Thanks to the video porn boom in the 90’s and a patriarchal societal lean, sex is everywhere, but intimacy isn’t. The second you read this sentence, over 28 thousand users are watching pornography. It has never been easier to access sexual performance, or in higher resolution.
THE J SPOT
THE J SPOT
Is there Such Thing as "Good" Porn?
Is there Such Thing as "Good" Porn?
In discussion with sex-educator, Only-Fans creator and multi-hyphenate creative Mon Barton.
Rediscovering Communal Bathing for Health, Pleasure, and Connection
Since our most ancient civilisations, sex has been performed for the enjoyment of others in many different forms, hidden or hero-ed by the shadows of culture throughout history. Humanity’s relationship with sex has come to include far more than just entertainment or procreation, providing us with a mirror for power dynamics and deep self-understanding. Despite artificial intelligence and attempts at prohibition, studies tracking the evolution of human sex show that the orgasm remains important to people– despite the worst of it, humans really just want to feel good.
As our dependency on technology deepens and the lines between digital and physical blur, our online behaviours become more closely linked with our offline behaviours. It has been researched that most men have viewed porn from the age of 12. Thus as the novelty of internet sex wears into a realisation that the porn we watch becomes the sex we recreate, we begin to wonder whose desires are being typified by our most accessible experiences of sex.
Multi-hyphenate designer/writer/creative/face-out OnlyFans creator, Mon Barton (aka MonsMonday), has embraced a collision of her outputs, with her OnlyFans accessible from her IG profile sitting neatly beside her boutique brand Sabi. Where women still receive backlash for occupying more than one niche or identity, Mon turns expectation on its head and uses her background as a pleasure educator to disrupt the typical porn supply. “The whole purpose of me being on OnlyFans is because my experience as a young woman with sex was so damaging and harmful, and I boil it down to such a misinformed, uneducated way of learning about sex as a young adult through commercialised porn.”
For Mon, involving her partners in her work is a deeply considered part of the authentic pleasure she captures, “When I first started doing it with my ex partner, when we were still trying to figure out the dynamic, I never wanted to make it feel like work. We had our intimacy and then I explored my own self-play/self-pleasure filming it when it felt aligned. Sometimes we would have to turn the camera off and need to just connect”.
Keeping reverence for trust and intimacy is a priority for Mon where some dynamics naturally don’t feel safe enough to invite sexwork in. “It’s not why I have sex with people, it’s not why I form connections with them,” Mon says, “I don’t want anyone to feel or think that I am connecting with them physically because I want to bring them into my online space and make money off my connection with them”. If the connection is right though, bringing a lover or romantic partner into the work is a conversation that starts with the open question: is us incorporating a camera into our physical intimacy something that you’d be comfortable with?
Although in recent studies conducted by CH-VOID around 85% of people have admitted to using porn in some way at some point in their life, there is still a negative identity stigma attached to porn usage. This sort of stigma is one of the reasons why sites like RedTube and PornHub thrive, because they represent an underground, anonymous viewing portal people can clear from their search histories. Subscription based models like OnlyFans invite a higher standard of behaviour of the users and therefore safety for creators because of the traceability and shame-expulsion. For Mon, doing the work in the daylight means she typically attracts customers who are deeply respectful and adoring of her authenticity: “I think what people would be really surprised to know is how respected and how fucking well I get treated in my online sex work space. It’s crazy to think I have dated so many shitty men and gone on so many shitty dates and all of my fans treat me like the biggest queen, and so they fucking should.”
Bringing realism back to the landscape of porn is something that has been advocated for by the likes of Erika Lust. Lusts’ disruptive porn focuses on textured, real bodies and centres around approachable narratives to give people access to sex that feels real-world. Where the actors are paid fairly and the set is designed to hold emotional safety, the pleasure transferred to the watcher is inherently drained of violence. “The sex can stay dirty but the values must be clean”, Erika famously said.
Like Lust, Mon finds there to be a transformational and educational responsibility deeply intertwined with creating sex for consumption. “I think people think that you go on OnlyFans and it’s just like commercial porn. For me anyway, my profile is based on giving people realistic porn, realistic bodies, real unfiltered, unedited photos. None of my shit is fancy, it’s iPhone quality,” Mon explains.
The historical divide between performative pleasure and embodied pleasure is one that Mon addresses in her work. “I think people connect to it because it feels like you’re right there with me in my bedroom or in my car or wherever I am when I’m horny. It’s real, it’s lo fi, it’s honest, I’m not dressing up or performing for the work. I live my life and I make money off that because I share it.” For all of us, crossing the borders laid by societal shame into our truest sexual desires is incredibly challenging. For creators like Mon, their sex work shares the fruits of their personal restorative internal work, inspiring people to see sex as something they can access honestly and joyfully.
It’s important to remember that sex-work is not a monolith. When it comes to custom experiences, what is offered by OnlyFans creators for purchase is entirely dependent on their comfortability. For some creators this comfortability could be dictated by a sense of feeling, and for others it’s more-so influenced by profit. Anal play might be an offering for some, but for a creator like Mon who doesn’t naturally enjoy it in her personal sex life, it’s unlikely it will ever be offered in her work. Either way, it demonstrates a unique and aspirational self-intimacy within a person who can define clear sexual boundaries and advocate for their sense of worth.
In the same vein, there is a lot of vulnerability in kink-play. On Mon’s profile, there is a zero kink-shaming policy perhaps with the exception of beastiality and pain in its more extreme forms. “I love shibari, I love sub-dom, and switch play. Real kink play, exploring and having fun with it, finding out what you really like, requires such a high level of trust and communication with constant check-in and consent.” Unfolding into our desires on our own, let alone in front of someone else can be a deeply emotional process with lots of healing potential. For Mon, the deepening of self-trust is a very real part of the work, “It’s like wow you made me feel safe enough to be me. It’s this crazy wild, primal feeling and then you snap back to reality and it’s like wow, you just saw me and you’re not judging me, you’re really respecting me and you’re still here. It’s really just a beautiful process”.
As we collectively purge violence from our sexual experiences, there is a real importance in supporting creators who champion this new era of sexual wholeness. In a life imitates art kind of way, by raising the bar of what we consume, our standards of pleasure soar upwards too.
Written by: Sophie Marsh
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