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On July 1, laws requiring adult websites to verify user ages took effect in Mississippi and Virginia, despite efforts by Pornhub to push back against the legislation. Those efforts include Pornhub blocking access to users in these states and rallying users to help persuade lawmakers that requiring ID to access adult content will only create more harm for users in their states.
Pornhub posted a long statement on Twitter, explaining that the company thinks US officials acting to prevent children from accessing adult content is "great." However, "the way many elected officials have chosen to implement these laws is haphazard and dangerous."
Pornhub isn't the only one protesting these laws. Last month, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) sued Louisiana over its age-verification law, with FSC Executive Director Alison Boden alleging that these kinds of laws now passed in seven states are unconstitutional.
For many years now, I have been accused of “shaming” people for their sexual pastimes. This is in large part because of my criticisms of porn and the sex industry.
To be fair, I probably have written and said less than positive things about various kinks and fetishes, particularly of the violent nature. I’ve never been particularly shy about my view of men who need costumes, skits, creepy scenarios, or pornographic performances in order to get off. Your body is quite literally built to enjoy sex: just regular old penis in vagina sex. Now, of course, this “regular” sex is called “vanilla” in defense of the people who have conditioned their bodies and minds to need a bunch of bells and whistles just to do what nature intended, long before the invention of smart phones and Hentai. But requiring a silly costume or a near death experience for either you or the object of your ejaculation signals a problem to me.
While in the past porn was something you had to go out of your way to find, often in rather embarrassing ways — stealthily going into Red Hot Video after dark or purchasing a plastic-wrapped magazine from behind the counter at your local corner store — today, it is not only easily accessible, but unavoidable. You really can’t exist online without porn being pushed on you in one way or another — via porn bots in your comments or dms on social media, pop ups on torrent sites, or what is simply embedded into pop culture — music, movies, late night jokes, your fav Twitch streamers, etc.
It is far from taboo — rather, it is expected. Men will often tell women that any man who claims not to use porn is lying.
The overriding message is that porn is a normal — even healthy — part of men and boys’ lives. It is a long running joke in comedy films and locker rooms, but also something girls and young women expect to have to participate in. For the younger generations, “sending nudes” is part of dating, watching porn with your partner is recommended as a fun and sexy way to get in the mood, and performing pornographic scenarios in the bedroom is expected. For young women today, one’s social media feed is an opportunity to display one’s fuckability in exchange for validation from men and OnlyFans is viewed as little more than a side hustle.
Unfortunately, much of the fault lies with third wave feminism. Modern faux feminism embraced “sex work is work” as a mantra, insisting that porn and prostitution are just jobs “like any other.” Anyone who suggested these were not spaces of freedom, neutrality, or empowerment was guilty of “slut-shaming.”
The reality is, of course, that young women who get into the sex industry tend to get used up and spat out quickly, with little to show for it financially, but instead stuck with a lot of regret, often some trauma and additional mental health issues. The eternity of the internet becomes a lot more upsetting when there are videos of you at your most vulnerable out there for life. The lie told to young women by this industry-approved “feminism” is meant to empower them to feel proud of their choices but fails to tell them the truth: that some choices are harmful, even if you shroud them in a veneer of sexual liberation, and actual self-worth never comes from the superficial.
It isn’t, let’s be honest, sexually liberating to perform unpleasant, degrading, or painful sex acts with men who don’t care about you, that you would never engage in voluntarily. That’s someone else’s sex dream — not yours.
But while women often leave the sex industry with a heaping of shame, what of the consumer?
Men’s relationship to porn tends to leave out the woman factor. Odd, considering the whole point is meant to be the woman on the screen. But to the consumer, the question of how she got there, how she is being treated on set, whether or not she is in fact enjoying herself, or what mental, financial, or emotional state got her there is erased from path towards the main event: orgasm.
Considering the messages we are bombarded with — that porn is normal, a harmless fantasy, and a healthy release for men who can’t access the real thing — you would think men and boys (as I think we all know, most young men start watching at around 11 years old these days — sometimes earlier) would have let that old-fashioned shame go. But they haven’t.
If you talk to men about their porn use, as I do quite often, most will tell you that the minute they orgasm, the sense of shame rolls in. It is often, I’m told, quite nauseating — a sense of disgust with oneself: “What have I just done, I am an animal” kind of thing.
You might chalk this up to shame around sex, as some attempt to, but that doesn’t make much sense. It’s not as though after having sex with one’s partner you feel a sense of regret. In fact, sex is (if done properly) the thing that bonds us and brings us closer in an intimate relationship or marriage.
I posed a question about porn-related shame in my Substack chat yesterday, curious to see what insight men might offer, asking:
“I want to hear from you (men, in particular): why do men feel ashamed of their porn use? Porn has been fully mainstreamed and normalized–we are told it’s nothing more than a harmless fantasy, perfectly natural, and even a healthy outlet that reduces male sexual violence (this is a myth, for the record), yet I hear over and over again that men and boys feel shame after masturbating to porn. Why? Be honest.”
A number of responses stood out. One man named Des told me that “A lot of men have some pretty confused attitudes towards arousal,” pointing out that “Boys can become aroused by the weirdest of things… including things that are taboo or otherwise ‘wrong.’” He went on to say:
“The thing that is especially personal to me, because I wasn’t especially ashamed of my interest in porn when I was younger, is the insidious, creeping increase in the ‘extremity’ of pornographic content. It took an experience of being traumatised by some video I stumbled upon in my search for something “new” to make me stop and withdraw from porn altogether. I used this experience as an opportunity to learn about the problems porn presents and to work through the residual feeling of shock and disgust from the awful video I saw.”
This made a lot of sense to me, considering what male friends have told me about their sense of shame around porn use. Essentially, the nature of internet porn is that it drags you deeper and deeper down evermore extreme and gruesome holes. You are fed videos you might not be seeking out, but masturbate to anyway, leaving you with the knowledge you just jerked off to “daddy-daughter” porn, “step-brother gives unsuspecting sister a surprise,” or some facial abuse video, wherein a young woman (and hopefully not an actual girl) is choked and violated until she is brutalized and crying.
If you didn’t feel shame around watching this kind of thing there would be something seriously wrong with you. Yet this is mainstream porn now. It’s not some niche fantasy. It is what will pop up should you end up on Pornhub crusing for something “normal,” whatever that means…
A man named Jacob said:
“Shame serves a social function. I don’t think you do feel shame unless you anticipate/experience social alienation. The excuses and justifications are just defenses of people who are hiding feelings of insecurity. Porn itself is marketed as ‘naughty,’ ‘taboo,’ and ‘barely legal.’ That it’s shameful/anti-social is part of the engine that drives its compulsive use. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think if it really was normalized/mainstreamed to the point someone didn’t feel ashamed, i.e., still felt socially supported and connected, it would just become apparent that it’s not very satisfying or fulfilling. You’re punching a chemical reward button in the brain of a social animal that’s supposed to bring you closer to other humans. You need to feel disconnected first before porn provides any relief. It’s like the Rat City experiment. I don’t think men in really connected relationships would even want to use porn.”
I found this quite insightful. Sex is designed to bond us: our bodies release oxytocin, which is called the love hormone for a reason, bonding mothers with babies and couples with one another. If your body is producing oxytocin on account of watching porn, you’re bonding with a person who isn’t there, isn’t bonding with you, and in a way isn’t even real. You aren’t actually connecting with anyone. Instead, you’re training your brain to crave and seek out the scenarios and imagery you see in porn, which are often abusive or immoral, but also leave you lacking. You have the orgasm but the bond with another human doesn’t follow, so you end up feeling alone, empty, and isolated when you are meant to be feeling the opposite.
What follows is the addiction cycle, wherein you continue to seek the oxytocin, so use porn, get the rush, but then feel alone, empty, ashamed so must seek it out again.
In this context, the shame makes sense: you’re doing a thing that is meant to make you feel good but doesn’t in the long term, only for a blip. It’s never satisfying the thing it’s meant to satisfy.
But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.
The fact so many women normalize this as nothing more than a harmless fantasy that has nothing to do with them has always baffled and troubled me. To start, those are real women and girls in the videos your partner is consuming — women and girls who are possibly being trafficked, abused, or raped. They are at very least mentally unwell, and are probably suffering physical consequences from what happens on porn sets as well. One would think you wouldn’t want your partner supporting the abuse and exploitation of women and girls, at least.
But beyond that, why on earth would you be ok with your partner “bonding” sexually with other women?? This doesn’t strike me as any different than cheating. Sure, you won’t end up with an STD, but your partner is engaging in sex acts with strange women regardless. Have a boundary. Come on. You deserve it.
Men in relationships, no matter how much they’ve told themselves porn is their right (After all, she’s not up for it all the time — what is he supposed to do while she’s tired or grouchy or out of town? Suffer?) must know, deep down, that jacking off to 18-year-olds in the basement is not a respectful or ethical act within a relationship. And because you’re probably hiding your porn use from your partner, knowing she won’t be happy about it, even if she is playing out-of-sight-out-of-mind, the porn use functions as an ever-growing mountain of lies, creating guilt — an emotion akin to shame. You might be hurting her, the person you claim to love; you’re hurting your own mental health and ability to connect sexually and otherwise in your relationship; plus you’re actually hurting a whole bunch of women and girls you don’t even know on the other side of the screen.
Not a great recipe for self-respect!
It’s almost like mantras can’t alter biology and people’s inherent sense of ethics. And it’s almost like these industries and ideologies are going out of their way to mindfuck you into being an unhealthy, unethical person so you’ll keep coming back.
Don’t let em.
The post There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention appeared first on Feminist Current.
In February 2020, Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition at the time, published an op-ed titled, “Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” bringing attention to the fact that Pornhub was hosting child pornography and videos of trafficking victims on the site. This sparked a petition and accompanying campaign, Traffickinghub. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, published a scathing exposé in the New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub,” leading the company to leap to action, deleting 80% of their content overnight — about 10 million videos. Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut ties with the site. In 2021, Canadian parliament began to investigate the Canadian-based company that owns Pornhub, MindGeek and a number of lawsuits were filed against the company on behalf of survivors. NCOSE — the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation — filed several of these lawsuits, representing victims seeking justice against MindGeek. NCOSE was featured in a documentary released on Netflix last money, purporting to address the scandal, called Money Shot.
I spoke to Haley McNamara, Director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the UK and a Vice President at the U.S. based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the situation at Pornhub, the Netflix documentary, and NCOSE’s efforts to stop exploitation in porn.
The post Pornhub was hosting videos of minors and trafficking victims — what’s next? appeared first on Feminist Current.
In response to the ridiculous "David statue" fiasco that recently happened in Florida, Mississippi artist Mitchell Gaudet channeled his incredulity and rage into an art project featuring "symbolically sexual objects" that he bought at Walmart. NOLA.com explains:
— Read the restHe spent $600 on items including a sleek racing bicycle seat, a green plantain, a hammer, a toy baseball bat … you get the picture.
Ryan McGinley, Fawn (Fuchsia), 2012. From Waris Ahluwalia’s portfolio in issue no. 201 (Summer 2012).
Well into my thirties, I was lucky enough to have friends with whom I could talk about anything. Anything—except the subjects of porn and masturbation. It had always been that way for me, outside of a few explosive arguments with ex-partners. The rest of the time we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to, because everyone was cool with it—or so our silence seemed to be saying. Except I was fairly clear that beneath this facade, I wasn’t cool with it—I’d almost never had conversations about porn, and because I hadn’t worked out my feelings and thoughts, I felt terrified to even begin. This seemed to indicate that I needed to bite the bullet and talk about it, and I imagined that other people probably did too.
So, over the course of 2020, when many of us were at home, I began to speak with friends and acquaintances on the topic of porn, recording and transcribing our conversations. Initially, I thought that if I published the chats at all, I would somehow incorporate them into essays—a safer and more literary and urbane strategy. Over time, I came to understand that these were conversations that needed to be presented as they were—in part to convince other people of the benefits of speaking about porn, and to give an insight into what those conversations could actually look like in practice. What follows are extracts from three of the nineteen porn chats I had.
ONE
A gay man in his early thirties. He lives in the United States, and is currently single.
What is good porn for you?
Good porn is no longer than twenty minutes long. Not to be overly virtuous, but I think that a lot of the porn I watched in the past—and probably the porn a lot of people consume—is pretty crappy and unethical. I’ve been interested in the idea of finding more ethical porn, less problematic porn. There’s more ethical stuff for straight people, a few sites. I’ve found a lot fewer for queer stuff, weirdly.
What would ethical porn look like?
Porn that’s less about cum, more about intimacy. Less about these “sexual scripts” that seem to be a really tried-and-tested formula for what sex looks like when visualized. I’m less comfortable watching some of the stuff I used to watch because I feel like it’s programming me or it has programmed me and will continue to program me if I continue to consume it.
Reinforcing scripts about what sex should be like?
Absolutely, and about what bodies are attractive. The only way for me to really move beyond some of that generic shit that a lot of us assume is normal is to stop consuming it on a daily basis. Anything that I’m engaging with on a daily basis is going to mark me in some way. I’m not sure that watching problematic porn, even with a critical lens, is the answer for me.
Have you observed the way these scripts impact you?
Definitely. The annoying thing is, I’m aware of the scripts but there’s still something that draws me to certain formulas, because I’ve watched thousands of porn videos where you can guess what’s going to happen, step by step by step. You can guess who’s going to be in it, the types of bodies that they’ll have. I was going to say that’s definitely changing, but I don’t even know if it is. Go on Pornhub and it just still seems to be the same stuff. If anything, there’s a bit more aggressive stuff on mainstream sites than ever.
Do you know what the part of you that’s drawn to the scripts wants?
Familiarity. The predictable is comfortable. It gives people a blueprint. It gives me a blueprint. It’s useful knowing how other people see the world, what other people expect in sex, what other people enjoy in sex. I think a lot of my ideas about what my hypothetical partner might enjoy used to come from seeing how people in porn react to people doing certain things. Like, Oh, that person in the video seems to really enjoy a finger up their arse. Then it becomes, Do I even like fingering or do I just think my partner might enjoy it?
And then, Do I know that they are actually enjoying it or are they performing this enjoyment because they also watch porn and think they should be enjoying it?
Are we just acting out porn every time we have sex? Are we just watching porn and then recreating it? Where’s the enjoyment? Where’s the actual pleasure? It’s so easy to go into autopilot and forget how fun sex can and should be.
Do you feel like the stage at which you start watching porn and the way in which you watch it is important in this? Does it matter whether your first encounters with sex are IRL or through porn?
Is anyone having sex before they’ve watched porn?! I’ve got this really vivid memory of being a young teenager—me and my friends at this particular train station with a news kiosk on the platform. You’d wait for a train to pull up to the station, and you’d time it right so that you could grab the porn magazines from the kiosk and run for the train. Some weeks we might do it more than once. That was where my consumption of sex began, because that was my first interaction with porn. It was theft and it was on a train platform and it was part of this heist.
Would you then take the magazines home?
I would and I’d be confused by all these boobs. So many boobs. Being a gay boy but still thinking to myself, I’m meant to like this, all of my friends like this, why don’t I like this?
As a gay boy looking at those straight porn magazines, was there enough male presence in there to be stimulating or was it all women?
It was basically all women. On some level, I was always searching through the pages to see stuff where women were interacting with men, and I don’t think I often found what I was looking for. Most of the people reading them don’t really want to be confronted by a dick. I preferred the images where there were men and women, but I never got into straight porn—it never made much sense to me, so I had a big period in my teens where I just didn’t watch porn. When I realized what homosexuality was, I didn’t switch to gay porn—that felt too scary. I just had no porn.
It felt too scary?
Being unsure about who I was then, consuming gay porn at that point might have tipped me over the edge. A gateway drug. Catholic schooling, through and through.
So what was it like when you eventually started watching gay porn?
It felt right and wrong at the same time. It felt right because I could tell I was more excited about what was going on, but it felt wrong in that it was so tied up with feeling uncomfortable in that identity and in my skin at the time. Once I started watching it, I couldn’t stop. It’d be daily consumption, in secret, with headphones on, blinds closed, when nobody else was home. It was a real shame cycle. Instant feelings of real aversion after I’d finished—clear browsing data, clear cookies, clear cache, whatever that even is. And my relationship with porn was really marked by that almost immediate feeling of discomfort after. I don’t know what motivated me to continue to watch porn, but I wouldn’t say it was pleasant.
At that time, all the bodies seemed identical—masculine-appearing men, having sex with what looked like their siblings. They were mainly white, everyone had abs, and all the bedrooms were the same. It was as if every studio had one bedroom and they just went in and used that one space.
Did you have a clear sense of what was missing or was it a sense of, This is what porn is?
I went as far as saying, This is what sex is. Sex is intercourse between models. I didn’t even start to think about what other people who didn’t look like that would be doing—maybe reading, or watching TV, but not having sex. Sex was for skinny, attractive, masculine men, at least in my consumption of gay stuff. That was partly because I probably wasn’t doing that much looking around. I went to the mainstream sites for gay porn because I didn’t really want to be online searching through lots of different stuff. I had it in my head that if I got too exploratory, that would be how I got caught, and I couldn’t get caught.
That sounds like a very powerful script to be going into sex with. Did it make your first real sexual encounters quite difficult?
It didn’t, because it made me very selective about whom I would have sex with. I went on to perpetuate those ideals in my sexual partners. The first few guys I slept with were all tall, built, and more masculine. It took a while to unlearn all of that. I’m still unlearning it.
Would you say that unlearning process was conscious?
More recently, it’s been conscious, to do away with the ends of that. I still have to regularly remind myself of basic shit that I’ve got to learn. I realized that being with someone conventionally attractive doesn’t have anything to do with their personality. It doesn’t mean they’ll be nice. It doesn’t mean they’ll be funny. I was dating people because I thought they were “hot” and realizing, Hold on a second, we have nothing in common. I don’t even think I realized I was unlearning it. I was just connecting dots and realizing that whatever gauge I was using to pick people whom I thought I was interested in just wasn’t working. It’s not easy looking back on my behaviour.
When I started learning how to date in my twenties, I’d gravitate toward masculinity.
I appreciate the scare quotes around “hot.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to find your partner attractive, and potentially that is something that you have to weigh up against them being a nice person. But I’m fascinated by “hotness” as received message, as social capital—how much do you think they’re hot because you think they’re hot, and how much do you think they’re hot because society has told you to think they’re hot? It’s easy to stand on your high horse and say, No, no, no, this is my personal taste, it’s nothing to do with social pressures, but it’s only once you start that process of unlearning, intentional or not, that you realize, Okay, no, I’m much more affected by these standards than I thought I was.
If the porn I was watching when I first found gay porn featured people with size 38 jeans, then the people I would’ve been drawn to when I first started dating would’ve looked different. Obviously, it’s not just porn—a lot of industries are to blame for how skinniness is so prioritized across genders. But fuck me, there aren’t many things that teenage boys consume on such a regular basis during that critical period of identity formation. It’s like learning a language. That’s what I was doing—I was learning a language of sex. I do want to watch more porn, I’ve realized. I just don’t know where to find it anymore. Of course this is not practical at all, but sometimes I think that the type of porn that I want to watch, I’d have to make or direct myself.
Have you ever felt that prospective sexual partners’ expectations of you are shaped by the porn that they’re watching? Are there special expectations that attach to you as a Black man?
Yeah, absolutely. Before I came out, whenever I interacted with women, there was an expectation that I’d be very masculine, very dominant and aggressive, and in fact, that’s pretty similar with men. That’s been my experience navigating the world through heterosexuality and navigating the world through homosexuality. A lot of people expect what they see in porn to be recreated in person, though that’s rarely explicitly verbalized. Even in relationships, I think the ideas people have gotten from porn have shaped people. Not expecting me to have an emotional anything, really. I can’t see a better candidate for what has shaped this other than porn.
That’s heartbreaking. It’s also illuminating, if not surprising, to think that what lies on the flip side of the “aggressive” stereotype is a total denial of someone’s emotional reality.
It’s not that I don’t want to be dominant sometimes. It’s just that that’s not how I always want to have sex. The expectation is that that’s where my preference has to begin and end whereas I’m like, Well, sometimes I want to be thrown around too. Being boxed in like that pretty much ended one of my earlier relationships. I’d initially accepted how fixed his views of me were, and it transferred outside of the bedroom, where he didn’t expect me to have feelings. It made me feel like a piece of meat. I’m a whole person! He wasn’t a bad person, it was just a bad fit.
Have you felt in the past like you’re being fetishized?
Definitely. There have been times where I’ve been talking to a white guy on an app and they’ve used the N-word. People have asked me if I’m into race play. There’ve been times where I’ve felt ignored. Obviously it’d be problematic to demand I get a response from everybody, but my experience and the experience of other friends of color who have navigated apps is one of being second-class citizens in that context.
For dating, or for sex as well?
I find there are more people who want to have sex with me than want to date me. For some people it can be about fulfilling a sexual fantasy, whether they say so or not, but it’s not meeting a potential partner. People are allowed not to be looking for anything serious, of course, but I’ve had the thing where someone’s not looking for something serious, so we just have sex, and then maybe a week or so later they’re in a committed, exclusive relationship with someone who looks like their sibling. I’m like, Okay, cool.
Are people ever vocal about the fact that you’re their sexual fantasy?
Oh, they’re not just vocal, they expect you to be grateful. I chatted with a guy on Tinder about it once. It was a debate more so than a conversation. It went on for hours until I realized it wasn’t my job to shift his understanding. Pouring energy into those debates is a trap for sure. If I’m just a thumbnail for someone, that person isn’t necessarily going to care about my comfort and safety during sex. So, not having certain conversations has implications for my welfare and health. I also have to remember that I’ve been watching porn for a really, really long time as well. What am I doing to people?
TWO
A queer person in their late forties. They live in Japan and are in a long-term relationship.
Is porn something you talk about with people around you?
Well, leading up to chatting with you, I went off in all kinds of directions thinking about it. I made a Venn diagram, I was all over it. One of the things that really interested me was a presumption that I’m part of a community that’s all about sex positivity and body positivity, where we happily and freely talk about various sexual things at the drop of a hat, nobody’s shy at all, et cetera. It’s not necessarily true. I’ve got these random memories of porn-related incidents or conversations in my various queer circles, and aside from those related to my partners, none of them feel really deep-down. So I was thinking, Maybe I don’t really have a relationship with porn, fuck, what kind of a queer am I? That sense of disconnect goes way back. When I graduated from university, all the cool lesbians went on a camping trip. They went in their cars up into the mountains, and for some reason I got to go with them. There was a hailstorm, it was really atmospheric. The cool liberal studies graduates were talking about sex, and one girl, whose cool mechanic girlfriend Dusty was right there with her, was saying, I just got Dusty to let me touch her perineum for the first time the other day, and everybody was having this conversation. I was there thinking, Ah, that sucks for Dusty. If she hadn’t had her perineum touched before, maybe she didn’t really want to talk about it either. There’s a coolness that doesn’t always go with checking everyone’s comfort level. I’ve seen that a lot over the years—people are happy to talk about sex while also not talking about it.
I often sense that when we’re talking about things that are hard to talk about initially, such as sex and porn and intimacy, that need to be “cool” can present a barrier. There’s an echo of the way people worry about political correctness in this pressure to be pro everything.
“Well, of course we’re fine with all of this”—that becomes a given. As you say, in most circles we haven’t really got the language. That’s why those sex toy videos I emailed you about are so great: “I’m just sitting here talking in a very normal salesperson voice with a little bit of extra softness about something I’m suggesting that you’ll really enjoy putting in your anus.” The disconnect that’s there is fantastic.
When you haven’t got a language around something, how do you go about developing one? At the start of this project, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about porn or masturbation. It was absent from my life.
From your spoken life.
Exactly, from my spoken life. The distance between the discourse and what’s actually going on is odd. When we’re forming a new language, does it have to be a kind of “fake it till you make it” thing? Do you and your current partner talk about porn?
My partner is just getting over a bout of the dreaded virus. It’s been really rough, and he went away for a while to quarantine. We’ve been talking on Skype like we did back when it was a long-distance relationship, when I was still in the sheep field. Yesterday I told him, I get to do the porn chat tomorrow, and I asked him what he would say his relationship is with porn. He said that, right now, the virus has killed his libido, he has no energy for anything. The idea of sexual things right now is still up there with, um, what was it? Chilies and caffeine: things he’s not quite ready for yet. Back in the day when I was in the countryside and he was here, we would read porn to each other. Send each other little videos of readings, or read to each other live until my laptop battery ran out in the horse box. I don’t remember what came first, but there were also wanking videos sent back and forth, on memory sticks. We had our own little poor-relation Pornhub going on. I’d forgotten about it until I was thinking, Let’s see, porn, porn, porn … oh yeah, there was all of that.
Actually, we made a little video, using the videos we’d sent back and forth to each other during that time, and sent it in for an online screening of pandemic porn. I don’t know if we made it in, because it was three o’clock in the morning here when it was playing in the UK and we couldn’t get the link to work. I’ll probably die not knowing. Or maybe someone will come up to me one day on the street and say, Oh my God, was that you in the sheep field?
Do you have any anxiety around that? I’m incapable of sending people videos or nudes or anything of me, because the idea of them getting out is terrifying in quite a nonspecific way. It’s not a particular scenario based in my head. It’s just a sense that I need to not do that for fear of … something.
With unknown fears, it’s not “what if this happens”—it’s “something could happen.” But, people on the street, maybe not so much. When I was living in the city a long time ago, whoring, often I’d be thinking, What if I’m walking down the street and one of my johns sees me and says hello? How funny would that be? How weird would that be? What if someone who’s only ever seen me naked sees me now? But that wouldn’t really be any different in terms from one of my clients at the English conversation company I work at now seeing me in my not-work clothes. There are so many ways in which that work—selling my full attention and all of my words for forty-minute sessions one after another—feels more distasteful and more dishonest than selling my body for money. I’m pretty sure I think that, anyway.
Obviously the way porn and misogyny and patriarchy interact is massively tangled and anything but unidirectional, but I do find myself wondering about how porn radiates outward, in terms of shaping sexual practices and the things that people—particularly men, I suppose—want to enact in the bedroom. In your experience of doing sex work, did you see that play out, or see things that were clearly from porn?
You can’t not go there, though. That’s the dark side, right? That’s the not sex-positive or person-positive side. The truly sinful side. I was only doing sex work for maybe four or five months. It wasn’t legal, I didn’t have a visa for it. It was how I was making a living, but it was also something I had chosen to do out of interest, something I wanted to know the experience of. When I thought about it in terms of temple priestesses, say, when I went all ancient Greece fantasy with it and was like, This thing that I’m doing and this service that I’m providing for this person is holy, and if I was with someone from whom I could get that sense of gratitude for the profundity of what was going on—because some people were like that, and that was amazing—that was pretty right on. Others were very clearly not like that—some people were doing things that they wanted to try out because they’d seen them on TV, and they weren’t nice things. Or they saw it that way. You can feel it. You can feel it in any situation when somebody is not seeing you as a human being. And that really sucks when you’re naked and you’re sucking their dick.
Did you have a sense before you got to the being naked and sucking their dick part—would you know which way the interaction was going to go?
There are probably a lot of people in the world who have better risk antennae than I do, but even I sometimes would walk into a room and think, Oh, this is going to be one of those. Sometimes I’d be wrong, and it would turn into something everybody could get something good out of. Other times it was just ugliness and abuse and it’s a real shame that that’s what people are capable of equating sex with. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the temple goddess strength to bring those people around. But how can anyone, really? All the ugliness is so deeply ingrained in us and so much of it is connected to not having a way to talk in a healthy way about it.
Do you think there was more ugliness because at that time you were in the bracket of sex worker in their heads? And therefore on the slut side of the slut/virgin dichotomy?
Absolutely. The commodification bit, right? If money is what I value and I can get it for money, then sure, the person doesn’t matter. That’s gross. Even if I was telling myself that it was just a job, the experience of commodification in sex work was still physical, it was going into my body, and there were unscheduled long, weepy baths on the bad days, soaking that stuff out. And that was without any of the truly bad stuff having happened. I don’t know how we fix porn, but it feels important.
It’s not just porn, though, is it? Porn has emerged from and plays into this enormous patriarchal capitalist system. And it’s so hard to imagine fixing just one part without fixing the thing in its entirety.
It’d be fine if we could fix everything.
THREE
A straight man in his early twenties. He is recently single.
Can you describe your current porn-watching habits?
It’s not something that’s set in stone. I probably watch it more in the morning than I do at night. I find that if I do it in the morning then I can just get on with my day. If I gave an estimate of how often, it varies on how I’m feeling, but say two to three times a week.
Would you ever masturbate without using porn?
I have done, but if porn’s available, then I’d probably use that. It’s more stimulating than my imagination. I’m fine with pictures, but if we’re talking videos, then these days I just use Pornhub.
What would you be watching on there? Do you go for the top-page stuff?
I’ll look through the top page first, and if there’s anything there that catches my eye, I’ll click on it. If I was going in looking and searching, I don’t search for anything too crazy, to be honest—maybe anal or orgies or something like that. Something maybe that I wouldn’t do in my own life. I don’t go out of my way too much. If there are things on the first page that aren’t too bad, I’ll watch them.
You said you tend to watch things that are things that you wouldn’t do in real life. Can you talk me through that?
Yeah, not as much with anal, because obviously I’ve done that quite a bit, but it’s not something that you do all the time. With orgies and threesomes and all that kind of vibe, it’s not that it’s taboo, but that it’s something that you don’t normally experience. So it’s living vicariously through that lens.
The full fantasy experience?
I don’t know if it’s my fantasy. I’d probably be down for a threesome, but with the orgies, I don’t think I’d actually want to do that in real life. It’s more that the chaos on screen of everything happening is quite stimulating. I wouldn’t choose to watch a porn of myself, basically, because I’ve got lived experience of that. Not that it wouldn’t necessarily be stimulating, but I think if you’re going to go to that effort, you watch something that you’re not going to do yourself.
Where do you stand on violence and rough sex—that whole aspect of porn?
Some people are into being a bit more rough, and I am as well, both watching and in my own life, but at the same time, there’s got to be limits to that. I’m not into people getting slapped in the face, or pinned down by the neck, or kicked. I get that maybe some people are, but to me that doesn’t seem enjoyable. A bit of choking and a bit of slapping is fine as long as both parties are in agreement. Whenever that is happening in real life, you talk about it first and have safe words so you know that that’s what you want. In regards to porn, even the taglines are worded in a way that fantasizes violence: “small white girl getting brutally destroyed” and stuff. I do think that porn has created a fantasized ideal in people’s heads about sex, and the physicality can bleed into people’s lives. If you’ve seen James Bond jump onto a fucking train in a film, you wouldn’t then think, I can go and do that. But with porn, even though it’s all scripted and specially cultivated in such a way that that’s what the end result is, people take it too literally, and I don’t agree with that.
How old were you when you first saw porn, and how did it happen?
My first experience of watching porn was when I was in first year, so I would’ve been about twelve. It was my dad who showed it to me. He was in this group chat and one of his pals had sent these two videos. One was just normal sex and the other was called “Super Squirter”—you can guess what happened in that. They were both short—one was maybe two minutes and the other thirty or forty seconds. He showed me them on his phone, and I was like, This is great shit, so I asked him to send them to me. Then I took them into school, showed all my pals. From there I just started searching myself—the thing with my dad is the part I vividly remember. As much as I probably wouldn’t send porn to my kids, I also think that when you do that, it opens up a dialogue. It makes a difference when you’re able to talk about the same things and you laugh and enjoy it.
Regardless of the kind of relationship you are in and how good the sex is, would you continue to use porn on the side?
It’s totally separate. It’s a means to an end, almost. Masturbating lets off steam. It’s not as if I’m choosing to not speak to you in order to go and do this. It’s when nobody’s around. But moderation’s a big thing. If I were doing it every day and it became not so much a habit as an addiction, then that’s dangerous.
Has the moderation come naturally, or is it something that you’ve achieved?
When I was younger, when I first started getting into it and falling down the rabbit hole, I was masturbating a few times a day for the full week, just thinking, Oh my God, this is amazing. Once I started having sex, though, the realization came that it’s a really different ball game. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, when I started having sex and understanding more what sex actually is and what’s involved, my porn usage really died down. It became more like I’m describing it now—a wee external thing for yourself. I would hate to rely on it. I’d hate it to be an end in and of itself, to think it’s better than the real thing. Maybe the first few times you have sex, it probably is. But then that brings up the question, How can I have better sex? That’s more of a task, it’s more interesting.
Do you feel that porn has helped you to know what you like in bed, and to talk about it with people?
I don’t want to give it the credit but I’m going to say yeah, I do think so. If anything, it gives you the language to explain and verbalize things. You see things in videos that make you think, That seems quite interesting, maybe I’d like that. It all comes down to doing it, but porn did help in giving me the vocabulary to be able to express it. Take how vocal people are in porn. I can’t speak for all guys, but I know that there are quite a lot of girls that aren’t that vocal in real life. I’m not talking about screaming in my ears, but just something, anything at all. That’s what gets people off sometimes, that’s what people really like. Even just moaning in somebody’s ear can go a long way. Let’s say you do see something and think, That looks good, I’d like to try that, I have the vocabulary to express that, you’ve still got to approach it with the understanding that, one, your partner’s got to be into it, and two, that it’s not going to be what you’ve seen on-screen. Even talking about it is difficult, especially when you’re younger and you’re just starting out. When I was younger, I was in bed with girls who wouldn’t take their tops off because they felt insecure. You can even go as far as having sex with somebody, and there’s still that stigma, especially when you’re in your late teens. To be able to talk about things, you have to feel comfortable. Everyone wants to talk about things deep down, but they find it difficult. Especially if it’s a newer relationship or if you’re sober, people really struggle. If you’re in a committed relationship, it becomes second nature to discuss things. If you don’t then your sex is doomed anyway. The more you do it, the more comfortable you are with talking, and if you’re comfortable then other people are comfortable. That’s the main thing: having a really good space to speak and to be judgment-free and to be like, I want you to feel pleasure, the same way I feel pleasure.
Polly Barton is a translator and writer. Her nonfiction debut, Fifty Sounds, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize. This piece is adapted from Porn: An Oral History, which was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on March 16, 2023.
On Wednesday, Netflix released a new documentary looking at how Pornhub came to be and the controversies (and lawsuits) that ensued. Directed by Suzanne Hillinger, Money Shot: The Pornhub Story features interviews with both porn stars reliant on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans for income, as well as with the anti-trafficking activists who sought to stop the rampant exploitation, rape, and non-consensual imagery (including videos of minors) on the site.
The film begins with a cutesy complilation of porn stars sharing their first experiences with porn. A number of these stories are pre-internet, meaning they do sound quaint in comparison to what kids see now, at ever younger ages, online. We’re talking 80s Playboys and fairy tale-themed “erotic movies” on Cinemax. Even I found such things confusing and disturbing when I accidentally encountered them as a kid, but apparently people think this stuff is cute and kitschy nowadays — ah the fond childhood memories of adult sex. A young woman named Noelle Perdue, though, grew up in the internet age, and describes going onto Pornhub at 11 years old, where she discovered “an eight person geriatric gangbang” — more fitting of the modern day norm.
Perdue worked in the porn industry for a number of years — namely, she worked as a writer, producer, and talent acquirer at MindGeek. Despite this apparent conflict of interest, she served as a “consultant” on the Money Shot. Perdue appears not to be the only industry representative to have had input.
Though the documentary can claim to show “both sides,” the narrative is shaped by industry advocates disguised as “independent sex workers.” One interviewee, Asa Akira, is in fact Pornhub’s spokeperson and brand ambassador. The other porn performers interviewed may not literally have that job title, but are reliant on these kinds of sites for their income and are invested in ensuring their industry and the sites they profit from don’t get a bad rep or get shut down entirely.
While including industry voices in a documentary purporting to expose or at least delve into accusations of serious criminal activity and sexual exploitation is reasonable, allowing those invested in ensuring the industry is not shut down or that profit is not restricted in any way (say, by blocking consumers from using their credit cards on porn sites) to control the narrative is going to compromise the final result. No one working directly for Pornhub is going to admit the company and the industry as a whole profits from trafficking, exploitation, rape, and child porn.
Missing from the film are women who have left the porn industry, now free to tell the truth about their experiences; researchers who might offer data and insight into who goes into porn and why, mental health, STDs, and addiction in the industry; psychological or physical impacts on the women involved; and trafficking victims themselves. Even porn producers, as evidenced by Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot’s series, Beyond Fantasy (in particular, the third episode in the series, “Hardcore,” which drops March 23), can offer insight into the manipulation, coercion, and sadism behind the scenes claimed as “consensual,” provided you ask the right questions. The producers could have asked the “consenting sex workers” featured about their pasts and experiences — how and why they ended up in porn, and what’s happened to them in the industry — but they chose not to.
The primary voices featured in the documentary who offer a critical view of the industry are connected to the anti-trafficking groups going after PornHub — namely Exodus Cry (founded by Nolot) and NCOSE — who are dismissed as Christian fundamentalists with ulterior motives.
Like many debates, the porn debate is treated as two-sided: there are the “sex workers” fighting for the right to sell sex legally, free from “censorship” (the little guy), and then there are the moralistic, anti-sex, religious conservatives who wish to repress sexuality and are campaigning against the little guy’s freedom.
We are offered “choice” or “no choice.” “Freedom” or “North Korea.” Pro-sex or anti-sex.
But this is not the story. It’s not even a story. In truth, porn is a multi billion dollar industry that uses a few “happy hookers” as politically convenient representatives to speak on their behalf, disguising the dark truth behind the sex trade.
There are many reasons to oppose the sex industry — including impact on users’ brains, mental health, and relationships, as well as impact on the women and girls in porn — yet most the critical are framed as “hating women’s bodies,” “trying to control women’s sexualities,” or “ being prudish/anti-sex.” Dismissing critics as religious extremists is always popular, as it scares off liberals and progressives from engaging with anti-porn arguments. Including voices like mine — a free speech and civil liberties advocate who comes from a leftist and feminist background and is far from “anti-sex” — complicates the narrative. Broadening context to include women’s stories about their pasts and experiences in the industry disrupts the simplified “consenting adult” narrative. Talking about men’s choices to consume abusive and dehumanizing pornography, or porn that sexualizes “teens” or childern is almost always left out of the conversation.
The “let adults do what they like” almost always applies to women, except when framed as “policing people’s sexualities,” which implies a form of thought policing, but conveniently excludes the fact that porn is not relegated to people’s imaginations.
Industry advocates are sure to restrict the discussion of disturbing categories like “teen” to one of “consenting adults” who are free to imagine whatever they like. Perdue claims the “teen” category “doesn’t necessarily refer to teenagers,” and that “it’s more in reference to a body type” — a rather genius defense, because it ignores the fact that sexualizing minors and encouraging men to masturbate to their degradation creates a market for actual teen porn and encourages men to view teen girls as sexual objects.
Siri Dahl, a porn performer featured extensively throughout the film, seems only to be concerned about categories like “teen,” in terms of finding “solutions to tagging” that don’t “police people’s sexualities, which they’re allowed to have because they’re a legal adult.” In other words, it’s not the content itself, it’s that the “teen” category doesn’t sound great on paper. Unfortunately, Pornhub’s customers love it, so what can you do, eh?
Just to hammer in the point, the producers include another performer, Cherie Deville (playing a creepily stepfordesque character), saying:
“We’re providing entertainment within the legal bounds for consenting adults, and within that buffet of pornographic content, that adult, if they choose to consume it, can choose… anything.”
It all felt incredibly rehearsed, as though Pornhub lawyers have fed lines to these women. By carefully presenting performers as “independent, empowered sex workers,” the film’s producers construct a conversation about “free choice,” and are able to avoid the fact porn sells abuse, objectification, and exploitation, regardless of “consent.” And that within that “consent” — those contracts signed, what happens on set involves a hell of a lot of coercion.
When we talk about porn, we aren’t talking about independents — we are talking about a massive, multi-billion dollar industry. Shoving “independent sex workers” to the forefront to pretend as though holding Pornhub execs to account is really an attack on these empowered women, just trying to get by so–please-be-nice-and-stop-talking-about-trafficking-it’s-awkward-for-us is gross.
I don’t know if the makers of Money Shot were simply naive, or if they had biased intentions from the get go, but they buy into the manufactured David and Goliath narrative full force.
The intent behind Money Shot is to argue that porn is a clean, happy industry full of enthusiastically consenting women, and that the “dark side” — child porn, trafficking, and nonconsensual content — is completely separate from that and only a tiny minority of the industry (in fact, they claim it’s not a part of the industry at all) — an accident led by bad actors who are dragging the industry’s reputation down unfairly.
This is not the case. The happy hooker fantasy has always only represented a tiny minority of women, and usually doesn’t tell their whole story anyway. The few stories of exploitation and abuse that make it into the mainstream represent only a sliver. Indeed, even the so-called “consenting” women tell horrific tales once they are free to do so and able to reflect back honestly.
~~~
The documentary does of course acknowledge that a few bad things went down on Pornhub.
MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, was sued by numerous plaintiffs who accused them of distributing and profiting from child pornography and nonconsensual sex videos. The company was undoubtedly aware that this content was displayed on Pornhub, as numerous women and teen girls had emailed them, desperate to have their images removed from the site, but the company was not pressed to do anything about it. Nonconsensual videos would stay up for months after complaints were filed, and when they were removed, they would immediately pop up again on the site.
MindGeek claimed it “instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history,” but until the lawsuits had only 30 human moderators employed to monitor millions of videos on Pornhub and did not have any verification process in place for users uploading content. Even after a verification process was put into place (which women like DeVille and Perdue claimed “sex workers” were begging for, as it would resolve the problem of pesky rape videos popping up on the site), there was still no age or consent verification required for the women featured in the videos. Anyone with an ID could still upload what they liked.
~~~
In an article for Rolling Stone, a DeVille writes, “anti-sex-trafficking campaigns are anti-porn campaigns in disguise.” She complains that the “war on Pornhub is a proxy war to take down the entire legal sex work industry” and that “what they really want is to shut down Porn Valley.”
And honestly she’s right.
I don’t want to just stop child pornography or trafficking on Pornhub. I don’t want to just see Pornhub shut down on account of isolated incidences of rape and nonconsensual videos found on the site. I want to make it next to impossible to profit from pornography, because I want it to be next to impossible to profit from the exploitation, abuse, and dehumanization of women and girls. I don’t want to simply “take down” the “legal sex industry,” because of course much of what happens in the sex trade is not legal — I actually believe that the porn industry as a whole should be illegal. I do not think it should be legal to pay another person for sex or to profit by coercing another person to engage in sex acts.
Realistically, I don’t believe we can end porn or prostitution entirely. But we could make it impossible for companies like Pornhub to exist, make profiting from porn illegal, and ensure a porn set must comply with labour standards, including health and safety standards and laws against sexual harassment and assault, thereby rendering everything that happens on a porn set illegal.
One of the common threads throughout Money Shot was the one of the empowered independent performer, making her own content happily, from the comfort of her home, under attack by these attempts to go after trafficking and abuse in the industry. And while I feel very badly for women who feel dependent on porn for survival, I don’t feel bad for the women who could choose something else — who have the means, education, options, and privilege — but instead choose to shill for a vile industry responsible for the trauma of countless women and girls around the world. The idea that the horror of the industry should be accepted because one woman managed to buy a house with her earnings is not good enough for me.
Whether they intended to or not, the filmmakers did little more than produce propaganda for an industry that hardly needs a boost.
For further discussion of this film and the debate surrounding the industry, you can watch a conversation between Benji Nolot, Alix Aharon, and myself which aired live on YouTube Thursday, March 16th.
The post Money Shot’s big lie appeared first on Feminist Current.
When the economy went virtual during the coronavirus pandemic during 2020, so did sex. The combination of loneliness and financial anxiety created a boom for OnlyFans, the online platform where anyone can join to sell unique content (almost always sexual) to their “fans.” The Guardian reported that the number of OnlyFans users grew from 7.5 million users in November 2019 to a staggering 85 million in December 2020—which is an increase of more than 1000 percent.
But as the world has reopened, much of sex has stayed virtual. OnlyFans has continued to expand: TechJury, a software review company, reports that in 2023, “over 170 million users have registered an OnlyFans account, including 1.5 million creators.” This means that purchasable intimacy is scaling: never before has sex been more available for such low costs.
As the sex work industry grows, debates about it have intensified. Some proponents focus on decriminalizing sex work, arguing that it is a matter of life and death. Others focus on moral justifications, pointing to arguments about bodily autonomy, the extra income such work provides, and even the fulfilling nature of the work.
These defenses overlook intractable harms caused by a growing sex work market. Sex work takes advantage of underage women who easily bypass OnlyFans’ weakly enforced age restrictions, and low-income women desperate for quick cash. It also has a corrupting effect on human well-being and dignity, since it denies the fullest meaning and power of sex. And it impacts the broader culture, encouraging men and women to commodify one another.
The sex work industry’s barbarity is apparent in the ways it manages its clients. Last May, the New York Times magazine published a report by Ezra Marcus on the “The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans.” These e-pimps are exactly what they sound like: middlemen who serve as mediators between digital sex workers and their clients. E-pimps also manage communications between digital sex workers and their clients. They hire chatters, who are ghost writers for OnlyFans “creators.” Marcus writes: “These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos.” He continues:
The subscribers presumably think they’re talking directly to the woman in the videos, and it is the job of the chatter to convincingly manifest that illusion. Their clientele—typically horny, lonely men—make it pretty easy. “Our best customers come to us not so much to buy content as they come to us to just feel a connection,” reads a post on Think Expansion’s website. This desire, the post explains, is a pimp’s bread and butter, “e-” or otherwise: “Hustling simps has been an art since the beginning of time!”
In other words, pimps and their chatters use male loneliness as an opportunity to coax as much money out of clients as possible. Perhaps some people applaud this as an example of the unfettered market working its magic. There’s a demand for companionship, people are willing to provide it at market price, and product delivery is streamlining.
But these market defenses too often ignore the real nature of demand, and the ways outside circumstances shape it. Our demands are not always on equal footing with one another: some things tempt us even though we know, ultimately, we don’t want them. Desires conflict with each other. Most of the men paying for digital sex would probably prefer freely chosen, genuine companionship rather than flirting with men in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia posing as beautiful women. But when counterfeit intimacy is just one click away, it creates a demand for something that men might not really want, but that is born of desperation or even addiction.
Our demands are not always on equal footing with one another: some things tempt us even though we know, ultimately, we don’t want them.
Digital sex work, like pornography, is probably reinforcing incel status and even turning men into incels. The sex recession has been widely documented at this point. In an April 2022 New Yorker essay, Zoe Heller cited some striking data: “In a study released in 2020, nearly one in three men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four reported no sexual activity in the past year.” Many users on OnlyFans are weary from the hardcore violence of porn, and have turned to OnlyFans for something that more closely resembles the intimacy of a relationship. It’s not hard to see how men might opt for these e-girlfriends and might shrink away from relationships with flesh and blood women who, like any human being, have needs, opinions, and imperfections.
Scaled sex work, therefore, manipulates and exploits men, and distorts the broader sexual environment. But what about the women who are sex workers? Is it harmful to them, or is it an edgy but ultimately fun way to make money? Is it a necessary revenue stream for women who would otherwise be bereft of economic opportunity?
For many sex workers, their experience is not as glamorous as the industry’s defenders suggest. In an unintentionally revealing conversation, Reason Magazine asked a sex worker and data science researcher named Aella to “explain the class differences in types of sex work.” Aella responds:
I did a survey of a bunch of escorts and found that the amount of bad things they encountered, like sexual assault … was pretty strongly correlated with their price range. Basically, the more money you charge, you’re pricing yourself out of more sketchy clientele. The people who are going to be paying you $1,000 an hour are not going to sexually assault you. They’re a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or someone who just doesn’t want to mess with that.
Educated, attractive, and interesting sex workers like Aella can get away with charging high prices and dodging “sketchy” stuff like rape. Those at the top of the sex work food chain avoid much of the violence and harm those at the bottom experience. As a significant body of research indicates, there are disturbing links between sex work, porn, and human trafficking.
Even for online sex workers who are not trafficked into the industry, some turn to digital sex work out of economic desperation. Again, this might seem like a defense of sex work: it offers income to those who need it. But on OnlyFans, only a small percentage of “creators” are making a good income. Another 2021 New York Times magazine report noted that “90 percent of creators take home less than $12,000 a year.” In other words, the vast majority of women are getting just a few hundred dollars here and there.
Yet even if all these women were making enough money selling digital sex to live comfortably, selling and buying sex is discordant with human well-being. Unlike other actions we perform with our bodies, the ramifications of sex are not confined to the activity itself. Someone can sell their labor mowing a lawn, but they probably won’t stay up for nights wondering if they did anything wrong or embarrassing while cutting the grass, desperately hoping that the lawn’s owner loves them, or anxious that a baby will emerge. Even when pregnancy isn’t a concern, sex stirs our inner lives. The clichés are true: sex can be like a drug because, when not tempered by self-restraint and social norms, desire for it can control the rest of one’s life. It’s something that’s too sacred and powerful to be bought and sold.
“Buying” sex with culturally approved gestures is a mainstay of dating culture: two or maybe three dinner dates is the standard price of going to bed with a Tinder match.
The power of sex is apparent in the ways its ramifications extend beyond the two people who do it. This is no less true of paid sex: as the sex work industry grows and moves online, it encourages a transactional view of relationships in mainstream culture. To borrow an image that Unherd writer Mary Harrington has used, our attitudes about sex and sexual practices are part of a broader ecosystem. The mainstreaming of virtual sex work means that sex will become more and more commodified for everyone else. Thanks to the rise of “sexfluencers,” women who have no connection to sex work but have an online presence regularly get approached by men requesting sexual images. And “buying” sex with culturally approved gestures is a mainstay of dating culture: two or maybe three dinner dates is the standard price of going to bed with a Tinder match. Women in this environment must often choose between sleeping with a man they just met or being ghosted by him since he can easily find someone else who’s willing to put out. The more sex is for sale online, the more likely these trends will continue apace.
Some like sex advice columnist Dan Savage have argued that all relationships are transactional, even marriages; so sex work is actually not fundamentally different than any other sexual relationship. Yet the idea that all relationships are transactional and therefore morally equivalent relies on an overly hazy, expansive definition of “transaction.” It’s true that marriage is transactional insofar as it’s mutually beneficial and an exchange between two people. But what marriage exchanges is self-sacrifice and, if it’s working properly, it makes people grow in virtue. Exchanging sex for money, by contrast, gives the buyer a sense of ownership over the product (another’s body), and requires no sacrifice other than a dent in the wallet.
The more sex work scales, the easier it will be for men and women to see one another as commodities to be used and discarded—all the while dulling their natural longing for love and companionship. We should not only make every effort to remove sex work (digital or otherwise) from the market, but also to make it utterly unthinkable.
Last week, a scandal errupted after a male Twitch streamer known as Atrioc (Brandon Ewing) was caught watching AI-generated deepfake porn of two female Twitch streamers. The two streamers were understandably upset, with one of the women, Pokimane, tweeting, “Stop sexualising people without their consent. That’s it, that’s the tweet.”
stop sexualizing people without their consent.
that’s it, that’s the tweet.
— pokimane (@pokimanelol) January 31, 2023
The controversy lead people to the site selling the deepfakes, and AI-generated porn of other female Twitch streamers was also discovered. One woman, Sweet Anita, tweeted: “I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead… Don’t know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point.”
This story was how I found out that I'm on this website. I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead. Don't know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point. https://t.co/voNoxRyVBd
— Sweet Anita (@sweetanita) January 30, 2023
QTCinderella — another streamer who discovered deepfake porn of her was being sold on the site — appeared most distraught, streaming a reaction video where she says, through tears:
“Fuck the internet, fuck the constant exploitation and objectification of women — it’s exhausting… Fuck Atrioc for showing it to thousands of people. Fuck the people DMing me pictures of myself from that website. Fuck you all.
… This is what it looks like to feel violated. This is what it feels like to be taken advantage of, this is what it looks like to see yourself naked against your will being spread all over the internet.
… If you are not able to look at women who are not selling themselves, or benefitting off of being seen sexually — they’re not benefitting, they’re not selling it, they’re not platforming it themselves — if you are able to look at that, you are the problem. You see women as an object. You should not be ok doing that.”
Atrioc posted a tearful apology, explaining that this is not a “pattern of behaviour” and that “it was just one video.” It was at 2AM, he explained. His wife was out of town, and he was on Pornhub — “a regular-ass, normal website” — when he clicked on an ad that “was on every fucking video” for a “deepfake thing.” Atrioc was deeply upset with himself, as a man who “wants women on Twitch to feel safer,” insisting his behaviour was “disgusting,” adding, “I don’t support this stuff… I regret it, I would never do it again as long as I live.”
It’s clear why deepfake porn is disturbing — imagine discovering images of yourself engaged in degrading, humiliating, graphic acts, being viewed by thousands online, and you didn’t even do those things. You have no control over these images, you can’t take them down, and not only that, but some creep is making money off of this. It would be incredibly disorienting. Certainly it would feel like a violation. I get it. Probably most women get it.
Yet, the responses have been strange.
There are complaints about “objectification,” but tied only to lack of consent, and the fact that the women are not being compensated or “benefitting” from the porn.
In a podcast conversation including QTCinderella, Hasan Piker, one of Twitch’s most-watched streamers, Will Neff, and Mike Majlak, they discuss what happened, and hear QTCinderella explain how badly it impacted her, psychologically. The men engage in a 20 minute long discussion of porn and prostitution, which they view as innocuous, while condemning “objectification” and nonconsensual deepfakes as terrible.
Piker tells a story about having visited a megabrothel in Germany called Artemis, complaining that the internet has never let him forget that it was raided in 2016 on account of rampant exploitation and trafficking. He claims it was in fact raided on account of tax evasion, but this charge is connected to the exploitative structure of the brothel. Artemis designated the women working in the brothel as “self-employed,” though they were in fact “regular employees with set work hours, price rates and instructions to perform specific sexual acts.” Many lived in the brothel. Anywhere where there is prostitution there is trafficking and exploitation, and this is applicable to all of these German megabrothels. Indeed, a flat-rate brothel chain called “Pussy Club,” which saw 1,700 men lined up to get in on its opening day in 2009, was shut down a year later for human trafficking. Michael Beretin, manager of the famous Paradise brothel chain, was arrested in 2015 on suspicion of human trafficking, forced prostitution, and fraud.
Despite leftists claiming legalization will “keep women safe,” the truth is that this only creates more prostitution, which means more trafficking, more abuse, and more exploitation. Someone has to fill the brothels after all, and there simply are not enough women who volunteer. The women in the famous legal brothels of Germany are full of Roma women, trafficked from across Europe to fill demand. The Roma are among the poorest, most marginalized, most discriminated against, and most vulnerable women in all of Europe. They are, according to reports, “treated like animals.” In 2019, The Guardian reported that “the huge growth of the sex industry post-legalization has fuelled a rising demand for women.” Augsburg’s chief police inspector, Helmut Sporer, estimated that more than 90% of the women working in Germany’s sex trade come from south-east Europe and Africa, and that half are under 21. Any man who goes to one of these brothels is participating in exploitation and supporting the trafficking of women.
Piker, who has, according to Neff, “fucked a lot of porn stars,” continues to insist his fanaticism for the sex trade equates to “defending sex workers,” chalking criticisms up to the fact “America is very puritanical and patriarchal.”
When asked if he had ever paid for sex, Piker said, “I’ve gone to a brothel, Artemis, in Berlin, and had sex with the workers there. I don’t hide it. I don’t give a shit. Why would I?”
Sex work is work, after all. No shame, no stigma.
Thanks to the progressive push to normalize and “destigmatize” prostitution and pornography (rebranded “sex work”), men not only need feel no shame about paying women for sex, they can feel proud. They are helping these women. They are fighting the patriarchy!
In truth, the left has simply decided that payment equates to consent. They don’t ask questions about what got that woman there to that brothel or onto that porn set, who the money is going to, how she feels about the things men do to her in exchange for payment, and how that might impact her down the road. A clean conscience is what they desire, not ethics. Reality is replaced by cult-like mantras like, “sex work is work” and critical thought-ending statements about “consent.” Modern leftist clownworld ideology has gifted men who use porn or buy sex with the ability to see themselves as feminist heros, uplifting and empowering women every time they cum.
The entire conversation among Piker, Neff, and Majlak conveniently lacks any deeper thought about their platitudes. “Consent” allowed for a self-congratulatory circle-jerk, with a few first year gender studies jabs at “patriachies” and “puritans” thrown in, in exchange for reflection and genuine analysis.
Neff seemed baffled at his realization that once he met porn stars in real life, and engaged with them as regular human beings, he could no longer “jerk off” to them.
The obvious conclusion to anyone willing and able to make such connections is that pornography is about objectification, regardless of “consent” — the entire point is to treat and view the women in porn not as full human beings who have complicated and unsexy things like families, feelings, interests, and desires of their own, but as living sex dolls. Were these women actual full human beings to the men watching (women who would, in reality, may be very unlikeable, annoying, troubled, or insane, or who actually have sexual preferences outside being choked with a dick), it would break the fantasy.
Objectification has nothing to do with consent, it has to do with how the viewer sees (and consequently treats) the object. And, to be clear, this is not about “finding women attractive.” Of course men find women attractive. Which is great. But there’s a reason you don’t want to see your girlfriend or your sister getting gangbanged in “Step-dad and uncle fuck teen babysitter.” The women you know and love are human to you, and, alas, you care about their feelings and wellbeing, and want them to be treated with respect.
Majlak, who dated Lana Rhoades, Pornhub’s most-searched-for porn star (even after having left the industry after just eight months, saying porn should be banned), complained to his co-hosts that “PTA mom-esque” types online were picking on him for promoting porn stars in his content.
Piker helpfully defends Majlak, telling him, “Anti-sex work sentiment has always existed, it’s just you’re humanizing adult workers.” as if anyone has a problem with “humanizing” these women aside from men who jack off to them in porn. The problem isn’t that Majlak is “humanizing” women in porn, it’s that he’s promoting an industry that abuses and exploits women, and selling an idea of the porn industry as a fun and cool place for women. (Notably, to an audience largely made up of teenagers.)
He of all people should know better.
Rhoades went into porn at 19, having no idea what she was getting into, thinking she was following in the footsteps of the “glamorous and beautiful” Playmates she watched on The Girls Next Door. She didn’t know she was going to have to engage in sex acts at all, never mind with a string of strange men, pushed into scenes that would leave her traumatized (but that the white knights of Twitch would surely call “consensual”).
Rhoades explains, as numerous others have, that the entire industry and career of a porn star is based on pressure and coercion. In a 2021 interview, she tells Playboy:
“You could get into the industry and say, I would never do a gang bang and I would never do this. You know that getting into it. But [agents] say things to you over time to sort of—what would the word be?—groom you into doing more… They’ll say things like, ‘Oh, all the good sluts do this. That’s how people are going to love you. If you do this, you have to do this and that.’ You don’t want to let anyone down, so you end up doing it over time.”
Rhoades came from a traumatic background, and was further traumatized in porn, used, abused, and spat out, left with money, sure, but also panic attacks, anxiety, and zero sexual desire. After leaving the industry, she famously told the truth women in the industry are meant to hide, saying, “I don’t think it’s good for anybody. They should make it illegal.” She described feeling like she was performing “circus acts” and that the industry was “infested with drugs and alcohol abuse.”
Consent is a joke for the young women being coerced and bullied into doing evermore extreme stuff, moving out of their comfort zones before they even have a chance to process what’s happening, pressured to continue with scenes that are painful, violent, and/or traumatic, under threat of not getting paid, losing future jobs, and causing everyone on set to lose a day’s work if she can’t or won’t complete the scene. “Consent” truly flies out the window afterwards, as those videos and images remain online for eternity, regardless of whether she wants them there or not.
Rhoades called pornography “a life sentence,” saying, “I can’t hide from it and everywhere I go there’s someone who’s seen my films.”
While the woke men and women of Twitch offer condemnations and tearful apologies over AI deepfake porn, the real bodies of women whose lives have been destroyed by the sex industry are ignored on account of an analysis that ends with “consent.”
It has been interesting (and frustrating) watching the emotional and dramatic reactions to this scandal, as my view is that, while AI deepfake porn is indeed morally repungnant and signals a disturbing new frontier in porn culture, “regular porn” is worse. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of women and girls who are being abused, exploited, and traumatized, for profit, across the world, for the temporary pleasure of men who don’t give one single shit what happens to those women and girls after they cum.
There is nothing redeeming about this industry. It doesn’t matter who “chooses” or “consents” to what, because this isn’t just about either the individual watching or even the individual being watched. This is about a multi-billion industry that exists because women and girls are pushed past their limits, manipulated, taken advantage of, exploited, abused, and forced. It impacts all girls and women everywhere, as well as men, and their relationships with the women and girls around them.
QtCinderella herself seems to know this, having complained about “hot tub streams” that began appearing on Twitch back in 2021, explaining that when women on the platform are sharing sexualized, porny videos of themselves, it puts pressure on other female streamers to do the same:
“I’m sick of being harassed and being told to get naked in a hot tub because it’s late at night [and] when I’m just chatting, I’m surrounded by other girls in hot tubs so it’s expected of me to be in a hot tub. It’s exhausting. I just want to wear a hoodie and watch a YouTube video.”
This isn’t about just you, or even about just her. Porn is such a massive industry, and so massively normalized, consumed by countless people around the world, so deeply incorporated with everything we see and do — online, in ads, in pop culture, all over Instagram and Twitter — it’s wholly unavoidable. Kids today start looking at porn as early as 11, shaping their sexualities before they even know what sexuality is. Men expect their female partners to participate in the fantasies and acts they’ve seen played out on screen. Young women perform for men based on what they think those men want — based on what they’ve seen in porn, ignoring their own desires, pleasure, and emotional/psychological wellbeing. Men like Piker and his fellow pontificators like to claim only those who grew up in “puritanical and patriarchal” households objectify women, while they promote an industry that exists to profit from the objectification of women, growing their followings and profits in doing so.
Piker summarizes the entire analysis offered by the woke, telling QT Cinderella, “It’s because there’s no consent — you didn’t consent, it’s completely outside of your control, and that’s what the problem is, right?” But that’s not the whole problem. The problem is porn, and that men have been groomed by porn to believe any woman is up for grabs — we can and should all be pornifiable, hence the deepfakes. And none of this will be addressed so long “consent” is allowed to end the conversation.
The post ‘It’s because there’s no consent — that’s what the problem is’ appeared first on Feminist Current.
Porn and people’s relationship to porn has changed immensely since the advent of the internet — even more with platforms like OnlyFans and other social media apps that connect consumers directly with women.
Many view these tools as a means to empower women, arguing that this allows them freedom, independence, and the ability to make a lot of money. But is that really the case? To learn more about the realities behind platforms like OnlyFans and Chaturbate, I spoke with Alix Aharon, Co-Founder of Partners for Ethical Care (PEC), the Founder of the Gender Mapping Project, and a porn researcher.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Listen to this interview on the podcast.
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Meghan Murphy: We’re here today to talk about pornography and OnlyFans in particular — new technological advancements in the porn world, generally.
Can you first tell me a bit about yourself and your background? What’s your interest in this topic?
Alix Aharon: Around two years ago, I founded Partners for Ethical Care (PEC) with several other women who were concerned about the gender industry — especially with relation to children. I also founded the Gender Mapping Project, where we document exactly how many gender clinics there are across the world.
I’m someone that deeply cares about women’s rights and I’ve been following the pornography industry as it pertains to children for years, but the really interesting thing about OnlyFans is that I’ve actually had the chance to watch it blossom from absolutely nothing to having one million users. So I really feel like I’ve been a part of this OnlyFans explosion because I remember when they had 25 users and were just getting started.
As someone who cares about women and children and people, in general, OnlyFans deeply concerns me. I have innumerable concerns about this website, what they’re doing, and the effect it’s having on society. OnlyFans is terrible for men as well. People are engaging in extremely strange relationships online, which are incredibly damaging both emotionally and financially.
MM: Tell me a bit about how OnlyFans started — what did it begin as and what was the intent there?
AA: OnlyFans was founded by a guy called [Tim] Stokley. And what he wanted to do was to tap into the market of findom, which is a particular type of fetish where men like to pay to be humiliated and dominated online. So he founded a website called GlamWorship, where people could reach out to these glamorous porn models and essentially tip them and ask to be humiliated online.
When he closed that, he launched Customs4U, which made contracts between people to create custom pornography. So I could, you know, join and say to someone, “I’d like to see you with the American flag, and I’m gonna pay you seven bucks to do it.” So that was kind of like OnlyFans 1.0.
Customs4U ultimately failed because Stokley realized that people were able to go on to Twitter and Instagram and make there instead of making payments through his platform and websites. So he understood that in order to make this a successful venture, he needed to be able to control the money aspect.
OnlyFans was founded in 2016, and what you’re able to do there is to subscribe to somebody’s content. So I could subscribe to you for 20 dollars a month, or I could get into a type of relationship with you where I am sending you messages and asking for custom, videos.
Really, OnlyFans was born off the back of interest in seeing pictures of nude celebrities. Do you remember back in 2014 when Jennifer Lawrence had that nude picture leaked? It’s that type of culture — it’s the ability to see something taboo, that you don’t ordinarily see in regular life. OnlyFans has actually attracted an insane amount of well-known celebrities. People like Denise Richards.
Currently the number of users they have — people who are creating content — is one million users. One million people are creating pornography on OnlyFans. Crazy. And 90% of them are women. And there are 120 million buyers — people who are logged in to OnlyFans and buying content. Okay. This is an insane venture, and it’s a massive social experiment as well, right?
Typically, what would have happened in, say, the 1990s, is that if somebody wanted to see pornography, they would go to the video shop, rent it, go home, and be alone. But now people are getting into complicated, pathological relationships with their pornographer. It’s almost like a girlfriend experience with a virtual person online.
Now that OnlyFans has been around for a few years, we’re getting to the horror stories, that are coming from both men and women. I want to share one message I got about OnlyFans:
So, to gain subscribers Sarah promoted OnlyFans on her private Instagram. Some people made fun of her for joining the platform, while others thought she was brave. Sarah then went on to create an advertisement on a classified website, and a user got in touch and offered her 300 dollars to film hardcore porn with a male co-star.
The request went beyond Sarah’s boundaries, but because OnlyFans hadn’t been as lucrative as she had hoped, she reluctantly agreed. She asked a male friend to film with her and booked a motel, but when Sarah sent a preview of the video to the requester, he berated her for its quality and content, flatly refusing to pay.
Sarah says, “I was crying because I was tempted by the money. I regret being lured into this request.” She later sold the video to someone else for 50 dollars, but the whole ordeal was a strain in her mental health. Just after one month, she deactivated her account. I have so many stories exactly like this.
So that’s basically what’s going on in general with OnlyFans.
MM: It’s interesting because OnlyFans is defended by many as not exploitative. When I criticize porn, people will respond to me consistently and say, “But what about OnlyFans? Women are just making their own content. There’s no pimp. There’s no exploiter. There’s nobody pushing her to do things that she doesn’t want to do. She’s keeping all the money. How is that unethical?”
AA: First of all, uh, she’s not keeping all the money. OnlyFans gets 20 per cent of everything that she creates. So they operate as a kind of pseudo pimp.
PornHub was recently involved in a massivecase where they actually said that they were operating almost like RICO — like a massive criminal conspiracy with the credit card payment systems. What the judge said that Visa was complicit in child abuse, because they processed the payments of people viewing a 14-year-old girl being raped. Now, On OnlyFans, they are taking a cut of the content and they know a lot of the content is either illegal or exploitative.
You can search words on the site like DDLG, which is “daddy dom, little girl,” and things like “Lolita.” You also have girls who are clearly, you know, working for somebody in a basement, like an Andrew Tate type of situation.
When people talk about OnlyFans, they’re talking about the top one per cent who are making a ton of money — the Bella Thornes and the Tana Mongeaus — these people who are making serious money from OnlyFans, from selling nude photos. But the truth of the matter is that the average girl makes 176 dollars per month. And in order to do that, she has to do extreme acts — we’re talking things like drinking urine from a dog bowl — extreme things in order to be your own pornographer and to have a complicated pseudo relationship with people who are requesting to see things of you online.
It is utterly insane to say that OnlyFans empowers women in any way whatsoever. You’re joining a website where you think you’re going to make tons of money, you invest a lot in it, you create lots of content, and at the end of the day, what do you have? 176 dollars.
MM: I’ve noticed that men in particular are very impressed by the women who have managed to make tons of money on OnlyFans. Like they speak of it as this incredible achievement. They use this as a means to defend OnlyFans as a good thing and as empowering.
There was this one woman named Lana Rhoades and I read somewhere she has an estimated worth of something like 20 million. I was watching part of an interview she did. with Logan Paul and her then-boyfriend Mike Majlak, and she said something traumatic happened to her when she was a young teen. She didn’t go into detail about what happened…
AA: Well, her sister was schizophrenic and tried to hang herself as a child. So this is someone who has serious mental health issues. I mean, Lana Rhoade’s story is something that could bring anybody to tears.
MM: Can you tell me a bit more about that story? What I found really weird was the way these guys in this interview, and a lot of other men speak, about porn stars, which is that, you know, “She had this troubled past, but she really managed to pull through and look at how much money she makes now!” But that’s not how you get healthy. Having made a lot of money off of your trauma is not healing.
AA: Lana’s a really great example. I really support her because she’s now come out against the industry and she’s speaking fire truth about it. She came from a troubled past. Lana Rhoades is the still the number one star on PornHub. And she was 17, 18 years old, and was enamored by the girls of Playboy. She thought this was so amazing and that all you have to do is meet this guy and he’ll fly you out. She explained that when she arrived in Los Angeles, she did not comprehend that she was going to have to fuck guys and suck dick in order to make money. When she arrived in Los Angeles, she hadn’t processed what she was actually going to have to do.
Lana explained that the moment she arrived there, she felt like everybody was grabbing her and grooming her and forcing her to do more and more extreme things for money. There are videos of Lana being slapped, spat on, urinated on… I mean, this is horrible, hardcore stuff.
She’s come out now, after a year in the industry, and saying, “Listen, what happened to me was horrific. Porn should be banned. The industry is completely corrupt.” I mean, she’s now pretty much an abolitionist. And what is really completely and utterly sick is that YouTube stars like David Dobrik and Logan Paul and all these young podcasters and vloggers who are targeting the 10 to 18 markets on YouTube have interviewed Lana in depth about her past her stories. They promote her. I call it adult content for kids. It’s digestible porn information, which can be given easily to a 12 year old boy. Think about if you’re a mother and you’re allowing your child to watch Logan Paul’s channel, and he’s eight years old and they’re clowning around opening Pokemon cards, then two years later he’s discussing anal sex with a porn star on a podcast. I mean, this should actually be like a sex crime — to discuss these kinds of things essentially with children. And what was even more outrageous is that Logan Paul and Mike Majlak admitted that they received tons and tons of messages from children, saying they just watched Lana’s pornography.
It’s so disgusting. I don’t even particularly have the words for it.
MM: It’s so frustrating and disgusting. And so many men seem not to comprehend, or they stay ignorant intentionally so they can keep using porn and not feel bad about it. Or maybe they don’t get it because they’re men and not women, so they don’t fully understand that particular kind of trauma. I mean, most if not all women and girls in the sex industry have this background of sexual trauma, of molestation, of rape. And tied to that, mental health issues, addiction issues, etc. I truly don’t believe that women who are mentally and emotionally and psychologically healthy go into porn. I don’t think they sell sex. You know, I can’t imagine doing something like that. And I can’t comprehend the women who see it as normal and harmless, like, it’s no big deal. I would never — no matter how broke I was.
AA: The other outrageous thing about OnlyFans is it’s also a type of pyramid schem. If you sign somebody up with your affiliate link, you get five per cent of everything that they earn. So think about a pornographic pyramid scheme where you are enticed to invite your friends to create pornography for people online. I mean, this is so barefaced and gross.
Think about a person who goes out into the world to entice people to join OnlyFans and get a cut. It’s low key pimping.
MM: I’m sure you’ve heard of this woman named Aella, who is spoken about by many, kind of, “heterodox” men — men in that heterodox space, libertarian men, as a success story of OnlyFans. She broke records in terms of how much money she’s made on OnlyFans and speaks very publicly about how much she likes it and how great it is. And she’s also treated as this kind of intellectual by all these guys, which I think is strange because she’s not an intellectual, though I think she sees herself as intellectual, and I think because she believes that about herself, the men who talk to her also believe that about her. And I think they like the idea of this, like, smart chick doing porn. Like she’s not just some “stupid whore,” [to use the language of porn users]. Are you familiar with her?
AA: Yeah, absolutely. To be honest, here are many creators who are on, who are on only fans, who are not really creating pornography. Um, you know, they’re people who are making money from selling, you know, kind of lewd and nude pictures. When you’re talking about pornography or the sex industry, you always have one or two people who believe that they can speak for absolutely everybody. But we have the evidence here right in front of us: there are 385,000 instances of, uh, Skip the Games on OnlyFans, which is an escort site. So we have barefaced prostitution occurring on this website. That’s what we should be talking about.
We shouldn’t be talking about the women who are making a million bucks selling pictures of her butt. That’s not the the real hardcore issue here.
I really have an issue with these people who take checks from this industry, too. You’re taking a check from an industry that has 2000 instances of “daddy dom, little girl.” I mean, just think about yourself — think about why on earth you would want to get involved in that type of thing if you know that the people that cut your checks — OnlyFans — the people who facilitate your online pornography are also involved in some very illegal, scary things.
There are 219 instances of the word Lolita on OnlyFans. We’re talking pre-pubescent girls on this website.
MM: That’s a really good point. I don’t know how you can claim that what you’re doing is totally ethical has nothing to do with anyone but you, like, “I choose to do this. This is what I like to do. I’m making good money. Leave me alone.” When in fact you’re promoting this platform, this site, this company that is enormously exploitative and contributing to the harm of so many women and girls.
AA: It’s important also to mention that OnlyFanshas been investigated by the FBI — experts in sex trafficking. They said within 90 minutes of investigation on the website, they were able to find child pornography. Um, and the, the, the jury is absolutely out on the fact that OnlyFans doesn’t put good measures in place to verify age and consent. They are just an unbelievably passive hub for sexually explicit content and images.
They also confirmed that this is used by sex traffickers and other criminals, so it’s wild that anybody would say, “I’m a libertarian. I’m creating this, blah, blah, blah.” Well, okay, this is not a victimless crime.
And from the other side, there’s tons of men who are going on chat shows and talking about their addiction to sending money to camgirls and OnlyFans. This is wrecking the lives of men as well. It’s of course wrecking the lives of women, but it’s absolutely wrecking the lives of men as well, because instead of going out into the world and finding a partner and falling in love, you are DMing a porn star that you have a kind of a pseudo pathological relationship.
What I also thought was interesting with the whole Andrew Tate thing is that Andrew Tate admitted that a lot of the time he was the person that was speaking to the men via Chaturbate or OnlyFans.
It’s is kind of like that movie Her.
MM: It’s interesting because another defense of pornography and prostitution is, “Well, what are lonely men supposed to do?” You know, what are the lonely men who can’t find a girlfriend, who no women wanna sleep with supposed to do? They need a sexual outlet too. They talk about OnlyFans in that way too, and have also have begun to talk about AI porn these apps where you can chat to, like, an AI girlfriend.
To me it seems like a not very well thought through response because I think that what it actually does is it just makes these men lonelier. Because instead of being pushed to go out in the world and meet real people and find relationships — not even necessarily sexual relationships, just form relationships with other people, and to find real meaning in your life, to feel like you’re a part of a community, but also, potentially meet a partner — instead, they’re just at home on their, their laptops or their phones, exacerbating the problem.
AA: There’s a really interesting statistic I heard today, which was that 28 per cent of men between the ages of 18 and 30 reported having no sexual contact in the last 12 months.
People have started to call OnlyFans, “LonelyFans.” I think there’s a lot of shame connected to the men who are addicted to camgirls and OnlyFans. You see these men who are addicted to these platforms and they truly are the saddest people. Very lonely people with no self-esteem are paying $30,000 to a camgirl in Ukraine to talk to them. As much as I like really detest to these men, I also feel incredibly sorry for them as well. It’s a terrible existence for them as well. I find it quite a sad situation.
MM: Let’s talk a little bit about these new technologies. You mentioned something called Chaturbate, which I’d never heard of before. What’s that?
AA: Last year I was at a very large porn conference, just to see like what is the latest hype. And everybody was talking about, of course, OnlyFans and also Chaturbate. In the center of the conference they had maybe 30 or 40 people who were engaging in live cam work. So what people would create little rooms, and gather followers, and do things for tips. So imagine, I would say, you know, “Take a shot of whiskey and you get five dollars.”
This is a really popular website. And it’s an incredibly sad example of society, basically. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of viewers watching very strange content. I don’t even call this pornography. This is more like engaging in a pseudo relationship with somebody online who you are almost involved in a sexual relationship with. These relationships that people have with camgirls are unbelievably complicated. They get deep into their personal lives a lot of the time. Camgirls will say to guys in America, “Hey, I’m gonna come and live with you — send me $40,000 so I can come.”
What does this add to the world? Truly? I mean this is not erotica, this is not a celebration of the human body. This is really sad, sick, degeneracy. What does this bring to the world? What is Chaturbate doing? How are they contributing to society?
We also have to ask serious questions about what the effects of pornography are going to have on the next generation. You and I are around the same age. I’m 36, so the kind of people that I grew up with were not exposed to pornography from the age of 12. That really started in around 2000 — that’s when it really went mainstream. Of course it was always available in different places, but with the iPhone you could open up your phone and have instant access to pornography all the time.
This totally changes the way that people are interacting in sexual relationships. How many 25-year-old women do you know saying that their boyfriend wants to choke them, or their boyfriend wants to spit on them? This is something that comes entirely from pornography.
And when you speak to people that are over the age of like maybe 35, they just simply don’t understand how violent the industry is. They kind of imagine like their father’s Playboy from 90s and they’re like, “Oh, porn is fine, porn is great.” They don’t actually go on these sites and see what is happening.
Once you see what is happening, it’s very difficult to defend it.
MM: It’s interesting because at the same time, Gen Z and I guess probably some younger Millennials have normalized pornography to such an extent that they don’t seem to see violence as violence anymore. Even the “regular” porn — the stuff that’s not kink porn, or BDSM porn — that’s not considered to be extremely violent, but I find really disturbing, humiliating, degrading, and often violent. But that generation that grew up looking at porn from the time they were, you know, 12 years old, and seem to think that what they’re watching is harmless and fine.
AA: We know what the top five rated movies are at all times on PornHub, and we know who’s watching it because we have the credit card information. The porn industry knows exactly who’s watching and what they’re watching. We know that what people are consuming is the Gonzo porn. That’s always in the top five. And when we talk about Gonzo, we’re talking about things like “Latina abuse” and “ghetto gaggers,” where, you get women and you utterly humiliate them, spit on them, urinate on them. Just the most degrading shit you can ever particularly imagine.
There’s an entire segment called “facial abuse.” People talk about things like violence and mass shootings and racist attacks. Why does nobody ever say, maybe this is coming from pornography?
Can you imagine the mentality of somebody who is watching “ghetto gaggers” at night, and then the next day he’s going into school, and being a schoolteacher?
MM: Or a man who’s watching “barely legal” porn and then going to teach in a high school classroom the next day.
It’s baffling to me that anyone could believe or claim that watching “barely legal” porn, which is pornography where they choose women who look as young as they possibly can look — often women who really do look underage — and they’re made up and dressed up to appear as teenagers and sometimes children, and made to talk using a childlike voice.. And so many people defend this as harmless because they’re not literally underage. And it’s like, what do you think this is doing to that man’s brain and his fantasies and what he’s turned on by and what seems like normal desire or normal sex to him?
AA: The whole barely legal content is actually supposed to be completely illegal. You’re not supposed to depict porn performers as being younger than 18. But you see all the time girls who are dressed in pajamas with teddy bears, and they’re not meant to be 18-year-old girls. They’re actually depicting like nine year olds and 10 year olds. And this is an incredibly popular genre of pornography. I find that people who defend the porn industry don’t truly understand it — they don’t understand that it’s affecting basically every facet of our lives.
You cannot escape porn culture. We are totally and utterly immersed in porn culture. It’s in every billboard that we see, it’s in every advertisement for, you know, whiskey. I always say to people, you know, the same people that are filming pornography at night are the filming Disney during the day.
The porn industry is absolutely insidious. And if you really sit back and think about it — think about the way that porn is affecting the culture… It says to girls, basically at the age of 12: either you’re gonna be a sex object or you’re going to be utterly invisible.
Gail Dines, who I really, really respect, says, “You’re either fuckable or you’re invisible.” And that is the type of culture that porn has created.
MM: Right. It’s not as though the effects of porn are limited to only the individual watching or only the women who are in the porn video, which few want to think about or talk about. I try to have conversations online — on Twitter for example, which I’ve been doing a lot lately — about porn. And men compare it to drinking or drug use in that, you know, they’re like, “Well, you can’t criminalize every bad thing. You know, look at what happened during prohibition.” Which to me it just makes it clear that to them this is just a product that they’re consuming. And I’m always saying, “But alcohol isn’t people — those are real women that those things are happening to, and you have no idea what else is happening behind the scenes and you don’t know what her life is like and if she’smentally stable, which of course she’s probably not.”
AA: Basically every porn actress ends up coming out of the industry and seeing how utterly awful it was. We have Lana Rhodes, the number one porn star, saying that porn should be banned. Mia Khalifa basically says the same. Lana Rhoades was like the poster girl for the porn. Everybody loved her. They thought, you know, she is just this fresh faced, amazing person who loves to have sex. And she eventually admitted in an interview that she is like, almost not attracted to anybody. She does not want to have any relationship with anybody. And she describes herself basically as asexual.
So everybody — most porn stars — end up coming out of the industry and saying how terrible it was, how bad the agents were, how predatory the entire thing is, how traumatized they are from the experience.
And you know, when they say that, what’s really fucking sad is that they just get humiliated all over again. Lana Rhoades is a great example. She came out and started criticizing the industry and people were just hating her for it. They were saying basically, “You’re a stupid whore, you shouldn’t have done it.”
So the cycle of abuse to porn stars truly never ends.
MM: Do you think something like AI porn is more ethical? I think that people ask that question a lot. When women like us who, who are critical of the porn industry, talk about how abusive and exploitative it is and how many women in that industry are really seriously harmed, people will be like, “Okay, well then what about AI porn? What about sex robots or sex dolls? Wouldn’t that be better? Because men can then have this outlet and then no humans are harmed in the process.
AA: Right. I don’t know if you are familiar with the type of pornography called Hentai? It’s kind of anime porn. And it’s actually the most graphic and the most sick genre that’s out there because what you can do is you can depict, for example, somebody raping a baby. You can depict people having sex with animals. You can depict absolutely anything you want — the sickest fantasies, from the deepest, darkest, most disturbed person. That’s what people are watching in Hentai. And there’s no humans that are involved in that, that are getting hurt and great, but the massive damage that this pornography does is well documented.
It’s built to be an addiction. Think about it: you get the pornography and then you get a massive dopamine hit. That’s an incredibly powerful tool — you’re fusing a virtual experience with an incredibly physical experience.
I’ve seen sex robots. I touched a sex robot last year at a porn conference. It feels incredibly disgusting because these dolls are often incredibly small — almost like childlike. I’ve spoken quite a lot with John Uhler about the motivations of some of these people who have these dolls. It’s like LonelyFans. It’s sad and pathetic to have a relationship with an AI robot. It’s crazy. And then you get into things like hypno sissy porn, where you have people who are being trained to take hormones and imitate the opposite sex…
I feel that the people who defend the porn industry blindly are over the age of 40 and actually don’t watch pornography on a regular basis because when you speak to somebody who’s 22, 23, 24, they tell you the porn industry or the porn that they’re consuming is seriously affecting their lives because they’re seeing violent stuff. They’re engaging with it on a daily basis, whereas our generation isn’t engaging with it. We don’t particularly even know like what it is.
MM: I’m not sure if you followed this story — I read an article about it on Pirate Wires a couple of days ago — there was this big drama around Twitch, that weird app where people watch other people playing video games for some mysterious reason… What was this guy, Atrioc — a big Twitch streamer — was caught watching a deep fake AI porn. One of his tabs was open while he was streaming and somebody saw that he was watching AI deep fake porn of these two other female Twitch streamers. It was this big scandal and these women were really upset and seemed kind of traumatized by the whole thing.
I watched his apology and I watched a response/reaction video from one of the young women that was in this deep fake AI porn. She’s crying, she’s really upset. But all of the people involved in this drama defended what they called “regular porn.” So their criticism of what happened was, like, “I’s different if I’m being paid for this. It’s different if I consented to being objectified, But I’m being objectified against my will. I didn’t choose to become a sex worker.” And Atrioc’s defense was, you know, “I was just watching regular porn and then this ad popped up for this AI deep fake porn, so I clicked on it, but it’s not something I normally do. I really just like regular porn.” And I was like, are you all crazy? Yes, this is a terrible thing, but I don’t think it’s that much more terrible than just the regular porn that you’re watching.
AA: Well, I mean, obviously that’s a huge violation of your boundaries. It’s utterly unthinkable to create a deep fake of somebody performing pornography. And this is someone who didn’t consent in any way whatsoever. I hope people are starting to get quite serious around the issue of revenge porn. They’re starting to kind of pass laws about it, which I think is absolutely fantastic. And I’m not sure what’s gonna happen with the deep fake porn because people are going to start arguing that they own the content because they made the content. And I think it’s going to end up with a massive legal argument around this, because that’s what the porn industry does. Whenever the porn industry is faced with any kind of adversary, they get their big shot lawyers out to come and defend them and talk about how porn is speech and blah, blah, blah.
That’s their go-to. That’s what they do. That’s what Larry Flynt did. That’s what Penthouse did — say pornography is a form of speech and it’s protected. And I do love free speech, but I cannot get behind that idea that pornography is a type of speech.
I think it’s such a legal gotcha that in reality just doesn’t work.
MM: I’m also a big advocate for free speech, and I don’t see pornography as a form of speech in any way, shape, or form. I see it as a form of prostitution. And I don’t find that those arguments make any sense at all. If you’re saying words, you’re not literally doing something to another person’s body.
What do you think the future of porn is? Do you think that AI porn is something that’s going to take over and get really big, or are people always gonna want the human factor?
AA: The direction that I think that porn is going to go is the direction that OnlyFans is taking it in. People are going to have very complicated, intricate relationships with people online who are creating pornography for them. And I think that the threshold for pornography is going to get much higher.
That’s what generally happens when you speak to men who are addicted to porn. They say they started out on regular porn and then four or five weeks later they’re watching Latina abuse and all of the really horrific, terrible stuff. So I don’t think that AI porn is actually going to catch on.
What I think is really crazy is that Men’s Rights Activists aren’t coming out to protest what is happening to men through pornography. It kind of baffles me that they aren’t taking this issue as part of their fight because, you know, everybody is a victim in this whole thing. The men who are addicted and sad and spending all their money, and the women who are creating the porn who are abused and trafficked and all the rest of it.
I would love to see that — the men speaking up and saying, “We want better for our sons.”
MM: Yeah, I would too. And I think more men are doing it. While on one hand pornography is becoming more and more normalized, I’ve talked to a lot of men, my age, but also younger men too, who have of their own free will quit porn because they started to recognize the damage that it was doing to their lives. So I do feel hopeful about that and I feel hopeful that those men will talk to other men about what they were feeling and why they stopped.
AA: It’s interesting, when you speak to somebody who is defending porn, ask them, “Please share with me the last 10 videos that you watched.” They don’t want to share it with you. They don’t wanna tell you. It’s such utter bullshit when people come out and say, “Porn is wonderful.” Okay, so please post the last 10 videos that you watched on Twitter if that’s the way you feel. And they don’t do it. They never do. Because they’re ashamed.
MM: If it’s so fine, then why can’t we know what you were watching? Let’s see it. And if you won’t show us because you’re ashamed, why are you ashamed? Do you want to think about that? Why are you watching something that you feel ashamed to be watching. I don’t think there’s anything that I watch that I wouldn’t admit publicly to watching. I admit that I watched Keeping Up With The Kardashians the day a new episode comes out. It would be strange to be participating in something regularly that you feel so ashamed about participating in or consuming.
AA: Totally. I mean, there’s a massive amount of shame — the worst thing that can ever happen to a podcaster or a male celebrity is that he accidentally shares the wrong screen and people see what he was watching. It’s something that happens like over and over and over again — that these tabs end up being shown and these men are really embarrassed and apologetic. Even the ones that are big defenders are still utterly and completely ashamed of what they’re doing.
MM: Have you come up with any solutions to the porn problem in terms of what we do? When I speak critically about pornography or talk about trying to curb porn use people yell at me about banning things. And I don’t think it’s possible to ban porn, so I don’t think that’s a realistic conversation to have, but I do think it’s incredibly important that we try as hard as we can to curb production and consumption. What do you think a solution could be?
AA: I think we need to do the same thing that we did with cigarettes — this needs to come with a massive warning and people need to understand that this is very [harmful]. If you think about it, 60 years ago, everybody smoked. And today you don’t really know that many smokers. People aren’t smoking cigarettes anymore. And that’s not because cigarettes were banned. That’s not because people were forbidden from buying them. It’s because people learned, were educated, and as a society decided not to smoke.
I think that’s exactly the same thing that has to happen with pornography. People have to come to like a consciousness — an understanding through education — that this is a seriously damaging thing to engage with, just like cigarettes and, do it at your peril.
We also have to say as a society, like enough with the pornification of absolutely everything. Every time I turn on an advert for, you know, Schweppes or a type of vodka, there’s always some naked woman. I feel as a society we can do better.
We have to really hammer in the message that porn is really, really damaging. People are talking about a lot more. I think that’s is going to happen. I think that people are going to decide that this is not something that they want in their life. That we as a society will say, you know, 28 per cent of men between the ages of 18 and 30 are not having sex. Something’s going on here,
MM: Right. And do you actually want intimacy and to resolve your problem of loneliness and not being able to find a partner and how will you do that? I don’t think the solution is in porn or talking to AI sex bots.
Thank you so much for talking with me about this today. I really enjoyed this conversation.
AA: Me too. Look forward to speaking to you again.
The post Transcript: The truth about OnlyFans, with Alix Aharon appeared first on Feminist Current.
Porn and people’s relationships to porn has changed immensely since the advent of the internet — even moreso with apps like OnlyFans and other social media tools that connect consumers directly to women. Many argue these tools are a means to empower women — allowing them freedom, independence, and the ability to make a lot of money. But is that really the case?
To learn more about the realities behind platforms like OnlyFans, I spoke with Alix Aharon, Co-Founder of Partners for Ethical Care (PEC), the Founder of the Gender Mapping Project, and a porn researcher.
The post The truth about OnlyFans, with Alix Aharon appeared first on Feminist Current.
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