That's as a worker, not a consumer. Many such folk have no problem being on the consumption end of it.
Having had the argument I was engaged in over that great "liberal" cause, porn, many times before, I could have told you every trick that was going to come up on the pro-porn side. But there is one quite effective one for the real liberal* side that I know too.
Several years ago, while having that argument I turned it back onto the preening, self-righteous, self-satisfied porn proponents and asked them who in their family they'd be happy to have make being a porn actor a career choice. Their daughter or son, or siblings, their mother or father or their spouse? Why, if porn was good, wouldn't they want any of those people to go into that branch of sex work?
How about if their wife or husband, as their kids watched TV in the next room, was having sex for the camera with other professional porn actors? Would they be OK with their kids wandering onto the set? Would they introduce them to their co-workers? The number of such proposed hypotheticals for consideration are limited only to the extent that the content of pornography can be. You can guess the real answer by how many such people introduce their children and dinner guests to the professional porn actors who they have NOT invited to dinner. And that goes quintuple for porn producers and directors who might see a future in porn for their daughters and sons.
Only, and immediately, suddenly, and angrily, that made it different. The proposal that, porn, an industry with the full protection of the Supreme Court - none of whom, I will hazard the guess, have ever had to face what some poor folks have, a family member being forced by poverty, desperation or addiction, of becoming raw material in the porn industry - why, if porn is great and OK and the cause of the progressive and sophisticated, wouldn't they be perfectly happy to have any and all of the above involved in porn? Well, in my experience of posing that question to stalwart champions of the rights of porn merchants over the last three years, only one has, after much prodding and poking for an answer, pretended it would be OK with him. And, given the amount of prodding it took to get that answer, I didn't believe it for a second.
Anyone who would be OK with their son or daughter being used in porn, penetrated by men who have penetrated so many other vaginas and anuses in their line of work, quite often without condoms, as per the market requirement and the demand of the producer and director, is either 1. lying, 2. mentally deficient, 3. sexually psychotic, themselves.
Once in a while you can read of a parent who has done that, sold their child into either prostitution or the porn industry, generally in exchange for the drugs they are hopelessly addicted to or under threat over a debt to drug dealers. Only I doubt even they are really OK with it. The porn industry swims in that same cesspool of those who would demand that, the high end of porn is just the deck level of a scow floating in it. When you see one of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of anonymous young people who are in the porn industry, you don't know if they're one of those people who were introduced to that form of sex work under that kind of compulsion. Many others are forced into it by other forms of desperation, some are forced into it by pimps or other such criminals.
Only for the affluent pseudo-liberal, that world is most often quite remote from their families and themselves. The people whose bodies are the material of porn are as remote from them as the people enslaved and killed to make the low priced consumer products they love to be seen wearing and using - until one of the all too rare media exposés ruffle their beautiful minds and they change to a brand not mentioned in the story. And the porn issue allows them to strike a pose for that supreme value of the pseudo-liberal mind, which is for the rights of words and images. Imagining themselves as some cinematic hero doing just what they're doing, with as little cost to themselves or effort. Playing some hero spouting pseudo-Jeffersonian phrases written by a hack writer. Pseudo-liberalism to a great extent is the product of the publishing industry which had the most obvious of financial interests in the elevation of those above even the rights of people who can be destroyed for profit. They've created the image of the pure, good and stalwart champion of pornography for the imagination of such champions of liberal-libertarianism who keep the reality of what they propose well away from themselves.
It's when you bring it back to them, when you propose that they or their loved ones could exercise the "agency" - that fashionable trendy, strangely Milton Friedmanian and entirely empty slogan, alleged choice - to have sex for view that you find out how they really feel. In my experience, it's especially obvious when you propose it to men for themselves or their sons, especially the proposal that they might consider being "gay for pay" as the industry term goes.
If a career as a porn actor were such a great thing, one thing you can be certain of is that the rich would flood that workforce. Affluent parents would encourage their children to consider it, certainly their less bright but photogenic children, if not others. Wealthy people, those who champion pornography as good would show their friends and colleagues their children's work, they would brag about their spouses work and take pride in their parents pornographic legacy. Only that scenario sounds entirely ridiculous, doesn't it. That's because they are lying about how they feel about it. Porn is OK for the people who have no choice except to "act" in it, poor people and the odd, really odd, affluent person unconnected to them who chooses it without financial need. But it's nothing they'd ever want to have done to someone they love or themselves.
Anyone who would not be willing to have their son or daughter, their brother or sister, mother or father, or, indeed, themselves, penetrated by a phallus that had penetrated many people with the history of intercourse typical in the porn industry, is a total hypocrite when they maintain that they believe porn is good. They're just practicing the same attitudes about labor and economic and sexual and class inequality that the worst of conservatives do. They are not liberals, they are pseudo-liberals, a species of libertarian conservatives with liberal pretensions.
* That is liberal in the traditional American sense, liberal as in the moral and political conviction that there is an absolute moral obligation to treat people well, respecting their dignity and needs, including their personal safety, bodily safety, their right to not be exposed to violence, both physical and violence done to their spirit. The abuse and violation of people in all of those ways is what pornography teaches, it caters to people who are sexually gratified by seeing other people used and turned into objects, it always ramps that up into the full program of their degradation and the destruction of their dignity and their sacred essence, including their most basic rights. In doing that, most if not all of the people used in the porn industry will be subjected to those and, whenever there is actual sexual penetration involved, it will expose them to health and life threatening infections and injuries.
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