It’s a new year. Time to recommit to hitting the gym, eating more broccoli, and saying “no” to screen time after 8 pm. While a new year is about goal setting, it’s also about reflection. How did we do with our goals from the year before?
One of the internet’s biggest porn sites is doing the same. Pornhub has just released its 2022 Pornhub Year In Review, and once again, it’s filled with more alarming stats regarding the most consumed pornography.
Before we dive in, there are a couple of things we want to note:
We have no way to fact-check and verify all of the metrics provided in the Pornhub Year In Review – we’re just going to have to take their word for it. (Sidenote: they’re historically not known for their honesty and transparency.)
We’re using Pornhub as our source to study the porn habits of society because it’s the 10th most visited website in the world and the second most popular adult site on the internet. Given Pornhub’s place as a world leader in adult “entertainment,” their reporting is more likely to provide insight into the greater population’s current and future habits.
We’re sharing this info not to draw more people to porn or Pornhub, but to help people understand the scope of the issue we’re dealing with, so we can be more equipped to address it.
With that said, let’s jump in.
The pornification of society
Despite Pornhub’s recent run of bad press and lawsuits, including, but not limited to, reports of them hosting and profiting from nonconsensual content and child exploitation, top credit card companies severing ties and suspending processing payments on their site, and investigations against them (Canadian Parliament members investigated the company, the site receives 3.2 billion visits a month and over 38 billion visits a year.
That’s billion, with a “b.”
There are 8 billion people in the world. That means the average human visits the adult site about five times yearly. And that’s just one porn site. It doesn’t include Pornhub’s competitors, like XVideos, which receives 3.3 billion monthly visits. (In case you were curious, they also face accusations of profiting from nonconsensual content and underage videos).
So, let’s take a look at this year’s most viewed content on the site:
Given Pornhub’s questionable history, it’s no surprise that the company continues to allow the sexualizing of underage children, profit from racist stereotypes, and fetishize LGBTQ+ individuals.
Cartoon porn can be just as harmful as real porn.
The most searched-for term on Pornhub in 2022 was “Hentai.” Otherwise known as cartoon porn, some consumers would argue it’s more ethical to watch it because no physical human being is harmed in its making. But that’s not necessarily true for several reasons.
Hentai depicts highly exaggerated sex acts with impossibly large body parts. It also features disturbing and dangerous ideas and fetishes like aliens, monsters, children (specifically small girls), and incest. It is not uncommon for non-human creatures like demons and giant insects to rape cartoon women, who tend to look like a mixture of an adult and a child.
What porn videos depict is nowhere near safe or healthy. While part of its popularization is because it’s not “real,” Hentai creates unrealistic sexual fantasies that normalize and glorify toxic fetishes and abuse. And that can easily translate into the real world.
Pornhub’s use of racist stereotypes
The second most searched term on Pornhub in 2022 was “Japanese.” Also in the top 15 were “Pinay” and “Ebony.” While Pornhub did not create these toxic stereotypes, it continues to profit off them and further normalizes and promotes these inaccurate and hateful ideas about certain groups of people.
Expert on domestic violence and cultural sensitivity, Dr. Carolyn West, has found in her time researching the porn industry’s history of perpetuating racism. “It doesn’t take long to stumble upon any number of racist titles that promote offensive and unwarranted racial stereotypes.” She continues, “the porn industry appears to get a free pass to promote horrifically racist and abusive content in the name of sexual entertainment to anyone with internet access, even children.”
Remember, Pornhub gets 3.2 billion views a month. That means billions of viewers are regularly exposed to hateful and racist content.
Pornhub fetishizes LGBTQ+ individuals and relationships. One thing Pornhub seems to do well is glamorizing the misrepresentation and mistreatment of real people, including those in the LGBTQ+ community.
“Lesbian” and “Transgender” are in the top 20 viewed categories on the site in 2022. While porn producers may be trying to create content that caters to the LGBTQ+ community, instead, they end up creating content that misrepresents those individuals and their relationships and ends up catering to the wrong audiences, who then fetishize the content.
Within the “Transgender” category, many videos include belittling and humiliating behaviors focused on “punishing” the actors with painful sex acts, often using offensive terms.
Why this matters
Porn is becoming more accessible, more normalized, and more mainstream than ever before. Although Pornhub has been subject to multiple lawsuits and had to take down millions of its videos in 2021 because it couldn’t prove whether its videos included underage victims or nonconsensual actions (and it still can’t), it continues to profit from exploitation.
Every view, click and download further reinforces attitudes and behaviors of degradation and objectification, including fueling the exploitation and fetishization of marginalized people.
So, will you join us in fighting back? Refuse to click. Choose real love and real relationship over porn!
2021 Pornhub Year in Review
2020 Exposé About Pornhub Reportedly Profiting from Nonconsensual Content
2019 Pornhub Year in Review
2018 Pornhub Year in Review
2017 Pornhub Year in Review
2016 Pornhub Year in Review
2015 Pornhub Year in Review
2014 Pornhub Year in Review
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