Open a private browsing tab. Turn on your VPN. Type ‘ethical porn’ into the search bar. Press enter. Try hardcore porn, softcore porn, or just porn. No, it’s not just your browsing habits.  Every time it’s the same: Pornhub wins the race to the top of the page. The second, third, fourth (and so on) search results reliably go to sites with the same parent company: MindGeek.

MindGeek is the overlord of online porn – it passes through the industry, absorbing and acquiring stragglers and growing ever bigger. And it won’t be stopping any time soon because the government will not touch the adult entertainment industry, even when sheathed in latex. As a result, MindGeek continues ravaging the industry, unimpeded by anti-monopoly laws. MindGeek’s sites together consume more bandwidth than Amazon, Twitter or Facebook; it is a porn provider in every sense, hosting streaming sites, performer agencies, production sites, and advertising for porn journalism. Not only has this near-monopoly been achieved to the detriment of the sex worker, but it also ensures MindGeek has a hold over much of the population’s sex lives.

The lack of competition in the industry allows MindGeek to pay porn performers only a fraction of what they would earn otherwise. Owning production companies and tube sites ensure that profits from both the creation and distribution of porn are funnelled into MindGeek. Their monopoly also reduces the amount of control creators have over their own films as each of the tube sites regularly pirate content from one another, repurposing the same film to generate more revenue – none of which is paid to the creators. Before MindGeek’s reign began it was almost unheard of for porn performers to offer full-service sex work; now, many performers can be found on escort sites. Performers often have no choice but to work for them given how omnipresent MindGeek is in the industry.

This may be the first time you’ve heard about MindGeek. Are you wondering why? Performers shy away from criticising the company for fear of being blacklisted and losing their income. Adult entertainment publications won’t criticise MindGeek because they risk losing advertising revenue in doing so. Political parties are disinterested. And the public continues to be disgusted by sex workers in their society and delighted by them on their screen. If porn is a game of strip poker, MindGeek holds all the cards. If sex work were treated as legitimate employment and sex workers as workers, MindGeek would have been forced into radical reform long ago. As long as governments criminalise sex workers and fail to legislate in their interests, MindGeek will be allowed to plunder the industry unimpeded.

We ignore MindGeek’s supremacy at our own peril. Half of UK adults said they had visited a porn site in the last month when surveyed – and that’s only counting those who were willing to admit it. Since the company may produce and curate the porn watched by much of the adult world, their considerable control over the industry affords them significant power to sculpt the sexual landscape. Nina Hartley, a former porn actor, said: “Let’s face it, folks: sex drive may be innate, modes of sexual behaviour are learned.” If this is the case, we must all face the fact that MindGeek is our sex educator. While a blushing PE teacher fumbling to put a condom on a banana at the front of the class isn’t an ideal way of learning about sex, it is certainly preferable to half the population getting their sex education from a multinational company.

We can be even more forceful than Hartley because not even your sex drive is protected from MindGeek’s meddling fingers. Like YouTube, MindGeek’s sites function on algorithms designed to keep you coming back for more, generating – and feeding – addiction. I spoke to Paula Hall, a psychotherapist specialising in sex and porn addiction. She said porn enables people to “discover sexual tastes and preferences they might not have known that they have,” but does not necessarily create new desires. She continued: “It opens doors to your sexuality that might have remained closed.” This at first may seem like a good thing. But, there are certainly doors, if they do exist within me, that I would prefer to open on my own terms (or perhaps not at all), rather than having MindGeek jam the lock and rip them open.

Hall said that certain sexual preferences are by no means a problem until we develop a dependence on them: “I would have no idea whether or not I liked pomegranate until I tasted it. It’s really not a problem that I like it, assuming it’s not illegal, which as far as I know pomegranates aren’t. But it might be a problem if I become dependent on it, and don’t like any other kind of fruit. And what if my partner doesn’t like pomegranates and is offended by them? Okay, the metaphor may be falling apart but you know what I mean.” When we rely exclusively on a specific desire to turn us on, the relationship between desire and dependency becomes clouded.

“If you get used to a certain level of arousal, [and] you always have that level of visual stimulus, then that’s what your body becomes accustomed to,” said Hall. She thinks Pornhub and other porn sites are “deliberately trying to foster repeat customers. As indeed is Amazon, and any other online portal. That is the nature of sales – to get repeat business. I don’t think they really care if people get addicted”. In 2002, research showed that only 2% of men under 40 had erectile dysfunction. But by 2016, 10 years after the first porn tube sites emerged, some studies were reporting that rates of erectile dysfunction in 16-to 21-year-olds were at 45%. Correlation does not always equal causation, but the link seems too stark to ignore.

Surveys have found that many heavy porn users would even prefer to watch porn than have sex. They also start prioritising watching porn over other things they previously enjoyed like going out with friends. They get to the point where porn has become “their social life, their hobby … it’s all they have now.” Many addicts believe when their life changes, their addiction will, too. And yet even after they’ve left home, developed a stable romantic relationship, or finished exams – when they’ve told themselves things would change – the addiction persists.

Hall thought that part of the reason many people get addicted is the age at which they get exposed to porn. “The majority of our clients say they were exposed from age 12 or 13. And were regularly viewing from aged 15 or 16.” She suggested a potential solution to this would be age verification. In 2019 the UK government dropped plans to require porn sites to have age verification. The main age verification system they had reviewed and planned to put in place was one designed and owned by MindGeek. This would have allowed MindGeek to essentially lick the crumbs up of the plate that is the porn industry. They would have been able to refuse use of the age verification system to any site they didn’t own, and either buy them up or watch them wither away. However, It’s hard not to agree with Hall that 12-and-13-year-olds should not have access to the kind of material that appears on Pornhub’s home page.

Why is the reach of MindGeek’s algorithm such a unique cause for concern? If YouTube, for example, had the same ability as porn to change active desires and behaviours, then I may well have started my day with the desire to learn how to light a camping stove and ended it with the desire to become a middle-aged man and move to Norway with nothing but a Decathlon tent and some freeze-dried chicken stew. Porn affects us in a way that YouTube cannot.

The privacy with which we cloak our sex lives forges and harbours the shame and fear that has allowed the ascension of MindGeek at our own cost. It’s unlikely that over a beer at the pub, someone would tell a friend that they’ve been watching porn for hours each day and are now turned on by things that used to disgust or scare them. As a result, porn watching habits exist unchecked and unspoken even when people may recognise that these habits are unhealthy. When much of the population is algorithmically pushed to the extremities of their sexual desires, masterminded by a singular company out for profit, we should start questioning things. Without the ability to talk about sexual desires and behaviour openly, we are left without wider perspective. This secrecy – partnered with the practices of mainstream porn – is not only responsible for insecurities such as penis size, pubic hair, and stamina, but also for harmful attitudes towards sex and sexual behaviour. The bodies that are portrayed as desirable in porn become the bodies that are desired by society, and the bodies that are degraded become the bodies that others desire to degrade.

I wanted to know how things could be better, so I spoke to Cindy Gallop the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a site that offers an alternative to mainstream porn. 13 years ago her personal experience dating younger men inspired her to start MLNP. From their behaviour in bed she came to realise that when we shy away from talking about sex, porn becomes sex education by default. She explained to me exactly what MLNP is:

“MakeLoveNotPorn is ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.’ If porn is the Hollywood movie, MLNP is the documentary. We are pioneering a whole new category of social sex. We are doing that with very different objectives. I created MLNP to make it easier to talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world […] I am very straightforwardly taking all the dynamics of social media and applying them to this one area that no other social network platform will allow. With the aim of bringing all this out into the open, taking the shame, embarrassment, and guilt out of it. And that’s why I refer to MakeLoveNotPorn as a shame changer … [MLNP has] the ability to change people’s sexual attitudes and behaviours for the better. In a way that nothing else does.”

MLNP is a video sharing platform where contributors, or as they’re known MakeLoveNotPornstars, are encouraged to share videos of them having what Gallop describes as “real world sex”. The contributors are then paid by watchers. I wondered what it was about MLNP that meant it avoided leading watchers and contributors into the peril that mainstream porn did. Her answer almost made the question seem silly. MLNP was not built on the back of the same profit concerned motives.

“The young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate today. The Facebooks the Snapchats and the WhatsApps. They are not the primary target, online and offline, of harassment, abuse, racism, sexual assault, violence, rape, revenge porn. Therefore, they do not and did not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results around us every single day. Those of us who are at most at risk, every single day, women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, disabled people, we design safe spaces and safe experiences… I and my tiny team spent literally years concepting and designing MLNP before we ever built it because we knew if we’re going to invite people to do something they’ve never done before, socially share their real world sex, we had to think through every possible implication of that to create a completely safe environment and trustworthy space. … So, I designed it around what everybody else should have: human curation. There is no self-publishing of anything on MLNP. Our curators watch every frame of every video submitted from beginning to end before we approve or reject it, and we publish it … We review every single comment on every single video before we approve or reject that comment. Nobody else does that.”

I asked Gallop how else she thought MLNP could improve our relationship with sex, rather than co-opting it in the way MindGeek has. She outlined a big difference that ensured people choose what they were interested in watching, rather than having that choice made for them.

“We do not tell you anywhere which videos are the most rented or the most viewed. We do not rank our videos in the way that everybody else does. And that is an entirely deliberate, conscious and intentional design choice. For two reasons. The first is that at MLNP real world sex is not competitive. We value every single one of our MakeLoveNotPornstars and every single one of our real world sex videos equally. And secondly we did not want to create a dynamic where people go, ‘Oh, if we had sex like that, we’d make more money.’”

MLNP has other features that MindGeek, if it had any concern for its contributors at all, would adhere to. It gives creators control. Gallop outlined this to me:

“Our commitment to you as an MakeLoveNotPornstar is that the moment anything changes, your relationship, your life, your circumstances, even just your mind, you tell us, we take your videos down, they’re gone instantly. There’s no process, there’s no form to fill in, you don’t have to apply. We might publish your video one day, you are free to change your mind overnight, and we will take it down instantly.”

I wondered if we decided we could promote good sexual behaviour through the mechanism Gallop described, what that good sexual behaviour would look like. Especially when it seems important not to over-moralise sexual preferences.

“I regularly ask people this question ‘what are your sexual values?’. And nobody can ever answer me because we’re not taught to think like that. Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, a sense of responsibility and accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should. Because in bed values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, respect, are as important as they are in every other area of our lives where were actively taught to exercise them.”

As Gallop has argued it seems that maybe MLNP does have the potential to not only ‘revolutionise’ sex online but also to revolutionise attitudes towards sex and sexual behaviour. Why then is it likely this is the first time you are hearing about it? The answer partly lies in advertising bans on sexual content.

“So what is infuriating is that MLNP is on a mission to end rape culture and we are banned from advertising everywhere. We are banned from advertising on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, on Youtube. We’re also banned by the way in traditional media… It’s an utterly gendered scenario, because any female lens sexual health and wellness venture cannot advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Menstruation ventures, menopause ventures, fertility ventures. In the meantime, male sexual ventures, ‘erectile dysfunction solutions come on in.’ So that is reflective of the fact that tech is patriarchal.”

Another factor that contributes to MLNP’s inability to reach the scale that Gallop intended is also ingrained in the white male take-over of the porn industry.

“When you are MindGeek. When you operate at that scale you’d be astonished by how many banks and investors are willing to fund you, as long as no one knows they have done. No one will fund me. If I were getting the kind of tens of billions of dollars that white male venture capitalists fling at white bro founders, I’d be fine. I don’t have that.”

Alleged funders of MindGeek include all the various different law firms and investment banks your PPEist friends have applied for internships at, including registered charity Cornell University. Gallop has found a way to exist without funding.

“I designed MLNP revenue sharing business model to democratise access to income. Our members [pay to subscribe and] half the income goes to our contributors, our MLNP stars. What I’ve done is create a business with the ability to be self-sustaining.”

Something still didn’t make sense to me. Why, when there seemed to be a genuine alternative to MindGeek’s current model that would appeal to a large chunk of the population, do they keep pedalling out the same videos with the same approach? Gallop knew the answer:

“Porn has fallen prey to the business syndrome that I call collaborative competition. Collaborative competition is when everybody else in a sector competes by doing exactly the same thing everybody else in the sector is doing. And porn as an industry is tanking, it’s not doing well, because its business model is being destroyed by the flood of free content online and it hasn’t invented a new one… So the explosive growth in extreme violent porn is not driven by ‘oh my god we’ve all become more depraved as human beings,’ it is not driven by evil, vicious, malignant forces at work within the porn industry.”

I was less convinced.

“It is driven by very prosaically a bunch of guys scared shitless because they’re not making any money, doing what a bunch of guys scared shitless about not making money in any industry do, which is play it safe. ‘Oh look, they’re doing that, let’s do that too, that must be what makes money, that must be what the consumer wants.’”

My chat with Gallop really brought into the cold light of day the dissonance between the sex portrayed in MindGeek’s porn and the sex that people have in their real lives. Gallop had an idea of how the outlandishness of mainstream porn could be laid out bare.

“I have an art project that I’ve been dying to do for years, but unfortunately I need funding for it. I want to take the home page of Pornhub, YouPorn, Brazzers and I want to replicate and recreate it by reshooting all the video thumbnail stills with the genders flipped. Because nothing would demonstrate the ludicrousness of the male lens in porn more than that. If any Oxford student photographers or models would be willing to work on this with me, they should get in touch.”

Gallop had another request of Oxford students:

“I want a category on MLNP that is OxfordMakeLoveNotPorn. It can be anonymous, you can wear masks; no one needs to know who anybody is. We know perfectly well you’re all out shagging in the stacks of the Bodleian…in punts on the Cherwell, under Magdalen bridge. Video that and share it on MLNP.”

To Gallop it was clear that MLNP is more than just a business idea; it is a way forward. She designed MLNP to heal the damage caused when we don’t talk openly about sex, and porn is the only sex ‘education’ people receive. But also, that a different attitude towards sex could solve many of the problems the most vulnerable in our society face.

“The only way that you end rape culture is by inculcating in society an openly talked about, promoted, understood and very importantly aspired to gold standard of what constitutes good sexual values and good sexual behaviour. When we do that we also end #metoo, we end sexual harassment, abuse, violence, all areas where the perpetrators currently rely on the fact that we don’t talk about sex to ensure victims don’t speak up, never go to the authorities, never tell anybody. When we end that we massively empower women and girls worldwide. When we do that we create a much happier world for everyone, including men. When we do that we are one step closer to world peace. I talk about MLNP as my attempt at bringing about world peace, and I’m not joking.”

I awkwardly giggled at the prospect that the answer to world peace was filming yourself wanking, but she really wasn’t joking.

This is not a condemnation of porn. Rather, it is a plea that some things about porn need to change. As long as the internet is around, people will use it to meet their sexual needs. Internet pornography is inevitable, but MLNP shows that there is a viable alternative to getting eaten alive by MindGeek for sex on the internet. Porn doesn’t have to promote harmful sexual behaviour, nor does it have to lead vast swathes of the population by the hand into the extremities of their desires. So next time you turn on your VPN and open a private tab, consider typing something other than Pornhub into the search bar. ∎

Words by Nia Large. Art by Niamh McBratney.