The Digital Closet, page 22
It is no wonder that professional and amateur adult entertainers alongside many consumers of pornography in the United Kingdom were fearful of handing over a monopoly on age verification to MindGeek. This monopoly would have quickly put most small-scale pornographers out of business and made it even easier for MindGeek’s tube sites and affiliate networks to strengthen their monopoly. According to a Freedom of Information request, MindGeek met with the British government five times between the critical months of September 2016 and January 2017 as the act was being crafted and lobbied for the government to shut down their competitors.56 They expected to sign up twenty to twenty-five million sites in the first month alone after the act went into effect on an initially traffic-based pricing schema, but there would be nothing to prevent them from increasing the rent once they have a monopoly on an age verification market. Further, there were no protections in the act for the massive amounts of user data that MindGeek would have been able to collect as it gained insight into the pornography consumption patterns of an entire nation.57 Lastly, it should be noted that the act let search engines and social networks off the hook, classifying them as ancillary service providers and focusing instead on regulating “pornographic websites.”58 Perhaps it ought to be expected that internet platforms would have the clout to escape regulation, but it demonstrates a bias in the regulation schema toward censoring those sites without the capital to fight back.
While nothing on this scale has been seriously considered to this point in the United States, it is increasingly possible. The end of net neutrality in combination with FOSTA making ISPs potentially financially liable for facilitating vaguely defined sexual services makes it easy to imagine a world in which content filters will be applied at the level of ISPs rather than individual platforms. Violet Blue goes farther and even imagines a future in which classifications of “pornography” are broadened to include any speech that the government doesn’t like and looks to examples like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, which classify the World Health Organization’s website as “pornography” in order to censor it under national law.59 As we’ve seen in chapter 3 and will continue to see in the rest of this chapter, however, even without heteronormative content filtering at the ISP level, the United States’ increasing reliance on internet platforms and payment services creates a technological infrastructure and political economy in which mainstream heteroporn can continue to dominate not only the porn we see but also the porn we can imagine.
Google SafeSearch and the Invisibility of Alt-Porn
As we have already seen, the tube sites that now dominate online pornography consumption operate heteronormatively in a number of ways. Many critics, like Pandora Blake, compare this to an idealized version of the open internet in which all content, no matter how niche or queer, was readily available to users. These ideal versions of the web as a pornotopia largely require us to view Google Search as an unbiased gateway to that pornotopia, else the content might exist, but everyday users would have no means of ever stumbling upon it. Or at least, if this imagined pornotopia can make room for just a little bias on Google’s part, like allowing the most visited porn sites, which are by default heteroporn, to show up first in its search results, it would require a sort of pornoliteracy in which adept users might manipulate the search results to get past the wall of heteroporn and discover the feminist and queer pornography cached all across the web. In reality, both of these axioms for a pornotopia are immensely flawed.
First, while some readers—especially adult readers with a longer history of seeking and finding alt-porn online—will think that this pornoliteracy is widespread and easily obtained, I am not convinced that we should be so hopeful. It requires that internet users be able to make rather sophisticated determinations about search content, such as what content is the result of paid advertising or SEO techniques. In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission conducted a study on how advertising might be better distinguished online to help people make these sorts of determinations and found that in its default state, only 45 percent of the Americans they tested were able to correctly identify advertisements in search results and social media feeds.60 A larger private study found that nearly 60 percent of people were unable to recognize paid ads on Google in 2018.61 Similarly, the Pew Research Center found in 2019 that 59 percent of Americans reported that they understood little to nothing about what companies do with the data they collect.62 Not only does this sort of pornoliteracy require the capacity to navigate around advertisements and search engine optimized heteroporn, but it also requires the impetus to do so in the first place. It requires the capacity to imagine that porn could be other than it is, a capacity severely diminished in our current pornographic ecology. This capacity requires practice to develop, which, as we will see, means that during the normative phase in which adolescents internalize archetypes of pornography and the possibilities for their sexuality represented in that pornography, they are most often stuck with mainstream heteroporn, at least until they develop a more sophisticated online pornoliteracy.
Second, Google has never offered an unbiased gateway to any content online, and certainly not pornography. Instead, it has always privileged mainstream heteroporn, a trend that has become radically amplified since Google’s SafeSearch algorithms were changed in 2012 when SafeSearch became an always-on feature in Google Search. Turning SafeSearch off only opens up the possibility for pornography to appear in search results, but in actuality, Google will still censor pornography from search results in most instances. In actuality, SafeSearch is now only turned off by the use of pornographic keywords.63 What this means is that unless your query signals to Google that you are intending to locate pornography, it will not present you with pornography in your results. By tethering the appearance of pornography—or more broadly nude or fleshy bodies—to this limited set of keywords, Google has essentially guaranteed the continual reification of the current political economy and genre hegemony of mainstream heteroporn. Mainstream heteroporn companies currently possess a dominant position in the link topography of the web, with well-established digital presences and vast systems of interlinking subdomains and companion sites, guaranteeing high positions in any Google Search results. Since 2012, they now have an easily identified and limited set of keywords that they need to perform SEO for and the upfront capital to hire top SEO firms to perpetually maintain their position atop the search rankings. As Safiya Noble has demonstrated, the porn industry is one of the most sophisticated users of SEO, particularly the American mainstream heteroporn industry.64 What this means is that in ensuring that you only get porn when you want it, Google has additionally ensured that you will always get the same kind of porn. And that same kind of porn will be made by the same people in the same political economy and set of power relations that have been the subject of an endless series of critical porn exposés over the past few decades.
Political economic research on mainstream heteroporn has shown that the industry shows a strong capacity for constructing global networks through new dissemination technologies and adaptable business models.65 As Jennifer Johnson has shown empirically, today’s mainstream heteroporn operates something like an online platform.66 Large corporations maintain closed networks of “affiliate websites” that are often independently run. These affiliate websites offer niche content to a limited set of users, but they purchase that content from a larger distributor. They also link to and sometimes share login credentials with other affiliate sites on the network, thus reinforcing that network and circulating porn users within their own online pornography platform. These affiliate programs allow large corporations and local webmasters to work collaboratively to use minimally differentiated content to cover a maximal number of established niche audiences and thus also capture maximal web traffic and economic expenditure. As Johnson explains,
By circulating consumers inside a never-ending series of click manoeuvres and interrelated websites, constantly updated gonzo content and strategic targeting of addictive behaviour, the industry views consumers not as sexual beings with authentic desire but rather as dehumanized “traffic” to be manipulated and maximally exploited.67
Rather than offering a system in which niche content differentiates to match the evolving sexual proclivities of its audience, mainstream heteroporn circumscribes that audience and uses affiliate networks hegemonically to constrain its pornographic tastes to prescribed, revenue-generating niches. Google’s algorithms are perfectly tailored to foster the digital hegemony of mainstream heteroporn, as their ranking metrics are highly sensitive to link topologies and expensive professional web design that meets their quality standards. By further limiting pornographic results to a limited set of pornographic keywords, SafeSearch only makes it that much easier for these affiliate networks to engage in SEO and further reify their hegemony over digital porn consumption.
While it may be true that sophisticated porn consumers figure out ways to escape mainstream heteroporn’s hegemonic networks online, doing so requires the cultivation of what I have called a “pornoliteracy” above. While Kath Albury has described “porn literacies” as an ability to critique misogyny, homophobia, and racism in mainstream pornography that might be a useful addition to sex education, here we need to think of pornoliteracy as something more basic and widespread among porn users.68 At its most basic, pornoliteracy is the capacity to navigate the world of available pornography, matching pornographic representation to one’s own internal desires and imagination. There is a sexual and media literacy implicit in all porn use.69 Porn users are active agents in their consumption processes. They select, reject, interpret, and cocreate the online pornography that they engage with.70 Porn users acquire skills through viewing practice and come to view themselves almost as hobbyists with tastes and preferences, likes, and dislikes.71 More than this though, pornoliteracy includes as well everything from viewing habits to a familiarity with the topography of online pornography—where the good stuff is and how to find more. What is important for our purposes here is that pornoliteracy is almost a style of porn use, and like any style, it takes cultivation.72 As Attwood, Smith, and Barker note of one user, “porn begins as unknown and monolithic—an ‘it’—but becomes ‘kinds’ over time and with the investment of browsing.”73 It is very likely that this monolithic version of porn will be the mainstream heteroporn variety. Mainstream heteroporn’s hegemony over online porn consumption through strategies like affiliate networks ensures that people will find it first and most often. They will only come to escape it by developing their own pornoliteracy. And finally, even once more mature users learn to escape mainstream heteroporn, it has been granted the opportunity to serve a normalizing function. The research indicates that repeated viewing of certain sexual behavior does normalize that behavior and increases the viewers’ positive evaluation of that behavior over time.74 This capacity for normalization is only enhanced by the compulsive or addictive usage patterns that researchers have found in porn users.75 This addiction occurs by design, as the content, web platforms, and affiliate networks are all engineered to stimulate it. As people stay enrapt in mainstream heteroporn, its normative influence grows.
Mainstream heteroporn thus constitutes the default pornography online, and its hegemony is only reified by SafeSearch making it easier for major players in the industry to game Google’s search results for pornographic keywords. Thus, while SafeSearch does not really seem to have ever succeeded in preventing adolescents from accessing pornography online according to most studies, it is successful in heteronormatively channeling adolescent porn use.76 The case of adolescents is again important, as adolescent porn use often precedes first sexual encounters and thus has a potentially socializing role on adolescents.77 It is very difficult to accurately assess the precise stakes of this heteronormative, commodified, and sometimes misogynistic socialization that SafeSearch helps to reinforce. As a number of scholars have pointed out, research on pornography tends to be binarized into an anti-pornography perspective that focuses on negative media effects of pornography and an anti-censorship perspective that rebuffs prudery and celebrates sexuality by embracing pornography perhaps too enthusiastically.78
Many anti-pornography studies are motivated by conservative Christian morals, are often tethered to pro-censorship policy advocacy, and, even when more rigorous, often operationalize an oversimplified “media effects” theory of how people interact with pornographic texts in which texts unilaterally and homogeneously impact their readers or viewers.79 Social science research on the subject is also deeply tethered to class and racial tensions. Pornography scholar Laura Kipnis perhaps puts it best when she reminds us that “researchers aren’t busy wiring Shakespeare viewers up to electrodes measuring their penile tumescence or their galvanic skin responses to the violence or misogyny there.”80 Keeping that in mind, there are some common findings in media effects research on the negative impacts of pornography use that warrant attention, especially now that SafeSearch helps to reify the centrality of mainstream heteroporn online. Many studies suggest that mainstream heteroporn—and particularly pornography depicting violence, pain, or suffering during sexual activity—may be a risk factor for sexually aggressive behavior or sexual violence.81 There also may be connections between mainstream heteroporn use and sexual risk taking, like having unprotected sex.82 More broadly, there are also potential connections between mainstream heteroporn use and subscription to stereotypical beliefs about women, their sexual roles, and the acceptability of objectification.83 Again, while none of these studies allow us to infer causation and many may contain implicit social biases, they are worth engaging so that we can better articulate the stakes of SafeSearch’s censorship.
There have been only a handful of studies to empirically consider the potential positive effects of pornography use alongside its negative effects, even though these positive effects might outweigh the negative effects.84 For example, Nicola Döring has described the positive effects as potentially including “increased pleasure, self acceptance, inclusion of handicapped people, improved communication between sexual partners, in addition to the widening of traditional gender roles and sexual scripts.”85 Within the media effects model of social scientific research, we need more balanced data so that we can effectively assess the overall impact of pornography use. Beyond that, more knowledge on the positive effects of the use of different types of pornography would be particularly useful in advocating for specific changes to content filters like the SafeSearch algorithm that might make more diverse porn more easily accessible.
Conversely, many anti-censorship studies look to celebrate the production and consumption of pornography. In particular, they focus on feminist porn, LGBTQIA+ porn, alt-porn, or Netporn. Looking at these pornographic texts, scholars argue that the internet has made possible new forms of amateur, low-budget, and/or niche pornography that can showcase empowered female agents, alternative body types, amorphous and queer sexualities, and BDSM, fetish, and other “grotesque” forms of sex.86 These new forms of pornography challenge everything from the political economy of mainstream porn production to the heteronormativity of sexuality as presented on the screen. However, a number of scholars have pointed out that we now are left with very little critical research on mainstream heteroporn.87 Pornography scholars tend to agree that mainstream heteroporn is “racist, classist, ableist, and heterosexist” and seem willing to leave it at that.88 As Mark Jancovich has argued, there is a class tension in its decision as well, which assumes that mainstream porn is uninteresting and rote because of its popularity and mass production.89 In short, anti-censorship studies need to be less automatically pro-pornography. To understand the impact that SafeSearch is having by directing users first to mainstream heteroporn, we need more critical scholarship on mainstream heteroporn that can help situate social scientific data on pornography use within broader analyses of its cultural context, as well as alternative interpretations of pornographic texts. As Kipnis has noted, “Pornography [ . . . ] is profoundly and paradoxically social, but even more than that, it’s acutely historical.”90 Beyond this, a number of porn studies scholars have argued that we need to be more critical of more celebrated alternative pornographies also.91
As I have noted above, mainstream heteroporn operates normatively on porn users as they (in the best of cases) develop the requisite pornoliteracy to escape, first, SafeSearch and, second, the mainstream heteroporn affiliate networks. This dynamic is duplicated at the industry level, as the normativity of mainstream heteroporn also influences a large portion of alt-porn, as one might expect from porn genres that define themselves over and against mainstream heteroporn. A number of porn studies scholars have demonstrated how the genre conventions of mainstream heteroporn continue to shape the production of what is often collectively referred to as “alt-porn.”92 Here, we can understand alt-porn as an aggregation of alternative pornographies whose main similarity is their positioning as outside the mainstream. Aside from that similarity, they are incredibly heterogeneous, ranging from niche fetish pornography to LGBTQIA+ pornography to feminist pornography. The influence of mainstream heteroporn on alt-porn is only complicated by the increasing professionalization of amateur porn.93 Cramer and Home have gone so far as to call indie porn “the research and development arm of the porn industry.”94 The hegemony of mainstream heteroporn that SafeSearch helps to maintain has consequences even outside of its affiliate networks, as it constrains the possibilities for alt-porn in many ways. For example, a study of YouPorn.com has shown that amateur videos on the site follow a heteronormative “pornoscript” that focuses on dichotomized sexual and gender differences as the primary source of visual pleasure and almost always from a male subject position.95 Some, but certainly not all, alt-porn falls under the critique that Kipnis made of mainstream heteroporn: that it “creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender,” where that one gender is male.96 This is particularly true of amateur porn posted to these sites because, as Paasonen notes, “amateur porn that is shared online needs to fit into already established subcategories to be recognized as porn.”97 This is particularly problematic because amateur porn signals “realness” or “real life” and thus can further naturalize heteronormativity.98 As Shoshana Magnet argues, alt-porn’s emancipatory potential is limited by its commercialization.99
