The digital closet, p.21
The Digital Closet, page 21
Tumblr presents a unique case, however, because of its long history of being used as a queer-friendly safe space that incorporated sexuality and pornography into its open LGBTQIA+ discourse. Alexander Cho, a digital media anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, has described Tumblr as a “queer ecosystem” in which LGBTQIA+ users felt free from having to articulate their identities in relation to heterosexual norms and, because Tumblr is such an image-based platform, of course, these communities flirted with edgy and sexual images.17 He further points out that because Tumblr offers pseudonymous accounts and reblogging features, it avoids the “default publicness” of social media like Facebook that makes LGBTQIA+ youth fear being outed. Stephanie Duguay, professor of communication at Concordia University, noted that these communities on Tumblr “share GIFs and videos and content around queer celebrities, queer characters, and fanfiction. Sometimes nudity and adult content is in this. . . . It’s a general part of people’s self-discovery, especially when you’re a young person and you’re determining things about yourself and your sexual identity.”18 Duguay notes that it is important for these youths to see representations of queer identities in the context of relationships, embraces, kisses, and sex so that they can imagine these scenarios as possibilities in their future, a process that heterosexual people are privileged to take advantage of in most popular media. By fragmenting these communities, young people will have a more difficult time finding these materials and experiencing content that represents their identities and everyday lives. In the wake of these changes, a number of LGBTQIA+ Tumblr users have given testimony to the role that the platform played in shaping their sexual identities as they used the site to discover and imagine new possibilities for their futures. Many of them expressed their worries about a future in which LGBTQIA+ youth don’t have access to these communities and this content.19
Internet studies researchers Tim Highfield and Stefanie Duguay have shown that by sharing edgy and explicit looping GIFs, LGBTQIA+ users are able to produce a sense of irreverence and play that builds communities and signals to people that they are in a safe space for sexual expression.20 In interviews with queer women, Duguay has found that this visibility of queer sexuality may also dissuade homophobic harassment and lead to less discrimination on the platform.21 For instance, trans Tumblr users engage in self-representation on the platform through sophisticated hashtagging practices that make their community dialogue visible to one another on the platform, often including sexual expression that challenges cisgender norms.22 A lot of LGBTQIA+ history was also archived and catalogued on the site and has now been rendered invisible. For example, the anonymously authored Tumblr Bijou World curated photos of vintage gay porn, old magazine covers, and newspaper clippings to capture the history of LGBTQIA+ erotica and culture.23 These losses may be irreparable to the community, as a number of artists have noted that not only were their images flagged, but their accounts were permanently banned, leading to them losing entire archives of their work that they had not backed up elsewhere because they trusted the long-standing reputation of Tumblr as a safe space for sexual expression.24 Perhaps most importantly, however, this entails a forfeiture of the space for digital pornography to mainstream heteroporn conglomerates.25
For many years, Tumblr was the perfect solution for people who found “tube sites” like Pornhub or XHampster to be too flooded with misogynistic, mainstream heteroporn and who could not reliably find alt-porn through Google Search. As Ashley Vex, an adult entertainer and curator of a DIY porn Tumblr, noted in her eulogy for Tumblr,
Sex wasn’t this separate, shameful thing. . . . We shared it, discussed it, debated it and curated it. Porn on Tumblr wasn’t treated as disposable, something just to be immediately purged from your browser history, but an aesthetic, artistic component of your page and your life, alongside your complementary colours of sunsets and song lyrics and personal posts. It was out in the open. It allowed you to become a collector of your own desires, displaying them and celebrating them proudly, rather than having them spoon fed by a tube site algorithm. [ . . . ] It allowed for sex in a space that didn’t feel like it was dominated by male desire. [ . . . ] It helped young, queer people find their communities and sexualities represented, to take control and represent them themselves. [ . . . ] It allowed people with disabilities, young parents, people of colour, trans and gender non conforming folk (identities that make up a large majority of the community of sex workers and who are too often ostracised by a traditional, capitalist workplace) to make rent. [ . . . ] If we push our depictions of sexuality into the shadows, we allow them to continue be defined and co-opted by the status quo.26
Vex’s article is worth quoting at length because this sentiment abounds in nearly all of the reporting on the changes to Tumblr. For instance, WIRED conducted interviews with more than thirty sex workers, pornographers, and porn viewers who collectively lamented the loss of the site and the unique safe space that it curated for exploring sexuality. The magazine noted that these interviewees “described the site as notably more empowering and friendly than more traditional venues for explicit content.”27 Liara Roux, a sex worker and online political organizer, told the magazine that “the options for finding adult content online are diminishing, and consolidating with big companies,” making it more difficult for LGBTQIA+ communities to find a space for their online existences.28 With Tumblr cleansed of pornography, tube sites and Google are the foremost remaining options for finding digital pornography, and thus the bulk of this chapter will be dedicated to examining them. The first section looks at the political economy of tube sites and the heteronormative biases they reinforce, with an added focus on the recent moves in the United Kingdom to make all porn sites use the services of MindGeek, which maintains a monopoly on tube sites, to age verify all of their visitors. The second section looks at Google’s move in 2012 to an always-on version of SafeSearch that only allows pornography to appear when users both turn SafeSearch off and use specific pornographic keywords in their search query. It goes on to show how the current political economy of “independent” porn sites is dominated by mainstream heteroporn whose influence sets genre standards that permeate even amateur porn and alt-porn. Lastly, this chapter will examine the financial impact that FOSTA-SESTA has had on sex workers and adult entertainers, and it will demonstrate how it has put pressure predominantly on low-budget and amateur pornographers, which results in an inordinate impact on LGBTQIA+ content.
Tube Sites and the Vicious Circle of Heteronormativity
In 2013, David Cameron centered his election campaign on censoring pornography, which he argued was “corroding childhood” and doing irreparable harm to the minds of an entire generation of British children.29 In 2014, the United Kingdom advanced David Cameron’s anti-pornography crusade by amending the 2003 Communications Act. The new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that online pornography now adhere to the same guidelines laid out for traditional video and DVD pornography by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). The act effectively bans pornography from containing acts of spanking, caning, aggressive whipping, penetration by any object “associated with violence,” physical or verbal abuse even if consensual, urolagnia or “water sports,” role-playing as nonadults, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, strangulation, facesitting, and fisting, noting that these final three are potentially life-threatening.30 The BBFC argues that these restrictions are a “tried and tested” method for protecting children, though adult performers argue that they are more aimed at regulating women’s pleasure with the odd inclusion of things like female ejaculation and facesitting.31
This sweeping set of regulations was just the prelude to the introduction of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which was introduced the next year and meant to require all online distributors of pornography to age verify every visitor to their website. The BBFC was to be in charge of enforcing the new regulations and holding sites accountable for any minors who viewed their content, with consequences including withdrawing advertising services, pressuring payment service providers to deny service to the websites, and requiring ISPs and mobile network operators to block access to these websites writ large.32 Independent adult content producers feared the regulation would turn all erotic film in the United Kingdom into “boring, unrealistic male fantasy.”33 This is largely because many independent pornographers would not have been able to afford to age verify every visitor to their site. As feminist pornographer Pandora Blake, who runs the site Dreams of Spanking, noted in an interview, “There’s no way sites like mine could afford to verify every visitor. We’ll all go under.”34
The United Kingdom’s new age verification requirements were originally set to take effect in April 2018 but were pushed back twice with no clear date of implementation as the United Kingdom attempts to pass the laws through Brussels at the same time as it is managing Brexit.35 As of 2019, Nicky Morgan, the fifth culture secretary, noted that the government no longer intended to enforce this component of the law but stated that its objectives might still be obtained by the new regulator set forth by similar legislation.36 A large reason why the United Kingdom’s porn blocker was repeatedly delayed before being canceled was the practical problem of implementing age verification. The BBFC intended to create a certification scheme for age verification systems that websites could’ve used but was never planning to create a nationwide scheme free of charge. Instead, it intended to leave this to the free market, with each site being responsible for implementing its own age verification scheme and, in most cases, doing so by purchasing schemes from third-party vendors that the BBFC had certified.37 The frontrunner that stood to gain a near monopoly on the age verification market in the United Kingdom was the AgeID system being developed by MindGeek.
While sizable portions of the porn-blocking legislation appear to be defeated for the moment—thanks in part to organizers who demonstrated the collateral damage that it would have in terms of overblocking nonpornographic materials like charities, schools, and social support websites38—this incident helps to demonstrate the international reach, lobbying power, and adaptability when faced with government regulation of the most highly capitalized segments of the mainstream heteroporn industry. If you remember from the introduction, MindGeek owns Pornhub, as well as many of the other most popular tube sites on the web, like RedTube, YouPorn, GayTube, Xtube, ExtremeTube, SpankWire, and Tube8. MindGeek’s platform boasts 115 million daily hits and consumes more bandwidth than Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon.39 The average visitor to these tube sites spends at least ten minutes on them.40 The frequency and duration of the visits have allowed MindGeek to create its own highly profitable advertising network, TrafficJunky, to serve targeted ads to the people consuming its free pornographic content. With its soaring profits, MindGeek has bought up several top pornography studios at discounted rates, including Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos, MyDirtyHobby, Reality Kings, and Twistys.41 MindGeek and its subsidiaries also spend lavishly on advertising in Adult Video News and other industry news outlets, in trade publications, and at events, allowing them to effectively shape the discourse within the pornography industry.42 As Shira Tarrant, professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Cal State Long Beach and author of The Pornography Industry, told the Atlantic, MindGeek’s business model “features vertical integration and horizontal integration, so they’re really monopolizing the industry.”43
In an interview with the Daily Dot, Adult Empire director of business development Colin Allerton noted that “every major studio and star is now partnered with MindGeek or has worked for a studio that MindGeek purchased.”44 In fact, studios and stars are so entangled with MindGeek that they are afraid to speak out about the company’s practices for fear of being blacklisted.45 One of these practices is hosting pirated pornography across their tube sites and requiring owners of that content to file individual Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests for each pirated video on each tube site, an onerous burden and one that many smaller and independent studios don’t have the financial resources to keep up with. As adult film star Siri noted, the tube sites “force copyright holders to jump through hoops to get our content removed.”46 This rampant pirating of content is occurring within an economy in which production, subscriptions to, and sales of pornography are all trending downward. As David Auerbach has explained, “The result has been a vampiric ecosystem: MindGeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek, which makes money off of the tube ads that does not go to anyone involved in the production side.”47
MindGeek, originally known as “Manwin,” has served to reinforce patriarchy and heteronormativity for twenty-first-century pornography. We can see how this plays out if we look to three communities impacted by this shift toward tube sites in the political economy of pornography: professional adult entertainers, amateur adult entertainers, and consumers. In terms of professional adult entertainers, it has reinstated the traditional subjugation of female porn stars in a political economy in which they had been making strides toward equality as more women opened and ran pornography studios and websites. MindGeek has essentially instituted a “freemium” economic model in which adult entertainers make pornographic videos as advertisements for their other lines of business, like camming, stripping, or escorting. Adult entertainers make increasingly diminished returns off their pornographic videos, which requires them to bank on a small minority of consumers of that free content who will pay for additional services.48 This pushes adult entertainers to heighten their performances and engage in more extreme sex acts, since they are essentially advertisements for niche audiences, and may explain the trend toward increasingly exploitative and misogynistic sex acts in mainstream heteroporn. It also has radically increased the number of adult entertainers who engage in escorting to supplement their income. According to Salon, while it would have been taboo within the industry to engage in escorting at the turn of the century, it is now considered normal. One porn star told Salon, “If you look at the escort sites, pretty much every porn star is on there.”49 Thus, the economics of tube sites and its subsequent impoverishment of adult entertainers has led to an escalation of misogyny in pornography and of adult entertainers engaging in escorting, a risky endeavor given state and federal anti-prostitution laws.
The same is also true of amateur adult entertainers, who similarly use their pornographic content on tube sites as advertisements for their camming, personal websites, one-on-one Skype sessions, and similar paid features. Even more so than professionals, amateurs must make use of tube sites to advertise their other content and services if they want to generate enough income to live off of. Tube sites are dominated by mainstream heteroporn, and the titles and metadata for their content reflect this. To generate clicks, amateur models often use similar titles and language to describe their videos, and they use similar tags to apply metadata to their content, all of which produce a normative effect on the actual content that they produce.50 Similarly, a quantitative study by French researchers of tube sites Xnxx and xHamster found that while the sites do host a wide variety of material, just 5 percent of the tags (e.g., “blowjob,” “teens,” “big boobs,” “cumshot,” “anal”) used to categorize pornography cover over 90 percent of the videos on the sites.51 In broad-ranging quantitative studies, computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam have similarly found porn to be increasingly heteronormative.52 As Shira Tarrant explains, the stereotypical, often sexist and racist, keywords that most people use to find pornography end up working as a feedback mechanism that subsequently influences what porn gets made.53 Tarrant describes this as a chicken-and-egg problem, but we might better think of it as a vicious circle of heteronormativity inscribed into the political economy and algorithmic infrastructure of the internet.
Lastly, MindGeek reinforces patriarchy and heteronormativity among its consumers as well. It operates sophisticated recommendation engines that are trained on the heteronormative titles, descriptions, and metadata of mainstream heteroporn. As Tarrant explains,
In addition, MindGeek, for example, uses algorithms to create highly curated personalized sites that are based on the user’s search history. It’s a lot like Amazon, where you look for a couple of books and they say, “You might also be interested in this.” Then you’re being spoon-fed a limited range of pornography based on the keywords you use, based on your geographic location, based on their algorithms and the information that they’re processing about time of day. They’re doing a lot of data collection. Online-porn users don’t necessarily realize that their porn-use patterns are largely molded by a corporation. We talk about the construction of wants and needs in other aspects of the economy, but that applies just as well to pornography.54
Thus, tube sites do not just lock porn producers into making content that corresponds with the view of the genre embedded in their recommendation engines; they also lock users into it as well. This is an opinion shared by Pandora Blake, who argues that MindGeek homogenizes pornography in accordance with the “male gaze” and objectifies all sex, leading to “clickable, sensationalistic” porn. She notes, “It’s a power law distribution—the more something is viewed, the easier it is to find and the more views it gets, and then producers make more porn like it because they know it’s popular. There’s so much diverse, alternative material out there on the open internet, but as MindGeek’s monopoly increases I fear it will become less and less visible.”55 These mainstream tube sites thus deflate their consumers’ sexual imaginations and capacities to experience new pleasures and form new desires at the same time that they harm sex workers’ livelihoods and push them toward more dangerous and unstable sources of revenue.
