There was a time, a few decades ago, when the men who owned the world’s biggest pornography businesses were happy to be famous. They paraded a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public dressed in silk pyjamas or with a woman in swimwear on each arm. Porn moguls like Hustler’s Larry Flynt or Playboy’s Hugh Hefner were household names.
The owners of the industry’s biggest companies are so anxious to remain anonymous that we often don’t even know their names. They have understood that it is wiser to live in total obscurity. So Nilsson’s decision to start investigating pornography for the Financial Times will no doubt have come as a very unwelcome development for these mostly invisible leaders of a sector that has been under-scrutinised for decades.
For five years, she subjected the industry to the same deep analysis that a journalist would give to the oil and gas markets. She wondered why, unlike most businesses of a similar scale, pornography companies rarely made the headlines. Why is the online world so saturated with images of people paid to have sex?” Nilsson says.
She asks at the start of Guilty Pleasure: “We live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to free porn as to clear water. Why aren’t we more curious about the growing role of pornography in our lives?” Nilsson, 34, says she belongs to “the first generation that came of age on the internet, and to whom oceans of free porn was a normal part of life”. This perspective has shaped her calmly pragmatic approach to the subject.
Her investigations led to the discovery that the industry’s owners were now tech nerds and bankers, with no particular interest in pornography itself. I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn’t find anyone who actually worked with porn. I couldn’t find anyone who even knew someone who worked with porn, because all these people were working in [web] traffic or payment processing,” she says.
I’ve attended a couple of these conferences and have been equally struck by the quantities of men in zipped tech-bro gilets who want to talk about impenetrably dry notions like affiliate marketing, barely acknowledging that they work in the world of explicit adult content. Nilsson was determined to bring the sector’s leaders out of the shadows in part because she wanted to reveal who was getting rich through porn and how they were doing it. But she also disliked the hypocrisy of these men, some of whom had become billionaires.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
