At the start of the pandemic, back in 2020, like many, I was looking for work.
As most companies scrambled to make remote work possible for their employees, some companies were already prepared for this work-from-home world. In 2020, I had already been working remotely as a temporary customer service worker. I loved being able to work from home and I wanted to find a job that would allow me to do that.
So I found another remote job as a content formatter for MindGeek, the parent company to PornHub (and many other porn-streaming sites).
The proceeding months would end up being some of the most entertaining, traumatic, and mind-bending months in my career.
Day In The Life of a Content Formatter
The training to become a Content Formatter at MindGeek was a lot more thorough than I expected. In order to get a good handle on what is and is not acceptable, you end up watching a lot of unacceptable content. You’re supposed to stop watching as soon as you’ve determined a video violates content guidelines, but I dare any of you to stop watching those videos once they’ve started.
It’s like watching a car crash. Except instead of cars, it’s literal shit coming out of a real butthole. Or necro porn. Or disturbingly intoxicated performers vomiting all over the place. Or an entire arm going up someone’s butt. It’s hard to pull yourself away, even though you absolutely do not want to see it.
This was a full-time job; 40 hours a week, with quotas. On any given day, you’ve got to format about 100 videos ranging anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours long. You watch ALL kinds of porn. Straight, gay, interracial, amateur, big-budget, vintage, gimmicky — there are so many kinds of porn and you end up watching it all.
Once I managed to survive my training (though I did receive persistent nightmares from all the trauma triggers), the regular day to day work was pretty entertaining. There’s just something endlessly amusing about clicking around porn videos to spot the sex acts and then suddenly seeing an old woman stick a phone receiver up her vagina. Part of the joy of this job was always having a ready-made anecdote about the ridiculous shit I had seen that day.
Tackling Porn From The Inside
I really liked the idea of working for a major porn distribution company. I had wild fantasies about working my way up the company and changing the industry from the inside. How naive I was back then.
I would think about ways I could subtly change the company policies and procedures to create a more woman- and queer-friendly digital pornscape. I started getting creative with video tagging.
Tags usually just list sex acts and basic descriptors of the talent (blonde, big boobs, etc), but you can tag videos with any words you want. I started tagging descriptions of the male talent in straight porn, and would add tags that spoke to the emotional or aesthetic tone of the videos. I also tried to use descriptors of the talent that weren’t just based on looks, like ‘quirky’ or ‘spunky’.
I got in trouble for all of these things. MindGeek wasn’t interested in my mission to make porn more accessible for women. They weren’t interested in being able to search with a broader array of descriptors. They didn’t appreciate the increased specificity that was possible if only we would take the time to create exhaustive and creative tagging.
Reporting Content Violations
Maybe I couldn’t change the way users could find videos, but I could work towards taking down problematic videos.
MindGeek’s content standards were actually a lot more strict than I expected. As a kink-positive person, I see no harm in offering high-quality fantasy porn that depicts a wide range of potentially problematic situations — but I do think this kind of content needs to be handled delicately, and it should be made obvious that the content is fictional.
Despite being a very common fantasy, rape fantasy videos violate MindGeek’s standards. I found a lot of videos that were in the rape fantasy genre. I reported as many as I could, especially when the videos seemed too realistic. There was one video that I reported that not only violated the content standards, but it also depicted a sexual assault I had personally lived through.
It was a video where a young woman gets stealthily raped while she’s asleep. I actually had to fight to get it taken down even though the guidelines explicitly talk about consent as it relates to a sleeping performer. Once I managed to get it taken down, I decided it was time to make use of the company’s mental health support services.
I think I had earned some support.
Accessing Mental Health Support Services
When I was hired at MindGeek, I was impressed to discover that they provide mental health care for their employees. Very few work places offer mental health care, especially in the first few months of employment. However, in retrospect, given the nature of the company, it would be reckless not to offer emotional support for their staff.
I called the number I was given and discovered that the mental health service was actually outsourced to a large company that offered generic mental health services to a massive amount of different companies. When I spoke with my appointed therapist, despite having explained everything to the operator under the promise that this information would be passed along to my therapist, he had no idea what MindGeek was.
Not only did he not know anything about my employer, he was also from a conservative town on the other side of the country. He was so radically unprepared for a MindGeek employee that I spent the entire session justifying why I worked for the company in the first place. Rather than helping me, that session made everything significantly worse. I had to deal with being shamed on multiple levels by some strange and incompetent man in addition to not receiving adequate support.
Shortly thereafter, (after reporting all of this to both MindGeek and the company offering mental health services) I chose to leave the company and gave up on my dreams of changing the porn industry from the inside.
The Greater Good
My brief stint at MindGeek opened my eyes to how this juggernaut was barrelling along a harmful trajectory that no one seemed willing or able to stop. The infrastructure was created a long time ago now and the categorization of media has been so static for so long that to change things now would create more work than is remotely possible to complete. There is now so much porn on PornHub alone that it would take nearly 300 years to watch it all.
Just imagine how difficult it would be to recategorize it all.
But at a certain point, you have to think of what this thing you’ve created is costing the world, and how much better it could be. Categories right now are fixated on details that really don’t matter. As people become less bigoted, race-based categories start to feel strange and viewers start to realize that so many of these videos are just slightly different versions of the exact same thing.
Humans love novelty and variety, especially where sexuality is concerned. Categories can be useful, but they need to be more nuanced. They need to actually mean something. And they should cater to more than just one type of person.
Room for improvement
We’re missing out on so much other porn that could be amazing.
There are millions of POV blowjob videos, but absolutely no female POV oral videos. There are a ton of lesbian porn videos, but they are almost exclusively geared toward straight men and rarely created by and for queer women. And what if you’ve got a thing for group sex where a woman is the single focus ( I like to call it goddess worship if y’all need a new term for it! ), like so many women?
Seriously, this is a VERY common fantasy, especially among women, and yet it is wildly underrepresented in porn. Do you really think you’ll find what you’re looking for in a typical gangbang video?
All sorts of people are horny, and the stigma of watching porn has practically evaporated. Yet, free and available porn is still stuck in the early 2000s, catering to teen boys. Sure, there is plenty of premium, cinematic and inclusive sites you can pay for to watch the best erotic videos on the internet, but it’s niche and exclusive.
Where’s the better free content for those poor, anxious teens looking to get off but too awkward about it (or too young) to get a subscription to something better? Should they have to wade through millions of trash videos just to internalize misogyny and bigotry? What about the porn-curious people who aren’t sure they want to pay for a subscription, but just want to casually watch a horny video once in a while. Should they have to suffer through the trauma that the typical PornHub (and other major streaming sites’) videos inflict?
A Call for Change
Let’s radicalize PornHub, and the industry as a whole. With so many glaring issues in available content, it’s no wonder user-generated streaming sites like OnlyFans have become so popular. The old model is clearly dated. It may be too late to change the internal structure of MindGeek’s policies and procedures, but it’s not too late to upload our own content and tag it however we choose.
Back in 2020 when I was working for MindGeek, I wrote an article where I urged women to upload POV videos from their point of view. Since then, there actually has been an influx of female POV masturbation videos! Not only that, but the queer content is improving as well. I don’t know if it had anything to do with that article and my call to arms, but I really hope it did.
KEEP GOING! Get creative with your tagging and create the pornscape you want to see in the world! Make PornHub better for the youth these days trying to get a sense for the world of sexuality.