Why I Chose to Appear in Netflix’s Controversial Pornhub Documentary – Rolling Stone

“Another day, another request to talk about Pornhub.” When director Suzanne Hillinger and Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions asked me to star in their new Netflix documentary, I thought so. Money Shot: Pornhub Story.

This movie tells the story of how Pornhub’s popularity exploded. new york timesNicholas Kristof of and advocate for sex trafficking victims accused the streamer’s parent company, Mindgeek, of hosting vile and illegal child pornography and rape videos. Hillinger promised that the film would show how right-wing Christians can deploy sex-trafficking allegations as Trojan horses to subvert the legal adult entertainment industry.

I was reluctant to sit down for the interview. Unless it’s MILF porn set in a laundry room, I generally don’t air dirty laundry in public. yeah. Most porn world docs hot girls wanted It presents us as a bunch of modeled, manipulated, abused, low IQ victim-cum-sluts.

But most of all, I was tired of talking about Pornhub. As Christophe’s story flowed, vanity fair (ironically) of new york times I was asked to discuss the scandal. have understood. I am one of America’s most famous porn stars. I write about sex worker issues on news sites. But I’m over it. Personally, I don’t care about Pornhub. Don’t worry about streaming porn sites. One her website is not my bread and butter. If Pornhub goes bust, 7,000 other tube sites will pop up. Who cares about tube sites?

The problem is that the war against Pornhub is a proxy war to destroy the entire legal sex work industry. If Christians really care about ending bad child pornography, they’ll go after Facebook. Facebook hosts far more child sexual abuse material than any tube site, Pornhub or MindGeek. But what they really want is to shut down Porn Valley.

I am interested in showing that the anti-sex trafficking campaign is an anti-pornography campaign in disguise. That’s why I started writing about these issues for news publications. That’s why I protest. I worried that if I didn’t speak up in the documentary, no one would. Worse, they’ll find the dumbest pornstars to present us as America’s dumbest women.

For security reasons, I requested that Jigsaw find another home for the interview. It looked artistic, but as a content creator, he knows that cameras have a lot of gimmicks. They could easily make me look like an idiot or a bitch, so I purposely covered my skin. I made sure the colors were soft to avoid looking like they showed up in the . I wanted to feel close.

Over the course of the four-hour interview, we discussed my time in porn, evangelicals trying to destroy the legal porn industry, why I decided to start writing on this topic, and many other issues. They even filmed me typing on my laptop and working on an op-ed about sex work.

you won’t find much of this money shotLike some other porn stars, I appear as a talking head. The roughly 90-minute film chronologically tells a short history of Pornhub. The first act depicts, in a humorous and well-crafted manner, the rise of Pornhub from how it reached prominence to the ubiquity of the brand’s theme song. They tell their stories through pornography, interviews with his performers, recreations, and even some TikTok clips. cute.They share some important details (how MindGeek Acquisition Pornhub; didn’t create it), but all in all, it gets to the point.

In my opinion, the film gets rocky in the second act. Find out how Exodus Cry and the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), a right-wing religious group that advocates for sex trafficking, discovered that Pornhub hosts illegal rape and child pornography videos. NCOSE attorney Dani Pinter tells the story on screen, but Exodus Cry cheerleader Lyra Mikkelwaite declined the interview.Pinter sat in a suit in her corporate office. and they are filming her from her front. Because she interacts with experts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a huge non-profit organization, Pinter says that despite working for a radical Christian group, she appears to be related to them.

Both Pinter and NCMEC spokespersons have described the horrifying content on Pornhub.After Christophe became aware of the material, he Times, which leads to a government investigation. Few people from MindGeek were available for interviews, but I’ve heard from two of them who are thought to be MindGeek’s whistleblowers. The moderator has seriously criticized MindGeek for not taking down illegal material, but his disguise makes it difficult for viewers to trust him. Additionally, the HR woman is unclear what expertise or knowledge she has on MindGeek.

The cinematographer shows these whistleblowers as brave individuals, but most porn stars like Asa Akira and myself from high angles. They give us little context to distinguish us. For example, Akira, he’s a spokesperson for MindGeek, and I’m his performer and writer for independent porn, seem to come from the same background. If you didn’t know the girls on screen in real life, you would have a hard time distinguishing them. I believe we were compelled to defend Pornhub from the movie’s suggestion that we have to play ball with Pornhub for a reason.Most of us sat down to discuss how this war will harm porn Performernot Pornhub.

Ultimately, the film cuts to the truth about the right wing. It details Mikelwaite’s connection to the homophobic church of Exodus Cry. This is how a lawyer who wants to derail MindGeek in a silly way compares it. The SopranosMost importantly, it reveals that NCOSE was previously a Christian group called Morality of the Media designed to end “immoral” content. Rebranded as NCOSE to take advantage of “Human Trafficking”. When confronted, Pinter loses it on camera. It’s a great moment to expose her as a fraudster.

However, the release may be too late to confuse some viewers. This is mainly because the film does not define sex trafficking. Subject repeats the phrase over and over. They say MindGeek was accused of sex trafficking, but without definition, Times MindGeek executives literally kidnapped children and accused them of filming their sex. But MindGeek never condemned this.of Times Blaming MindGeek for hosting the video, which is still despicable and wrong, is very different from literally sex-trafficking women and children.

Filmmakers wanted to support porn stars, but the stigma of sex trafficking is so strong that it is difficult to outright accuse the right of manipulating the masses. No one wants to appear to be endorsing sex trafficking, so the film devolves into a “two-sided” debate. While watching the movie, I kept thinking about what President Donald Trump said about the horrible riots in Charlottesville.[There are] There are some very nice people on both sides.

They could have solved this problem by editing the film differently. Let’s not start with Pornhub, but with evangelical extremists. There would be no ambiguity if the director showed Christian motives from the start, starting with Exodus Cry’s origins and his NCOSE rebranding. It’s clear that Pornhub hosted horrible videos, but this is an internet-wide problem and these right-wingers are using “sex trafficking” to subvert porn.

I didn’t hate it money shotI didn’t love it. But this movie would have been worse if the other sex workers and I hadn’t been in it. Without a narrator, the film relied on the testimony of those seated at the camera. The more porn performers speak to the press, the more likely journalists and directors are to share our lived experiences rather than the fabricated talking points of self-proclaimed “sex trafficking advocates.”

Two “advocates” who haven’t tweeted about the film are Dani Pinter and Laila Mikkelwaite.And if the two of America’s most smug and Twitter-addicted hotties aren’t tweeting money shot, and they believe the documentary thwarts their aims. The problem for Mikelwaite is the tenacity of the sex worker rights movement. money shot It wasn’t perfect, but it streamed on major platforms, further denting the false narrative about the porn industry. money shotAnd I will not stop raising my voice.