Has Pornhub, the industry giant part of the billion-dollar pornography industry, grown a conscience? This month, women’s rights campaigners noticed that when people search for the word “unconscious” on the site, they are directed to a message warning users that they might be searching for content that constitutes criminal activity. The platform now features the message: 

Warning: Your search could be for illegal and abusive sexual material, including non-consensual intimate imagery or image-based sexual abuse … Actual or staged depictions of coerced or non-consensual sexual acts or the use of a person’s likeness without their consent is not permitted on our site. We take image-based sexual abuse and non-consensual intimate imagery very seriously.

Is this morally serious or does it represent a “woke” revamp to keep up with the times? The about-face from the pornography juggernaut appears to be in response to an ongoing legal case currently taking place in France that revolves around allegations of large groups of men bonding with each other in online communities through their common interest in sex with unconscious women. 

In recent years, Pornhub has come under increased pressure from campaigners to shut down some of its more overtly violent content, or at least those involving children and extortion — therefore it is natural that people’s eyes turned towards the company. In 2020, both Mastercard and Visa claimed they have banned people from using their cards to pay for the website following internal investigations and media exposés that the platform was hosting rape content. MindGeek, the parent company that operates Pornhub, agreed in December 2023 that it had profited from sex trafficking.

Pornography giants are no strangers to the interest many of their users have for violence and it could be argued that they positively encourage extreme content in order to gather clicks and increase their revenue. This concern about “non-consensual sexual acts” is sudden indeed. Although they now include a disclaimer on searches for the word “unconscious,” the website has featured masses of content depicting sex with unconscious women — or, as it is commonly understood outside of the sex industry, rape and sexual assault. 

In England and Wales, rape is legally defined as the intentional penetration with a penis of another’s person’s vagina, anus or mouth without their consent. Rape Crisis England and Wales defines sexual violence as: 

Any kind of sexual activity or act (including online) that was unwanted or involved one or more of the following: pressure, manipulation, bullying, intimidation, threats, deception, force. In other words, any kind of sexual activity or act that took place without consent.

This very week, a video of a man penetrating an unconscious woman was featured on Pornhub’s front page. There are 682 pages of videos of men “waking women up” by inserting their penis somewhere in the women’s body. The same scenario made up most of the 627 pages retrieved when people searched for “asleep” pornography, with women being “surprised” by a man penetrating them vaginally, anally or waking up with semen on their faces. 

Searching “fucking her while she is asleep” brings up 28,819 pages, while “wake her up with dick in her mouth” leads to 37,886 pages. Granted, search engines being imperfect, not all of these videos necessarily portray these acts — but many do. This does not account for the videos explicitly advertised as “painful” or “aggressive”, or containing sexual acts that are promoted as being “forced” on women. Neither do these search results account for the multitude of channels featured on the website whose only purpose is to create and disseminate videos of women exhibiting various states of distress.

It would be naïve to presume that it does not affect their perception of women

The millions of men consuming this content are oftentimes watching these videos while their wives, girlfriends or female relatives are nearby at home. Others close their computer or their phones, to go on dating sites searching for women. Employed (alongside female coworkers) or not, all of the men consuming this content interact with women in their everyday life. It would be naïve to presume that it does not affect their perception of women and that many will seek to recreate these disturbing and thoroughly illegal scenarios.

The global women’s liberation movement has been remarkably successful in instigating societal change to acknowledge that sexual violence is unacceptable. However, no matter how many Sexual Offences Acts may pass through Parliaments and Congresses or how many rape crisis centres are inaugurated around the world every year, the reality remains that a proportion of men recoil at the demand to respect women’s boundaries, seeking refuge and camaraderie among men with similar interest. Where do they find this solace? They find it in pornography and in the thriving online communities for men with similar interests, which are oftentimes intertwined. I should know this very well because my academic research focuses on online communities for men with these types of interests.

The search for explicit violence against women, including sexual violence, is not an incidental bug of pornography; it is a defining feature. There is ample research to support the theory that the higher the pornography use, the more audiences are likely to want to replicate sexual scripts (the way people express their sexuality) which are aggressive, with men wanting to engage in belligerent sexual activity with women acquiescing to a compliant or accommodating role in sex. More overtly, there is also abundant evidence that high levels of aggression, including verbal and physical abuse of women, permeate the most sought-after pornographic videos, with those that depict male aggression towards women being some of the best-selling and most watched content.

If porn websites have any interest in banning abusive sexual material, they ought to close up entirely. Without coercion, abuse and violence, their websites, and the obscene amounts of money they derive from them, would not exist.