Mostly straight guy here. I'm not typically in a relationship and am fine with that, so my sex life usually revolves around porn. My go-to option is Chaturbate, because it feels more authentic than scripted porn clips. Yes, I know the girls are doing it for the money and are putting on a play to get guys to pony up and I wish them as much success as possible. My question is, are sites like that ethical? It feels like one of the safest ways for girls to do sex work, but what do I know? Should I avoid some sites, or some types of cams in particular? I'm trying to cause as little harm as possible.

Curious About My Masturbatory Ethical Report

P.S. As a gamer, my other major porn outlet is clips of my favorite video game characters going at it, animated quite professionally by amateur artists. It's also a great way to satisfy more hard-core fantasies I wouldn't want real women to experience, even for money. Not sure if you knew about that scene? I've never seen it covered on Savage Love, but it's getting pretty big.

Cam sites are one of the safest ways for women—and men and gender nonconforming power bottoms and non-binary piss sluts and home-schooling Mormon housewives—to do sex work. Camming is legal and some of the risks associated with sex work, like being busted by cops with nothing better to do or having to be in the same room with someone with lousy personal hygiene, are mitigated away to nothing. Sex work is work, however, no matter how someone does it. Getting others off requires emotional and physical labor from a cam girl or boy—labor that should be compensated and, where criminalized, decriminalized. Online sex work can have consequences IRL forms of sex work don't, like screenshots and surreptitious recordings circulating online long after the performer hangs up his/her/der camming software.

Some specific good news for you (and the girls you get off to): Chaturbate is a pretty ethical site. The owner of Chaturbate had this to say during an AMA about the people who cam for money there:

The ones who are there to make money don’t work "for" Chaturbate, they work on it. When they do work on CB, although they are independent, they must agree to comply with legal documentation requirements and they must agree to act ethically and legally as set forth in our terms.

The performers on Chaturbate (and cam sites in general) work for themselves, they collect their earnings, and camming can allow them to create fan bases that can support performers in other ways, i.e. via Amazon Wishlists and other online gift registries.

Zooming out: Everyone has their preferred method of getting off, CAMMER, which is why there are almost as many paths to solid/enhanced solo orgasms as there are sexual interests. Mainstream porn works for some (it must, right?), romance novels do it for others, group sex livestreams do it for a select few. Some masturbatory traditionalists can even managae, in these porn-swamped times, to get off using their own dirty imaginations. That said, it's encouraging to see more and more people concerned about the ethics of the porn they consume. A woman asked me this a few weeks ago: "The porn industry is dangerous for women and a lot of the content that can be found online isn't really consensual and ethical... where do we find feminist porn?" Some corners of the porn industry are dangerous and exploitative, of course, but others are not. Some corners are consensual and feminist. It's on us to seek out the ethical stuff and take our responsibilities as consumers seriously. Feminist porn, again, is a great place to start. And as I told this particular letter writer:

It's important to note that if we wanna see more feminist porn in the world and on the web, we have to support that kind of porn—and by "support," of course, I mean "consume," PORNO, and the only kind of consumption that matters here is the kind that creates a viable market, i.e. paid consumption. Paying for porn downloads helps finance projects and create careers for filmmakers and performers we like (and get off to). If you gets all your porn from Tumblr and/or the various tubes, you forfeit your right to complain about the porn that's out there. Buy the kind of porn you like and more of the porn you like will be made.

So, yeah. Want more ethical porn? Find the ethical, guilt-free porn—but don't just masturbate to it. Pay for it.

P.S. I'm aware of animated video game character porn, CAMMER, but I've never had to field a question about it. I can only assume that people who masturbate to video game character porn are perfectly content and don't have any sexual or interpersonal problems they'd need my help solving.