A Frank Talk With the Ex-Pornhub Employee in Netflix’s ‘Money Shot’
As one of the most well-known tube sites in the industry, to the degree that its opening music is a meme on TikTok, Pornhub has become a prime target for the religious right’s war on smut. Most recently, the website was subject to litigation filed by NCOSE (the National Center on Sexual Exploitation), a right-wing organization formerly known as Morality in Media. The group also spearheaded a public relations campaign against Pornhub following a New York Times op-ed by writer Nicholas Kristof alleging the website was deluged with clips of sexual abuse, convincing numerous payment processors to cut ties with the website in the process.
Most of the coverage of the war on Pornhub has focused on one of two demographics: the groups lobbying to shut it down, and the sex workers and small content creators who have been hurt by their efforts. But above all else, Pornhub is a company like any other, subject to the foibles and weaknesses of virtually any other business, and there’s been little focus on the website or MindGeek, the massive company that owns it, itself.
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Money Shot, a Netflix documentary about the war on Pornhub directed by Suzanne Hillinger, is trying to change that, offering a glimpse into the inner workings of a controversial company that, all things considered, is much more mundane than most press coverage would suggest. Her key interviewee to tell the story of MindGeek is Noelle Perdue, a porn industry professional and writer who is currently working on a book about the history of moderation.
Perdue is also a former Pornhub employee who is intimately familiar with the inner workings of the site, warts and all — and now finds herself in the strange position of having to defend an entire industry that she herself acknowledges has flaws. “The most frustrating part about it is, these kind of false criticisms [led by groups like NCOSE] actually end up concealing the real change that needs to happen in the industry, and the really powerful movements that are happening that are led by sex workers,” she tells Rolling Stone.
A self-described “porn nerd” and former stand-up comic based in Toronto, Perdue has always been fascinated by the adult industry: “I feel like it’s a window into a really private and intimate part of humanity that you don’t always get to see just from interacting with people in real life,” she says. After Googling offhand whether porn scriptwriting was a “real job,” she got started in the industry as a scriptwriter for Brazzers, a porn production company owned by MindGeek, primarily focusing on porn parodies, which essentially consisted of stringing as many dick jokes and pop-culture references together as humanly possible. Initially, she enjoyed the gig, but she became squeamish when they transferred her to write for studios that produced LGBTQ content.
“With Brazzers, you’re joking around and you’re making parodies of Marvel or whatever,” she says. “But when you’re writing for a studio that hinges more on identity, it’s when the more uncomfortable aspects of pornography really come out.” At one point, while working for a trans studio, she was asked to write in a “dick reveal” scene, which she was uncomfortable doing as it “played into a really dangerous narrative of trapping.” So she asked to be transferred to Modelhub, the Pornhub clips site where creators uploaded and sold their own content.
Perdue joined Modelhub at a pivotal point in Pornhub’s history. For years, sex workers had excoriated the platform for essentially taking money out of their pockets by allowing users to upload their content without their consent. With Modelhub, Pornhub was extending an olive branch to the sex workers who had helped build the platform in the first place. “Pornhub had so much name recognition, it had so much power, that I thought it was really exciting that they really, really wanted to become a positive force in the industry, and they really kind of wanted to make up for their past as a piracy aggregate site,” Perdue says.
Perdue’s job was primarily to recruit big names in porn to the platform, but it evolved into her essentially becoming a sounding board for sex workers’ issues with Pornhub. One primary sticking point was that Pornhub did not offer mandatory verification, which would serve the dual function of protecting sex workers from their content being pirated and prevent anyone from uploading any content that violated its guidelines, such as videos featuring underage models or nonconsensual porn. “It was collectively very frustrating for everybody involved, that they were kind of delaying it for so long,” she recalls, saying she’d bring this information back to Pornhub executives and they’d discuss it with “very little movement.”
“It was sort of a battle constantly between people working in Pornhub, who genuinely really cared about this kind of turning over this new leaf and creating these positive relationships with porn performers, and people who just didn’t give a fuck,” she recalls.
In motivational speeches at meetings, Pornhub corporate executives would frame Pornhub not as a porn company, but as a tech company, which Perdue found both disingenuous and disrespectful to those who had actually built the website in the first place. “They didn’t engage with their content or performers or the people who actually made the money whatsoever,” she recalls. At one point, as she also recounts in Money Shot, Perdue remembers being in a meeting with the CEO and him not knowing about SESTA/FOSTA, the infamous 2018 legislation intended to curb sex trafficking online that had the effect of endangering sex workers. “I was raging,” she says.
Frustrated with Pornhub’s perceived inability to listen to and understand the grievances of the very performers who built the platform, Perdue left Pornhub in 2020. Two months later, Nicholas Kristof’s article came out, sparking a maelstrom of negative press for the website led by groups accusing it of aiding and abetting sex trafficking. Perdue knew this was patently untrue, and that the issues people were focusing on with Pornhub were not the actual problems with the website.
“This is the frustrating thing, because I wish that I I could have just left Pornhub and been like, ‘Oh, my old employer, screw them,’ like everybody else gets to do,” she says. “But because there is so much moral panic, unjustified moral panic, in the ways that porn companies are spoken about and held to the standard that other companies aren’t, obviously, I was put in an extremely frustrating position.”
When director Hillinger first reached out to Perdue to participate in Money Shot, she was initially reluctant, particularly given all the negative coverage of Pornhub and porn in general in the media. But she saw value in adding her voice to the conversation, thinking, “‘I’ve had a bajillion-and-one conversations about Pornhub, and about the New York Times piece, about payment processing. And I might as well have a bajillion and two.’”
Not everyone who was featured in the film has felt entirely positive about the result: porn star Cherie DeVille, for instance, penned a column for this magazine accusing Money Shot of “engaging in a ‘both sides’ debate” between the pornography industry and the right-wing-led anti-trafficking industry, with “the middle-ground approach [making] it unclear what the film’s lesson is.”
Though she says Hillinger and the crew were incredibly open to feedback from the sex workers they interviewed, Perdue feels similarly conflicted about the documentary, wishing that Money Shot had taken the opportunity to provide more context about what actually constitutes trafficking (which is far more complex and nuanced than Kristof and organizations like NCOSE would have the public believe, with the vast majority of cases involving marginalized people being trafficked by a trusted family member or friend). She also wishes the film had touched more on the complexities of online moderation in general, pointing out that Facebook hosts far more child sexual abuse material than Pornhub, according to data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Ultimately, however, Perdue says that her issue is not with Money Shot, but with the fact there are so few opportunities for those in the sex industry to tell their stories in mainstream media. “When an opportunity arises to talk about pornography in mainstream in an accurate way, you kind of want it to be everything because there are so few of those opportunities. You want it to clear up everything; you want to educate everybody in the right way. And it’s just not a realistic expectation to have for one documentary,” she says. “I have criticisms of the movie. But ultimately, my actual criticism is that there needs to just be way more opportunities to have these conversations in the mainstream.” What she is primarily advocating for is “the ability for something to be nuanced,” rather than leaning into the binary that the adult industry is all good or bad.
To its credit, the frustration with the lack of nuance in the discussion of Pornhub and porn in general is evident in much of Money Shot, which juxtaposes clips of right-wing talking heads frothing at the mouth about the evils of the website — one lawyer even compares it to a criminal enterprise akin to the mob in The Sopranos — with shots of a janitor loitering around the corporate Montreal headquarters at night. In Money Shot, MindGeek, and by extension the industry in general, looks innocuous, even mundane — and that, of course, is the point. Far from being a shibboleth of evil, the company is like any other trying to turn a profit in the Western world in 2023, which comes with its own issues and frustrations separate from the ones posited by Kristof in his viral article.
Now that Perdue works in media and not the adult industry, she says she has learned this lesson firsthand: “I’m like, this shit isn’t better. This is horrendous. This is horrible,” she says. “And that’s the frustrating thing, where now that I’m on the other side, I’m like, ‘Fuck, why aren’t we talking about this?’ Like, let’s all take a step back and check our own teeth in the mirror.”
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