Porn is ‘never going to go away’: Money Shot: The Pornhub Story looks at the naked truth behind sex work

A new documentary to be released on Netflix on 15 March, takes a thorough look at Pornhub and the backlash against it, featuring performers and sex workers who share legal, consensual content on the platform. Clémence Michallon reports

(Netflix)

If you were online in February 2020, you might remember a certain corner of the internet catching fire. That month marked the start of a campaign against Pornhub, accusing the site of disseminating illegal, non-consensual content. The movement, known as Traffickinghub, describes itself online as aiming to “[shut] down Pornhub and [hold] its executives accountable for enabling, distributing and profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking and criminal image based sexual abuse.”

The allegations were shocking. The individual stories they highlighted, distressing. One featured a woman who says she was raped at 14 years old, after which videos of the attack ended up on Pornhub. “I sent Pornhub begging emails,” she told the BBC in 2020. “I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.’” She says the videos were taken down after she threatened legal action, posing as a lawyer via email.

Traffickinghub went viral. In December 2020, a report in The New York Times by columnist Nicholas Kristof brought the topic to further mainstream awareness. An online petition launched at the same time as the campaign, calling for Pornhub to be taken offline entirely, has now received more than a million signatures.

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, a new documentary to be released on Netflix on 15 March, takes a thorough look at Pornhub and the backlash against it. It engages with the issue in a complex, nuanced manner, featuring voices that often seem to be missing in conversations about regulation in the porn industry: those of the performers and sex workers who share legal, consensual content on the platform, and depend on it to make a living.

Gwen Adora, an adult performer and content creator on platforms such as Pornhub and OnlyFans, witnessed the campaign gain traction with trepidation in 2020. “I feel for the people involved in that story,” she tells The Independent in an interview ahead of the documentary’s release, about people featured in abusive content, or whose content was shared on the website without their consent. “Telling their personal stories is a huge thing, especially about such a vulnerable topic.”

Adora worried about calls to moderate the industry more heavily, “which we as performers know does not work”, and which she says would “only harm other marginalized communities trying to exist and thrive online.” Siri Dahl, another performer featured in the documentary, explains in the film that without the stable income provided to her by the content-sharing platform OnlyFans, she might have to consider working with studios with whom she doesn’t have an established relationship, or whose on-set practices she doesn’t fully trust.

The virality of the Traffickinghub campaign also meant that the subjects of pornography and sex work were discussed on a broader scale than usual. Adora found herself “having to explain to people that it’s not completely black and white, and there’s a lot more nuance to the story.”

“It’s just tough to see your industry, something that you’re personally involved in, painted as something that is profiting off of and encouraging activities that are so dark,” she says. “It’s tough.”

Suzanne Hillinger, the director of Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, was first approached by Netflix about making a documentary about Pornhub in early 2021. She asked herself: “What are the unanswered questions? Who do I think are the missing voices in it?”

“I didn’t want to just do a film that was sort of the WeWork story of Pornhub,” she tells The Independent. (The corporate troubles of WeWork, the provider of coworking spaces, have been chronicled in multiple documentaries, books, and write-ups.) “I wanted to figure out what story was being missed.”

“I think that it’s really easy to tell a story that has really clear bad guys and really clear good guys, and the world does not work that way,” she adds. “... So I wanted to tell a really nuanced, gray story about sex workers grappling with the fact that in order to make a living online, they have to interface with these platforms that they don’t know if they can trust.”

This isn’t to say that Money Shot: The Pornhub Story goes easy on the titular website. It doesn’t. Pornhub falls under plenty of scrutiny; a particularly gripping sequence features a participant, contributing anonymously, stating they used to work as a moderator for the platform and describing what they say was a lack of means and capacity to vet videos properly.

“At the end of the day, these social media platforms [and] pornography platforms are there to make money and get clicks,” Hillinger says. “Are they doing what’s best to keep people safe? Is it even possible?”

MindGeek, the company behind Pornhub, told The Independent in a statement: “Any insinuation that we do not have enough moderators to thoroughly review all uploaded content is categorically false.”

The documentary also contextualizes the Traffickinghub campaign. Laila Mickelwait, one of the driving voices behind the movement, was previously a “director of abolition” at Exodus Cry, a faith-based organization that states on its website it “first began as a prayer meeting” and pursues the goal of “abolishing trafficking and commercial exploitation.”

“Exodus Cry uses ‘abolition’ in the sense used by anti–sex work groups, meaning the abolition of the sex trade, including prostitution and porn, by means of the criminal law,” Melissa Gira Grant, a journalist, author, and former sex worker whose writing has covered the industry extensively, wrote in The New Republic in December 2020.

From there, a question emerges: should the campaign to further regulate an industry really be driven by the same people who have advocated for its abolition?

Dahl says in the documentary that as a performer, she was “not pleased with Pornhub early on.” “Piracy was a massive issue” on the site, which let users upload the content of their choosing, even if they sometimes did not have rights to it. So Dahl’s first experiences with Pornhub consisted in “a game of Whack-A-Mole getting my stolen stuff taken down constantly.” There is a sense of frustration at the systematic association of pornography with exploitation when, as Dahl explains, pornography, when produced properly, is concerned with performers’ consent, boundaries, and bodily autonomy. That concern, in fact, is “one of [Dahl’s] favorite things about the industry.”

To Dahl, who says most of her work now comes from OnlyFans, the problem is not with Pornhub specifically, but with the internet at large. In a call with The Independent, she brings up Section 230, a piece of legislation that limits the liability of services such as Pornhub, which host content generated by third-party users. The Supreme Court recently heard two cases seeking to increase the responsibility of online platforms in some cases. That debate extends far beyond the realm of pornography, to video-sharing services such as YouTube and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Dahl finds the idea of Section 230 being gutted “terrifying.”

“I don’t think that people who aren’t sex workers or closely aligned with adult work and sex work online – civilians, as we like to call them – realize how catastrophic that would be for the entire internet,” she says. “It would very well be the end of my ability to make a living, if Section 230 were gone.” She mentions the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), previously known as Morality in Media, an organization founded in 1962 and described in 2014 by ThinkProgress as “perhaps the nation’s loudest voice against adult pornography”, “with a coalition that reads like a who’s who of conservative Christian organizations.”

“It’s really scary and incredibly frustrating to see groups like Exodus Cry and NCOSE pushing to make these changes [to the industry],” Dahl says. “They have to have an understanding of the sort of domino effect that that could cause across other parts of the internet. But they’re so focused on getting rid of all porn that it’s like, ‘Oh, well, the collateral damage, who cares?’ Which is not great.”

Dani Pinter, a senior legal counsel for NCOSE, is also interviewed in the documentary. During our phone call, Hillinger mentions “the work that [Pinter] is doing to represent” survivors of abuse, and describes her as a “really fantastic attorney.” “I think her role is complicated,” Hillinger adds, “because I think NCOSE is a complicated organization that she works under.”

Throughout the documentary, the industry and the stakes of the campaigns against it are broken down by multiple participants, including Noelle Perdue, a porn writer and producer. Perdue’s had a lot of practice explaining the industry to people who don’t participate in it. When I ask her how she might contextualize the anti-porn campaigning of the past few years, she says she tries to approach the task with “a lot of patience”, because those campaigns have “put a lot of thought and a lot of money into specifically targeting young, liberal people.”

“There was a noticeable rebrand that is discussed in the documentary, to pivot away from sort of conservative-leaning, older generations and towards this new generation of liberal or centrist people,” Perdue tells The Independent. “And they were really effective in that pivot, obviously.”

When trying to discuss those issues, Perdue might ask people to move away from generalizations (for example, “porn is bad”, or “porn is exploitative”), and “get them to define the words they’re using.”

She narrows it down until she and her conversation partner can “get on the same page and understand each other.”

“Oftentimes, it’s a very reasonable concern,” she says. “Maybe they read an article that said that people who worked in studio porn were exploited by their managers, and they no longer have the rights to their content or their image, and that was really traumatizing. And that’s something that I can address more reasonably, where I can say, ‘Absolutely. The exploitation of younger people by managers in the industry – that’s a real problem. And that’s actually something that the porn industry is addressing.’” She finds that people often lack enough knowledge of the industry to make specific criticisms, “so giving them that information allows them to participate in the conversation in a more effective way than generalizations do.”

MindGeek told The Independent in its statement that it “has zero tolerance for illegal material or the bad actors who attempt to upload it on the internet. Our policy is to immediately remove any content that is found to be in violation of our terms of service, and to review any material that is reported by users, with no questions asked.”

“No user can upload content to our platforms without uploading a government-issued ID that passes third-party verification,” MindGeek added. “Any user has the ability to disable a piece of content on our platforms by filling out the Content Removal Request Form, and our policy is to immediately and automatically disable the material for further review.”

It said “these policies are just a small part of MindGeek’s industry leading safeguards,” adding: “The fight against illegal material on the internet must be led by effective policies, data and facts, and MindGeek is committed to remaining at the forefront of this fight.”

Hillinger hopes people come away from the documentary understanding that “this is not a Pornhub problem, this is an internet problem.” She wants platforms hosting third-party content to invest more in moderation, “to make the internet a safe place for people using it however they want to use it, as long as it’s legal and consensual.” Moderation, she says, “is incredibly expensive to do right. You need a lot of moderators, not just computer-generated moderation. [You need] people with real skills, who are highly trained.”

She argues that porn is “never going to go away.”

“It’s always going to exist on the internet. And I think it needs to be recognized as a job that people pay for,” she adds. “These people can earn a living doing what they’re doing. They’re not deviants. It’s a job. They need to be treated and taken care of by the platforms who make money off of their backs, as a very, very valuable workforce.”

Dahl hopes that viewers understand that “sex workers are human beings” after watching and that “people will think a little harder after watching this documentary about maybe questioning the motives of groups that push for censorship of adult content.”

Adora hopes people leave “with an open mind to further listen to sex workers”, and “willing to trust us with our own industry.”

“I hope that people leave with a curiosity about the industry, and a feeling of responsibility to engage genuinely with an industry that in all likelihood they already engage with in the privacy of their own bedrooms,” Perdue says. “I would love it if people were more curious about pornography and about the porn industry beyond these kinds of moments of solitude.”