This oped, written by our Director of Abolition Laila Mickelwait, was originally published here on the New York Post.
Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, has been under fire in recent months for featuring videos of sex-trafficking victims—including a 15-year-old victim from Florida, 118 confirmed cases of child abuse, as well as 22 women allegedly duped and coerced by Michael Pratt, owner of GirlsDoPorn, into performing sex acts on film that were subsequently monetized on a Pornhub partner channel (Pratt has been found civilly liable and now faces federal criminal charges).
Now add another blatant misdeed to the litany of the site’s misdeeds: While the rest of the country grapples with race and racism, Pornhub enables, monetizes and promotes content involving racism in its most extreme forms.
The sexualized hatred Pornhub dishes out as masturbation material should alarm a nation that otherwise claims to condemn bigotry.
Decent Americans mourned the unjust killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Yet for Pornhub, the tragedy supplied grist for masturbation. Recently approved and uploaded titles include “I Can’t Breathe,” posted by a verified user, with search tags that include “George Floyd” and “choke-out.” A for-profit partner channel on Pornhub called Black Patrol sexualizes police brutality against African-Americans with titles such as “White Cops Track Down and F–k Black Deadbeat Dad.”
Countless other titles on Pornhub feature variations on the N-word and “white master.” “Exploited black teens” and “black slave” are suggested search terms deliberately promoted by Pornhub to its users. If the titles repulse you, imagine what the videos do to the ever-younger eyes and minds that daily encounter hardcore, racist porn.
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“Exploited black teens” and “black slave” are suggested search terms deliberately promoted by Pornhub to its users.
African-Americans aren’t the only community denigrated for pleasure and profit on Pornhub. There are also loads of anti-Semitic content on the site. Pornhub had approved and monetized with ads videos with titles such as “Nazi Rick & Morty Have Sex at Auschwitz” and “Nazi F–k Camp” (involving “Jewish corpses”).
Wildly anti-Semitic videos such as these are uploaded by Pornhub verified users, accounts with usernames like “OvenBakedJew” and “Hitler the Jew-Slayer.” Many of these videos have remained on the site for months and years, with comments such as “Blacks, Jews and Muslims—bad seed!” and “Anne Frank was hiding, but I didn’t want to kill her, I just wanted to make a casting-couch Auschwitz edition!”
Pornhub places monetized ads all over these videos, comments and user accounts.
As Calev Myers, deputy president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, told me, “the violently aggressive nature of the anti-Semitic rhetoric on Pornhub dehumanizes the Jewish people and brutally assaults the memory of the Holocaust and all the people who were murdered in it. Those who allow these types of expressions to be broadcast publicly are essentially condoning the Holocaust and its horrors.”
The company insists it has an “extensive team” of moderators dedicated to viewing every video uploaded for illegal content. Yet a horrifying number of abuse videos have made it through, and the firm appears indifferent to racist content. Moderation or not, Pornhub is monetizing extreme forms of racism and anti-Semitism (not to mention videos of trafficking victims).
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The abject reality of Pornhub—it makes this content available for 115 million visitors daily and monetizes it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—should disturb anyone who cares about the rights of women and children to be free from exploitation and everyone who cares about equality and a society free from hatred.
America has made great strides in combating the exploitation of women and girls. We have also overcome historical slavery, legal apartheid and the horrors of anti-Semitism. This is to our credit. Yes, racism and anti-Semitism persist, but they are utterly banned from ethical society. And yet there is this underside to our society, where the same awful phenomena are promoted, broadcast, used for pleasure—and monetized for profit. That’s not progress.
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