Who are you and what's your relationship with porn?

Tracy Clayton: Hello! I'm Tracy, staff writer at BuzzFeed. I'm very interested in issues of race, sex, and class, and porn is an amazing arena to watch it all play out. My relationship to porn these days is primarily scholarly, watching to see how trends change and wondering at what those changes could mean on larger scales — and cosmetic because I really need to learn how to nail that porn smoky-eye look.

Alex Tauchman: Hi. I'm Alex, and I like to tweet a lot about porn, sex, and feminism. I have been interested in porn for about a couple years now and recently attended the Feminist Porn Conference in Toronto in my capacity as a big fan of porn and feminism.

Julie Gerstein: Hi! I'm Julie, the style editor at BuzzFeed. I was a women's studies major in college, so I studied porn in a scholastic setting — mostly in the context of feminist porn and then vis-à-vis anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who felt that porn was violence against women. But I don't really watch it in my personal life.

Conz Preti: Hi! I'm Conz, the editor for BuzzFeed Espanol and Brasil. I watch porn regularly and have been able to understand more of what I'm into and not throughout the years.

Lara Parker: Hi! I'm Lara, staff writer at BuzzFeed. I have experienced vaginal pain/extreme pain with any sort of penetration and tampons since I was about 14 years old. Therefore, porn makes me incredibly uncomfortable and I feel like it sets a standard that I will NEVER live up to. (I don't watch, mostly because it brings me to tears.)

Aurora Snow: Hello! I'm Aurora, retired adult actress and current freelancer for The Daily Beast. I worked in the adult industry for 11 years, saw it change dramatically, and now work to educate others about it.

Picking up on what Aurora just said about how the industry has changed dramatically — is porn more interesting to you now that the landscape is changing? Is the landscape changing that dramatically yet, or is it still a small movement?

CP: Yup, definitely see the change and have been more into the things I find. Before there was a lot of time spent looking at things and going, "Nope, nope, not liking it," and now there's more of a celebration of normalness in sex and sexiness in women. Maybe I JUST came across it, but I've been seeing it a lot more lately.

TC: My interest in porn has waned over the years; I don't watch much now because I guess I'm kind of burned out and bored by much of what I see. I think that I somehow know or assume that things have changed, but I don't readily see those changes, I think. Like, I know that there are more woman-centered options out there, but I still have to look for them explicitly. Big, popular sites, like YouPorn and Xtube, for example, are still largely (from what I see) full of the same old, same old. But I know that there was a time when searching specifically for something different was a chore, and it doesn't seem to be as big a hassle now.

JG: From my perspective, I'm amazed that there is a movement at all, because I haven't kept up with what's happening in porn at all, since the earliest burgeoning feminist porn makers like Tristan Taormino and Susie Bright and such. To know that there is actually a feminist porn thing happening now, amidst all the other crap out there, is actually kind of heartening, though I wouldn't know the first thing about finding it.

AS: I think the movement itself is rather small, but small as it may be, receives a disproportionate amount of media attention. It's still a lot of the same, but with more women in powerful roles, it is changing. Even with porn aimed at women, made by women, the porn still has to appeal to men in order to find a distribution company unless the same producers are also the distributors. When you get to the top, it's still some of the same people running it that have been doing so for the last decade.

AT: I want to pick up on what Aurora just said because it reminded me of a portion of the keynote speech that Courtney Trouble gave at the Feminist Porn Conference. Courtney said that their porn "Trans Grrrls" has been their best-selling so far, and they originally figured it would be more a labor of love than anything, because men, or "the casual cis guy," as Courtney referred to them, wouldn't watch it. I am delighted that porn that increases sexual representation is finding audiences in "the casual cis guy," and I think that is perhaps a harbinger of the possibilities for more crossing over between "mainstream porn" (i.e., large-budget porn made by men for men, presumably) and feminist/queer porn.

JG: Does it matter, Alex, though, if cis men are watching that porn in a genuine way, or not, though? Does how it's viewed matter, or just that it's viewed?

AT: I think that any time the casual cis guy, or whoever, is able to see porn that is earnestly made by people who want to publicly show how they have sex and what they like, that's a step in the right direction.