Taken from Wiktionary: “From French pornographie, from Ancient Greek πορνογράφος (pornográphos), from πορνεία (porneía, “fornication, prostitution”) + γράφω (gráphō, “I depict”). “
Pornography literally means the depiction of prostitutes, so it’s a term that meant something inherently exploitative. To talk about something that isn’t inherently exploitative, maybe the term “erotica” would be better.
So yeah. I think that banning porn might help similarly to the way that banning it for children has probably helped, but hasn’t gotten rid of the issue completely. I think porn, capitalism, and misogyny perpetuate themselves in a vicious cycle. It reinforces the sexist/racist stereotypes perpetuated by capitalist society at large, while introducing males to new levels of depravity. It exists because of those reasons and makes it worse.
Most people are only doing porn for the money, which I can’t consider true consent. Those who aren’t doing it for the money are sometimes unaware that they are being used in porn (spycams, revenge porn), groomed, and if they are truly freely choosing it, they make things worse for the majority who are coerced and tricked into it because the “positive” voices get boosted while the negative ones get suppressed and people get a distorted view of what the industry’s actually like. Sometimes people don’t even realize what they’ve gotten into until they’ve been out of the industry for some time, since they’re not allowed to talk negatively about it when they’re in it.