Rashida Jones speaks out against male-centric porn saying 'women should have sex and feel good about it'

The actress and producer of documentary Hot Girls Wanted spoke about the negative impact of sexualised culture at Sundance

Rashida Jones criticised porn for manipulating women for male pleasure

Rashida Jones has criticised the porn industry for damaging young women.

The actress was speaking at Sundance Film Festival to promote her documentary Hot Girls Wanted and criticised the porn industry for exploiting young women, as well as failing to properly represent female sexuality.

Talking to The Wrap, Jones cited "the difference between sexuality and sexualisation". She said: "Women should feel pleasure and have sex and feel good about it – and there’s a lot of shame involved with porn."

Saying that porn was purely focused on male pleasure, Parks & Recreation actress Jones argued that women derived no pleasure from it. "Because it’s performative, women aren’t feeling joy," she said. "It would be a whole different conversation if women were like: 'We’re having sex, we love it so much, we want more of it, we feel so good about our bodies and ourselves' – that’s not the conversation."

Jones continued: "It’s performative, it’s fulfilling a male fantasy. It’s not about how you feel about it, it’s like going with it because you’re making money from it.

"The 'female empowerment' thing [makes it] tricky to have that conversation, because you’re making money and therefore you’re 'empowered', but what is the real cost to your soul to your psyche?"

Hot Girls Wanted is a documentary about young women who have been drawn into the sex trade - and how easy it is for a web-savvy generation to end up making porn.

"They’re not connecting with or considering the real cost, the psychological cost, the emotional cost, the physical cost to your body – the trauma it does to your body to have sex for a living is a real thing," Jones said of the film's teenage subjects. "And I think by the time they realise it, it’s not too late because they can go back to their lives, but they’ve lost their childhoods."

She also panned today's "one-note" pop culture, describing it as "objectified, sexualised, performative".