Just pay for porn, already

Hypothetical story time:

Let’s say you are wandering around the city one day and all of a sudden your stomach starts growling. You haven’t eaten anything all day because of an early-morning meeting and you’re starving. Thankfully, someone nearby offers you some apples. And why not? You like apples; they’ll fill you up, problem solved.

But on the other side of the street is an apple pie cooling on a windowsill. And we all know apple pie is better than apples. Sure, it was never offered to you, and in all likelihood it won’t be, but you’re hungry and the steam from the pie is beckoning. Do you accept the apples or steal the pie?

One thing about porn piracy is that there are so many free alternatives to professional porn, other than simply stealing movies, that it is an irrational, dickish decision, rather than a necessary evil. Here’s the thing: with the dawn of Xtube and other legitimate, user-generated content sites, there now exists a porn niche where free spank material is not only accessible, it’s encouraged. If you want to get off for free, there are large segments of the internet that enable you to get off with other like-minded exhibitionists.

But amateur isn’t for everyone; I’m aware of that. If you absolutely must have professional-grade porn but you don’t want to spend too much, here’s a crazy idea: just suck it up and buy a membership. Despite what you might think, porn really isn’t that expensive. A one-month membership to men.com’s four sites will run you only $25. A month on Next Door Studios (I saw 12 sites listed on the main page) is $29.95, and 200 minutes on AEBN, which offers movies from 25 studios, is $20.55. As I said, it really isn’t that expensive.

I’m aware that people like getting shit for free. But they need to get over this idea that art has no inherent value because it’s not a tangible commodity.

As media moves toward increased digital content and the undercurrent of entitlement makes people less willing to pay for entertainment, we have to be more fair with regard to compensating artists. I don’t mean a full-on SOPA/PIPA-style law that would cripple freedom of speech; I’m just saying that pitching in less than $30 a month for porn might not be the worst thing in the world.

To revisit the hypothetical story from the beginning, it boils down to this: if you have two equally viable options, one being a win-win situation and the other involving taking advantage of someone else, choosing the latter is not just illogical — it makes you an entitled fuckwad.