"Another day, another request to talk about Pornhub." That’s what I thought when director milf date Suzanne Hillinger and Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions asked me to appear in their new Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story.
The film recounts how Pornhub exploded in popularity until The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof and sex-trafficking victim advocates accused the streamer’s parent company, MindGeek, of hosting vile illegal child pornography and rape videos. Hillinger promised the film would show how right-wing Christians deployed sex-trafficking allegations as a Trojan horse to destroy the legal adult entertainment industry.
I was reluctant to sit down for an interview. Unless it’s a MILF porn set in a laundry room, I don’t typically air dirty laundry in public. Most porn-world docs follow the Hot Girls Wanted model and present us as a bunch of manipulated, abused, low-IQ victims-cum-bimbos. And no disrespect to Hillinger, but I don’t trust documentary filmmakers.
But more than anything, I was sick of talking about Pornhub. No one website is my bread and butter. If Pornhub goes under, seven thousand other tube sites will pop up. I get it. I’m one of the most famous porn stars in America. Since Kristof’s story ran, everyone from Vanity Fair to (ironically) The New York Times has asked me to discuss the scandal. Personally, I do not care about Pornhub. Who cares about a tube site? I can’t be pressed to care about a streaming porn site because I don’t make the bulk of my money there. I write about sex worker issues for news sites. But I’m over it.
The problem is that the war on Pornhub is a proxy war to take down the entire legal sex work industry. Editor’s picks But what they really want is to shut down Porn Valley. If Christians really cared about ending gross child porn, they’d go after Facebook, which hosts way more child sexual abuse material - 20.3 million reported incidents compared to 13,229 - than Pornhub or any of MindGeek’s tube sites ever has.
I care about showing that anti-sex-trafficking campaigns are anti-porn campaigns in disguise. If I didn’t speak up in the documentary, I worried nobody else would. So, I agreed to an interview. Or even worse: They would find the dumbest porn star they could to present us as the stupidest women in America. That’s why I protest. That’s why I started writing about these issues for news publications.
For security purposes, I required Jigsaw to find another home for the interview. They rented a cottage somewhere in the hills around Los Angeles. It looked artsy, but as a content creator, I know cameras can pull tricks. They could have easily made me appear dumb, or like a bitch, so I purposefully covered up my skin. I wanted to look friendly. I also didn’t want them to make me look like a faker, so I made sure the colors were soft to avoid looking like I’d shown up for a deposition.