It’s tempting to think of the porn industry as a “seedy underground thing, which good people ignore and to which bad people are addicted”, said Lucy Thynne in The Telegraph. But as the journalist Patricia Nilsson argues in her fascinating book “Guilty Pleasure”, the reality is more complex and disturbing.
Porn, she points out, isn’t significant only because it is a big industry worth tens of billions, and is intensely addictive; it also provides “nothing less than the model for the internet we all use today”. Algorithms, targeted adverts, attention-grabbing headlines: all were forged in the “crucible of early porn websites”. Porn sites helped pioneer secure online payments and high-definition streaming.
All this, says Nilsson, helps explain why even using non-sexual content online often “makes us feel so weird”, and why scrolling feels like a compulsive, even “masturbatory” act of self-gratification. Her book isn’t perfect – the editing is sloppy – but it is intelligent and “necessary”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week US
Quite aside from the thesis it advances, “Guilty Pleasure” is a compelling history of porn, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. Nilsson begins with a sketch of the pre-internet industry. Here, “her tone is nostalgic, even rosy”, and she underplays the exploitation it involved. She then charts the rise of “tube sites”, which allowed user-uploaded videos, often pirated from traditional porn films, to be watched free with adverts. It was these sites that developed the “grammar of the attention economy, devising ways to keep users hooked that would be carefully studied by more salubrious businesses”. Then came a “more intimate kind of porn”, with the rise of platforms such as OnlyFans that enable “performers to sell sexual pictures and videos direct to consumers”. These, Nilsson writes, “formalised what the internet has been moving towards for years: the commodification of the self”.
Once, owners of porn companies were flash publicity-seekers like Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner, said Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. But Nilsson observes that today’s bosses tend to be “tech nerds” and money men with no particular interest in porn. She brings several such figures “out of the shadows”, including the “mysterious” Bernd Bergmair, an Austrian ex-banker who controlled the Pornhub empire between 2013 and 2023.
One might expect this book to be a “depressing read”, said Marie Le Conte in The Observer. But it proves surprisingly entertaining: “substantial, enriching and enjoyable enough that it leaves you feeling sated – just like having sex, instead of merely watching it”.
