Storing “child porn” (child sexual abuse material or “CSAM”) for future re-uploading; maintaining the title and web data of a video depicting the sexual abuse of a toddler to draw traffic; anonymously smearing critics — these are just some of the appalling allegations that have been levelled in a newly-released court judgment in the United States against multinational conglomerate MindGeek.

The case and its related judgment serve as a carnival of misery for anyone who has the misfortune to read it, but a brief overview for those who haven’t: for several years, MindGeek and its subsidiary site Pornhub have been locked in battle with anti-sexual exploitation activists, experts and organisations over the site’s alleged involvement in the dissemination of illegal material. 

This material ranges from videos and images depicting the sexual abuse of children, teenagers and adults to the non-consensual sharing of intimate images of its subjects (more colloquially known as “revenge porn”). 

The case at hand was brought by an immeasurably brave young woman called Serena Fleites, who was also one of the subjects of a New York Times expose on Pornhub in 2020. In her case, Fleites brought numerous causes of action against MindGeek, but perhaps most pertinently here, she also named Visa as a defendant. 

This may seem like a strange connection to make for those unfamiliar with the workings of the porn industry in the digital age, but the relationship makes perfect sense, even from an “above board” perspective. In short, Visa acted as a payment processor to and from MindGeek’s websites. 

The marketplace is bursting with depictions of depraved acts

Whilst many would argue that profiting from pornography — which is itself the commodification of (overwhelmingly) women’s bodies as sexual objects — is fundamentally unscrupulous, the charges levelled at Visa were even graver.

Fleites alleged that Visa not only profited from the processing of transactions of illegal and abusive content, but that it was aware that this was the nature of the content. Further, Fleites alleges that Visa ignored public outcry as well as its own due diligence processes and procedures to investigate whether its continued relationship with MindGeek was non-compliant with such processes and procedures. 

In response to Fleites’s case for damages — which was brought partially under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act — Visa distanced itself from the harm suffered by Fleites, and from suggestions of involvement in the general profiteering from highly illegal content. The judgement is lengthy, but powerfully written and well-worth reading. The court refused (in part) to allow Visa to circumvent responsibility and culpability for its alleged involvement in profiteering from illegal, abusive material. 

As well as giving credibility to charges against Visa, MindGeek and Pornhub, the judgement explores and ultimately rebukes the fundamental operational structure of the porn industry. It provides a window through which we can all understand just how incurably exploitative the industry is, whether knowingly or not. 

The judgement states: “If not for its drive to maximise profit, why would MindGeek allow Plaintiff’s first video to be posted despite its title clearly indicating Plaintiff was well below 18 years old?” Further, “Visa urges that it has no involvement in the maintenance of MindGeek’s websites [ … ] Plaintiff’s [Fleites] claims against Visa are all based on an unsupported assumption that Visa could force MindGeek to operate differently [ … ] But Visa quite literally did force MindGeek to operate differently, and markedly so, at least for a time” (referring to a period in 2020 whereby Pornhub removed over 80 per cent of its content when Visa suspended MindGeek’s “merchant privileges”). 

The recognition by the Court that MindGeek — and the porn industry more broadly — is driven to maximise profit is something that active campaigners against the porn industry have been saying for many years. Feminist author and dedicated anti-pornography campaigner Andrea Dworkin recognised this prior to the existence of the internet itself, all the way back in 1981. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she stated: 

In the photographs and films, real women are used as porneia and real women are depicted as porneia. To profit, the pimps must supply the porneia as the technology widens the market for the visual consumption of women being brutalized and loving it. The number of pictures required to meet the demands of the marketplace determines the number of porneia required to meet the demands of graphic depiction.

This theme of the marketplace dictating the quantity of “product” — women’s bodies — required for profit was something Dr Gail Dines continued with in her landmark work Pornland almost 30 years later. Dines stated, as she wandered round a convention hall bloated and surfeit with pornographers and their insatiable punters: “it becomes very clear that they are not particularly interested in sex. What turns these people on is making money”. 

So the trend continues, nearly half a century on from Andrea Dworkin’s economic analysis of pornography as an industry. Over a decade after Gail Dines’s recognition that profit drives the pornographers, not a desire to depict any particular kind of sex — except of course, that which will create the most profit. But in 2022, the marketplace has already reached saturation point, its banks bursting at the seams with almost-infinite depictions of the most depraved acts one can possibly imagine. 

Without the profit, the industry would quickly crumble

This in turn leads MindGeek and Pornhub to act as they do. The fantasy age of mutually pleasurable sex being the basis of the porn industry is dead. Now, due to the hydraulic press effect of the free market crushing and squeezing every last drop of profit out of the porn industry, a grotesque hyper-division of “labour” is occurring. 

No longer is the industry “just” made up of women being sold as whole individuals, paraded around to be sold as the entire product as was historically the case in the era of the “porn star”. Now, these whole objects are broken down into individual units to squeeze profit from: a vagina, a mouth, an anus. Each body is oppressively “specialised” into its component parts, and then assigned into a “category” for easy access for consumers. Sometimes, young women have pictures of their body parts taken without consent, and then uploaded into a larger but distinct cesspit of content: “teen”, “barely legal”, the list goes on. 

Visa is as compromised as any profit-driven institution that swells its coffers by virtue of its involvement in the porn industry. Pornhub might provide the platform, and MindGeek might provide the infrastructure, but Visa is the one facilitating the profit. Without the profit, the industry would quickly crumble. 

Young women like Serena Fleites are the ones who suffer from this corporate avarice. It drives a hypersexualised culture in which those same women and girls are seen as nothing more than objects. Don’t let Visa’s mealy-mouthed evasion fool you. Involvement is complicity, and this complicity drives and fuels horrors.