Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, a new Netflix documentary on the biggest porn website in the world, opens with a simple question: do you remember the first porn you ever saw? The film’s older subjects (read: late millennial and above), including several adult film performers, recall bespoke, analog porn, illicit and enticing – movies of Mother Goose fairy tales given a raunchy twist, a neighbor’s video tape of women using a giant ice dildo, Playgirl and Playboy spreads.
Noelle Perdue, an internet porn historian and multimedia artist, harkens a shift. She was 11 the first time she watched porn, noodling around on Pornhub looking to be surprised and finding an “eight-person geriatric gang bang” – a sight which “did kinda set the tone for how extreme things could be on the internet”, she laughs.
