It is telling that Suzanne Hillinger, the filmmaker behind the new Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story first set out to tell a rather different story altogether. Originally entitled ‘The Future of Porn’ it soon narrowed its focus to Porn Hub, the world’s biggest porn site, with more visitors per month than Netflix itself. Because behind the online behemoth’s success was a gift of a story for any documentarian. It had it all: corporate greed, systemic failure, a horrifying dark secret and a worrying world of online censorship.
The documentary begins as an almost quaint look at the origins of porn in top shelf magazines and wobbly VHS tapes watched covertly at teenage sleepovers, before it becomes a wild unregulated world of online content where, crucially, anyone can upload anything. It is that last statement which becomes chilling when you consider the documentary’s main revelation, that a staggering number of real rape and sexual abuse videos have been uploaded to the site. Many of these involve children.
Hillinger’s film shows the efforts of those to end this; following activists like Laila Mickelwait whose campaign #traffickinghub began a multi-million signature strong petition to shut the site down, lawyers taking on the cases of young people desperate for videos of their abuse to be removed, and journalists like Pulitzer Prize winning Nicholas Kristof, whose 2020 New York Times piece ‘The Children of Pornhub’ became a viral sensation. The stories it uncovers are truly horrifying. A missing 15-year-old was only found when her mother was alerted to the fact videos of her sexual abuse were on the site, a 14-year-old who shared a naked photo of a classmate found on the site and a young woman who was sex trafficked from the age of nine by her adoptive parents features in countless videos. Now in her early twenties, she tells Kristoff that “Pornhub became my trafficker” and issues the disturbing statement that, all this time later, she knows people are “still masturbating” to her rape.
“If websites or companies or corporations or these large, powerful bad actors are profiting from this horrific exploitation of children, they should be held accountable,” Dani Pinter, a lawyer at the US based National Centre on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) tells me. It is an organisation which features prominently in the documentary and is currently mounting several civil cases against Pornhub.
The documentary shows that the response of Pornhub to these allegations is paltry at best, criminally negligent at worst, and this murky underbelly of the porn behemoth chimes horribly with several ‘revenge porn’ cases, like the recent case involving Stephen Bear and Georgia Harrison. Many victims find their videos posted online and, thanks to the site permitting downloads, removing them from the internet is like trying to keep water in a sieve.
But Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is a tale of two halves. It also shows the impact campaigning against the site had on the professionals within the industry. Following the virality of both the #traffickinghub campaign and the New York Times article, all credit card companies involved in processing payments for Model Hub, the part of Pornhub behind a paywall- and ironically, the only part of the site guaranteed to be populated with professional, verified, age appropriate performers - cut ties with the site. “Overnight I lost a huge chunk of my income,” says performer Siri Dahl. “That move dramatically reduced the pool of viable income and possibilities for sex workers.”
“I think that the company has become a scapegoat for the whole industry,” says Noelle Purdue, a porn producer and historian who used to work for Pornhub’s parent company, Mind Geek and who also appears on the film. “Unfortunately, I think I think the company made a lot of decisions that opened up opportunity for it to become that scapegoat.” It’s a diplomatic way of explaining the site’s colossal mishandling of these issues, but her main argument – that anti trafficking somehow became anti porn - hits at the heart of this documentary.
Siri Dahl and her fellow performer, Gwen Adora, (both of whom feature on the documentary) Zoom me on a Monday afternoon and are evidently exhausted by having to endlessly explain the obvious: that there is a difference between rape and porn. This is not a distinction made clear by many campaigners, whose work against the very real horrors creeping onto Pornhub became a crusade – consciously or otherwise - against porn itself. Meanwhile, their actions have perverse outcomes for those working in the industry.
Tougher restrictions on social media sites have meant it becomes increasingly impossible for Adora and Dahl to advertise their work, or even, in some instances, to just wear a low-cut top in gym selfies. “Sex workers are typically the first people to experience any type of censorship or discrimination en masse,” says Adora, defeatedly. “I guess we're the canary in a coal mine, especially because so many of us are queer or trans or people of colour and so we experience the brunt force of things because we're so silenced online.”
Both Dahl and Adora, not only took a financial hit after the New York Times article was published, but suffered trolling because of it. Indeed, a disturbing amount of the online (and offline) response to this, were death threats against porn stars and executives, with comments such as “save your daughter from becoming a whore” and “abolish sex work and trans rights.” There were also concerning mentions of IRL vigilantism against anyone who looked as though they may work in the industry. The campaigns mounted against the trafficking seen on the site, were done by groups with questionable backgrounds (one, Exodus Cry is mired in its own homophobic controversy) and this includes NCOSE, once called Morality in Media, which refers to porn as a ‘public health harm.’
Even just a very cursory look at NCOSE and Exodus Cry’s websites show worryingly that the line between sexual content and sexual abuse is being treated as if it is very fine, when it is, in fact, miles wide. Yet Pinter assures me, authentically, that she is not anti-porn at all. “I just want to see proper verification on these sites because I think the industry as a whole, and for those performers, would be improved by this being better regulated and safe,” she says. “It’s also improving the experience for the users- wouldn’t you want to know that what you are watching is not an actual scene of real abuse?”
The problem is, what underscores so much of this debate is that despite proclamations of sex positivity, our society is still underpinned by a puritanical view of sex. Because of this squeamishness about sex and porn, a truckload of nuance is lost. The inner workings of the industry are rarely explored and ‘porn’ is instead a byword for a seedy underbelly replete with abuse and illegal activity. A term which, quite literally, covers all manner of sins. This is largely because reportage about porn is all at a pearl-clutching distance, as though performers are exhibits at a zoo to be talked about but not to. Even documentaries (though interestingly not this one) treat porn stars as freakish, exotic creatures and their coverage feels as exploitative as many others claim porn itself is.
“We need to get past the sex work is bad, sex work promotes violence talk,” says Adora. “The general public are so stuck on issues that we in the industry have already dealt with. But you wouldn’t know that, because nobody wants to listen to sex workers. They want to ‘save us’ from porn instead.” Indeed, as we are talking, a news story drops about a UK inquiry which concluded all pornography should be treated as commercial sexual exploitation in law and policy. Zero sex workers were spoken to as part of this.
The inquiry serves as a neat echo of the campaigning seen in Money Shot, a film which manages to both expose the crimes of Pornhub, and force a reckoning with our own preconceived judgement of porn. The documentary’s original title may well have been apt. For what is the future of porn? It is hopefully an industry with vigilant regulation in order to prevent abuses and protect victims, but it is hopefully also one in which the lives, livelihoods and voices of sex workers are not forfeited in the process. Because we must remember that censorship is not the same as activism, and that sanitising the world is very different from saving it.
MoneyShot: The Pornhub Story is available on Netflix from March 15th.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qLjApqauqp2WtKLGyKecZ5ufY8Kse8Crq6KbnJp8rrvNnrCsoJ%2BperW0xGanqKqencKjedKtpquxXaOytbLLoq9mnJ%2BYwq6xza2Yq7E%3D