Every time we pur­chase cloth­ing from a major retail­er, we risk sup­ply­ing a demand for an indus­try that runs a sweat­shop in a dis­tant, third-world coun­try. Many con­sumers boy­cotted the indus­try by wield­ing the pow­er of their pock­et to encour­age all fash­ion retail­ers to improve con­di­tions for their work­ers, and they did — more than 200 fash­ion brands signed on to a legal­ly bind­ing agree­ment that sought to pro­mote safer gar­ment-indus­try conditions.

The anal­o­gy between the gar­ment indus­try con­tro­ver­sy and the porn indus­try ends here: There is no way to insti­tute eth­i­cal con­sump­tion of porn with­out elim­i­nat­ing the demand. Accord­ing to many sur­vivors of sex traf­fick­ing, there is often no way to know whether a girl in a porno­graph­ic video is appear­ing on cam­era under coer­cive, non­con­sen­su­al, or threat­en­ing cir­cum­stances. View­ers can’t know whether they are view­ing a child or whether the “per­former” is being raped on camera.