5. Conclusions
Be the Porn You Want to See in the World
From the PornHub FAQ page on June 24th, 2008:
- "Ok, so what's this PornHub thing all about?
PornHub is a community of people who all have one thing in common, their love of great porn! On PornHub you can post your favorite videos, watch videos that other users have posted, meet other like-minded individuals and discuss what's great (or what you'd love to change) about porn from all eras.”
PornHub's apparent original dream has not panned out quite as one would have hoped--but I, like many, believe it still holds a lot of the potential signified in this statement. Internet porn sites can be meeting point of liberation where sexuality is debated, negotiated, & appreciated and they can provide fair compensation & protections for performers & users alike--but more people frankly need to start giving a damn.¹ PornHub should be like a sexier version of this Oxford debate between Fabian Thylmann an Dr. Finn MacKay (on the topic of sex work legalization in the U.K.)² where sexuality can be collaboratively enjoyed and owned without being viciously exploited by titans of tech industry. The power of pornography to both shape & reflect changing societal sexual discourse cannot be understated, and we should use it to empower those most disadvantaged by the current porn economy.³
But there are so many problems we need to address to get to that digital porn utopia. As we've seen, tagging & AI are a minefield, especially for trans performers, and algorithms reflect the same transphobic ideas as the humans that train & control them.⁴ Mindgeek & other porn giants operate as unregulated monopolies, making competition and regulation near impossible. Their size makes us debate access & quality, putting the burden of providing quality, healthy, diverse free content on those most vulnerable and least economically able to provide. And worst of all, the shady data dealings, cross-play of advertising tracking services from other large tech giants, and lack of digital likeness protections endangers the safety of all digital users. But as we've now seen, the public has a great deal of data available to work with, as long as we know where to look. Unfortunately, by exploring this data, it has only become more frighteningly apparent much power we've handed over to tech company's for the price of free porn.
But we have methods at our disposal to start untangling the data and to begin solving the problems of this porno-mess. First off we need to stop trying to morally judge porn and its consumption (porn leads to divorce, etc.), and start focusing on the well-being of the performers--stopping watch porn doesn't mean helping them. And stopping doesn't even mean saving your own data, given that even those who don't consume or create porn face the same privacy risks.
We need to pursue alternative data collection & encourage public oversight of all large tech platforms, PornHub & its network sites included. We need to require disclosure of selective access & data partnerships to understand what facts are being given to us by those studying the porn sphere. We have to seriously, legally protect digital likeness rights transnationally and create real avenues of recourse--takedown notices and slander suits are just not going to cut it digitally for most people. We need to break up tech monopolies like Mindgeek to make feasible economic room for smaller, more ethically-economical sites like ManyVids (owned by former cam-star Bella French) & OnlyFans and support performers moving into more management positions. And we need to put protections in place against the extensively researched coercise digital marketing techniques that can psychologically manipulate users into extreme consumption patterns.⁵ We should regulate minimum per-stream wages across the media-streaming space in order to help make sure ad-driven "free" content more equitably distributes profits between corporations and creators. You (yes, you there) need to start tracking your own consumption--even if you're using Tor or a VPN to block surveillance (although probably don't use PornHub's VPN). And lastly, I'd suggest we imagining more radical goals, like making anonymized porn data an international public health resource.
And while I highly doubt nationalized porn data will become a thing anytime soon (and the regulations on it would be incredibly difficult to maintain), I think it faces us towards larger goals of collaborative thinking with less privatized data. That being said, we're not getting there anytime soon, so we're going to have to work with private companies like PornHub for the time being to get data. Just instead of relying solely on them, we'll need to work together to corroborate and compare private data against as many sources and databases as possible.
And throughout all of this problem-solving, we have to be constantly concerned about harming performers with research and changes--because they are an incredibly vulnerable population that has become completely financially beholden to porn monopolies due to a lack of international government oversight on pay and media property licensing. The number one question I have for all this work is really: will this benefit performers? And if the answer is no--or even that it may harm them--I don't want to publish the work or push the ideas. Performers are simply at such a disadvantage to the overall economy of the porn industry that there is no excuse for researching just for the sake of it. Regulation in sex work is never a simple task, and it's critical always weigh decriminilzations versus legalization & regulations in regards to tangible improvements for those in sex work.⁶ Because of this, I've been beginning to interview & work with other performers more engaged in both the "amateur" and "professional" porn industry. I'm also beginning to work with digital sex-work researchers at the Harvard Law School, and have been diving further back into the economic hxstory of "Porn 1.0." This project must absolutely be empathy-driven in its pursuit of data and analyses--the people in these videos are very real human beings with very real lives. To many this may be a "fun" topic, but the consequences are intensely serious.
I believe that means that we should looking for better platforms & models—but also working off the concepts these platforms have developed. Making it possible for anyone to upload and to view for "free" is a huge part of the access, and having options inside that to both get ad revenue properly paid out to performers as well as promote paid purchases and subscriptions makes it possible to have an accessible and balanced platform. While it's uncomfortable to talk about, we need to be focusing on improving the porn sphere so that when young people inevitably find porn online, they're exposed to healthier things that promote safe sex practices, open dialogues of desire & consent, non-dysphoria inducing gender representations, and general respect.⁷ And we need to pursue regulation alongside performers & sex work industry professionals in order to avoid making things like "violent" BDSM play into the enemy, because kink play, at its finest, is exponentially more consent & safety driven than the vast majority of "non-violent" porn on the internet--but those outside the sphere can harmfully criticize it.⁸
Bigger than Porn
As I've said, we’re not simply talking about issues in porn here--we’re talking about larger issues of surveillance, privacy, economic exploitation, consent, body rights, sexual freedoms—porn is made to appear as an outlier, but it is operates under the same premises of any other digital media. And yet most research on the subject still treats it as a separate entity, instead of working together to tackle it alongside the big-tech issues faced by so many other vulnerable economies. In order to build a better porn market for producers and consumers alike, we need to produce bold new solutions that tackle the larger economic issues at play--and we need to do so with an empathetic focus. Or, we can do nothing, and non consensually transition into sexually manipulated drones of technocratic domination. Your choice, really.
- Steinbock, E. (2016, May 26). Look! But Also, Touch!: Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism from Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics: Desire, Affect, and Representation in Pornography. Punctum Books.
- Thylmann, F., & MacKay, F. (2015, June). This House Would Embrace Sex Work as a Career Choice. Debate: Oxford Union.
- Billard, T. J. (2018, November 21). (No) Shame in the Game: The Influence of Pornography Viewing on Attitudes Toward Transgender People. Communication Research Reports.
- Hern, A. (2019, September 26). TikTok's Local Moderation Guidelines Ban Pro-LGBT Content. The Guardian.
- Kielty, P. (2018, July 3). Desire by design: Pornography as Technology Industry. Taylor & Francis: Porn Studies.
- Garsd, J. (2019, March 22). Should Sex Work Be Decriminalized? Some Activists Say It's Time. NPR.
- Cusack, C. M., & Waranius, M. E. (2014, November 10). Nonconsensual Insemination and Pornography: The Relationship between Sex Roles, Sex Crimes, and 'STRT,' 'Gay,' and 'Shemale' Films on Youporn.Com. J Res Gender Studies.
- Illing, S. (2018, September 30). Proof that Americans are Lying About Their Sexual Desires. Vox.