Porn is the theory and rape is the practice

Robin Morgan, the US feminist that coined this phrase in 1980, was right. So was Andrea Dworkin when she said "it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny.

News that PornHub, which is owned by a company called MindGeek has been bought by, wait for it, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP) is no surprise to those of us that follow the commercial trends in the sex trade. ‘Ethical’ is nowhere to be found in the porn trade, and most certainly not within a million miles of Pornhub. Word is that ECP was formed specifically to buy MindGeek in what has to be one of the most cynical whitewashing operations in the murky world of commercial sex.

Last year, MasterCard and Visa refused to process payments for MindGeek after a legal case against MindGeek raised questions over whether they could be facilitating child pornography by handling its cash. Victims of rape have taken legal cases against Pornhub. Despite this, MindGeek’s revenue in 2022 is estimated to be around £455 million.

Pornhub receives over 130 million visits every day. On 2021, MindGeek settled a legal case with 50 individuals for hosting non-consensual sexual videos, and was served class action lawsuits in Montreal, New York, and Alabama for underage sex trafficking, child porn, and rape.

There is no effective age verification mechanisms in place on the site. Pornhub has recently been compelled to block access to users in Mississippi, Virginia and Utah because these states have passed laws that require age verification to access porn sites.  But users simply bypass this with a VPN (virtual private network).

What on earth might force this hell site to close down? Selling to ECP is clearly a whitewashing exercise, and already MasterCard has partially lifted its boycott.

But nothing has changed. One of the most popular search terms of the moment on Pornhub is Hentai, a type of Japanese animation of child sexual abuse. The levels of sexual violence depicted in this genre are horrific. Were the things in these cartoons to happen in real life to children, they would be seriously hurt if not killed. Hentai draws in children to the site. It also attracts men that get sexual kicks from sexually abusing kids.

Gail Dines

Gail Dines, the scholar and feminist activist against pornography and director of Culture Reframed tells me that in her view, MindGeek wanted to offload Pornhub to ECP because of the various legal cases against it, as well as a powerful expose of its wrongdoing in the New York Times. “They have built the infrastructure of the online industry, control much of the traffic,” says Dines, “and many of the most lucrative tube sites. Any criminal proceedings against MindGeek is a threat to the entire porn industry.”

Andrea Dworkin

Three years ago I interviewed Rose Kalemba, who, as a 14-year-old was violently raped by two men. Another man filmed the attack, which was then uploaded to Pornhub. The videos were entitled Passed out Teen and Teen Getting Destroyed.

At the time I spoke to Rose, she was 26 years old and had been trying for sometime to get the film of her rape and degradation removed from the site. She was ignored. However, when she threatened them with legal action, having been offered support by a lawyer, all of a sudden the footage was removed. She told me how she felt ‘sick, devastated and degraded’ seeing the video titles trending on Pornhub as search terms.

The annual revenue from this industry has been estimated at $90 billion. To put that in context, the Hollywood film industry makes around $10 billion a year. Progressives who defend pornography often miss the fact that the porn trade profits from the real-life abuse and degradation of some of the most disenfranchised women and girls.

‘How can anyone defend Pornhub and claim to be a feminist?’ asks David Challen, a campaigner against male violence towards women and girls. “Why is violent pornography anything to do with freedom of speech,” asks Challen. “How is putting your hands over somebody’s mouth, or around their neck OK, with some even claiming it is feminism?”

Challen is right. If men really do care about the abuse and degradation that porn both depicts and promotes, they need to do two things: stop consuming it, and speak out, as loudly as possible, against Pornhub and the entire sex for sale industry.