult to quantify and not widely known. But there is scholarly work that can allow us to construct a more informed opinion on this subject. I quickly found that some of my preconceptions were unfounded. In summary:

Porn has negligible negative impact on the entertainer’s and viewer’s emotional/psychological well-being.

• An Oct 2013 study with 177 actresses found that pornographic actresses have higher levels of self-esteem, positive feelings, social support, etc., in comparison to the control group.
• Nov 1989 study found 20 patrons of adult theater, who viewed more pornography, had more favorable attitudes toward women than 184 male or female college students. Attitudes towards women were not influenced by the type of porn watched.
• Nov 2010 swedish study found the pornography functioned as a frame of reference in relation to bodily ideals and sexual performances for both men & women. And young adults responded to the medium through a process of normalization and ambivalence. It could be said this is no worse than the ideals portrayed in commonplace media.

Though it should be noted that women project their own sexual experiences on the performers and perceive emotional labor in pornographic production.

• Oct 2006 study found women were ambivalent towards porn due to perceived emotional labor in porn filming, and questioning the authenticity of actresses’ pleasure. Emotional authenticity was perceived through the lens of their personal biographies, including sexual coercion.

However, porn contributes to a male-centric view in defining sexuality

• There is less incentive to make porn for women. A 2007 Swedish study found 50% of women strongly agree that porn is not exciting in any way. 77% of young men find porn sexually exciting, in comparison to 33% of women.
• In most mass-marketed porn, sex is divorced from intimacy and contributes to “raunch culture”, where women make sex objects of themselves and others — a cultural expectation that women will exhibit their bodies, and female empowerment is signaled by overt and public sexuality.
• Jensen and Dines published that the narrative of female nymphomania and male sexual prowess in mainstream pornography worked in a symbiotic relationship with common constructions of masculine heterosexual sexuality. Porn portrays women as having insatiable sexual appetites and that all women are sexually satisfied by whatever the men in the film do.
• A 2007 Australian study concluded that porn intensifies investment in constructions of gender and sexuality which are already part of some boys’ peer cultures, such as pressure to gain masculine status through sexual achievement, a sexual double standard of female‘sluts’ and male ‘studs’, narrow images of female sexual desirability, and an obsessive focus on bodies and sexual acts.

We need to separate our feelings towards porn and those towards the young woman’s decision. Porn has permeated the fabric of our society long before this woman made her choice and will continue to have an indisputable place in our lives unless we heavily regulate all forms of media. We should be wary that mass-marketed porn directs us towards a one-sided definition of sexuality, given its widespread use among men and not women, but also realize that it has not been proven to have a deleterious effect on society nor on the individuals involved in filming.

As to the woman’s decision, I fully believe in one’s agency to join any profession of their choosing, so long as it’s legal — which pornography is. Every industry will have its pros and cons. Granted, this woman is going to face inevitable social stigma far beyond that in tobacco, oil or banking, but we should respect her decision as she fully understands the implications of her choice and there was no coercion involved.

Besides, bigotry and explicit acts of hatred add no value to our society and serve only to tear us apart when we should be striving to understand our differences and questioning whether our default cultural norms are the right framework in making value judgements.