Netflix’s Money Shot: The Pornhub Story neglects pornography’s real victims
Madeline Fry Schultz
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The mainstream discussion of pornography seems to have two opposing hermeneutics.
Either pornography is all bad because it’s inherently exploitative and a morally bankrupt expression of human sexuality, or pornography is only bad because it exists under a capitalist system in which big executives exploit the labor of poor workers for profit.
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It’s either suffering from a lack of values, or it’s actually a societal good that just needs to break free from the oppressive foot of those who own the means of production. There are conservative religious types, and then there are Marxists.
This dichotomy is abundantly clear in Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, a new documentary now streaming on Netflix. The film is like a Rorsarch test for what you already believe about porn.
Porn star Cherie DeVille, who was featured in the documentary, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone complaining that Money Shot “devolves into a ‘both sides’ debate” and lets “evangelical extremists” off the hook.
As a conservative Christian myself, I thought the film was a little too eager to let the porn industry slide for the multitude of ways in which it can be, and often is, abused.
If you have the stomach for an hour-and-a-half-long exploration of the pornography industry and its abuses, Money Shot will reveal a convoluted narrative about the rise and fall of Pornhub. It begins with, and consistently highlights, testimonies from “porn industry professionals,” “porn industry advocates,” and porn stars themselves.
Pornhub became the most recognized name in pornography by, until recently, allowing anyone to upload almost anything to the site with little content moderation. (We later hear one anonymous content moderator say that he and his coworkers were each expected to survey 700 videos per day. If they couldn’t tell whether or not someone was over 18, they’d let their supervisor guess.)
Pornhub collaborated with celebrities such as Kanye West and took out billboards in Times Square. But its image as “the cheery, winking face of naughty” came crashing down when Nicholas Kristof, the journalist who wrote those words, published an exposé on the company in the New York Times.
In it, he described how one 14-year-old found a nude video she had sent to a classmate posted on the website. She asked for it to be taken down, and after a delay of a couple of weeks, it was. Then it popped back up again. This trauma sent her down a spiral that included drug addiction and two suicide attempts. But hers is just one of many stories.
At the time of Kristof’s exposé, there were countless videos of rape and incest on the site, and while Pornhub may have argued that it was all just acting, there were too many real women who said the company profited from their sexual assaults for years.
We learn all this in Money Shot, but then the narrative cuts back to the sex workers, who are complaining that other people’s trauma gives their profession a bad rap.
Noelle Perdue, who wrote pornography scripts for Mindgeek, Pornhub’s parent company, responds to a text about the article: “Loooooool these are so exhausting.”
Pornhub Ambassador Natassia Dreams says: “I just thought of it as another attack. I have so many attacks personally that I’m like, I can’t take on that attack right now. Let me handle my own stuff first.”
DeVille, the performer who complained about the documentary in Rolling Stone, said, “It’s a nightmare for us because when you present two unrelated things [sex trafficking and the pornography industry] as being closely related in a paper that everyone’s going to believe, what happens? Well, exactly what you think would happen, and exactly what did happen.”
What happened was the backlash. Pornhub quickly deleted 9-10 million unverified videos from its site and actually implemented the suggestions Kristof gave at the end of his December 2020 article: “1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.”
These moves were seemingly agreeable to all sides, but when baseline protocols have been set up to ensure that a website can’t profit off sexual assault, that’s where the camaraderie ends.
Suddenly, Money Shot pivots to “exposing” anti-trafficking organizations Exodus Cry and National Center on Sexual Exploitation as having conservative Christian ties. And it doesn’t matter whether or not these personal biases come through in the fight against sexual exploitation; interviewee after interviewee says that these supposedly backward organizations are waging an assault on human dignity.
“If the attack on porn continues on the path that it’s currently on, it’s like, it’s not just an attack on porn, it’s an attack on women’s sexuality, it’s an attack on queer sexuality, it’s an attack on people being able to express themselves openly, especially online,” porn star Siri Dahl says.
So what if Pornhub was grossly abused for years (and surely still is abused) by people looking to profit from others’ suffering? There are a handful of performers who make good money off this lifestyle, and who are we to take their livelihood away?
Money Shot is much more interested in highlighting porn stars and their problems than sympathizing with victims (the 14-year-old from the New York Times article appears just briefly in video testimony she gave to the Canadian government). It does let Dani Pinter from NCOSE speak in several clips — before the many porn performers begin dog-piling on her organization.
The film’s final word is telling: As lines of text flash on screen at the end, the last thing we see says: “Porn performers still can’t sell their content on Pornhub.”
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Money Shot is so afraid to give any credence to those who believe both that pornography can be weaponized and that it’s inherently bad that it’s almost afraid to take a full look at what’s going on. When one porn star dismisses the “teen” category of pornography as just a “body type” (because as long as it’s an adult acting, it doesn’t matter if they’re engaging in a pedophilia fetish), it’s not hard to see where the documentary’s biases lie.
The defense of pornography lies at the intersection of choice feminism and Marxism, where pornography is good as long as it is chosen and better if those who perform in it can work for themselves (yes, OnlyFans makes an appearance). But Money Shot is so focused on propping up this narrative that it neglects the victims of its own narcissistic philosophy.