Oh No. The MAGA Moment Has Come for Me in the Worst Way Possible.

How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous!

Dear How to Do It,

I recently discovered a porn creator whose work I really enjoy. I’m a pretty eclectic consumer and it’s rare for me to discover a video performer that does it for me quite like this one.

However, their latest upload involved a MAGA hat and a Trump rally playing in the background. Knowing the performers politics have ruined their other videos for me, and now I feel weird and vaguely guilty for still wanting to watch and enjoy the older videos. How can I either reclaim the pleasure those videos brought me and/or find new stuff to enjoy?

—I Can’t Masturbate in These Conditions

Rich Juzwiak: Let me preface this by saying that everyone is special. But the market is flooded with performers, and I don’t think it’s that hard to find somebody else. I understand people form attachments to people and some videos really do it for them, but there’s an abundance of videos that can become part of your own personal greatest hits. What is this performer doing that’s so unique other than existing? I have faith in the ability of the writer to find somebody else just by browsing.

Jessica Stoya: When I started performing in pornography, many people with a lot more experience than I had at the time made sure to prepare me for what they saw as an immutable fact about the universe, which is that the consumers of adult content who will pay for it are fickle. You’re going to have a fan for a couple of years, then they’ll get bored of you and move on to someone who’s a lot like you, but novel because they’re different or newer. That doom and gloom narrative about constantly fighting attrition didn’t turn out to be completely accurate. But this warning being passed on as industry wisdom speaks to the fact that there are just so many videos, and so many for people to choose from. And this was even before the rise of easy direct-to-consumer platforms like OnlyFans.

Mostly, though, this question strikes me as a genitals-based manifestation of a question we’ve been kicking around as a culture for a long time: Can we separate the creator from their work?

Rich: Oh, yes. There seems to be a level of ick here that is probably ineffable in a way. It’s like no matter what, even if I want to separate the performer from their politics, A) now the politics are in the performance, and B) my body can’t do it. One of the most practical ways that you can show your allegiance in a capitalist democracy is by where you put your money—it’s one of the few actual shreds of power that you have in this kind of culture. So from a practical level, why put your money there? Why put your money behind somebody who’s supporting people and things you don’t agree with that are actively harming people?

Jessica: I don’t necessarily think that the person who wrote this letter is spending any money.

Rich: That’s true, too.

Jessica: Call me jaded, but most people cannot be bothered to pay for the sexual content they consume. And so since our writer mentioned absolutely nothing about commerce and, in fact, only says “their latest upload,” I don’t think there’s any direct exchange of money here.

If they’re using a tube site, perhaps that tube site purports to give some kind of payout to the performers or creators involved. But just for people to know, it’s essentially the Spotify model. No one is getting paid fair compensation for their uploading of videos on these tube sites. If we want to talk about the ethics of consumption in a profit-based industry and world, it is so much more complicated than just this one creator. Because by being on a website like this, which sustains itself based on advertising, you are supporting the turn to this revenue model in this medium, and, potentially, the political allegiances of the company owners. It unfurls.

Rich: I think that’s an even stronger argument as to the maybe ethical origins of what people call “cancel culture.” It’s not a perfect capitalist system. It’s not a system where you’re voting always with your money because of these shortcuts you’re talking about. People aren’t paying for stuff, so it’s ultimately a matter of attention. So then it turns into we’re going to all gang up and “cancel you” or get people to not pay attention to you because that is a currency of this culture.

Jessica: Anyone who believes that there is a way to be completely morally clean in this world is not living in reality and is falling into the same kinds of purest ideologies that they often purport to be against. Though, I’m not trying to say that the person who wrote this letter is somehow a bad person for coming to us with a situation that they feel complicated about.

Rich: Yeah, I think you’re totally right. It’s probably a combination of: This makes me feel bad. I don’t want to have anything to do with this person because they’ve revealed something about themselves that doesn’t jive with what I consider to be ethical behavior. And I have so little power in this world. I’m going to do what I can to assert it. And it is then expressed imperfectly.

Jessica: That imperfection is human, beautiful, and real. And the thing that I think would be most helpful for our letter writer and also for the entire planet is to go, “Oh yeah, things are complicated and messy.” Sometimes we have to sit with that and sometimes we have to ask ourselves, “Oh, why am I still turned on by this person who I so vehemently and viscerally disagree with this big thing about?”

Rich: There’s something that stuck out to me too about the language in the letter. They write, “Knowing the performer’s politics have ruined their other videos for me, and now I feel weird and vaguely guilty for still wanting to watch and enjoy the older videos.” Well, are they ruined or not?

Because if they’re ruined, then there’s no conundrum here. Then you say, “I’m done with them. Moving on.” That’s beyond politics in a way because it’s your body’s visceral response to politics. If there is still some pull here, well, you have to look at what harm is being done. What hurts here? If they are, in fact, subscribing to somebody’s OnlyFans, then you could make the argument that this is your money and you get to decide what to do with it, even though it’s insufficient to really get in there and make the actual change that you want. If you think that your $15 or $20 a month could be put to a better person who’s doing better things for the world, go ahead and do that. Donate it to whatever organization you support.

But say this is a different scenario. Let’s say this person has a bunch of videos saved on their hard drive. Then there’s no real cost to looking at this porn. You’re not technically supporting that person. You just have these videos. You can chalk it up to the body wanting what the body wants, and this isn’t actually doing harm in the world. This is your own personal, private experience.

Jessica: I think it’s useful to consider arousal non-concordance, too. Essentially, studies were done on men and women where scientists attached sensors to the genitals to measure blood flow and had the subjects self-report their perceived arousal or their mental arousal in response to many different kinds of video clips.

And basically, these things did not always match up. What people in their brains believe they’re turned on by and what their genitals believe they’re turned on by were many times different. The two are not talking to each other often. So I’m wondering if our writer is intellectually super turned off, but their genitals are still very turned on, which just brings us back to the fact that humans are complicated.

Rich: Absolutely. I don’t know what the scene is like with non-gay porn stars (and I don’t know that much about the gay porn world either) but I do know that there has been a more visible MAGA subpopulation within gay performers, which is to me just unconscionable. It’s voting against your rights. You see what they’re doing to trans people. It won’t stop there. To me, it’s a really severe thing to be a gay person actively voting against your rights and the rights of people in your community, which are certainly trans people. LGB without the T is disgusting to me as well. So I just wondered if this was a gay male performer.

Jessica: I can’t tell from the letter, but partially, yes, it is bizarre to me to see anyone who does sex work support people who have it out for them. Consistently, attacks on sexual freedom are one of the early warning signs. Sex workers are still very much on the list of targets for the current United States political leadership.

But at the same time, it is also not that surprising because when you’re looking at a nightmare, it is very human to not want to think about it and to say, “Surely they can’t possibly mean me.” Because to admit that they do mean you makes you feel vulnerable and afraid. So people hide their heads in the sand and then they make very strange choices, such as voting for and publicly celebrating an administration that wants to end their right to do business and live their lives as they have done thus far.

Rich: Because it’s not just sex work but porn that is specifically being targeted, too. The age verification stuff is all part of this process to eradicate it from culture, which doesn’t make any sense because conservatives love porn. We know that conservative states are huge consumers of porn.

Jessica: Yes, none of this is new. Anyone who’s been through the wringer several times like pornographers can look at these bills that are being introduced, ostensibly to protect children, and see that the language used is so broad. We can see the writing on the wall. This is no longer about pornographers. This is no longer about the “other” that you can think of as subhuman and also a celebrity, but removed from you. This is about people simply existing as homosexuals. This is about people providing sexual education to young people. These are very basic things.

I appreciate our letter writer’s personal issue to work through. But also, since we’ve just gone full politics, you have to look at the whole situation. You have to realize that everyone’s a human, even if you think they’re so much more privileged than you are, or so weird or so different that they are beneath you. The feeling of ineffectualness is what a regime like this administration wants to foster, and you cannot allow that to happen. You are more than your capacity to dunk on someone on social media for having a differing opinion, and you are more than your capacity to buy this or buy that instead—speaking in the broadest definition of “you” imaginable. It’s a weird time.

Rich: Yes, it really is. All of that to say, if you’re so turned off by a performer now, there are a lot of performers out there. Just do some surfing around. You might find somebody that you like and they might turn out to be MAGA too. That’s just the reality of the world today. You keep it moving.

I also think that (not that anyone should soften or cave to anything), but when we talk about complicated humans, we’re also talking about complicated humans who are MAGA. History will give the purest picture of this, but I think that the task of life is to give people grace even when they’re making terrible decisions that you absolutely don’t agree with. If you find yourself unable to detach from someone whose politics you resent, then give yourself some grace too. Don’t stop working on yourself, but just go easy on yourself right now because it’s a hard time.

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My husband and I have been married for 11 years. For most of that time, we’d frequently invite other women into our marriage and bed. Sometimes I’d be an active participant, other times I would just watch. It’s been a little over three years since our last playdate, coinciding with the pregnancy and birth of our youngest child. Recently, my husband introduced me to a friend of his and suggested she be our new “date.”