We talk a lot about how much we watch Netflix or Disney. Yet, more than a quarter of all video streaming on the internet involves pornography. Pornhub, one of the most well-known and highly trafficked porn-streaming platforms, reported 42 billion visits to its site in 2019—an average of 110 million visits per day. Over 80,000 users reportedly visit Pornhub every minute. According to some reports, internet users in the United States access Pornhub more frequently than Twitter, Wikipedia, or Netflix. Globally, this site has almost as many visits as Amazon. According to former chief executive officer Feras Antoon, Pornhub is among the top five most visited websites on the internet, and in 2020, MindGeek—which was rebranded as Aylo in 2023 and is the company that owns Pornhub—reported receiving 4.5 billion visits per month to its various platforms, which was more than the figure for social media sites like Facebook. xHamster, another major porn-streaming platform, reported over 13 billion visits in 2019 and 1,400 videos downloaded every minute. In 2021, XVideos, yet another popular porn-streaming platform, was the thirteenth most frequently visited website on the internet.
The viewing audience on these platforms is pervasive. The results of one study suggested that 46 percent of American men watch pornography in a given week. Another study found that 91.5 percent of American men and 60 percent of American women reported consuming pornography in the past month. In Canada, 4 million discrete users—more than 12 percent of the country’s population—visit Pornhub every day, according to the company. While estimates vary, and are different for different age groups, every recent study confirms that pornography consumption today is incredibly common.
Yet, while a lot of people consume porn, few talk about it. As Rowland Atkinson and Thomas Rodgers note, “The paradox of mass access to sexually explicit material alongside its relatively secretive engagement is a distinctive feature of today’s cultural landscape.” However, there is one important exception to this observation: some consumers are talking about it, albeit anonymously, on the porn-streaming platforms themselves.
In her discussion of internet porn, professor India Thusi writes: “Technology . . . allows the audience to become a community and a forum for associating around various forms of speech.” Internet viewers, she observes, can discuss content with each other, unlike the passivity demanded of viewers in a movie theatre, for example. Thusi concludes that “technology allows audiences around the world to connect with each other as fellow audience members and with content providers as part of their community and viewership”; not only that, she continues, “it generates movements and mobilizations around different forms of [pornographic] content.” As professor Susanna Paasonen observes in Carnal Resonance, “the sense of connectedness, interactivity, and presence facilitated by networked technologies renders online porn specific in the resonance it entails between the bodies displayed on the screen and those located at the keyboard.”
Constructing online forums, or communities, of this nature appears to be intentional on the part of some porn-streaming companies. The creators of xHamster reportedly imagined it as a social media site designed to bring together people who wanted to chat, exchange sexually explicit videos and pictures, share “amateur” porn with each other, and potentially meet others for intimate interactions. Similarly, Pornhub has explicitly branded itself with this community-building objective. Pornhub describes itself as a “social community” and as “the most inclusive and safe adult community on the Internet.” Its logo, which is shown at the beginning of videos on the site, reads “Pornhub Community.”
The affordances—or mechanisms for interaction and use—available to a user on porn-streaming platforms are similar to the ones found on other social media platforms. Users can sign up to become “members” of these communities. Like with Facebook and Twitter, members of the “Pornhub Community” can send friend requests and follow other users on this site. The platform enables community members to interact with one another (and with the content). It is possible to upload content, tag to other videos, “like” particular videos, and, until recently, download them and share them with others. The platform allows its members to send each other messages and leave comments on specific videos for other viewers to read. In 2019, over 70 million messages were sent between members of the “Pornhub Community.” During that same year, 11.5 million comments on Pornhub videos were left by viewers for others to read.
Assessing the social role played by pornography requires consideration of the ways in which porn-streaming platforms create this sense of community among users. Dana Rotman and Jennifer Preece describe online communities as “group[s] (or various subgroups) of people, brought together by a shared interest, using a virtual platform, to interact and create user-generated content that is accessible to all community members, while cultivating communal culture and adhering to specific norms.” As Atkinson and Rodgers suggest, “The world of online porn . . . facilitates the creation of implicit peer support communities.”
There is yet another technological development that contributes to the contemporary social role of pornography. The vast majority of porn is consumed on mobile devices—primarily, smartphones. This means that porn can be viewed almost anywhere, including, for example, in public parks or on public transportation. It can be readily accessed on smartphones while one attends public school or university classes. It can be viewed in offices and public washrooms. Nearly half of Pornhub’s 110 million daily visits occur between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.—typical school and work hours for many. As many as 20 percent of American men report viewing pornography while at work. Studies not reliant on self-disclosure indicate that between 30 percent and 70 percent of Americans access porn at work.
Similarly, research suggests it is not uncommon for students to consume porn on smartphones while they are at school. There is a plethora of online stories told by women about their experiences of riding public transit beside a man who is watching porn on his phone or laptop. In most of them, women report an inclination not to complain or protest due to their lack of clarity around whether this behaviour is illegal, and due to an assumption that what people view on their mobile devices is private. Some jurisdictions are now pursuing legal mechanisms to prohibit the consumption of pornography in public spaces.
Porn is also consumed in public facilities that provide free internet access on computers and tablets, such as public libraries and municipal recreation centres. Enough porn is being consumed in some public libraries that they have had to adapt their computer policies. Public libraries in New York City reportedly installed plastic hoods on some of their computers to respond to the problem of people viewing pornography in plain sight on library computers. In the interests of protecting free speech, public libraries typically do not prohibit porn consumption (other than child sexual abuse material) on their computers. Instead, library staff may encourage patrons to view sexually explicit content in more discreet locations in the library, such that others are less likely to be involuntarily exposed. Some public libraries even have adult-only computer labs, where users are permitted to openly view porn.
The use of mobile devices and public computers to consume pornography in public spaces muddies the public/private divide. Unlike in a movie theatre, one’s screen is not necessarily (or intentionally) shared with others, making it private in a sense. But then watching it on the bus, at the library, at work, or in the airport is certainly more public than doing so in one’s basement or bedroom.
While advances in technology mean that porn can now be acquired and consumed without any public interaction, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of free internet access in public facilities have created new intersections between public spaces and the consumption of pornography. Not only has the consumption of porn moved into public spaces, but so, too, have porn companies. Whether it is Pornhub’s Times Square billboard, its offer of a $25,000 (US) “happiness scholarship” for one university student (a fairly modest contribution for a company with revenues of approximately $460 million per year), its promise to send two dozen snowplows to Boston during a storm (which the company claims to have done in 2017), or xHamster’s three-day fundraising event for LGBTQ, trans, and sex worker organizations, the marketing strategies of major porn-streaming platforms have an undoubtedly public component to them.
While porn, and the consumption of it, may still linger at the margins of our public spaces, those margins have shifted. Porn has changed. And if we do not pay attention to what this means for our relationships, our social and legal systems, and our sexual norms and practices, it will change us.
Adapted and excerpted from Mainstreaming Porn: Sexual Integrity and the Law Online by Elaine Craig, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.
