I will say that it is probably a good reminder to everyone that most everything discussed here is from the worldview of the consumer, or those outside of the porn world looking in, and stems from some comparison of your own personal sex life, your relationship with the images that may or may not exist of yourself that mirror, to some degree, those seen in porn.

I just want to respond in kind to some of the statements made because, whenever I see an article or statement by a porn star/sex worker etc., it's always read as some absolutist truth about the nature of the typified person that would participate in such a workforce.

My partner does porn, runs her own website and films for other content providers. Many of my good friends do porn, cam shows, have done "rough sex" genre porn at places like Kink.com, so a few of the things said here I am taking a bit personally. I've talked with a few of my friends about the article (stuff like this makes the rounds pretty quickly) and, even amongst a vitriolic feminist, sex-positive, pro-porn crowd, the way that the author tries to contend with the issues at hand seems a bit trite, and annoying that whenever pornographic revelations are made, it always has some appeal to normalcy in the exposition (typically some girl-next-door type that "confesses" or is outed). The wellspring of negative attitudes that shore up against their actions (and this is with family and friends from before they did porn, not just strangers on the internet), which are seen as "wrong" or "bad", typically without reasonable argument, but just simply negative based upon their participation, are mostly ignored or dealt with in a congenial a way as possible. The negative comments and attempted degradation by proxy from some asshole is seen as just a thing that will just happen, and the stigma and negative backlash does not come as a surprise anyone I know.

If you're taking money to be degraded on camera, you can't act surprised when people who are titillated by your degradation attempt to degrade you, nor can you make sweeping arguments about "the patriarchy" while simultaneously arguing how empowering it is to get paid to get peed on.

The thing about this degradation is that it is not simply limited to those that participate in "rough sex" porn. Every female-bodied person I have known has experienced some sort of forcible degradation, being called a "slut", groped, being forced upon, especially so whenever a woman is shown enjoying herself in a sexual context (ie. fwb/exes being raped, women molested on a dance floor in a short skirt, strippers coerced into illicit activities). The degradation porn aspect of it may just act as a lightening rod for this type of feedback, and it should come as no surprise that those attracted to degradation would also participate in it. However, her complaint does not lie with those who viewed the porn and responded to it after having sought it out purely for it's content, but instead with the supposed "normal" interactions that could have occurred between her and many of the male students at her university that now accost and now abuse her, as well as the perceived (though I don't believe this is true myself) egalitarian internet/twitter interactions with a blind populace as to her sex work. Her response to patriarchy (and more so rape culture) has less to do with the feedback being less than positive, but from outside observers having the revelation that a "normal" person participates in such an "unscrupulous" activity, that somehow this allows the response as seen to be normalized, and before, as a consumer, it is much more so as an "us and them". This type of feedback that she is responding to is not limited just to an "outed" sex worker, but any such female-bodied person or anyone who reads as "submissive" or enjoys some type of "abuse" (not just abusive porn, but just the mere participation in porn elicits this reaction from people, as if they are abused, and if it is made known they are not, they are labeled obtusely with such things as "whore", "slut" etc.) as a result of patriarchal culture who can only respond to sex-positivity with derision and unwarranted abuse.

As for the empowerment aspect, kleinbl00 is correct that "Porn is about power. Sexual dynamics are about power. Rape is about power." There are very good reasons, however, that two of these are considered "okay" and one is definitely "bad/evil" and I really shouldn't have to expound upon that much to understand why. The dialectics of power in sexuality and porn are managed by all participants in them, for good or bad, depending on their person.

It is a difficult world to mitigate when you discover that your sexual preferences lie towards a more submissive ("bottom") style of interaction. Some people enjoy being abused, whether it is being choked, tied up, urinated on, or what-have-you, but this always lends those who retain the permission and ability to do these things ("tops", daddies, etc.) to abuse, in an unwarranted manner, the permissions allowed them., and this is why the carefully crafted world around BDSM of safe-words, safe spaces and references are so resilient.