“There’s heaps of good, inspiring, sensual, feminist, kinky and, above all, fairly produced porn… You just have to find them!”

Earlier this year PinkLabel.TV was rated and reviewed by a new adult website review project called PORN BETTER. Now, we’ve had our platform reviewed by review sites before, but the results are generally lackluster, with reviewers coming from stereotypically heterosexual white male perspectives that never quite understand what we’re about. (Are we Lesbian? Gay? Vintage? Hint… We’re all these things because viewers like us want to watch all these things!) Imagine our excitement to discover PORN BETTER, a uniquely progressive review site that asks performers opinions and presents an appealing layout that is refreshingly absent of racist, sexist, and transphobic terminology. 

We invited the small team behind PORN BETTER to tell us more about their philosophies and share what they’ve learned along the way. Whatever your relationship to porn – whether performer, producer, or fan – we hope you’ll enjoy what they have to say and get familiar with their site to help them continue to push for industry excellence.

We’re thrilled with the look and logic behind PORN BETTER! When did the site come about and what was your initial motivation? 

The idea for PORN BETTER was born about two years ago. In 2020, I was talking to friends about how difficult it was to find porn that didn’t cater to the male gaze and / or was presented in a way that really killed the joy because of sexist, aggressive, or discriminatory language and imagery. Even within the queer feminist & sex worker bubbles that my co-founders and I were involved in, there was little knowledge about the fact that, scattered over the internet, there are actually many porn sites that offer really awesome stuff. Porn that was made by FLINTA (female/lesbian/inter/trans/agender) for FLINTA people, porn that was experimental, porn-art fusions, literotica, audio porn… As a standard consumer, you don’t realize how many options you have because of the incredible market dominance of the free tube sites and a prevalence of porn sites that are still designed to attract a mainstream male viewer. In that sense, I’d consider my younger self as one of these standard consumers. When you grow up with free porn, you kind of think that what you find on the big tube sites is all porn has to offer. By the way, there’s good content on free sites too, but you have to click past a lot of bad stuff and terrible ads to find it and then you also never know how it got there, because there’s still a lot of pirated content on tube sites.

You may end up not watching porn at all anymore because it starts grossing you out. With PORN BETTER, we wanted to create a safe space where people can check out better options without being confronted with sexist, racist, violent or discriminatory content during their research. We examine every porn site carefully before we list it, checking out the appearance, getting in touch with the producers / hosts of the site and also with performers. We have developed a feedback form for performers that allows them to rate their experience with a company in just a few clicks.

Performer feedback certainly sets you apart. Was there anything else about porn review sites that inspired you to create your own?

There are many review sites for porn that, again, are designed for a male audience with huge databases and many discounts etc., but quite un-transparent rating criteria and the same problematic language and imagery that I described before. Then there are other blogs and articles, often written by FLINTA or for a FLINTA audience, which can be well researched and informative but don’t necessarily deliver an extensive overview of all the options.

What we’re trying to create with PORN BETTER is an easy-to-navigate, honest and transparent review site that offers education about ethical porn production on top.

Is there anything you’ve learned about the porn industry in the process of making PORN BETTER?

We’ve learned that the label “ethical” causes a lot of controversy within the industry. While we use “ethical porn” as a label because it’s easy to understand for consumers, we do acknowledge that it’s actually not as easy as that. Who defines what’s ethical? How do you know if a company that labels itself as “ethical” is actually treating their staff /performers ethically? Is it understandable that performers avoid “ethical”/feminist studios because they have smaller budgets than big studios? These are all topics that we’ve been discussing with queer feminist producers, site owners, performers.

There’s a huge gap between the knowledge that creators and industry insiders have versus what the average consumer thinks about porn and its production, and this is a gap that needs to be closed.  As long as porn and its consumption are stigmatized and avoided as a topic in the public discourse, there’s little room to reflect on one’s own consumption habits and choices. And that was a big learning curve for us as well. At first we were amazed to find out how much great online porn there was. The more we learned about the performers and directors, the more we were convinced that more people need to start appreciating the work that has been done to bring them pleasure, as producer Angie Rowntree put it in her interview with us. The best way of showing this appreciation is to pay for your porn if you can afford it.

Have you faced any financial obstacles or censorship issues while building and promoting the project? (Common challenges in porn include bank prohibitions, biller restrictions, and marketing limitations.)

Limitations in marketing are obviously a huge topic. We can’t just run ad campaigns like a non-adult business, we risk being banned from social media at any time – even if we don’t post any explicit content… This makes it very difficult to grow our audience.

We’ve cross-funded PORN BETTER to this day. We have had positive feedback from places we wouldn’t have expected and even received state funding a couple weeks ago (a small but very appreciated sum), which shows that there is some willingness to start addressing the topic and changing the mindset. We’ve stayed away from investors so far because we don’t want to lose track of our actual mission, and this is not maximizing our revenues or scaling to the sky but staying transparent, impartial, sex worker centered and queer feminist without compromises.

How is the project growing and what are you looking forward to? 

We’re very excited that our traffic is constantly growing and so is the interest in our project. Apart from a long waiting list of reviews to be written, we now want to upgrade the existing reviews we have by accumulating as much performer feedback as possible. We want to encourage more performers to share their experience with studios / sites via our anonymous feedback form so that our users can see what rating a site gets from performers.

We will also start a crowdfunding campaign in the near future because we’d like to upgrade our website to make it more user-friendly, accessible for people with disabilities, and multilingual.

Amazing! We’ll be sure to help spread the word about your fundraiser. In the meantime, how can people find you online and how can we help make PORN BETTER …better? 

People can find us on porn-better.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter. If you’re a performer, help us validate our reviews by sharing your experience with the listed studios via the feedback form. If you’re a porn consumer, just visit PORN BETTER and get inspired by our choice of cherry-picked porn sites. Are you an influencer / web host / blogger? We’d be thrilled if you helped us gain visibility by posting / blogging about us!

Beyond that, everyone is invited to share their feedback, comments, or thoughts with us about what we do and how we do it, we’re constantly learning and happy to take your input on board.