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ABSTRACT
On 14 February 2016, Pornhub ran a Valentine’s Day promotion allowing the general public free premium membership for the day. As a symptom of Pornhub Insights, the site’s scientification of sexualities, Pornhub subsequently published a statistical analysis of the average increases in searches based on specific categorical terms and gender. In History of Sexuality Vol. I, Michel Foucault states that the end of the eighteenth century witnessed a concerted proliferation of discourses concerned with sex. One such discourse was a scientia sexualis which conflated ecclesiastical confessional techniques and scientific normalization in such a way that helped establish sexuality as its own taxonomic system of individuals. According to Foucault, concerns about masturbation were central to said discursive proliferation. Examining Pornhub’s post-Valentine’s Day report, in conjunction with Foucault’s analysis of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, proliferation of sexual discourses, and the importance of confession therein, this article explores how Pornhub used Valentine’s Day and the lure of free usage to turn its search engine into an apparatus of ‘pornoptic’ confession, and discusses the ideological consequences thereof.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘central tower’ here refers to the central tower in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison design.