Rashida Jones Says Porn Is 'Fulfilling a Male Fantasy' 

Rashida Jones doesn’t think women are deriving pleasure from amateur porn. “It’s performative, women aren’t feeling joy from it,” Jones said last week on a panel at Sundance while promoting Hot Girls Wanted, a documentary she produced on the amateur porn industry. “This would be a whole different conversation if women were like ‘we were having sex, we love it so much. We want more of it. We feel so good about our bodies and ourselves.” But Jones thinks it’s anything but. “It’s performative. It’s fulfilling a male fantasy.”

The documentary’s website describes the film as “a first-ever look at the realities of the professional “amateur” porn world and the steady stream of 18-to-19-year old girls entering into it.”

Jones admits that the conversation about porn is tricky: women are making their own money and in a way, she says, that is empowering. “But what is the real cost to your soul and to your psyche?”

The fight about whether or not porn is “good” for women has been raging since the 1970s when feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon coalesced around the message that pornography is an inherent form of sexism and must be dismantled. In the ’80s a sex-positive movement formed promoting women’s agency – that sex work can be a good and powerful thing for women who want to do it. <—- my position. "Women should feel pleasure and have sex and feel good about it – and there's a lot of shame involved with porn," said Jones. Yes, this is true. So says I, let's try and make some fucking radical mainstream porn that fulfills women's fantasies too then, yeah?