How and Why Pornhub Has Increased the Risk of the Adult Entertainment Industry for Everyone.
7 months on from the headlines we ask, “were the card schemes’ processing suspensions enough to tackle the serious social issues which plague the adult industry? Can and should Payments, RegTech, FinTech and the adult entertainment industry itself be doing more?”
In the past, pornography was always thought of as a dark and seedy secret. Talked about in hushed tones and stashed away in secret magazines under mattresses. However, along came the 70’s and the sexual revolution. The younger generation began to be much more open about their sexuality and preferences. No longer were people as ashamed to admit what they liked and disliked. Perhaps the most impactful thing to come from this change in mindset, the thing that really shoved Pornography into the public eye, was Deep Throat. This movie was the turning point for the adult entertainment industry. It was the first porn movie to feature a real plot, character development and musical score, and was shown in actual movie theatres. It was an x-rated sensation that changed the industry forever.
Now, of course, porn is everywhere. TV shows and movies openly show sex scenes, social media is full of celebrities and influencers proving that sex sells, and there are advertisements for LoveHoney and viagra in mainstream media. However, with this level of openness comes vulnerability. Where there’s vulnerability, there’s always someone looking to exploit it.
The Beginning of PornHub.
Pornhub launched in 2007, and within seven months it was already reaching one million visits a day! Following the addition of the mobile app in 2008, it was ranked in the top 100 sites visited per day. The success of this new site caught the attention of Pornography kingpins Mindgeek, who officially bought the company in 2010 (adding to their already vast Pornography empire which includes RedTube, YouPorn and several production companies specialising in adult films.)
I think it’s safe to say that Pornhub has done a pretty good job of becoming a global name. Everyone’s familiar with the site, 130 million people visit every day (according to the stats they published in April 2021) and, at the time of writing this, they have a total of 807,000 subscribers.
What Makes Pornhub Different to Other Sites?
Unlike most other porn sites, ANYONE can upload videos to Pornhub. You don’t have to provide any sort of identification for yourself or the people involved in the video. You just click “upload” and within minutes it’s available to watch. You can even now simultaneously upload to Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn. Until recently you could also download videos straight from the site and, of course, the main attraction for viewers, it’s completely free.
While the free access might be a bonus for the average viewer, and being able to upload amateur videos could be good for someone looking to get a foot in the door of the industry, the lack of authentication of videos and participants opens up the gateway for many negative and outright horrific videos to be added to the site daily.
In 2018 a young girl was reported missing by her mother. It wasn’t until a year later that she was found and returned home after 58 sexually explicit videos of her were found online. She had been taken by Christopher Johnson Davie and another man, who continuously raped and forced her to perform sexual acts on them. When she was finally found, the girl told police everything about her horrific ordeal but Johnson denied ever having sex with the young girl. However, the multiple online videos, along with paperwork from an abortion clinic that was found at Johnson’s home, were enough to have him convicted on charges of lewd and lascivious battery. His bail was set at $75,000.
Similarly, in 2020 a former school and special needs teacher was sentenced to 7 years in prison after sexually abusing an underage family member and uploading the footage to the site.
The previous ability to download videos was a major contributing factor to a lot of issues. Thankfully, Pornhub removed this feature at the end of 2020. For many, however, it’s too little too late.
We all know how challenging it is to be young and always fighting to fit in, always comparing how you look to other people, always worrying about not experiencing things at the same speed that other people are. This seems to be especially difficult for the youth of today who are exposed to so much explicit content from such a young age. A 14-year-old girl from Bakersfield, California, was talked into sending nude videos of herself when she began dating a slightly older boy. Despite her reservations, she was flattered by the attention and finally agreed. The boy uploaded the video (plus others that he convinced her to send) to Pornhub and in next to no time the explicit videos had been viewed across her school. Her parent’s pleaded with Pornhub to remove the videos, unfortunately, so many people had already downloaded them that they were just continually reuploaded and were already shared to other sites.
Despite changing schools multiple times these videos have haunted her for the rest of her life. Due to the bullying she endured and the constant judgement from others she began to feel completely worthless. She developed a drug addiction, attempted suicide and turned to selling pictures/videos of herself on Craigslist to make ends meet. She was quoted in the New York Times as saying “I’m not worth anything anymore because everybody has already seen my body”.
Unfortunately, this is just one example out of millions. Pornhub’s complete lack of consent and age checks means that underage videos are continually uploaded. Yes, you can report videos on the site so that they are taken down, but by that point, they have already been shared to so many other sites. Also, Pornhub may have removed the option to download videos but there are easily available alternative apps allowing users to download content. Pornhub manages to escape the blame by claiming that they are not responsible for the sharing or monetising of their content.
Pornhub’s Claim to Fight Against Racism.
Racism is also a huge problem within the Porn industry. In 2020 Pornhub tweeted “Pornhub stands in solidarity against racism and social injustice” followed by links to help support the Black Lives Matter movement. However, this claim was immediately rebuked and Pornhub’s hypocrisy was brought to light. Despite their claims to fight against racism, there are hundreds of racially motivated videos on the site. Videos related to slavery, multiple videos promoting the idea of young back men being aggressive or black women being taken advantage of.
A report by Gail Dines and Robert Jenson found that “the official face of pornography is overwhelmingly white. However, alongside this genre, there exists more aggressive material in which women of colour appear more frequently.” There are so many videos that depict sexual violence being carried out against women of colour, and multiple videos showing black men carrying out violence.
Ex porn star Vanessa Belmond gave an interview about her experiences in the industry and stated that her boyfriend was “passed up many times because he was not dark enough, and because he was uncomfortable being rough with women and calling them racist names. He wasn’t good at playing into the ‘scary black man’ persona, so directors went for the guys that could.” Experiences like this as well as search options like “Submissive Asian” make it pretty clear that fighting against racism isn’t as high on Pornhub’s priority list as they would like you to believe.
Violence and Lack of Consent.
The lack of proof of consent is perhaps the most troubling aspect of Pornhub. Alongside the underage videos and racist stereotypes, there is an alarming amount of videos promoting violence against women and a staggering amount of videos showing sex with girls who are unconscious or sleeping. As discussed earlier, anyone can upload videos, and without any proof of consent to show that the girls in the videos are willing participants, there’s no guarantee that these aren’t real violent attacks and sexual assaults taking place on innocent victims.
There have been many studies looking into how viewing pornography affects you mentally. One of these studies, by Dr Elly Hanson of the PSHE Association, took a deep look at how pornography can influence young minds in particular. As we all know, young people are actively involved in social media. This means that they are also frequently exposed to sexual imagery from a very young age. Instagram, Tik Tok and Snapchat are filled with videos of models/influencers or even actual pornstars and, despite parental controls, Hanson’s study reported that within a month 44% of children aged between 9 and 16 had come across sexually explicit material. 16% of these children had seen videos involving actual sex, and 17% had seen videos of someone exposing their genitals.
With children being exposed to so much graphic sexual information before their rational mind is fully formed, and their hormones are at their peak, it’s not exactly surprising that seeing such content will mould the way they view sexual relationships. 35% of young girls admitted that they worry about how their bodies look because they’re comparing themselves to pornstars. Young people are growing up with unrealistic ideas of sex. They believe that they should be reenacting the over the top scenarios portrayed in porn, instead of focusing on the emotional connection or finding out what feels good for themselves and their partner. Studies have also shown that pornography promotes unsafe sex with its lack of focus on condom use and drug/alcohol abuse. Porn also emphasises sexual acts that many young and inexperienced people would be uncomfortable with but will try to mimic as they believe that what they are seeing is an accurate representation of real-life relationships.
A vast amount of pornography is aimed at male sexual gratification, with much less focus on female satisfaction. In fact, the most popular and easily accessible pornography often focuses on female humiliation and submissive behaviour; they are only there to satisfy the male. If this is the main source of sexual information that young boys have access to, research has shown that they can grow up believing that sex is based on physical aggression to women. 71% of women between the age of 17 and 21 agreed that in their experience porn makes males more aggressive towards them. Videos promoting male dominance; gagging, hair-pulling, degrading name-calling is something that young men are growing up to expect to experience in their sexual encounters, with little regard to their partner’s wants or needs. There is even strong evidence to show that pornography and sexually aggressive attitudes go hand in hand.
So How Can We Change This?
Major payments companies such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal blocked payments to Pornhub back in December 2020, and given that the only two payment methods available supported by the site today are SEPA and BitCoin, it looks like they’re sticking with it (despite Mastercard being the only one to declare the ban permanent). This is already a massive change in the right direction. However, Pornhub responded by saying they had made changes to their website policies (such as removing the download option) days before the bans were enforced, and that the punitive move by Card schemes “is incredibly damaging for the models who rely on the site to make a living.” The inability to pay the site using the most usual payment methods could absolutely impact a lot of legitimate models who rely on the site as their main source of income. However, this could all be avoided if PornHub had stricter measures in place to verify the identity of the people featured in the videos, and the people uploading them. This could help to ensure the safety and protection of everyone involved in the videos available on their site.
