“Pornhub, close-up on the sex giant” on Netflix: the not chic underwear of a social phenomenon

Lasting more than an hour and a half, the documentary “****hub, close-up on the sex giant”, directed by the American journalist Suzanne Hillinger and broadcast on Netflix, immerses us in the often obscure world of ****ography and shows how the Internet in general and the ****hub site in particular have come to shake up the habits of a sector as old as the world. An increasingly lucrative sector that now weighs billions of dollars, but does not like to talk about it.

It was in 2007 that the platform ****hub arrives on the Web, imagined by three Quebec students passionate about sex and the Internet, who will sell it three later to the Canadian empire MindGeek. The Internet is becoming more democratic and the site is seeing its audience jump from year to year. For actresses and actors of ****ographic films, it’s a real godsend. The revolution initiated by the Canadian giant has allowed them to no longer depend on the studios by producing their own videos and to see their income climb comfortably.

The other side of the coin, the leaders of the site prefer to count their dollars than to check their content. If the site will become one of the most profitable in the world by democratizing ****, the system will very quickly go off the rails and fall into the sordid, because, in its race for the audience, ****hub leaves anyone, on condition of anonymity , post anything. In question, deciphers the documentary, videos around the sexual exploitation of women and underage girls, films of rare violence such as those featuring the rape of children.

“A haunt of pimps that brings in a lot”

With many testimonies – sex workers, former employees of ****hub, lawyers, magistrates … – the documentary deciphers and dissects the operation of the site. Its success and its excesses. It was the journalist Nick Kristof, Pulitzer Prize winner, who was the first to take an interest in the case and denounce “a haunt of pimps which brings in enormously” with 3.5 billion visitors per month and 3 billion dollars in advertising revenue per year.

ensues a slow descent into hell for ****hub : PayPal and other means of payment let him down, the complaints are countless, in particular by parents of teenage girls who discovered their daughter on the site, and a very virulent campaign accusing him of getting rich on sexual violence and child ****ography is taking over America.

****hub has no choice but to review its copy, but its leaders, who will eventually be heard by Canadian justice, are not very convincing. Its CEO Feras Antoon swears that he will seriously tackle the proliferation of illegal content and announces that he has deleted between 9 and 10 million videos. If he is supported by the majority of players who want to keep their financial autonomy, they also call for a major cleaning. “For it to be ****ography, it has to be consent. Otherwise, it is evidence of sexual abuse”.

Very researched and sometimes messy, the documentary which connects testimony on testimony sometimes drags in length. If the film does not make any revelations about the dark side of the Net, it has the merit of denouncing the hellish setting of ****ography 2.0.