The gender case for investing and disrupting the digital pornography industry

In the digital age, its not surprising that 40% of boys in the UK between the age of 14 - 17 are watching porn regularly according the London School of Economics. What’s more chilling is that over 50% of children have access to a smartphone by age 11, and are simply one click away from browser based porn tube sites. 

Its estimated at the pornography market size is $97b, and porn tube sites have more views than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. I was surprised to find thousands of Twitter handles full of hard core porn, which is banned on Facebook and other social media sites. The accessibility is frightening, partly due to its scale, and like music or news websites, the content is offered for free with very little security.  I don’t see the pornography industry going away soon, but I think there is a case to not shy away from it, but actually turn towards it, re-imagine it and invest into this currently rotten genre of media. 

Gender activists, academic researchers, and civil society often scream foul of how under-regulated this industry is, and how easily accessible the free online content is to children. If kids aren’t accessing porn tube sites, or porn on social media, they are sharing it through messaging platforms like WhatsApp. It gets worse because men (and fathers) share such degrading sexual content between each other, meaning that there is a system and culture, which requires radical disruption. 

It’s already well documented that we cannot separate violence against women, from boys/men the watching pornography. However, in modern society, ALL pornography and erotic film-making gets generalised as degrading and abusive to women. This is understandable too, given that the industry is primarily controlled and produced by men, and the easiest content available within 1 click, is a vile form of aggressive, and free pornography. 

But the core problem I see here, is how else do our children access responsible sexual education that they are interested in? Kids in modern society are primarily accessing their education online, via school and their parents. In the US school system alone, children receive less than 2 days of sexual education in total. Awkward conversations with parents about ‘birds and bees’, and bland anatomical diagrams just won’t satisfy teenagers with raging sexual hormones who are experimenting, and often putting themselves in danger. We need a radical re-imagination of sex education and erotic film-making, which demonstrates connection, respect, love, responsibility and ultimately the evolutionary gift of life through sexuality. Sex has been made objectified and vile, and we need to show our children  (at scale) how sacred it and fulfilling it can be.     

But it gets worse. The people the pornography industry preys on, are mostly young, freshly out of high school, come from poor socio-economic backgrounds with little economic  opportunity, and/or high levels of student debt which they can’t afford to pay back. The lure of the industry is clear to the millions of young, poor adults leaving high school each year, with the largest and most profitable category of porn being ‘teen’ videos, who are performing for their first time. So, the choice is earning between $20-30k a year versus $80-200k as a young pornography star or what is termed a cam-cam girl (live web cams). 

It’s well known in developed countries that our economies over the last 15 years, are becoming feminized, as more women continue to participate in higher managerial levels of employment. My worry is that gender equality issues are often dealt with superficially, where we are not tackling root causes. Most of the gender based violence and gender equality initiatives attracting funding are aimed primarily at women (ie: the primary victim of the abuse). Although this is very important, as the vast quantum of philanthropic and public monies is spent there, we need to track backwards in my opinion to how young boys form their sexual behaviour, and manage their anger and violence. I see some of those root causes coming from the pornography industry, and society at large consuming this content, creating the market, with patriarchal, abusive and slimy men setting the global agenda on our children’s sexuality and how its formed.

This industry primarily caters to men, where over a third of all pornographic content is aggressive, and the majority is abusive towards women. It’s also one of the few legal industries left at its scale, where both aggression and racism is paid at higher values. Young, teenage white girls are paid premium to have sex with black men with large appendages, or perform in aggressive / abusive content (e.g. choking). To me, the opportunity to disrupt this industry is clear. Of course, the go-to place is the regulation of tech companies, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), browsers, social networks and content producers. But there is a far larger opportunity for positive impact to create new media channels and content creators accessible to young people, which demonstrate consensual, caring, responsible, and loving sexual interactions. Investments need to be made to create a new market with new incentives, and re-invigorate the erotic film genre with female producers and directors, creating content which is sexually empowering to women, and demonstrate healthy sexual relationships, which even break the traditional gender sexual norms. I don’t want to pretend for a second that many of these issues are complex, that there aren’t ethical actors in these markets and I have clear solutions. But I haven’t yet seen any Intelligent capital and movement at scale, given the size of websites like Pornhub, which are global content giants. The literature I have read are mostly academic, and those won’t be the disruptors in this sector. Social programmes tackling what’s tackling what feminists call ‘toxic masculinity’ is definitely shaping, and global projects like The Mankind Project have taken root. But once again, it’s not denting porn consumption patterns and the sheer content being generated in 2019 alone.

Given the proliferation of free content, and the low cost of home production with new sharing platforms like TikTok, I can only expect content production and distribution to increase. This corresponds with ‘amateur’ video searches being the highest keyword search in 2019. On a positive note, it seems that consumers are seemingly looking for more realistic depictions of sex than solely produced porn stars. A great insight into the porn industry and how it impacts every part of our society, especially online dating, is a humanizing documentary on Netflix called Turned On.

My short conclusion is that this sector is ripe for social entrepreneurs, investors with clever capital, who can take an ethical lens, and focus on investing into the pornography industry, with the purpose of reducing gender based violence over the long term. I personally think that social services in any town can’t keep up to the sheer volume of young teenagers being recruited into this profession. Additionally, as consumers of porn on these sites, there are no ethical standards (the fair-trade of pornography), to know that what they are watching contains fair pay, no abuse, grooming or coercion at any level. It’s time to lean into pornography, and change the narrative towards positive change, in new experimental ways.