The concept of “cancel culture” has been a hot-button issue for a while now. People, such as the editor of Teen Vogue, have been fired for decade-old tweets, while others, such as a recent Bachelor contestant, have been called out for racially insensitive photos, and more. Some people think cancel culture goes too far at times; others think it’s just desserts. Either way, it’s clear we are in a cultural moment that levies strict public consequences for actions that are perceived as harmful.
Yet, one industry has avoided “cancellation” despite its overt misogyny and racism: the pornography industry.
For instance, a new study analyzed the titles shown to first-time users on the first pages of the top three pornography websites in the world — Pornhub, xHamster, and XVideos. The researchers analyzed 131,738 pornography titles, the largest research sample of online pornography titles ever collected.
And the results are horrific.
One in 8 videos on these sites was described as portraying sexual violence or nonconsensual sex, often including descriptions of the people in the videos being drugged, unconscious, or “very young.” And more than 5,000 videos overtly referenced sexual assault, “force,” or some physical aggression, even after excluding BDSM videos.
The study concluded that Pornhub, xHamster, and XVideos are “bombarding users with sexually violent material depicting rape, upskirting, and other abuse.”
Disturbingly, it’s essentially impossible to know how many of these videos are of real-life rape or abuse given the recent revelations of sex trafficking, rape, and child sexual abuse involved in materials on mainstream pornography sites including both Pornhub and XVideos. The New York Times, for example, covered the story of a young survivor of sex trafficking who had videos of her child sexual abuse uploaded to Pornhub, where they remained despite her pleas for their removal, causing trauma. As she hauntingly explained, “Pornhub became my trafficker.” During hearings in the Canadian Parliament over these issues, it was revealed that for more than 10 years, Pornhub illegally failed to report any instances of child sexual abuse materials, despite many complaints from survivors.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed against these sites over these issues, including several by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. One of the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Pornhub was 16 years old when she was drugged and raped by an adult man, who then uploaded the video to Pornhub through its official profit-sharing program. Pornhub reviewed, categorized, tagged, and shared these images of child rape, which got thousands of views. Another plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit was sex-trafficked at just 14 years old and eventually trafficked into the pornography industry while still a minor. She is suing XVideos for hosting and profiting from her child sexual abuse material.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, a recent content analysis found rampant racism in the pornography industry. The analysis of 1,741 randomly sampled pornography scenes on Pornhub and XVideos found that 50.8% of black women were targets of physical aggression, whereas 36% of white women were. Black men were more likely to be aggressive toward women than white men (47.3% vs. 35.3%) and were also less likely to portray intimacy or affection to their partners than white men (18% vs. 27.5%). It doesn’t take an academic to find racism on these pornography sites — with a few clicks, you can find white supremacist pornography depicting the abuse of a racial minority as a “slave.”
The question is, where is the public outcry?
Not only is the pornography industry systematically and intentionally portraying rape, incest, and racism, but it has also facilitated real-life child sexual abuse and other nonconsensual content.
Too many people are turning a blind eye to these problems because the pornography industry revolves around sex. Some don’t want to be criticized as “prudish,” while others don’t want to be challenged to think critically about their own pornography use.
But you can’t cancel someone over an insensitive joke from 10 years ago, then visit a website promoting white supremacist rape pornography and pat yourself on the back for being a good person. You can’t share a cute graphic about girl power on International Women’s Day, then ignore the plight of female survivors whose abuse is being profited from by the pornography industry and call yourself a feminist.
If we’re trying to build a society free from racism and sexual violence, we can no longer ignore this. It’s time that cancel culture came for the pornography industry.
Haley McNamara (@HaleyMcNamara) is the director of the United Kingdom-based International Centre on Sexual Exploitation (@TheICOSE) and vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).
