“...long and elegant like the great man himself...sits perfectly naked...Get some Ron into you.”

*Content warning* This post may be distressing. 

Earlier this month Rose Kalemba, who had previously exposed Pornhub for hosting footage of her rape as a fourteen-year-old and their unwillingness to remove the footage for six months, exposed Pornhub hosting videos of her friend being raped as a toddler. Despite being flagged, Pornhub allowed the child rape videos to remain for hours, during which time they accumulated hundreds of views. We wrote about it here.

The high cost of Pornhub's 'free' offer

Apparently there’s no end to the lengths the porn industry will go to to legitimise its exploitative practises. Now with the world in the grips of a pandemic, Pornhub is showing that not even a global health crisis or its victims are off limits.

This week, in the name of slowing down the spread of COVID-19, Pornhub boasted about donating 50,000 surgical masks to the city of New York and expanding its 'free premium' offer for ad-free content worldwide. The offer prompted UK MPs to call for urgent action to get control of online porn.

This type of publicity stunt - one that attempts to mesh objectification and commodification of women's bodies with 'charity' - is not new. Earlier this year several porn stars came out in the name of supporting Australian bushfire victims. For example, an LA-based Only Fans (subscription-based content service) star claimed to raise one million dollars for victims of the fires. The claim is dubious, given the woman’s method of ‘donation’ was to retrospectively give other donors a digital nude image in exchange for proof of their donations. How do we know those donations would not have been made regardless of her offer? Her claim of ‘raising’ funds is unsubstantiated and in the end, her efforts appeared to be nothing more than a plug for the porn industry.

During the same crisis, a Cairns hotel promoted a bikini car wash in the name of bushfire charity. Men were able to pay for ‘sexy girls to wash their car’ - all for a ‘good cause’.

Are fundraising and donation activities that exploit women really charitable?

The interconnected sex and porn industries are rooted in malevolence: women (and children) are the means to men’s sexual gratification and profit, not ends in and of themselves. Trading off of the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, agents of the industries - like Pornhub - legitimise misogyny and exploitation.

Acts of 'charity' are normally seen as benevolent. But when these are borne out of industries that exploit women, they should be rejected and condemned. What are Pornhub's COVID-19 'donations' other than profits derived from women's bodies, at the cost of women's humanity and worth, transferred to another party? 

History shows that women and girls are more vulnerable to trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse during natural disasters and emergencies. In the present COVID-19 pandemic, the UN has pointed to previous health crises to highlight the 'exacerbated sexual exploitation risks for women and children', while the Executive Director of UNICEF warned that right now, the risks of exploitation and abuse for children are 'higher than ever'. These facts must inform our interpretation of so-called-charitable acts carried out by exploitative agents like Pornhub which prey upon and profit from women's and children's vulnerabilities.  

Attempts to connect acts of ‘generosity’ and ‘sacrifice’ - the essence of philanthropy - with the porn industry result in aberrations. Philanthropy is about promoting the welfare of others. The porn and sex industries are underpinned by the idea that women are objects to be bought and sold, used and abused. When porn industry proponents - individuals and corporates that profit from the use and abuse of women - promote themselves as charitable, we must call them out - each and every time.

(Last year we called out sex shop Honey Birdette for its use of exploitative marketing tactics - pinkwashing - in the name of breast cancer awareness and charity.)

Pornhub hosts countless videos showing the real-life rape and torture of women and girls for men's entertainment. There is a cost to this, as Andrea Dworkin explained: 

When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute. You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else’s freedom and someone else’s fun.

In the midst of a global health crisis in which women and children are at increased risk of exploitation Pornhub is fuelling and feeding the worldwide demand for exploitation material. It has even twisted COVID-19 public health advice to 'stay home and help flatten the curve' for its own purposes. Meanwhile, Pornhub is steepening the curve of abuse and crimes against women and children. 

There is nothing 'free' about Pornhub's 'Premium' offer. Women and girls will pay the very high cost of it - with their safety and well-being; with their very lives.

Giving is good. But exploitation of women and girls is an indefensible trade-off for supporting other people in crisis. Philanthropy - truly charitable giving - cannot be pornified. And porn - inextricably linked to women's harm - is never charitable.

Help #ShutDownPornhub and hold its executives accountable for aiding trafficking: Sign and share the petition here.

See also:

Pornhub hosts hundreds of Coronavirus-themed porn videos

Child sexual abuse, trafficking, rape: the global push to shut down Pornhub

Pornhub claims to have a "steadfast commitment" to eradicating non-consensual, underage material: we're not buying it

Pornhub, the largest pornography site in the world, is hosting hundreds of Coronavirus- themed pornographic videos. Many of the videos involve people wearing face masks, and scenarios based on quarantine, perpetuating racist stereotypes of Asian women and encouraging sexual harassment of nurses.

After almost half a million people have signed a petition to shut down Pornhub over cases of sex trafficking, rape and child sexual abuse, new reports of the porn site hosting videos of a toddler being abused have emerged.

Rose Kalemba, who had previously exposed Pornhub for hosting footage of her rape as a fourteen-year-old followed by a period of six months where she begged the site to remove the videos, has appealed to Pornhub again to remove videos documenting the abuse of her friend, who was a toddler at the time. 

Academics Dr Sarah Ashton and Dr Meagan Tyler spoke to ABC Life about the role of online pornography in sex education and practices. 

Senior lecturer at RMIT Meagan Tyler says porn is increasingly seen as a "textbook" for sex and that's creating problems.

"Porn's the thing that everyone's looking at like it's normal, but it's not normal, we know it's not normal, it's completely manufactured," she says.

"[Porn] contains a lot of violence against women. It's terribly racist. If you look at mainstream porn, it's terribly misogynist.

"[Yet] pornography equals sex has become just such a cultural staple."

What about "ethical porn"?

So-called "ethical" or "feminist" porn is often positioned as a positive alternative to run of the mill misogynist and male-dominated pornography. But the bar for what constitutes ‘ethical’ porn is very low, and typically only refers to conditions of production, such as fair compensation and labour conditions, representation of diverse body types and sexualities, consent and authenticity.

The actual content in ‘ethical’ or ‘feminist’ porn may be indistinguishable from violent and abusive mainstream porn. Rather than showcasing more egalitarian or non-violent content, degradation and acts of physical violence against women such as slapping, gagging and strangulation are still found in ‘ethical’ porn. Does this sound all that ethical? And if ethical porn truly exists, is anyone interested in watching it?

It's not easy to verify how the porn you're watching was made, especially if you're not paying anyone for it. And Dr Ashton says some people "turn off" their ethics and moral thoughts when they're engaged with porn.

"It may not be something that people are aware that the content that you're actually consuming when you masturbate, and when you're experiencing sexual pleasure, that's actually pairing with a reward in your brain that will reinforce what you're aroused to, and the sort of things that you associate with your sexuality, it actually has quite a profound impact," she says.

Dr Meagan Tyler told ABC that porn has become normalised in our society, and that the demand for "ethical porn" was part of that.

"Why is [there a] desperation for there to be an ethical porn, rather than the question of what would sexuality look like without pornography now?" she says.

"It's not food, it's not water, it's not air, it's not exercise.

"In a post-Me Too era, if we're really talking about sharing equal sexual relations between men and women, I cannot see the pornography industry is part of that.

"You can't say you're pro-Me Too, and you're pro women's consent, and then still go and masturbate to material that fundamentally subordinates women."

Read the full article on ABC Life. 

See also:

What's the problem with porn? Collective Shout respond to common pro-porn arguments- Collective Shout

Triple J week-long promotion for sex industry harms women and girls- Collective Shout

Michael Flood, Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology, has recently written about the harmful impacts that porn is having on young people. 

For many young people, pornography has become the default sex educator. Children and young people are encountering pornography in greater numbers, at younger ages, and with a wider variety of content, influencing young people’s sexual lives.

Research evidence from around the world shows porn has harmful impacts on young people and adults alike. Some impacts are deeply troubling, particularly pornography’s contribution to sexual violence.

Pornography can shift sexual interests, behaviours and relationships. It shapes “sexual scripts”, providing models of behaviour and guiding sexual expectations, with studies finding links between watching pornography and heterosexual anal intercourse, unsafe sex and more.

Watching pornography can lower men’s relationship satisfaction. And for women, male partners’ pornography use can reduce intimacy, feed self-objectification and body shame, or involve coercion into sexual acts.

But these next areas of impact concern me most.

Pornography teaches sexist and sexually objectifying understandings of gender and sexuality. For instance, in a randomised experimental study among young men in Denmark, exposure to (nonviolent) pornography led to less egalitarian attitudes and higher levels of hostile sexism. And in a longitudinal study among US adolescents, increased use of pornography predicted more sexist attitudes for girls two years later.

Pornography also teaches violent attitudes and behaviours to both adolescents and adults.

What’s more, meta-analyses – systematic research that synthesises multiple studies – from 2000 and 2015 have found associations between watching pornography and actual violent behaviours.

Aggression, largely by males and overwhelmingly against females, is common in pornography: an analysis of top-selling and top-renting titles found 88% of scenes showed aggression.

Men who use pornography more often are more likely to practise or desire dominant, degrading practices, such as gagging and choking. And women who use pornography are more likely to practise or desire submissive practices.

In fact, longitudinal studies among adolescents find watching pornography is linked to sexually violent behaviour later in life. In a US study, people who watched violent pornography were more than six times as likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour. In another, it predicted more frequent sexual harassment perpetration two years later.

In Collective Shout's submission to Senate Environment and Communications References Committee, Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the Internet we recommended: 

• The Australian Government should work with Internet Service Providers to establish a scheme for all existing and new customers to be provided with a default family friendly setting (no pornography) with opt-out only permitted by account holders who can establish that they are aged 18 years or over. Regulations to impose this requirement should be considered as a backup if after 12 months insufficient progress has been made by ISPs towards this goal.
• New programs should be designed with respectful and mutual relationships as the starting point, not just ‘sex education’. Young people want content based on their real lives and experiences – information that empowers and equips them to make healthy decisions about their sexuality.
• All children and young people should have access to comprehensive, age-appropriate sexuality and relationships education that promotes respectful and mutual relationships.
• The school curriculum should, in an age-appropriate manner, specifically address the influence of media, including the influence of pornography and the sex industry more broadly. We believe it is not enough to adopt a public health perspective, but that a gender equality perspective is also crucial in understanding these problems.
• School communities – including teachers, wellbeing staff and school leaders – should have access to quality professional learning, support and resources, to support them in implementing comprehensive relationships and sexuality education. This should include specialist support to address the influence of pornography.
• Pre-service teacher training should include learning about the influence of pornography and how to address it through respectful relationships and sexuality curricula, and in other relevant learning areas.
• Parents and carers should have access to information and resources to support them to parent effectively in this relatively new context of easy and anonymous access to pornography. This should include support to understand the issues, and practical advice about how to manage technology to minimise exposure and how to support their children’s reflective and critical thinking.
• Other adults involved in children and young people’s care and education – such as youth workers, doctors, counsellors and health promotion staff – should have access to relevant professional learning and resources addressing the influence of pornography.

We also contributed a submission to Inquiry into Age Verification for Online Wagering and Online Pornography. 

Recommendation 1: In light of data verifying the real-life harms of childhood exposure to pornography the Commonwealth government should recognise the potential benefits of an Age Verification system along with other measures to limit porn exposure to children, including education programs and improved ISP filters.

Recommendation 2: An age verification scheme for access to online pornography, drawing from work done to develop the original United Kingdom model and with added measures that address perceived shortcomings in that model, for example, additions that extend application to social media platforms, should be implemented by the Commonwealth Government.

Recommendation 3: Introduce an age verification system that will restrict children’s access to online pornography (and the global porn industry’s unfettered access to children), acknowledging that our obligation to protect children, and the ensuing protections afforded to children by such a system far outweigh the concerns of those with vested interests in the global porn industry.

Recommendation 4: Introduce an Age Verification system that will restrict children’s access to online pornography (and the global porn industry’s unfettered access to children) and so uphold Australia’s international obligations to protect children from abuse, exploitation and developmental harm, acknowledging that exposure to online pornography amounts to abuse, exploitation and harm.

Children need the adults around them to protect them from the harms of porn. Have you had "the talk" with the the young people in your life? 

Read the full article here

Read also: 

What's the problem with porn? Collective Shout respond to common pro-porn arguments (including why 'ethical porn' is not the answer)

Last week was Triple J’s ‘Porn Week’, with a special focus on stories about pornography and “discussing all things porn”, promising to examine “every facet of pornography”.

Perhaps a thorough examination of every facet would include a discussion about sexually violent content in pornography, including frequent acts of aggression, cruelty and humiliation of women, the normalisation of a male dominance/female subordination paradigm, or a critical look at the sexist and racist tropes that are commonplace in porn.

Maybe it would include accounts of mistreatment from female pornography performers, citing abuse and exploitation within the industry and being raped during production or high rates of suicide among performers.

“No amount of money would make it worth it”: Former porn performer Mia Khalifa speaks out

It might also include a conversation about the experiences of women and girls growing up in a ‘porn culture’, with growing numbers reporting sexual coercion in their intimate relationships with men and boys, and pressure to submit to unwanted, painful or degrading sex acts. 

Maybe a segment would be devoted to the potentially devastating impacts of children’s early exposure to hardcore pornography and how it shapes their attitudes and sexual practices. The quadrupling of child-on-child sexual assaults attributed to pornography, reports of girls as young as twelve requiring medical treatment for sex-related injuries, or more recently, the sixteen-year-old girl forced to get a colostomy bag after rough group sex

But there was no meaningful discussion of any of this.

Rather than engaging with legitimate criticisms of the pornography industry, or a growing body of research documenting how pornography harms women, children and men, Triple J instead promoted pornography use with articles like “How porn can be a positive force in your relationship” and “Porn, kinks and kink-shaming: You're not weird for watching the porn you watch”, just weeks after publishing a piece entitled “So you want to book a sex worker”, with instructions and advice on the ins and outs of purchasing sex.

What could have been a frank and much-needed examination of pornography felt more like a week of free PR for the sex industry.

Viewing rape porn "nothing to be ashamed of"

The article “Porn, kinks and kink-shaming” reassures readers that it is both normal and acceptable to masturbate to rape and incest porn- that these are “kinks” and “nothing to be ashamed of”. Masturbating to the physical abuse of women is framed as a matter of individual preference, and kink advocates quoted in the article warn against “kink-shaming” or “demonising” consumption of this material. Porn is, we are told, “only a fantasy”.

But it’s not just a fantasy. Fantasy occurs in the mind. When acts of sexual violence and cruelty are carried out on the bodies of living women, this ceases to be a fantasy and becomes reality. A porn scene featuring a woman being choked cannot be produced without an actual woman being choked on camera. That’s not fantasy, that’s a man’s actual hands around a woman’s actual neck, actually choking her.

It’s also not merely fantasy when it happens to women outside of pornography. A recent US study found a quarter of women surveyed have felt scared during sex. A number of these said their partner had tried to choke them without warning. Researchers in London studying heterosexual anal sex among teenagers found a climate of coercion, and that young people rarely spoke about anal sex “in terms of mutual exploration of sexual pleasure”. 

Eurydice Dixon’s killer Jaymes Todd was this week sentenced to life in prison for her rape and murder. The court heard that Todd watched violent pornography before and after raping and killing the young comedian, and that Todd was addicted to a fantasy of coercive rape, including fantasies of death, and searched for snuff films online, in which people are killed. Was Jaymes Todd’s preference for pornography depicting rape and extreme violence against women, even murder, a mere “kink”? Was it a coincidence that a man who was obsessed with porn depicting the sadistic rape and murder of women carried out these same acts against a real woman?

Triple J promotes "ethical" porn

Another segment was dedicated to ‘ethical’ porn, with a visit to a Sydney porn set. So-called ethical or feminist porn is often positioned as a positive alternative to run of the mill misogynist and male-dominated pornography. But the bar for what constitutes ‘ethical’ porn is very low, and typically only refers to conditions of production, such as fair compensation and labour conditions, representation of diverse body types and sexualities, consent and authenticity.

The actual content in ‘ethical’ or ‘feminist’ porn may be indistinguishable from violent and abusive mainstream porn. Rather than showcasing more egalitarian or non-violent content, degradation and acts of physical violence against women such as slapping, gagging and strangulation are still found in ‘ethical’ porn. Does this sound all that ethical? And if ethical porn truly exists, is anyone interested in watching it?

Dr Meagan Tyler, Senior Lecturer at RMIT, argues that the notion of ethical porn is a cynical attempt to make porn companies look like good corporate citizens.

“It’s a marketing ploy and an exercise in obfuscation,” she says.

"It's for a small segment of consumers who would like to think that their pornography consumption is unproblematic and they would like to think that what they are doing is totally different from what others are doing when, in reality, it all feeds the same commercial sex industry."

“It speaks volumes about how much pornography has colonised our understandings of sex that we can only imagine the possibility of a (potentially) slightly less harmful pornography, not a happy life without pornography at all.”

Were any researchers who have analysed the harmful impacts of pornography, especially in young people in their sexual development, consulted? Or was it only those in favour of porn consumption, including those with vested interests in the industry? ABC is a publicly funded broadcaster, and Dr Tyler says we need to ask questions about who commissioned this discussion, and under what circumstances.

“Triple J ‘Porn Week’ [is a] week long advertorial for why porn is great - we can’t ignore the intersections of men’s violence against women and intimate violation of women and the multi-billion dollar global pornography industry.”

We need to have honest conversations about the realities of pornography and our engagement with it. Porn Week was a platform for pro-pornography indoctrination, and many more women and girls will suffer as a result.

See also:

What's the problem with porn? Responding to pro-porn arguments

Porn stars speak out

Violence against women in pornography is not a fantasy, it's a reality

The dark reason porn stars keep dying

Dear Mr McKay,

Collective Shout is a grassroots, not-for-profit movement advocating for an end to the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in advertising, media and popular culture. A significant element of our work is to call corporations to account for facilitating the development of sexist attitudes which contributes to harmful behaviours toward women and girls, as demonstrated in a growing body of global research (see for example here: and here)

Your company, 7-Eleven, has come to our attention due to the pornographic magazines you sell, which normalise and even encourage behaviour which is not only harmful but often illegal. Front covers with headlines like ‘Fresh Teen Flesh’ and promoting content relating toup-skirting and ‘nip slips’ are on open display including to children and young people.

One of our founders recently visited a 7-Eleven store in Brisbane and discovered that it was selling unrestricted magazines, People and Picture. These magazines contained X-rated material including ‘teen porn’ and ‘barely legal’ content promoting the idea that young women - often made to appear younger than they really are - want sex with older men.

Much of the content eroticises sexual assault and promotes illegal activity such as‘up-skirting’ and ‘nip-slips’. These magazines have been given ‘Unrestricted M15+’ serial classification. However the particular issues cited appear to breach the requirements of that classification. Loopholes in Australia’s classification system allow for these titles to be displayed and sold to an all-age customer base.

However, this does not absolve 7-Eleven of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and duty of care to stop distributing these unrestricted porn titles and immediately remove them from all stores.

We note 7-Eleven’s response to customer inquiries, that ‘modesty covers’ are placed over the magazines. This is an inadequate response. Subtitles promoting “X-rated Aussie teens” and up-skirting are still visible to customers. Moreover, the response does not address the main issue, that these magazines contain material that should not be available for viewing and purchase by an all-age customer base in the first place.

Given 7-Eleven’s well-known, specific appeal to teenagers and children, and that a number of your brands and promotions specifically target these groups (Slurpees, Chupa Chups, Krispy Kreme), we believe it is imperative for 7-Eleven to remove these magazines from sale and stop profiting from them.

We note 7-Eleven’s dedication to “Fairness and Integrity”, and your claims to behave with “respect and social responsibility”. However, authentic CSR needs action above words. We believe that your company is violating its CSR commitments by distributing unrestricted porn titles.

We urge you to address this and demonstrate you really do care for your community - especially women and girls who would welcome positive action on your part.

Yours sincerely 

Melinda Tankard Reist

Movement Director

Collective Shout 

Click here to see the PDF letter

Ask their execs to stop selling sexploitation today.

Take Action!

Contact 7-Eleven. Tell them women and girls are not sexual objects and to pull 'unrestricted' pornographic magazines from sale in their stores. 

Website (if viewing on a phone and a contact form does not appear, click 'view full site' - small writing at the bottom of the page - then once on full site click ‘Contact us’ on top right menu which will take you to the contact form.) 

Message 7-Eleven on Facebook

Message 7 Eleven on Instagram

Tweet to 7-Eleven on Twitter

Call their Head Office on (03) 95410711

Write to them at 2/658 Church St, Richmond, Vic, 3121.

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