Rashida Jones Wants Everybody to Talk About Porn More

For being so ubiquitous, it’s interesting how little we talk publicly about porn. Actress Rashida Jones set out to change that with her Emmy-nominated 2015 Netflix documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, and a recent follow-up, which explore women’s role in modern-day porn and the ease with which it is to make it online.

Vox recently sat down with Jones to talk about her perception of the porn industry and what she’s learned about it from her two documentaries. We’ve teased out some of her juicier quotes below.

On Sex in America:
“There’s this real puritanical, religious restriction in terms of sex being something that really only should happen between a married couple and should really only be for the sake of procreation.”

On the Fantasy vs. Reality of Porn:
“It gives me hope that young women who are sexually active look at porn and a third of them don’t like the way women are treated. That gives me hope because there is this weird struggle that porn is protected by this bubble of fantasy and there’s a lot of really problematic representation in porn, racially, gender-wise, politically.”

On the Perils of How We Discover Porn:
“There’s not a ton of ways to protect kids from porn. Yes, individual parents can do their best, but most kids come to it accidentally, so that really is the problem—exposure to young minds who might not have seen the experience of sex and may have never even had their first kiss.”

On the Current State of Porn:
“There’s so many people making porn now that it’s really hard to make a living doing so. [Porn industry workers] feel very protective and defensive of the business that they work within because they want to continue to work. And it makes perfect sense. But to me, the way to do that is to talk about it, not just keep it secret.”

On Talking to Your Kids About It:
“[As] awkward as it is, I do feel there’s a responsibility here to continue [the] conversation, and you have to assume that if your kid is 11, they’ve probably happened upon porn. And it’s worth having a conversation to find out so that they can have a healthy relationship with their sex life that isn’t driven by porn [but] driven by their own desires.”