The content of porn changes through the substratum of porn, the social infliction on the view of sex. Thus sex itself is reified, through the patriarchal view of women, through reification of desire. Porn is a part of that infliction, it has been reduced to a mere representation.
The proliferation and universalization of porn is real, but the primitive conception of porn didn’t start with ideology. Libidinal urges aren’t exclusive to men, so when others are talking about the ontological nature of porn as an instrument of reification, they end up alienating it.
To fix the issue of porn you should not mythologize it and instead dive into it’s inner makings, viz. how civil society has encouraged us to view the act of sex. it’s made to be seen as an objective necessity through for producing objects. So if us as subjects are alienated from the sensuous act of having sex, then desire in itself have become vulgarized. Of course, this nature is conveniently intersected with male resentment. Their libidinal desire to fuck thee significant intrudes on their inflicted, objective, formalized and vulgarized view of sex.
So this goes back full circle from how religious mythologizing of desire has alienated sex from desire, thus this resentment gives conception to how men try to resolve this contradiction by trying to explicitly repulse themselves from thee significant other.. and consider them to be objects of their desire in an attempt to run away and cope from and with this antimony… or even worse, pour this unresolved tension into resentment and hysteric neurosis against women.
“Can I still be […] if i’m against sex work in general?”
The best answer to this would be it depends. Sex as work, or sex, as social exchange for desire? And desire comes in many forms. In bourgeois society, and through bourgeois view of sex, it is seen as an instrument, where sex is done through strictly objective means. It’s a duty qua production.
When young women are uncomfortable with sex you can’t call this to be a subject of “puritanism”, because that’s exactly the opposite of the issue of the subject. It’s the issue of reification, as sex is now alienated from the subject, it is something done void of desire.
Bourgeois society condemns sex, they view it as a means of necessity, a coincidence where the act itself is a coincidentally vile means towards producing babies. Yet the antimony continues, in this thought. Desire is not made to belong to the workforce, they are made to be averse to sex. They are sublimated beings, with desire repressed in the pursuit of producing objects, of reified utility, producing them for the sake of producing them.
Yet the higher echelons of power, so averse to sex, so averse to desire, fail to repress desire as it is a part of our sensuous needs, as species being. They themselves fail to abide to their own product of bourgeois thought. So desire is fulfilled towards the bourgeoisie, but the victims, subject to their desires do not desire their sex, and thus become victims, of rape and capital. As we live in a society that upholds something they condemn (rape), as most perpetrators get away scot-free, never to take responsibility for inflicting trauma.
But the issue begins when you are averse to ontological sex work, where the mystification of sex begins yet again where form is alienated from substance. You return come back to the bourgeois thought, the notion that is so averse to sex as an act aware of its essence.