Pornography is no longer a marginal phenomenon; it’s a global mass medium. It is everywhere, shaping fantasies, influencing body images, and setting expectations about what desire should look like. But porn is also a mirror: whatever is skewed in a culture tends to appear there first, in concentrated form. Gender roles, power imbalances, taboos, violence – few places make them as visible as an industry that turns bodies and pleasure into products.
A feminist reading has to hold two truths at once: pornography can be a space of liberation, and it can be a site of exploitation. It doesn’t just show what we want; it shows what we’ve been taught to want.

Liberation: desire as its own narrative

For many women, porn has also been a place of appropriation — a space where female pleasure is not erased but made visible, sometimes even directed by those who feel it. Feminist porn movements have tried to do exactly this: to film sex in a way that allows the people on screen to be subjects, not props. A performer leaning into the camera does not automatically exist for a male gaze; she can also be claiming her own desire, making it undeniable.
Seen that way, pornography becomes a language that women can reclaim. A room in which they can say: This is my body. This is my desire. And I choose how it appears.
For erotic writing, that thought is fertile ground. The core question is not “Am I allowed to write this?” but: “Who is speaking here? Whose desire is being told?”

Exploitation: bodies as commodity

On the other side lies the harsh reality of an industry still marked by inequality. Many performers work under financial pressure. Contracts can be opaque, boundaries unstable, consent eroded by money, reputation, or coercive dynamics. The mainstream market is dominated by a gaze that centres male pleasure and reduces female bodies to functions.
This is not only about individual stories of harm, but about systems: when pleasure becomes a commodity, bodies lose autonomy. The same logics appear elsewhere — in precarious work, influencer cultures, monetised intimacy. Porn is extreme, but it reveals patterns that run through the entire social fabric.
For authors, this is a warning: erotic scenes can either interrogate these power structures or reproduce them without thinking. Writing is never neutral. It always normalises something.

The body as political site

Pornography makes something very clear: bodies are always read politically. Every position, every framing, every close-up carries values. In erotic literature, it’s the same: you may describe breasts, skin, mouths, hands — but you are always also describing stance. A woman who touches herself can be in control or painfully disconnected from herself, regardless of the explicit act.
Feminist porn tries to alter this choreography. The explicitness remains, but the question of who holds control shifts. The body is not just consumed; it acts, decides, rejects, insists.

The central question: who controls the story?

The real fault line in debates about porn is not the sex — it’s the interpretation.
Who decides what desire looks like?
Who profits from it?
Who owns the story that is being shown, sold, or written?
Pornography becomes exploitation when women (and other marginalised bodies) have no real control over how they appear and what they are expected to do. It becomes potentially liberating when they can narrate their own desire — in front of a camera, on a page, or far away from both.

Utopia, reality, and the role of literature

Erotic literature has a particular strength: it can open spaces that mainstream porn rarely touches. Spaces where bodies are complex. Where desire doesn’t start fully formed but develops. Where power is negotiated rather than taken for granted.
The feminist potential of erotic writing is not that it is automatically “better” than porn, but that it can be freer: freer in its body images, its voices, its possible endings. Free to imagine scenarios in which consent is active, agency is shared, and pleasure is not purchased but created.

For your writing

When you write an explicit scene, ask yourself:
What power dynamics am I reproducing here?
Who is allowed to feel? Who is allowed to change their mind?
Whose pleasure is treated as important — and why?
Every scene becomes a small counter-narrative that way. Not a lecture, but a choice. Not moral cleansing, but awareness.

Writing Prompt

Write a scene between two characters who explicitly negotiate how they want to share pleasure. No silent assumptions, no automatic scripts. Let their words, pauses, and bodies show how power circulates between them — and how it can shift when both are truly heard.