Netflix’s Pornhub documentary is out to radicalize and weaponize porn fans

In those bygone days when you had to sit on a family computer in the living room in order to access the internet, teenagers watched documentaries like Netflix’s Money Shot: The Pornhub Story hoping to catch a glimpse of a world they could otherwise only access by stealing someone’s dad’s Playboy. (RIP HBO’s Real Sex, one of the premier providers of this type of content in the ’90s and ’00s.) But one of Pornhub’s big, epoch-shaking innovations was to make actual pornography available to anyone with a smartphone — no credit card required.

There’s a more graphic version of this story that could be told. At the beginning of Money Shot, a woman who’s worked in the porn industry for most of her adult life describes watching an “eight-person geriatric gangbang” the first time she ever fired up Pornhub. “That did set the tone for how extreme things could be on the internet,” she says.

Perhaps as a tacit acknowledgement that Netflix can never compete with actual Pornhub content, Money Shot leaves its analysis of the “gonzo” side of porn there. If this movie played in theaters, it’d be rated R for language and a little above-the-waist nudity. (Seriously, though, if you want to see people having unsimulated sex — much of it quite athletic — the site to check is right there in the name of the doc.) That allows director Suzanne Hillinger to focus on the thing that’s really driving the movie’s narrative story: feminist infighting.

Image: Netflix

It isn’t sexy, but it’s true. From the moment hardcore adult films stepped out of the shadows and into the zeitgeist in the “porno chic” era of the early 1970s, feminists have been entrenched in a bitter argument over whether pornography is a degrading act of misogynist violence, or a liberating path to sexual freedom. The debate ebbs and flows with the tides of public sentiment and generational backlash, but the opposing teams remain roughly the same decade after decade. And each side airs its grievances in Money Shot.

One group whose voices are rarely heard in this debate are those of sex workers who make their living producing X-rated content. Money Shot gives a group of (mostly) female sex workers — one male performer is interviewed, but he isn’t really a main character — the opportunity to defend their industry on camera. According to these women, websites like OnlyFans and Pornhub give them the opportunity to market their services directly to consumers, freeing them from the need for exploitative “producers” and “managers.”

But the passage of SESTA/FOSTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act/Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) in 2018 forced these performers back underground, as payment-processing companies like Mastercard pulled out (no pun intended) from Pornhub under pressure from anti-porn groups. SESTA/FOSTA was a triumph for the other side of this debate, made up of “anti-human trafficking” organizations who have freaked out countless women online with stories about zip ties, unmarked vans, and innocent girls seduced into a life of sin.

Money Shot takes the bold stance that claims of rampant CSAM (child sexual abuse material) on Pornhub are mostly bullshit, including stories of underage girls who were traumatized by having private videos uploaded to Pornhub without their consent. It also asserts that groups like NCOSE (the National Center on Sexual Exploitation — there are a lot of acronyms in this documentary) are using these kids to further a larger conservative Christian agenda. The anti- and pro-porn feminists featured in the doc do agree on one thing: that Pornhub should have required its posters to verify their age and identity in order to upload videos to the site long before it actually established that policy in 2020.

Image: Netflix

The fact that Pornhub remained a lawless tube site for so many years comes down to its parent company, MindGeek, which operates on the same kind of techno-libertarian arrogance that led to the SVB collapse dominating headlines this week. The shadowy men who run MindGeek have made their fortunes on the backs (and fronts) of sex workers. They’re also perfectly happy to let the performers take the fall, both financially and in terms of reputation, for the company’s laissez-faire attitude toward content moderation.

Money Shot doesn’t even entertain the idea that watching porn is bad for you, which seems fair, given the fact that most people do it at least sometimes — even those who won’t cop to it publicly — and that society doesn’t seem to be collapsing any faster than it would be otherwise. The film’s argument that tech bros and venture capitalists are accelerating societal demise by concentrating money and power in the hands of an unaccountable few, meanwhile, is more persuasive.

That’s Hillinger’s true agenda with Money Shot. It’s essentially a get-out-the-horny-vote exercise, trying to persuade the people who enjoy porn to throw their political support behind the people who make it. It’s titillation with a side of radicalization. And if any teenagers whose folks have installed parental controls on their computers do watch this documentary late at night with the volume turned down, they’ll learn more about workers seizing the means of production than they learn about sex — which is far more dangerous to the powers that be than any bare breasts or asses.

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is streaming on Netflix now.