01 - We Are the Perverts

Thousands of hours of porn are consumed globally every single minute, yet we still avoid the topic of porn in most conversations and social situations. This taboo leads to a lot of people feeling worried about their porn habits. How did we get here? In this episode, we find out just how much porn people are watching and society’s attitudes around it. We cover a brief history of porn, the impact of porn going online, and the significance of a pornographer in Prague calling us all perverts.

Featured Guests & Links:

Patricia Nilsson, reporter for the Financial Times and host of the podcast Hot Money: porn, power and profit.

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Porn Nerds is a co-production of Squirm and BOOM Integrated, the podcast division of GRAMMY-winning audiobook leader John Marshall Media. Huge thank yous to Adrien Glover, Uri Mansion, and the team at BOOM Integrated.

Squirm is an educational platform that helps people have productive and compassionate conversations on difficult topics related to sex and relationships. We do this through approachable, inclusive offerings, including games, events, workshops, and audio originals. A lot of sex advice ends with “talk about it.” That’s where ours begins.

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Transcript

Porn Nerds - Episode 01 – We Are the Perverts - Transcript

In case it wasn't obvious from the title, this show will feature adult themes and explicit language. Now that that's out of the way... 

Do you watch porn? Yes. How often? Twice a day, maybe. How do you feel about it? Not good. You kind of get the urge and you just do it, I guess. But I wish I didn't have it. It'd be great if I didn't. But it is what it is, I think. 

Welcome to Porn Nerds.

I'm Tess. I have a master's in sexuality and have worked with indie porn producers. And I'm Kels. I'm a director, producer, and daughter of a sex worker. In this series, we are going deep into the trenches of your incognito windows. Using a combination of research data and a crowdsourced collection of dirty details, we explore questions that would scandalize your conservative aunt.

So buckle up, babes, because this is Porn Nerds. 

Porn is a super thorny topic. Even though it's a global billion-dollar industry, and we've all watched it, and we all know people who watch it.

And at this point, it's like the biggest, horniest elephant in the room that people are watching tons of porn. We still don't really like to talk about it. To be clear, we like to talk about it.

We like to. Yes. Tess and I love to talk about it.

We talk about porn all the time. But the collective we, the societal we, generally does not like to talk about it that much. And the collective we probably should talk about it a little bit more because this is a huge industry.

And when an industry is this enormous and touches our lives so intimately, it's probably worth understanding a thing or two about how it works. Okay. But before we get too deep into it, let's just back up for a quick second and introduce ourselves.

So Tess and I co-founded Squirm in 2021, and we are a sex education platform that is dedicated to healthy sexual communication. We do events, we do workshops, and all of that work is aimed at the same goal of de-stigmatizing conversations about sex and sexuality. We often will say that a lot of sex advice ends with, just talk about it, you dummy.

Just talk. Come on. Just talk about sex. Spit it out. Just do it. And that's typically where our work begins, is how do you have these conversations? Right.

Like, what do you even say? And when? How do you know how to bring it up? Like, there's a lot more involved than just talk about it. And you can't really talk about sex without talking about porn. It's going to come up.

So that's why we made this show, to have a conversation with you about porn and our sex lives. And this is near and dear to both our hearts. We care about healthy sexuality and people feeling good in their sex lives.

I know for me personally, I've always been really curious about sex. I remember in middle school finding my parents erotic fiction and reading it when I was home alone. If you're listening, mom and dad, thank you for keeping that on the bookshelf in the living room.

The true genesis. Yeah. Of Squirm and Porn Nerds.

So even though I was really curious about sex, I was pretty uncomfortable with porn. And whenever I did see it, like internet porn, whenever I saw it, I almost didn't even want to look at it with both eyes open. I would kind of like squint and be like, ah, what is that? So it made me pretty uncomfortable generally.

And at the same time, I was very aware that the people that I was dating and the people I had sex with, that they were watching porn and it was like a part of their lives. So it's kind of this background noise for a long time in my dating life. It wasn't until my mid twenties.

I remember watching this documentary series on Netflix called Hot Girls Wanted Part Two. And I think it was episode one. They featured EriKa Lust, who is this pornographer based in Barcelona.

She focused on porn made from a woman's perspective, a queer perspective. And that kicked off a huge career transition for me. I left my job.

You and I were working together. I was like, hey, I got into grad school in Amsterdam. I'm going to go study porn.

But I did. I went to Amsterdam, got my master's degree and spent a year researching how adults learn about sex. And a lot of that took me back to porn and how porn has this huge impact on our sex lives.

I also got to work with some amazing people in the industry. And upon coming back to the US and reconnecting with you, I just knew I wanted to do something with all of that information and all of that good data. Yeah, we've known each other for a long time.

And when you came back, it was so exciting to start to build all this together because I've also been really interested in this topic for a long time. I think the first point of entry for me was when I was around 12 or 13. So my mom was working at a very corporate job and had this big transition and started doing erotic photography, which turned ultimately into porn and sex work.

And all of that was happening in my own coming of age and understanding my own sexuality and being interested in dating and all that. And so I think I just from a pretty early on started thinking about what this thing was, like what impact this kind of erotic media has on the world and simultaneously knowing all my peers are watching internet porn too. And throughout my teenage years and early 20s and even now, having to confront that stigma that comes up internally and with other people when telling people about my mom's work has led me to do a lot of introspection about the kind of role that sexuality plays in our lives.

Why it can be deemed this dirty topic. We spoke with a variety of people when making this show. And one thing that really stood out is that a lot of people who watch porn don't feel great about it.

The TLDR, or I guess in this case, the TLDL of some of the concerns that people have are watching porn contributes to an exploitative industry. 

I think that there are a lot of ethical concerns with it, exploitation and stuff like that. Guys fucking women and then fucking them over.

Porn doesn't realistically depict female pleasure. 

I'm going to go ahead and say, like, I think the problem is it's derived from a male's view of what fantasy sex is to them. It sets unrealistic expectations about what bodies should look like.

I want to see two, like, regular, hairy, sweaty dudes getting it on. You know, that's what I want to fucking see. I'm going to watch porn. But now everything's like all stylized and, you know, I don't know, everything's plucked. 

And it can be a way to avoid the vulnerability that's needed to build or maintain an intimate relationship. 

The things that I was getting off to with porn, it's going to be different than with another person. It can just be somewhat conditioning, which makes it difficult to get off and can sometimes make it more difficult to connect with a person. 

And all of these concerns are totally valid, but we couldn't help but wonder how much of this anxiety is warranted and how much of it has to do with a bigger societal squeamishness about sex. There's a huge disconnect between how much porn people are watching and how comfortable they are with it.

We're excited to really dissect that disconnect. But first, let's just start with how much porn people are actually watching. 

There are a reported 25 million porn sites available on the Internet. Between September and November 2023, Pornhub was the fourth most visited website across the globe, with 12.8 billion monthly visits. Beat out, pun intended, only by Google, YouTube, and Facebook. 12.8 billion monthly visits.

For context, that is about three times the traffic that Amazon had with a measly little negligible 4.2 billion monthly visits. Let's remember here that we're talking about only Pornhub traffic, which means there are approximately 24,999,999 other sites with data to consider. And okay, to be fair, probably some of those are just like a simple landing page with somebody flashing their tits.

But the point is, there is so much porn being consumed all the time. And truly, we cannot emphasize enough the significance of porn meeting the Internet. When porn went online, society's relationship to porn and to sex changed dramatically.

Yeah, and it makes sense, right? Because it's so easy now. It used to be, if you wanted to get off to something dirty, you'd get yourself down to a video store, amble through the aisles, casually looking at the comedy section like, oh yeah, this is good. And then you, oh, oopsie daisy, I passed the beaded curtains, I'm in the adult section.

You like hurriedly grab a DVD. Maybe grab American Beauty on your way in and like pretend to read it on your way out while you stall for that family to finish at checkout. It took a concerted effort to get the goods.

Right. Whereas now, 84% of Pornhub's traffic comes from phones. Yeah.

People literally going to the toilet or waiting for their bus can see almost anything imaginable. And we wanted to know, how did we get here? From cave drawings of cave tits to watching cream pies in the bathroom at work. 

Porn Nerds presents, A Brief History of Porn. We're not going quite as far back as cave tits, but please come with us to the 1500s.

It's 1524. We're in Rome. We're with Mercantonio Raimondi, a printmaker who collaborated closely with the Renaissance artist, Raphael.

Raimondi engraved and printed a series of 16 explicit illustrations of sex acts under the title, I Modi, which translates as The Positions. He was then thrown in jail. Ah! The writer, Aretino, came to his rescue.

He got the Pope to release Raimondi from jail and then wrote 16 smutty sonnets to go with Raimondi's pictures. In 1527, I Modi was reissued with the porny poems and it became a bestseller all over Europe. Now let's fast forward to the 1830s.

Photography has hit the scene. The first recorded selfie was in 1839 and by the 1850s, erotic nudes are flying like hotcakes. The Oxford English Dictionary officially adds the word pornography.

In this same year, the UK passed the first Obscene Publications Act. This gave the government power to enter private spaces to search and seize explicit books, pictures, and other items. Yikes.

1896, we're back in the US. The film The Kiss comes out and it's a whopping 18 seconds long. This was allegedly the first kiss to be publicly shown on film.

The Roman Catholic Church was not pleased and in response called for censorship and moral reform. At the time, kissing in public was socially unacceptable. Now we're cruising between 1915 and 1968.

This is prime stag film era, short, silent, amateur porn films mostly from a male interviewer. In there, in 1953, Playboy magazine hits the stands. 

And voila, the golden age of porn, 1969 to 1984. Here we get feature-length pornographic films, films like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas.

In this 15-year period, porn films were shown at the cinema and generally positively received by critics and audiences. This is also the rise of the VHS era. And in 1978, porn made up the majority- Whoa, really? Yeah, according to Pornhub History of Porn, that's crazy. By 1978, porn made up the majority of VHS sales. 

That pops us into the mid-80s. Around this time, women were like, what the fuck, babe? You're kind of missing it. Which gave rise to feminist pornography. One of the pioneers was a woman named Candida Royale. In 1984, she founded her own adult film studio called Fem Productions to show pleasure from a woman's point of view.

First pornographic website goes out. The domain name, sex.com. Fast forward to a year that changed porn forever. 2007, when two giants entered the scene, Pornhub and Xvideos.

Thanks to these two sites, now more porn is being created and uploaded than ever before. And it's accessible for free. But let's back up real quick.

What is a tube site? Yeah, so a tube site is like YouTube. It's a site that doesn't create its own content. It's dependent on people visiting the site to upload content.

And the people who own the site make money by posting advertising. That's Patricia Nelson, a reporter from the Financial Times and the host of the porn podcast Hot Money. We don't know nearly as much as Patricia does about the impact of porn going online.

So we asked her what she thought were some of the biggest takeaways. One thing is that, you know, porn films disappeared in that sense. You know, the idea of making a feature length film, you know, that's very rare today.

Everything kind of became snack sized or whatever you say in the advertising community, you know, to fit these advertising driven sites where people just kind of keep clicking and moving on from one thing to the next. Another thing that it has meant is the barrier of entry is much lower. I mean, before, if you wanted to be in porn or make porn, it was, you know, it was making sort of like making any other movie.

You know, you had to have quite a lot of money. You had to know the right people. I mean, now anyone can basically upload anything to the internet.

One of my favorite Pornhub stats is a few years old now. It's from 2019. And for some reason they have not given us updated information about this particular piece of Pornhub data.

But in 2019, there were 1.3 million hours of new videos uploaded to their site just that year. Yeah, I think 1.3 million can feel like a vague, big number, but to put it in a different scale, it's about 155 years worth of content that was added to the site in just that year. Just that site, just that year.

Another way to look at it is if you started watching 2019's content in the year 1869, right around the time that the word pornography was added to the dictionary, you would still be trying to catch up today. With the amount of porn that's being uploaded every minute of every day, it is literally impossible to run out of new content. Patricia says that porn going online not only impacts the volume, but also the type of content that we get.

I have a theory, you know, in kind of mainstream media, when the internet happened and all newspapers were trying to figure out how to make money because, you know, it was more difficult to sell online subscription than it was selling kind of real life print subscriptions. And then you had this, you know, revolution that kind of led to clickbait, right? So you just needed headlines that made people angry or emotional in some way, and people were just kind of clicking and just reading the headlines of a lot of things. And that, you know, often it diminished the value of the journalism.

And I think something like that could be argued for free porn as well, where kind of, you know, fewer resources are put into it and there's less thought and there's less, you know, perhaps artistic expression. I mean, a lot of people who work in porn, I mean, do it because they're, they see themselves as artists, you know, they want to create something, they want to portray something, they want to, you know, communicate with people on the other side. And I think there is less room for that in an advertising driven free system.

Of all the anecdotes Patricia shared, this one really stuck with us. I was in Prague and I was talking to a porn producer. We met at a party, we were kind of chatting, and Prague is the kind of hotspot for making humiliation porn, you know, like very violent porn.

And I asked him about it and I was like, you know, how do you feel about making this type of content? I mean, does that make you, does that not make you feel uncomfortable? And I kind of said something like, you know, I think this type of pornography is such a big reason why people outside the industry, you know, see the world of porn as perverted. And he just absolutely snapped at me. And he was like, that's what people pay for.

That's, that's where the demand is. You know, I would rather shoot other stuff, but this is where the money is. And he kind of hitched his sunglasses up and he was like, we are not the perverts.

You are the perverts. There are a lot of layers wrapped up in this exchange. And we've wrestled with our response for a while.

Here is a little excerpt from an impassioned conversation that we had in the Oakland airport. It gets more intense, like as years go on, because you're always trying to up the ante of what people have already seen, right? And like, it's tapping into this like... There are a few key pieces to this pervy puzzle. My initial thought when listening was, it's just so easy to point fingers at people who work in the industry and think, ew gross, how could you do this for a living? How could you make this kind of stuff? Completely ignoring the fact that there's interest and participation from the consumers too.

Yeah. Yes. Like there's this sort of disconnect between what we're, how we feel about an industry at large, or they're like the people who are in the industry driving it forward.

And then how we're actually engaging with the industry. And sometimes we forget that we vote with our dollar and we vote with our eyeballs and our attention. And our clicks.

And our clicks. And that's like precious. That's currency.

Like our attention is our currency. And so when people are giving a lot of attention to these things, they're going to make more of it because it's doing well. Like they're responding to what's happening in the actual trackable analytics.

So let's like put this into a practical example, right? Let's say a video called Extreme Public Slut Humiliation gets uploaded and it gets 6.8 million views. This is a real example. The production company thinks, okay, people like this.

We're going to make more of it. And Extreme Public Slut Humiliation 2 is born. Extreme Public Slut Humiliation 3. The tongue just straight out.

Extreme Public Slut goes to the seashore. Extreme Public Slut Humiliation Holiday Party. It feels like this very porny chicken and the egg situation where these videos are being made and people are watching them.

And so more of them are made. And then more people are watching them. And it's kind of like what came first, you know, and him calling us perverts really makes me wonder if it's tapping into our intrinsically pervy nature or if it's causing us to become perverts.

Yeah, it's like the verb form versus the like adjective form. Exactly. It's like porn is perverting us or porn is appealing to our pervy, rotted natures.

It's like, which is it? Slash my vote is both. It's both. It's for sure both.

But it's just like this cycle of like perv and be perved. Yeah. Perve upon others the way that you would like to be perved upon.

Yeah. But talking about this type of porn, like violence, humiliation, I think with the pornographer calling us pervs, there is a genuine curiosity that people have around seeing certain types of sex. Which in and of itself, there's nothing categorically wrong with that.

Like plenty of people engage with those kinds of violent kinks or BDSM with care and communication. And that can be a healthy and cathartic expression of sexuality when done thoughtfully. Right.

But to Patricia's earlier point about how tube sites changed porn, suddenly internet porn became this ad driven model where the people uploading content were really fighting for our attention. And then titles became more clickbaity and a little more extreme and a little more sensationalized. And so that combined with this already existing curiosity around seeing some extreme stuff makes what's out there feel even more intense.

Well, yeah. And then there's this whole other layer to it of not knowing. I think this is true for all types, all flavors of porn, right? Like even setting aside the extreme public slut humiliation or like violent styles of porn.

I think there's always a little bit of a concern of like, are the people like meaningfully consenting to what they're doing? Do they know this is up there? There's always that little lingering question of, is this good? Is this okay to be into? The more extreme the sex act is, the more that that concern can get amplified, especially if we are talking about something that's violent or has elements of degradation or humiliation. Yeah, completely. But you know, the word of the day here is pervert.

And I don't want to lose track of that. More you know. And so when we talk about more extreme types of sex, BDSM, consensual non-consent, the question is like, at what point does something move from pervy to kinky? Like the word pervert is wrapped up in a long history of judging unconventional sex acts that stems from the Catholic church.

The original meaning of the word pervert was someone who turned away from the church, who turned away from God. And it has become something associated with sexual deviance. But it just shows that for a very long time have judged sex through the eyes of religious purity.

And you can't really ignore that when you talk about kink and BDSM and sex that appears extreme. Yeah, I think as long as the content features consenting adults, right? Like, of course. Super important caveat.

But other than that, that criteria is satisfied. Is there really any such thing as objectively pervy porn? Or do we just have to get more comfortable accepting that some things aren't going to be our cup of tea? And how much of the idea that certain things are perverted or wrong is tied into a much deeper sense of shame about being sexual people. Okay, it's Saturday.

We are sitting in our office on a big pink couch. And we're going to perform a little online experiment. We have an incognito browser open.

And we're using incognito mode so that our pervy cookie history does not sway the search results. I'm typing porn consumption into the search bar. And what do we see? Watching porn.

How normal is it? When is porn an addiction? Pornography, addiction, science, causes, and statistics. Pornography and depression. The connection explained.

Is porn addiction real? Are you watching too much porn? So this is all on the first page. And we're not like editing out results. They're all pretty anti-porn.

The brains of porn addicts. With an incorrect apostrophe. The brain.

The brain. The effects of porn consumption. Seeking professional help.

We scrolled and found pages upon pages of links that include words like addiction, aggression, dissatisfaction, divorce, drug, and violence. And as a point of comparison, we also searched from an incognito window, TV consumption, another seemingly neutral term. And we did not receive the same heavily negatively biased search results.

No, it's like stats about like, how much does the average American watch TV? Or just like numbers of hours consumed. Very, very neutral. We even searched alcohol consumption in an incognito window.

And that too yielded more balanced results than porn. And we intentionally did not search. Am I watching too much porn? Or is porn bad for you? We searched porn consumption.

Yet the search results frame porn consumption as a threat to marriage and public health and even public safety. And let's put that in context with the numbers that we learned earlier. 25 million porn sites on the internet today.

In 2023, Pornhub, just one of those sites, received 12.8 billion monthly visits. Here's a new stat for you. Another site, XVideos, received 9 billion monthly visits.

That is like a lot of horny people fapping it to porn all around the globe. We're not saying that porn is free of flaws. But surely these horny people aren't all destroying their relationships and losing jobs or contributing to society's demise just due to porn.

Throughout this episode, we've been talking about this disconnect between behavior, tons of people watching tons of porn, and the attitude about the behavior. Porn is harmful and dangerous. This divide is not only evident in people's firsthand accounts, but also in experiments like what you see when you google porn consumption.

Or even just how hard it is for us to market this show on social media. This mismatch feels so important that we decided to give it a name. The Central Conflict.

This central conflict creates some serious tension between what is considered moral and what people are actually doing. So in this series, we are going to get straight to the meat of this tension. Starting with, how much porn is too much porn? Is porn addiction real? And am I normal? Join us next week as we dig into all of that and more.

Till then, I'm Tess. And I'm Kels, and this has been episode one of Porn Nerds. For more from Squirm, head to GetSquirmy.com, follow us on Instagram at @__squirm__, and please rate and review this show. It really helps. 

Here's what's coming up this season on Porn Nerds. We have this world of porn out there that is so misleading.

And all the time I'm getting like, well, I don't understand why my girlfriend's not screaming and moaning like in these videos. And I'm pounding harder and harder like they're doing. And it is ridiculous.

What are we doing? You'll hear from industry insiders on how porn shapes our ideas of sex. Sex is kind of not what it's marketed to us as. I think sex is really creative.

For a lot of people, they feel limited in their sexual expression because they feel limited to what they saw in movies. And that's just the tiniest piece of what's possible. A sex therapist who feels concerns about porn addiction.

Porn itself isn't toxic. But I think that the way that people engage with it can sometimes create habituation that makes it difficult to translate that experience to partner sex. And I think that's what a lot of people run into when porn use becomes problematic.

And everyday people. I never desire porn over real sex. I just have more access to it.

We'll talk about vulnerability. It was so revealing and vulnerable and weird. And I fucking loved it.

Shame. I have a lot of shame around the kind of porn that I like. I feel like there's this weird interplay of shame and guilt and eroticism.

And did you find the one unfilled hole in the porn world? So buckle up for this nerdy, dirty, squirmy ride into the porniverse. 

Porn Nerds is a co-production of BOOM Integrated, a division of John Marshall Media, and Squirm. It is an educational podcast made for your entertainment and curiosity. Any opinions shared by the hosts and guests are solely their own and not intended as therapy or medical advice. Thanks for being here and we'll see you next week.