Feminist porn: shifting our sexual culture | Olivia Tarplin | TEDxJerseyCity

Feminist pornography has evolved from its beginnings of female porn icons and sex-positive academic feminists. It seeks to both address existing issues of sexism within the mainstream porn industry as well as create new spaces and paradigms for pornography that challenge mainstream tropes. It also strives to create fair and favorable working conditions for performers. Through these many changes, feminists’ relationship with porn has shifted from battles over what pornography reveals about structures of power to experiments in what pornography can change in structures of power.

Pornography has become the way that people learn about sex. It has become the new sex education, as actual sex-ed is scarce and highly limited. By depicting authentic, non-scripted, diverse representations of men, women, and genderqueer people, feminist pornography has the potential to sexually educate and sexually reorient the public and thus revolutionize sexual relationships.

Olivia Tarplin is a Jersey City native who received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Global Studies with a concentration in Gender and Media Studies from The New School in 2014. Her research has centered around issues of gender, politics, sexuality, media, and specifically pornography. Focusing on the thriving industry of feminist pornography, she has spent the past 2 years studying how experiments in feminist porn can change the widespread sexual culture and how porn made ethically can act as a new and improved way to educate the masses about sex. In keeping with these interests, during her time in college she co-designed new and innovative ways to teach sex-positive sex/health education, and implemented these strategies by leading sex education workshops in Freshmen classrooms around campus. She currently works in New York City in the non-profit world.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx