TikTok has accidentally conquered the porn industry
The video-sharing app bans explicit content, but TikTok-style videos, often filmed and edited in the app itself, are finding fans on other platforms.
When Gwen, a 25-year-old sex worker from Toronto, noticed a TikTok trend where people were personifying popular restaurant chains, she immediately spotted an opportunity. âIt was perfect to be made into a porn video,â she recalls. âA lot of other creators had done Goth IHOP or Femboy Hooters content â but I wanted to take on milf Dennyâs.â
In her TikTok-inspired video, Gwen plays a waitress who works at Dennyâs, and seduces a customer into impregnating her in the break room. The video, a trailer for which was uploaded to Pornhub, was one of Gwenâs best-sellers in 2020. âThe response was amazing,â she says.
The success of the video speaks to a wider phenomenon â the profound influence TikTok is having on the sex industry beyond the app itself. Pornhub, for example, is filled with videos mimicking one of the appâs popular trends or challenges, or sexualised compilations of clips downloaded from TikTok â often without the creator’s consent or knowledge, and, troublingly, sometimes featuring people who appear to be under the age of 18.
This phenomenon is partly down to TikTokâs âFor Youâ page â a mixture of trending clips and recommendations which makes it more likely for a video to go viral and to be posted elsewhere. âTikTok has allowed me to connect with a whole new, diverse group of followers that I wouldnât be able to reach through Twitter or Instagram,â says Gwen, who has accumulated 125,600 followers on TikTok since joining last September. âItâs been an integral part of my business growth in the past half a year.â
TikTok has also allowed Gwen to show her fans a different side to her personality. Sheâs made use of the platformâs popular âSilhouetteâ and âBuss Itâ challenges, and used TikTok Live to talk directly with followers.
Sam*, a 28-year-old sex worker from San Francisco, also uses the appâs editing features, such as to make her videos. âItâs kind of like being at a strip club, when the performer does something exciting,â she says. Transition edits â which allow users to suddenly change outfits, or go from fully clothed to nude â are made easy on TikTok, and have emerged as a particularly popular feature among sex workers using the app.
While nudity and sexual activity goes against TikTokâs community guidelines, a number of these types of videos slip past the algorithm â and besides, videos donât need to contain explicit content to help performers drive traffic to other platforms.
The demand for âTikTok-styleâ porn videos, and the appâs superior editing tools, is fuelling the rate at which NSFW TikTok videos are crossposted to other platforms, such as Pornhub and OnlyFans.
Gwen says that in the past she has created a video on TikTok, screen recorded it and uploaded it straight to OnlyFans â without ever posting to TikTok.
This use of unpaid social media as a marketing tool for paid work elsewhere is nothing new. However, since the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA, a US law intended to curb sex trafficking, it has been more difficult for sex workers to advertise their services online. The bill, which was introduced in 2018, was an attempt to shut down the websites that facilitate trafficking, but a number barred posts from sex workers entirely to avoid any potential legal issues, often forcing them into more dangerous situations.
Instagram and Tumblr, for example, were extremely popular platforms among sex workers, before they started clamping down on them in the wake of FOSTA-SESTA. More recently, Instagram was denounced by sex workers after it introduced new updates penalising users who âimplicitly or indirectlyâ offer or ask for sexual solicitation, at a time when the community has been made particularly vulnerable by Covid-19.
Compounding this is the fact that platforms such as OnlyFans have ballooned in popularity during the pandemic. This is where TikTok-style videos â posted on the app or across other platforms â provide a new way to cut through the noise.
It should come as little surprise, then, that subreddits dedicated to posting NSFW TikToks are growing in size. After r/TikTok and r/TikTokCringe, the next most popular TikTok subs are r/TikThots, r/TikTokThots and r/TikTokHot. One of the largest, r/TikTokXXX, has more than 61,000 members, and has gained over 20,000 new subscribers in 2021 alone. Although, according to one of the subâs moderators, only â30 to 40 per centâ of the videos on the sub have actually come from TikTok: most, he says, are using the sub and the TikTok aesthetic to get traffic and to tap into the appâs 18+ Gen Z audience.
Gen Z and young millennials are, after all, more willing to pay for adult content compared to previous generations â particularly if the star of the video is also the creator. This reflects a broader shift in tastes favouring âhomemadeâ porn videos, with âamateur pornâ being the most popular category in the US and third most popular worldwide, and an increase in searches for ânaturalâ bodies and authentic situations.
âTikTok has added to this [demand for âhomemadeâ porn], but I wouldnât give TikTok all the credit for it,â says Katrin Tiidenburg, professor of participatory culture at Tallinn University and co-author of Sex and Social Media. âWe had a decade of Tumblr, which taught whole generations about the mixture of body positivity, social justice and sex positivity.â That said, TikTok has hardly had a history of promoting body positivity, with leaked documents from 2019 revealing the suppression of disabled, queer and fat creators.
Still, according to one of the mods of r/TikTokXXX, videos that tend to perform highly on the subreddit are ones that appear DIY and authentically âTikTokâ. The mods claim to âupvoteâ content which is âfun, âon-brandâ and follows a challenge,â and ones that include the TikTok watermark, which is applied to all videos posted to the TikTok app (although users can download unpublished videos without the watermark).
Even when videos arenât made using the TikTok app, many still adopt the memetic formats, challenges, and distinct visual language popularised by TikTok. âThis is done in order to lend popularity or relevance,â and âborrow the fresh feel of TikTok aestheticsâ, says Tiidenburg.
âPorn has always been a âremakeâ genre,” she adds. “Thereâs a porn version of everything popular, right after it becomes popular.â Tiidenberg points to porn websites, and even news sites, which have remade themselves to look more like TikTok in order to capitalise off the siteâs huge popularity.
There is also a darker side to âborrowing aesthetics made by childrenâ especially on platforms like r/TikTokXXX, where the implication might be that the creator is underage. This points to the issues of consent and legality which arise from the sharing of TikTok videos across other platforms. These videos might not contain anything explicit, but, if shared without a creatorâs permission and out of context, they could, as Tiidenburg puts it, âpornify things that werenât supposed to be pornâ.
One of r/TikTokXXXâs mods says that the content on the subreddit is meant to be shared with the consent of the original creator, and that videos will be removed if this is not the case. Pornhub ran into similar controversy last year when it was reported that a compilation video of a TikTok trend popular among minors had been uploaded to the adult website. Of course, this isnât the first time Pornhub has been denounced for hosting nonconsensual content: last year the site was forced to delete the majority of its videos when it was revealed that the site was hosting content featuring children, teenagers and victims of sex-trafficking. In January, TikTok changed its settings so that videos created by users under the age of 16 are now set to private by default.
With the growing censorship sex workers find themselves subject to on TikTok â often without ever posting anything explicit â crossposting is becoming a necessary option for those looking to advertise their services. TikTokâs community guidelines state that accounts that attempt to redirect traffic to sexual content can face permanent bans, which has led some sex workers to believe that their accounts were removed for including either a direct link to OnlyFans, or to a Linktree (a third-party app where creators can list all of their social media accounts in their bios). Last November, swathes of accounts belonging to sex workers were deleted in what the community called the âTikTok purgeâ. A TikTok spokesperson says the safety of its community is a âtop priorityâ.
For many sex workers, the need to remain across as many platforms as possible outweighs other concerns. âThe TikTok community is so engaged and creative, I would make accounts 100 times over to stay there,â says Gwen. âEvery other site is going to censor me too, so I might as well be putting my effort into the most active one â TikTok.â
And besides, as Sam puts it, there are ways around TikTokâs policies. âYou can still play by TikTokâs rules and generate a substantial income. It just takes some dedication.â As conditions grow more hostile for sex workers on the app, this dedication will likely involve finding life for their TikTok videos beyond TikTok.
*Some names have been changed
Source: wired.co.uk