Ethical Smut is the idea of creating the structure in our society where people who wish to watch pornography or erotica can do so without the fear of finding themselves participating in the exploitation of anybody. Ethical Smut will be modeled after “Fair Trade” and allow people to know for a fact that entire chain of events that brought them their desired good everything was ethical.

Status

At this time Ethical Smut is just an idea. Please write and offer help if you wish to participate.

Proposed guidelines

These are not “Ten Commandments” and they are not intended to be set in stone, the idea is that Ethical Smut will have ratings, and the created porn will display a logo which will have the rating number which it has been tested to conform to.

The ratings can be something along the lines of:

Nobody has been physically or emotionally harmed without consent. Nobody was taken advantage of economically. Everybody had an equal chance to define the outcome of the produced material. Nobody entered into the creation process without understanding the consequences or out of desperation (having nothing to eat, having low self esteem, etc.) The content can be redone, built upon, aggregated, studied, etc.

Each rating includes all things listed above it as well. So the V2 of Ethical Smut would mean no economic exploitation and no non-consensual physical/emotional pain.

What these ratings are not:

stages (All smut needs to be pushed to become the most ethical, no reason to wait for the previous number to begin implementing the next)

buying in (The current system needs to be changed through a revolution, but we cannot wait for the total revolt, so we are trying to stop suffering and exploitation as much as we can)

Freedom Porn "laws" (Submitters to Freedom Porn are allowed to do that which they find sexy),

Prior negotiation

All individuals need to know what they are entering into.

This does not mean that every second needs to be story-boarded, but everybody needs to know what othersʼ expectations and boundaries are.

Ability to withdraw at any time during the production process

Every person must be able to withdraw consent from participating at any time.

If the participation was for some sort of compensation that was agreed in advance, the individual must be compensated fairly for the time and effort up to the moment of withdrawal.

Reference to all

“Everybody”, “all”, “every person”, etc. means just what it says. This includes models, sound engineers, web masters, and … well … everybody.

See also