“The liberals are turning you gay through porn” sounds like the spittle-flecked paranoia of alt-right commentator Alex Jones. But recently released, covertly recorded conversations with senior employees of Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub among other pornographic websites, suggest that at least some industry figures think that gay and trans conversion should be part of the pornography giant’s marketing. And, bizarrely, they think this makes them the good guys.

The story was picked-up by Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire, who interviewed journalist Arden Young of Sound Investigations. Young filmed informal discussions with insiders about their work. Arguably the most unnerving footage is of Dillon Rice, a senior script writer at Aylo. As the black t-shirt clad, bespectacled, bearded man idly muses on his role, he says:

Let’s say I was 12 and I saw, like, TransAngels […] it would help me figure out what I do like and what I don’t like.

Rice also described deliberately inserting queer themes into pornography films, to “see if you can convert somebody, right? Somebody who’s never looked for anything like that.” He outlined a business model that tries “to push stuff that’s less accepted, like putting a trans male or a trans female in a scene… Test it out, see if you can get a bigger audience with it.”

In Young’s footage, the script writer comes across as relaxed about the grim reality that children watch pornography, and pretty sanguine about the fact that it might shape their sexual script as adults. He seems proud of his job, arguing that for “12-year-olds” who’ve “not yet figured out” their sexuality or gender it might be “helpful to see” their nascent desires represented. But while Rice’s words might expose a mindset that’s shocking to the outside world, the idea that pornography can be used as a path to self-discovery is baked into Pornhub’s public relations. 

Analysis from Pornhub states that in 2022 “the transgender category grew by +75% to become the 7th most popular category worldwide”. Within the gay category, “Trans searches for ‘FTM’ (female to male) grew by +202%”. This is soothingly spun by the porn giant as evidence that “society has become more inclusive of diverse gender identities”. 

Media psychologist and therapist Dr. Laurie is quoted as offering her support for this worldview: 

Increasingly, marginalised sexuality (outside the vanilla world) is coming out of the shadows. We are talking about sex more, we are more free to explore our sexual fantasies with less judgement attached. Our sexual curiosity is coming out of the closet.

There is much to unpack from this closet, not least the implicit suggestion that same-sex attracted people are less likely to be “vanilla” and inclined to shadowy, taboo-breaking sex. It is worth noting that one of the resolutely heterosexual films currently ranked on Pornhub within the “most popular” category is titled “Physics professor is fucking a student. Little slut is swallowing cum.” If this is a representation of curiosity about a sexual fantasy, perhaps it’s not unreasonable to wish the door had been left locked.

What modern pornography trades on is not a flowering of desire and diverse representation of sexual interests, but rather the feeding of an insatiable appetite for content. It has long been acknowledged that as a sex, men, who constitute three quarters of Pornhub’s users, are hardwired for sexual novelty. 

Mounting evidence shows consumers of pornography become numb to what once aroused them. By slipping in taboo-busting content, or in Rice’s words, pushing stuff that’s “less accepted”, pornographers can hack the sexual interests of consumers. If this simply led to straight men spaffing off to gay pornography that in itself might not be any more morally dubious than watching heterosexual scenes. The problem is what this says about the malleable tastes of male pornography consumers; the extra clicks come from the breaking down of social norms of what is “acceptable”. This clearly does not always stop with seeking out “trans” or “gay” categories.

Those who become addicted to pornography often find themselves inexorably sucked onto a downward conveyor belt of increasingly depraved and extreme content. This grim pattern has been observed by some working to combat the proliferation of child abuse images online. 

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, who advises the government on safeguarding, has shared that in his experience a growing number of 18 to 26-year-old men are starting to look at child pornography. As a result, they are emerging as a new group of potential online paedophiles:

“They get to the point where there’s no pornographic material that is stimulating them so then they start to explore what child abuse imagery might look like,” Bailey told the Internet Watch Foundation.

This is one bleak ending for the quest for novel and new material. Pornhub denies that it hosts illegal content, and it has partnered with charities to trial a chatbot to deter those who attempt to seek out child sexual abuse images. But parent company Aylo is facing a class action lawsuit for allegedly “systematically participat[ing] in sex-trafficking ventures involving tens of thousands of children by receiving, distributing, and profiting from droves of child sexual abuse material (“CSAM”).” 

Pornhub is only one of many sites providing pornographic content. Nonetheless, there are over 125 million daily visits to the Pornhub Network of sites including YouPorn and Redtube, and Pornhub itself has 20 million registered users. Given the size of the industry it would be naïve to imagine that pornography consumption, and the attendant insatiable push to break down social taboos, was confined to people’s screens.

It would be comforting to laugh off the claim that pornographers are hacking sexual interests as the hyperbole of frothing alt-right nutters in the US. But the evidence, and the alleged victims, are building up. 

The power of pornography over men’s minds is not a niche problem, it is a global crisis that is already being played out on the bodies of the most vulnerable.