Netflix’s Pornhub documentary is out to radicalize and weaponize porn fans

polygon.com:

In those bygone days when you had to sit on a family computer in the living room in order to access the internet, teenagers watched documentaries like Netflix’s Money Shot: The Pornhub Story hoping to catch a glimpse of a world they could otherwise only access by stealing someone’s dad’s Playboy. (RIP HBO’sReal Sex, one of the premier providers of this type of content in the ’90s and ’00s.) But one of Pornhub’s big, epoch-shaking innovations was to make actual pornography available to anyone with a smartphone — no credit card required.

There’s a more graphic version of this story thatcould be told. At the beginning of Money Shot, a woman who’s worked in the porn industry for most of her adult life describes watching an “eight-person geriatric gangbang” the first time she ever fired up Pornhub. “That did set the tone for how extreme things could be on the internet,” she says.

Perhaps as a tacit acknowledgement that Netflix can never compete with actual Pornhub content, Money Shot leaves its analysis of the “gonzo” side of porn there. If this movieplayed in theaters, it’d be rated R for language and a little above-the-waist nudity. (Seriously, though, if you want to see people having unsimulated sex — much of it quite athletic — the site to check is right there in the name of the doc.) That allows director Suzanne Hillinger to focus on the thing that’s really driving the movie’s narrative story: feminist infighting.

It isn’t sexy, but it’s true. From the moment hardcore adult films stepped out of the shadows and into the zeitgeist in the “porno chic” era of the early 1970s, feminists have been entrenched in a bitter argument over whether pornography is a degrading act of misogynist violence, or a liberating path to