If most of your interaction with porn is typing in a few keywords and leaning back with your favourite lube, it might seem crazy to think that porn as we know it is under attack. After all, it's not like it isn’t accounting for a massive percentage of the Earth’s web traffic; porn isn't hiding anywhere.
But if you’re someone who makes a living in any way connected to the estimated $35 billion business of porn, you know that it’s more than an attack. This is an all-out war.
The great PornHub shift
Rewind back, just a touch. December 10, 2020. It was the first day of Hanukkah and also Human Rights Day. T Swift dropped her video for “willow.” And that was the fateful day that Visa and MasterCard suddenly announced that they were cutting all ties with PornHub and would no longer be processing payments. And on that day, all hell broke loose.
Some outlets reported it like it only affected Pornhub, the main target in the financial giant crosshairs, but it was bigger.
The strike was Pornhub’s parent company, Montreal-headquartered MindGeek, who owns:
- Pornhub
- RedTube
- Brazzers
- Reality Kings
- Wicked
- Adult
- YouPorn
- And the list goes on
They’re the largest adult entertainment operator in the world. And if you were someone who relied on porn to put food on the table and keep the lights on? You were officially fucked (and not in the good way).
Maybe you’re wondering what suddenly expedited this crusade against porn, particularly amid the quarantine aftermath when we’re historically more lonely and less sexed than any other time in recent history? Buckle up!
What led to this?
This latest freakout came on the heels of a New York Times opinion piece, The Children of Pornhub, by Nicholas Kristof. In it, he details legitimately damning accounts of Pornhub’s lack of attention to moderation and escalation efforts that allowed content of minors to remain and circulate on its platform. He identifies heartbreaking accounts of young women who’ve had their images uploaded to PornHub and cannot reliably find a solution to have their images removed.
This is a totally legit criticism, by the way. From all accounts, MindGeek sucks rocks at removing unwanted content in meaningful ways. Its laissez-faire approach to built-in privacy controls means that once a video is uploaded to a MindGeek aggregator, the site’s tools make it easy to disseminate, re-upload, and lose track of the uploaded content.
This has long been a beef with porn performers, especially indie/amateur performers, who use aggregator sites like MindGeek to drive traffic to their paid sites. If they lose control of their clips, they lose their traffic, aka their livelihoods.
Tellingly, these complaints by consensual performers don’t make an appearance in Kristof’s piece.
Kristof produces the Internet Watch Foundation’s claim that in three years of monitoring Pornhub, it found 118 instances of sexual abuse imagery involving minors. Which, let’s be VERY clear, is 118 instances too many.
But when compared with the 12.4 million images found by the same group on Facebook, the whole thing starts to smell weird. “And call me a prude,” he writes, “but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women.” Well, six days later, the credit card companies did just that.
So now here’s where it goes from Kristof’s article being slightly smear-scented coverage of Pornhub’s content moderation failures to something bigger. It turns out that this wasn’t a one-off piece. This was part of a campaign to eradicate the porn industry entirely.
The group Exodus Cry stated in their blog that one of their key members “spent the last few months in communication with Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times article’s author, to share her insight and knowledge about the ways in which Pornhub is both enabling and profiting from mass sexual crime. In fact, it was the successful petition and viral Traffickinghub video that initially made Nicholas aware of the issue. Many of you helped make this possible.”
If you’re not familiar with their work, Exodus Cry is an extreme evangelical group for such bangers as calling abortion a “modern-day Holocaust” and gay marriage “an unspeakable offence to God and His design.”
The group began in 2007 by anti-sex worker Benjamin Nolot as the group International House of Prayer, or IHOP, dedicated to “saving” women from sex work, stripping, and porn. They caused so much stink that the International House of Pancakes demanded a name change. I mean, imagine being so hateful a pancake sues you for defamation.
Despite a few feeble claims that they aren’t anti-sex-worker and aren’t necessarily advocating criminalization, their 2018 tax filings tell a different story in their mission statement about “abolishing sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry.” So, yeah, not exactly the impartial third party.
The Canadian government's involvement
Reaction to the New York Times piece was swift— you might remember the scrub in December 2020 that removed all unverified accounts and videos not uploaded by official content partners and verified uploaders. (Since the platform launch, any user could upload to PornHub with relative anonymity until then.)
As Samantha Cole at Vice points out from sex worker interviews, “Much of the content on Pornhub is free to view, but for many performers, Pornhub was a stable revenue stream. The platform’s verified Amateur Program, as well as the clip selling service Modelhub and ad revenue made on video uploads make up a constellation of ways performers can make money on Pornhub.”
This is where the Canadian government got involved after pressure to investigate. From the start, the hearing’s focus flopped around on the ethics of the allegations of MindGeek’s privacy protection failures to finger-wagging at the porn industry in general. As NDP MP Charlie Angus said, “We were not there to arbitrate the merits of naughty videos posted by consenting adults.”
These hearings were essential to what the future of legal porn in Canada could look like. Just look at the devastating effects of SESTA-FOSTA in the US: a bill package allegedly intended to help sex trafficking victims that wound up taking away sex worker and porn performer safety vetting tools.
During the hearings, when Canadian sex workers were fighting to be allowed to speak, and US anti-porn activists were welcomed, the real heroes of porn advocacy emerged.
Jennifer Clamen, the National Coordinator of the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform, talked about the real fear of a crackdown haunting many sex workers:
“It’s becoming increasingly hard to make money and sex workers are living increasingly in poverty….There are existing laws around privacy. There are existing laws around people who are under 18, whether or not that actually stands in line with our recommendations at the alliance. Existing laws can just be applied. Additional repressive measures are not what we recommend.”
Another is Sandra Welsey, the head of Stella, a Montreal-based non-profit organization by and for sex workers. She took a broader approach, detailing the needs of sex workers and performers to make an income, to expect reasonable privacy protections, and to be treated with dignity:
“As long as this government wants to eradicate sex workers, as this government is doing through the Criminal Code when it comes to sex work, violence will continue, and there will be no solutions to make it safer for anyone, for people who are there willingly and for people who have their videos put online against their consent.”
Let’s be honest: content aggregator sites can suck the living wages out of porn performers by feeding into consumer entitlement to access their work for free.
But it’s also the way that a lot of independent adult content creators cobble together a living; they offer limited free content on MindGeek sites to build name recognition and a fan base in hopes to drive traffic to clip sites, live streams, and their own independently run subscription platforms.
Especially when you consider the keyword crackdowns on non-adult social media like Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. This search-based censorship makes them nearly useless for drumming up a new fanbase, causing indie creators to rely more than ever on savvy usage MindGeek properties.
Sex workers need your support
In the meantime, porn performers rely on advocacy from groups like Stella, the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform, and international groups like the Adult Performance Artists Guild, the first-ever adult industry union.
As Parliament navigates the future of Canadian porn, these not-for-profits need your support more than ever.
Consider making a donation of time, materials, or just plain ol’ hard dollah dollah bills, y’all, to support the tireless work they’re doing for our porn workers.
