The Pornhub Scandal Shows How Rape Culture Has Been Monetised
By: Stark Raving
Tags: Rape Culture, Sexuality, Women, Sexual Assault, Equality

The Pornhub Scandal Shows How Rape Culture Has Been Monetised

Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

Videos of child sex abuse, rape, footage from spy cams, “revenge porn” are shockingly common on the world’s biggest porn site, PornHub, according to a report this week by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof in New York Times.

In his damning article, he recounts the struggle of Serena K. Fleite, who sent a naked video to a boy she had a crush on when she was 14. He shared it with friends, and someone posted it on PornHub. Her world imploded. Boys started demanding she send them videos and threatening to show her mum if she did not. She changed schools, but the rumours followed her and the harassment started again. In the end, she attempted suicide twice. Then she got hooked on meth and opioids, dropped out of school, and became homeless. To make money, at the age of 16, she started selling naked photos and videos of herself on Craigslist. “It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it’s crazy how it turns into something so much bigger …A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake,” she told Kristof.

Although Pornhub officially states that it had a “zero tolerance” policy towards child sexual abuse at is “unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community,” in reality, the site is infested with rape videos, including many with children involved. When Kristof searched for “underage” on the site, he found tens of thousands of videos. Not all of them show children, but some of them do. Pornhub was quick to disable this search term after Kristof’s article — now the search comes back with a message saying “sorry, no terms match your search”, and then thousands of videos of related search terms.

The porn site works like Youtube, allowing users to upload content — which Pornhub also makes money from. Moderators are supposed to scour the site for content that breaches the rules. Apparently, not enough. In certain cases, when child porn has been found on the site, those who posted it have been convicted. Yet so far, PornHub, even though it profits from the content, has evaded taking responsibility.

An article in OneZero argues that this is the natural life cycle of websites with user-generated traffic. Inevitably, someone will post something abhorrent, leading the platform to up its moderation capabilities — which PornHub has done already. Not only have they blocked certain search terms, but it was announced yesterday that major changes would be made to the site's rules. It will increase its moderation team, allow only verified accounts to upload content, and ban downloads. The question is why it took so long for the site to do so. PornHub is a giant. It is worth $2,830,000,000. In 2019, it counted 42 billion visitors, 6.83 million videos and a combined viewing time of 169 years. It could have cut into its profit margins and hired more moderators — if it actually cared about morals, and not just money.

It was no secret that such vile content was widely spread. There had already been many documented incidents. Earlier this year, BBC News told the story of Rose Kalemba, who was raped when she was 14 and then discovered that videos had been posted on PornHub, with titles like ‘teen crying and getting slapped around’, ‘teen getting destroyed’, ‘passed out teen’. One had over 400,000 views. She had to fight for months to get the video taken down.

In fact, anyone who has ever browsed PornHub has come across this sort of content. When you report it, nothing happens. The videos remain. That the site is rife with nonconsensual content is as much a secret as Harvey Weinstein’s systematic abuse of young women in Hollywood. Everyone knows about it. We just don’t seem ready to do anything about it.

What’s even more disconcerting is that often, it is genuinely hard to tell whether or not the content is consensual or not. It’s hard to tell if an actress is 14 or 18 in many videos, especially as producers seek out women that look extremely young. The fetishisation of children is completely normalised in porn — “teen” or “barely legal” categories are amongst the most popular of all. Violent treatment of the female protagonist is also extremely common in porn — making it really hard to tell whether some clips are scripted depictions of rough sex, or actual videos of rape and gangrapes.

The PornHub scandal in reality brings up not just one but two crucial issues. On the one hand, the cases of abhorrent content being monetised, victims being ignored when they ask for it to be removed and rarely receiving justice either for the abuse or the filming and broadcasting on it. On the other, the fact that porn so often depicts abuse that it becomes almost indistinguishable from the non-consensual content on the site. Both elements boil down to the same, worrying conclusion: the porn industry and porn websites are monetising abuse and rape culture, and making huge profits from it

That the content we jerk off to so closely resembles child porn and rape videos is extremely worrying. It’s important to remember that porn not only depicts our fantasies but also shapes them, especially since children begin watching it at ever-younger ages. Our minds are very malleable when we are young, we desire what we learn to desire, and if that is women with the bodies of children, and women being tortured and violated, that is what we will come to fantasise about.

Let me just say here that I am not saying this to demonise BDSM, which is a very different thing. Playing with the line between pleasure and pain is not intrinsically wrong. It’s just that often, porn today has kept the violence, with non of the disclaimers and precautions of BDSM culture.

In reality, the sado-maso community is a world where consent is valued perhaps even more than in ‘vanilla’ sex. Practising violence requires conversations about boundaries. Safe words are an established necessity, which free the participants from having to justify and explain themselves when they want to stop. None of these subtleties are portrayed in porn. All that is left is the mistreatment of — usually female — protagonists. When you search for “choking” on Pornhub, a related term is “she can’t breathe.”

My only hope, now, is that the New York Times report will be the final straw — that it will lead us to have a proper conversation around porn, and how it contributes to rape culture in many disturbing ways. But it seems more likely that PornHub’s new measures will be enough to quiet the critics, and things will go on as before: child porn and rape videos rife on porn sites, an open secret that brings shame to us all.