By Naomi Miles, Founder and Chair of CEASE
Every year, Pornhub releases their ‘Year in Review’ which outlines the latest viewing trends on its website. The report’s introduction advises its readers to “Revel in it! Share it with your friends! Have a toast and a laugh and most of all, enjoy yourself.”
Before we even get started on the specifics, the very premise of this review is revealing.
Firstly, it reminds us that pornography sites are an example par excellence of surveillance capitalism. Where pornography and particularly age verification for pornography is concerned, people seem to care a great deal about privacy and yet the irony is that every aspect of our pornography viewing is minutely scrutinized by faceless forces interested only in making money.
Secondly, this review reinforces the idea that pornography is just about giving us what we want, catering to the sexual tastes and preferences that are somehow just there. If this were the case, there wouldn’t be trends in pornography. As it is, our sexuality is not fixed and static. This means that it’s putty in the hands of the pornography industry which uses sophisticated algorithms to push us down the same kind of user paths as millions of others around the world. For the vast majority, the pornography industry creates rather than reflects innate sexual tastes.
This brings us onto the point that pornography is clearly not about sex. Without the emotional, relational and psychological dimensions, it doesn’t take long before watching the industrialized, highly artificial sex substitute becomes boring. To ensure we stay turned on, pornography must continually evolve to break more taboos and to become more egregious, outrageous, violent, extreme or even just new. Novelty is a must.
This helps to explain Pornhub’s 2023 report that genres relating to lesbians, older people (‘MILFs’) and larger people (‘big black women’) have been growing in popularity. Rather than a sign of its commitment to equality, diversity and inclusivity, this demonstrates how our sexual appetites, dulled by long-term exposure to pornography, have expanded to demand ever novel objects of lust.
The differences of human sexual orientation, size, shape and race are reduced to exotic new ‘flavours’ of commodified bodies whose entire value lies in being sexually used, abused and degraded. Yet these ‘flavours’ are not new; they are completely normalised and accepted genres of pornography.
The genuine ‘new’ genres reflect the growing place technology has in our lives. For example, there has been a startling increase in the search term ‘sex machines’ with searches for the term ‘android’ growing by +1,689%. This illustrates how pornography is fundamentally dehumanizing since human beings are interchangeable with machines for delivering sexual gratification. Not only is age, body shape, race and identity irrelevant, it doesn’t even matter if we’re flesh and blood.
AI-generated pornography sets even more unrealistic expectations, allowing for extreme, abusive, and physically impossible sexual behaviours to be depicted, shifting users’ perspectives of what normal sexual behaviours might look like and exposing viewers to deeply harmful and abusive content. Users can generate AI pornography that goes past the typical physical barriers limiting sexual interaction, generating content depicting extreme physical abuse, rape, or impossible sexual situations. Consistent exposure to these types of extreme acts may encourage viewers to adopt more harmful sexual attitudes.
Pornhub’s Year in Review may not deliver the promised ‘laughs’, but it is a call to action, a reminder of the reasons to keep fighting for a world free from sexual exploitation.