There was a time, a few decades ago, when the men who owned the world’s biggest pornography businesses were happy to be famous. They paraded a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public dressed in silk pajamas or with a woman in swimwear on each arm. Porn moguls like Hustler’s Larry Flynt or Playboy’s Hugh Hefner were household names.
“Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling,” Patricia Nilsson writes in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy and Everything Else. “These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.”
It’s not that they simply feel shy about posing alongside the women who generate their income, or are wary of giving interviews. The owners of the industry’s biggest companies are so anxious to remain anonymous that we often don’t even know their names. They have understood that it is wiser to live in total obscurity.
Photo: EPA-EFE
UNDER-SCRUTINIZED
So Nilsson’s decision to start investigating pornography for the Financial Times will no doubt have come as a very unwelcome development for these mostly invisible leaders of a sector that has been under-scrutinized for decades. For five years, she subjected the industry to the same deep analysis that a journalist would give to the oil and gas markets. She wondered why, unlike most businesses of a similar scale, pornography companies rarely made the headlines.
“I started wondering: why is there so much porn everywhere? Why is the online world so saturated with images of people paid to have sex?” Nilsson says.
Photo: AFP
She asks at the start of Guilty Pleasure: “We live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to free porn as to clean water. Why aren’t we more curious about the growing role of pornography in our lives?”
Nilsson, 34, says she belongs to “the first generation that came of age on the Internet, and to whom oceans of free porn was a normal part of life.” This perspective has shaped her calmly pragmatic approach to the subject.
“Of course there are parts of the industry I’m critical of,” she says. “My argument is not that we should be neutral towards porn, but that we need to accept and understand it as a real industry, and ask what its growth and popularity says about the state of our economy and the world of work.”
Photo: AP
Nilsson is in London when we meet — she has British and Swedish citizenship but Polish roots and lives in Frankfurt, where she is approaching the end of maternity leave (she finished writing her book in the exhausting first weeks after giving birth).
TECH NERDS AND BANKERS
Her investigations led to the discovery that the industry’s owners were now tech nerds and bankers, with no particular interest in pornography itself.
“I started realizing: this industry isn’t really about porn any more. I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn’t find anyone who actually worked with porn. I couldn’t find anyone who even knew someone who worked with porn, because all these people were working in [Web] traffic or payment processing,” she says.
I’ve attended a couple of these conferences and have been equally struck by the quantities of men in zipped tech-bro gilets who want to talk about impenetrably dry notions like affiliate marketing, barely acknowledging that they work in the world of explicit adult content.
Nilsson was determined to bring the sector’s leaders out of the shadows in part because she wanted to reveal who was getting rich through porn and how they were doing it. But she also disliked the hypocrisy of these men, some of whom had become billionaires.
“Online sex workers literally have to bare it all; once you put your image out there on the Internet, even if technically you control the IP, it can be very difficult to ever get it down. So it’s terrible if the people profiting from the industry then have the gall to say: ‘I want to protect my anonymity and I don’t really want to be associated with sex work,’” she says. “They don’t want to put their names out there, they don’t want to put their faces out there.”
She was the first person to track down Bernd Bergmair, the mysterious figure who, from 2013 to 2023, owned MindGeek — then the world’s largest pornography company and the conglomerate operating Pornhub. It turned out he was an Austrian former Goldman Sachs investment banker, described as an “uncle type” in expensive clothes, who had been so determined to stay hidden that others in the pornography world described him as a ghost and doubted his existence. Bergmair had written his undergraduate thesis on “financing strategies for corporate acquisitions,” and knew so little about pornography that, early on, he took his competitors out for lunch to pick their brains on how the business functioned.
A banker who had worked in Frankfurt, London, New York and Hong Kong, Bergmair “seemed entirely uninterested in the sex [work] that underpinned the empire he was buying,” Nilsson notes. “He knew it was a highly profitable business and he just cared about ensuring that the structure was safe enough so that he could keep taking his dividends out.”
In 2020, Pornhub removed millions of unverified videos, some of which may have contained nonconsensual pornography, rape, child sexual abuse, violent sexual abuse of women and other abusive content.
‘MASTURBATORY’ MODEL OF THE INTERNET
We’re already familiar with the way pornography companies drove early improvements in the power of the Internet from the 1990s onwards, to enable large quantities of video to be distributed to the maximum number of people at maximum speed. But Nilsson lists half a dozen other ways that pornography has dictated the way we navigate the Internet.
We can also thank pornography businesses for developing reliable, high-quality video streaming, honed by the need for glitch-free camming, where models broadcast live video feeds of themselves to customers and chat to them. And long before influencers started working out what they needed to do to grow and maintain a lucrative social media following, Webcam models were deciding how best to curate online personas to keep audiences’ attention, and elicit generous tips.
Nilsson says her own virtual world is usually full of cheerful sourdough recipes or restaurants that she wants to check out on her next trip to Sicily, but she realizes now that the way “all this lovely, worthwhile content” is transmitted to her phone, and the way she consumes it, is closely based on a model developed by online pornography tech developers. Companies such as MindGeek trade on desire, so they became expert early on at spotting what people browsing the Internet are genuinely interested in.
“Staring at content that is algorithmically engineered to arouse you is a perfect metaphor for our relationship with our devices and the Internet and social media. Pornography is no longer just about sex — its logic of capturing attention through stimulation, keeping us watching rather than doing, is embedded in the online world,” she says.
Social media sites have learned from innovations developed by pornography companies — how to make the stream of content addictive, how to ensure people stay browsing for a little longer.
“We’re often scrolling, and we feel like we’re living these things, but we’re not. We’re stuck in this sort of endless loop of gratification and self-soothing, and we use our phones to calm ourselves down, or just take our mind off things, but we’re not living.”
She calls this the “masturbatory” model of the Internet; a model that feeds us content designed to “make us feel good, to arouse us, to flatter us, to make us linger.”
She traces a clear line from the carefully flirtatious interactions of women stripping online for camming work, trying to get tips from their clients, to the docile and sycophantic tones given by developers to chatbots, “who indulge our fantasies and make us feel better than any person in our real lives can.”
ONLINE OUTRAGE
In parallel, online outrage also has roots in pornography and the competition for hits, she argues.
“If you look at the state of online culture today … we have so much anger and everything feels so extreme. This follows a trend you could see on Pornhub a long, long time ago — where the onslaught of free material meant that content needed to shock more and more to stand out, making pornography become more and more extreme,” she says.
Anyone who followed last year’s race between the British porn stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips to outdo each other by broadcasting themselves having sex with hundreds of men will know what she means.
Nilsson’s primary focus is analyzing the business model, rather than charting the experiences of the women who create the content. She doesn’t soft-soap the extremes of the industry — documenting, for example, the disturbing popularity of “humiliation porn,” which is pornography that involves actors being used sexually by a group of men to the point of gagging or tears. But many of the women she interviews emphasize how the work has given them options. A different perspective is offered only occasionally.
She tells me she felt awkward when she found herself sitting next to a depressed Webcam model at an adult industry event in Prague one evening. Nilsson had been invited to attend by Katya Tiuni, a Ukrainian woman who went into camming in the 1990s to escape the poverty of the post-communist economic collapse. Tiuni later set up a school for women hoping to become online sex workers, teaching them brand development and how to cultivate long-term audience loyalty (more than 10,000 women have attended her Webinars).
But the young woman next to Nilsson was not enjoying the training.
“I was trying to chat about the job and she was just so unhappy, saying: ‘I don’t want to be here, I miss home, I made a mistake.’ It was such a great contrast to Katya’s lean-in feminism, feeling empowered through making money,” Nilsson says.
This woman’s views on the industry do not make it into the book.
Instead, Nilsson is at pains to avoid judgment.
“Historically, much feminist analysis of sex work has come from women who have never done it, or never been in circumstances where it might seem like the best option available. If we are genuinely interested in supporting sex workers, their own accounts of what the work means to them have to be central to the conversation,” she says.
Thinking about what the proliferation of online pornography means for women, like her, who have to “live in a world where the idea that you can buy female attention and affection” has become mainstream, is a “completely different conversation to what it actually means to people who are doing sex work.”
More interesting, she says, is to think about why so many women are opting to go into this world. She wonders what we can learn “about the state of capitalism when so many people are saying: ‘Actually, it’s not going to work for me to get a degree and try to get a job and work my way up because just earning an income, if you don’t have previous assets, is not working any more. I need to hustle to get a down payment on my house.’”
Finally, she is curious about the links between social media and a growing readiness to post explicit content.
“Why,” she asks, “do we have an online culture that has made self-exposure so normalized, and the drive to monetize one’s own image so normalized, that the step to actually selling pornography is not that big for many people?”
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