The 3 biggest myths about pornography, debunked by Belle Knox [View all]

[Capt. Obvious]

This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.

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1) Sex work isn’t work.

One of the most damaging notions that conservatives and anti-sex work feminists spread about sex work is the idea that it is not a legitimate form of work. By superimposing a pre-conceived moral landscape onto the field of sex work, these cultural actors portray sex work as an illegitimate form of labor that is only necessary in an evil and/or a patriarchal world.

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2) Emotional connection and sex have to go hand in hand.

Not only do we live in a culture that still considers sex to be the emotional endpoint of a traditional romantic trajectory, we also associate women with emotion to such a degree that it seems inconceivable that a woman could have sex without intense emotional investment. Slut-shaming, in part, functions to reinforce the idea that women should only want to have sex within the confines of a romantic relationship with a man.

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3) Porn performers can’t be empowered if they have emotional trauma.

Those who oppose sex work often cite statistics about the number of women working in the porn industry who have a history of rape or child sexual abuse as evidence that porn performers enter the industry as wounded victims whose history of abuse has led them to make poor choices.

As Slate reports, however, rates of past sexual abuse among female porn performers aren’t significantly higher than the female population at large, we just “tend not to ask insurance agents and mainstream actresses about molestation” in the media in the same invasive way that we do with porn performers.

Salon