People love porn – it’s undeniable. Pornhub Insights said visits to the site totalled to 33.5 billion in 2018. Whether they’re single, in a committed relationship or anything in between, people are often drawn towards something that can in some way help them fulfil the fantasies inside their head. It’s not something to be ashamed of.
But when you’re browsing Pornhub or various other ‘tube-style’ sites, do you ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of your orgasm? The porn industry is constantly criticized for the maltreatment of its workers – women in particular. A lot of blame for this lies in the culture of ‘free porn’. You know the type, the porn you can find in one simple google search.
With the rise of free porn websites, making money off of porn is now harder than ever. This leads to creators producing porn and prioritizing quantity over quality, resulting in performers being coerced into filming more extreme mentally and physically harmful scenes in a bid to earn more money or because they are obliged to by their contracts. Accounts of this are all over the internet. This is no secret.
While a lot of this porn is filmed for sites that require members to pay a subscription, it is often pirated and shared on free sites for anybody to watch. These sites gather revenue from advertisements displayed alongside the stolen videos. Since most porn companies don’t have the money to sue the sites for the stolen content, this has become the norm.
A lot of people believe that watching free porn is more ethical than paying for it, simply because they aren’t contributing money to an industry that has been portrayed as so toxic. Another widely-held view is that paying for porn from porn companies is better seeing as the performers are better paid, assumed to be better treated and is obviously, produced at a higher standard.
But the problem with the porn industry doesn’t solely lie in the debate over paying for porn or watching it for free. It lies in the treatment of pornstars, the rate pornstars are paid for their work and the darkness hidden under the sexy, glitzy façade the industry tries to wear.
Fight the New Drug is a non-religious, non-legislative organization that intends to provide individuals with the opportunity to make informed decisions about pornography by providing them with personal accounts, statistics and facts.
Fight the New Drug say that about 22 percent of global human trafficking victims are trafficked for sex acts. They say that “nearly half of sex trafficking victims report that pornography was made of them while they were in bondage.”
The information about the toxicity of the porn industry creates a moral dilemma. If I’m contributing to the mistreatment of workers by watching porn, how can I watch it ethically?
One of the answers to this lies in online sex work. More and more in recent years, performers are joining websites in which they can create their content in the safety of their own homes and market it to whatever audience they want to. One of these websites is OnlyFans.
OnlyFans is a social media site that can be accessed online and on your mobile phone. On the website, creators can run a subscription content service in which their subscribers pay for content created exclusively for them.
Twitter user @hoochiemermaid from Dublin is one of many women who have begun marketing their adult content on the site.
“Truthfully I just started it for fun,” she said. “I had been told by so many people I should start one up! I was selling content already on a private message basis and I was also posting somewhat explicit photos already on my personal twitter, so the comfort level was already there and I figured – hey if I can make a few sheckles from it then why not!”
The concept of adult content creators on the website being their own employers means that they can create the content that they want to, whether it be just of themselves or videos with other people and they can decide when to turn the camera off, when they’ve had enough and what they’re comfortable doing.
In terms of safety, she feels it is a safe environment for users in some ways but still treads with caution.
“I feel like it’s safe from a financial and platform point of view, the site allows explicit content and thus makes money transfers and the like a lot safer (as opposed to PayPal) but there’s still that element of paranoia”
When you subscribe to someone’s OnlyFans account you can message them and comment on their content, similarly to other content-sharing sites.
“I pretty much always have subs messaging me, some just to applaud or compliment the content and others with suggestions,” she said.
She also admitted that a lot of subscribers straight up ask for sex or suggest hooking up with her for the sake of content which is not something she’s interested in doing at the moment.
But a world where people are paying for porn that has been created in a safe, consensual environment may not be on the cards anytime soon. In an Instagram poll asking “Would you pay for porn?” only nine per cent of voters said yes.
There was a slightly larger percentage on Twitter with 14 per cent of voters saying they would pay for pornographic content. Free porn websites, XVideos, XHamster and PornHub remain as the top three most visited porn websites
But it seems subscription-based sites that host adult content are still growing in popularity, regardless of whether people are willing to admit they subscribe to these channels.
In regards to this, hoochiemermaid feels strongly that her platform will only continue to grow and that creators will continue to benefit financially from sites that give them more control.
“If it isn’t OnlyFans it’s Patreon or one of the other host of adult content selling sites,” she said. “I mean there will always be that side of porn that isn’t great…but as a whole I think most people love and want to do things on their terms and to their own comfort, I really do think it’s going to be an industry changer.”