‘The story is really complicated’: inside the controversial world of Pornhub
A Netflix documentary aims to show all sides of a politicized battle between protecting and destroying a long-running porn site and its many workers
M oney Shot: The Pornhub Story, a new Netflix documentary on the biggest porn website in the world, opens with a simple question: do you remember the first porn you ever saw? The film’s older subjects (read: late millennial and above), including several adult film performers, recall bespoke, analog porn, illicit and enticing – movies of Mother Goose fairy tales given a raunchy twist, a neighbor’s video tape of women using a giant ice dildo, Playgirl and Playboy spreads.
Noelle Perdue, an internet porn historian and multimedia artist, harkens a shift. She was 11 the first time she watched porn, noodling around on Pornhub looking to be surprised and finding an “eight-person geriatric gang bang” – a sight which “did kinda set the tone for how extreme things could be on the internet”, she laughs.
Such is the conundrum of Pornhub, the gateway to adult content for many young people, a website so popular it’s basically synonymous with online porn in general. And, as such, a place that encapsulates both the potential and the peril of the internet – private exploration amid furtive data collection, boundless opportunity and information warped toward extremity, the freedom to view and post tied to the ability to steal, harass and abuse. “This issue of nonconsensual material on the internet – it’s not a Pornhub problem. It’s an internet problem,” Money Shot’s director, Suzanne Hillinger, told the Guardian.
