🆕 Never Post! Pornhub Goes SFW

HELLO TO ALL! We've got an SFW episode for your ears. Today, Senior Producer Hans Buetow digs into the data from the 2025 Pornhub Year-in-Review, and wonders aloud to sexual wellness educator Courney Brame, and co-founders of SWR Data, MelRose Michaels and Mike Stabile - what’s going on with the sudden rise in SFW content on a decidedly NSFW platform?–

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Pornhub Is Entering Their FrictionMaxxxing Era

• Courtney Brame
• MelRose Michaels
• Mike Stabile
• SWR Data Website
• SWR Data Substack
• Pornhub 2025 Year-In-Review
• Mia Khalifa on Always Open
• In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing (The Cut)
• How I Frictionmaxx (P.E. Moskowitz)
• THUTT! (Jessica DeFino)

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and we have a desirable show for you today. Senior producer Hans Buto talks with sexual wellness educator Courtney Brame and cofounders of SWR Data, Melrose Michaels, and Mike Stabil about the rise in safe for work content searches on the very not safe for work platform Pornhub. Why is this happening? What does it tell us about the Internet at large?

And is it really safe for work? Before we get to Hans, who attempts to answer these questions and more, some ads, unless you're on the member feed, and then a quick story from reporter Bob Woodward in his book, The Brethren, about some old men in a basement watching body movies. It's the nineteen sixties in Washington. The men are mostly in their seventies, and they are the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States with their younger clerks. They all gather once a session in the basement or maybe a conference room of the Supreme Court Building.

They make popcorn, and together they watch a series of pornographic movies. Because each movie is an exhibit in an obscenity case that has appealed to the court, and the system at the time was that these people had to go through them one by one to judge based on their own direct experience if those films were, in fact, obscene. Each of the nine judges dealt with movie day, as they called it, a little differently. Judges Douglas and Black never attended. Nothing should be banned, they said, and they dubbed it a supreme court of censors.

Judge Berger just didn't want to go. Judge Harlan, who was ill and nearly blind by the end of his career in 1971, would sit just a few feet from the screen. He could only see shapes and outlines and had his clerks describe to him what was happening. Famously, around this time, his wife had to read Lady Chatterley's Lover to him. But maybe most famously, in 1964, during this ritual, justice Potter Stewart coined the phrase that would become perhaps the most famous yardstick for measuring obscenity.

He said, I know it when I see it. Now, I know it when I see it is not a legal standard by any stretch, but it has lingered for sixty years as a shorthand for how we think about the nuance of what is and is not pornography. Our story today is not about litigating obscenity, but it is about how we know what fits into which categories when it comes to the murky, the personal, and the private world of desire and sex. What is and is not safe for work? Well, maybe we know it when we see it.

And we are looking for it. The data says so. But first, around the world, there are cameras, cameras, cameras. And a lot of those cameras are connected to the Internet. And some of those cameras are on 20 fourseven, pointed at one thing, an unblinking eye.

And some of those cameras have microphones, always listening, even when there isn't really anything going on. So in our interstitials this episode, quiet cams. Live streamed cameras with microphones in places where really not much is happening at all. In order, the Namib Desert, the North Circular Road in Dublin, and Lamai Beach in Thailand.

We love some data here on Neverpost. Give me some data, and I'll give you the world. That is a quote from legendary Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw. I just made it up, but we believe in it very strongly. So I got very excited when last December, as they do every December, one one of the biggest porn sites in the world, Pornhub, published a report analyzing some of the usage data that they had collected over the past years.

Search terms, biggest categories, visit length, top performers, breaking all that stuff down by country and then even by state. We don't see any data, it's only analysis. So as legendary Minnesota Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton said, you can tell any story from the data, so be careful. When I looked at the stats this past December, one thing in this most recent report made me go like legendary Browns quarterback Otto Graham did at some point in his life. One of the top six trends that the data team at Pornhub noticed for 2025 was a rise in safe for work content.

It said, quote, it might be counterintuitive to think people come to Pornhub for safe for work content, but over the years, it has been impossible to deny its rising popularity. Some of the top gaming categories of 2025, podcast up 327%, gaming up 283%, and music up 62%, shows users interest in creators and sexuality goes beyond pornography, end quote. This tickled my brain as much as legendary jets quarterback Joe Namath tickled his teammates in the locker room in some of the internet fanfic that I found. Why, I asked myself, would people be watching safe for work content on one of the most not safe for work platforms? I expected that the answer was gonna be a combination of a few things.

One, that Gen Z is in a so called sex recession, having even less sex than us chaste millennials did back in our day. Two, that chastity content like anti masturbation stuff is on the rise, especially amongst the manosphere boys. Three, that Pornhub had always been used for weird, say, for work experiments. So weird comedy pranks, full length Hollywood movie piracy, and just assorted hoozy whats it for a long time. And four, the fact that due to age verification laws, which we've covered on the show before, causing Pornhub to be unavailable in half the states in The US, half the dataset would be missing, and the data would be off or at least different.

And truly, some of those four are factors in the rise of searches for safer work content on Pornhub, but I still wanted to look into whether I was missing something. And boy howdy. Spoiler? Yes, I was. So first, let's talk about what you get when you search for safe for work content on Pornhub.

What are we talking about? Well, not all of what you find with that label is really actually safe for work. I mean, I guess it depends on where you work. I don't know where you work. But there is a gradation of sexualized content.

There are very safe for work videos like-

I got this little card right here.

People unboxing Yu Gi Oh card packs. There's hand cleaning videos. Hi there. ASMR and video game speedrun.

I was trying it. I was looking for that jammer.

There are people in front of chalkboards and whiteboards just explaining complicated math concepts.

The sum notation, which you might have seen as this.

Then there are the videos that move into talking about sex and sexuality.

Otherwise, you're not going to make money.

Mhmm. So advice for how to model in the platform. Sexual wellness discussions.

My husband and I decided, why don't I make, like, a Tinder account? And I can start flirting with guys.

Kink explainers and lots.

Hold on, sex. Stop right there. Before we start,

we have big exciting news. And lots.

That's a good question.

Of podcast interviews with performers.

Like a threesome in a jail or something like that.

Yeah. So these sometimes get not safe for work when the performers move into performing sexual acts, but they are often conversations about the porn industry, performers' sex lives, and other sexualized topics.

Does that sound like something you might be into?

So in the 2025 report, there are these stats about the trending rise in safer work searches in the platform. And just below those stats, giving some context to why those stats are important, there's a quote from a guy named Courtney Brame.

And I just approach it from that lens of, oh, okay. Well, let me see what stands out. Save for work. Right? That's not even that's not porn.

Right? Like, how did this make it into a top porn category? So I think that was my initial reaction.

Courtney is the founder of Something Positive for Positive People, which is a nonprofit platform for support, education, and stigma reduction for people diagnosed with herpes. Courtney is also the host of the SPFPP podcast, a video creator, and a consultant for Pornhub's Sexual Wellness Center, which is how his name appeared on the report. So I decided to do like legendary St. Louis Rams quarterback Norm Van Broklin might have done, and I called up Courtney to have him walk me through what he had written about why safer work was trending.

I think that porn offers us the opportunity to experience what we're not experiencing. There is the talk about porn use being consumed for education but I think that a lot of people who may become the porn hub are looking for something that is different than what they normally have access to.

For Courtney, the rise in safe for work content points to more people looking for intimacy online.

I think back to when Mia Khalifa went to Rooster Teeth, the gaming platform, and how popular that was.

Mia Khalifa was listening, guys. That's awesome. Lovely. Mia Khalifa. So lovely.

Mia Khalifa was a performer who was listed as number one most popular on Pornhub in 2014, despite having had only a three month career. Three years after this, she appears on a podcast called Always Open.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Always Open.

In this appearance, as a woman best known as an adult performer, she doesn't talk about it. She talks about her dating life. She talks about using Lyft. She talks about Twitch streaming video games.

My favorite video game of all time is actually one that I just played recently. It was called Until Dawn.

Okay. Yes. I've heard of

Yeah. And right now, I'm playing You played that with Edward.

Yeah, did. I watched it.

When I think about the intimacy, think about the the connectedness. Right? Sometimes we can feel more like we know someone and someone knows us. I think that's like true intimacy. But then there's this one-sided intimacy where you know someone so well and they don't even know you exist.

So that feels like connection, that feels like intimacy. And I think that what Safe for Work does is it also gives us that. Right? You listen to your favorite podcast or you might watch your favorite streamer or gamer. You may hear people just talking about their daily life and you kind of feel like you're there.

So then why go to a porn site for that?

Because oh, this is I like this question. You you may have your go to people person. You see them often and, you know, they get the job done. Right? So you know you see this person, it's gonna be a quick session.

Right? And I think that having the opportunity to see them in a different way because when you watch the same person, you're watching them in their different roles and their different performances. So that kind of gets old and you still want that novelty, the newness, the excitement. So the only thing that you can see them in different outside of their natural naked bodies might be them in clothes or doing something that isn't sexual.

There's this quote that I love to misattribute to legendary Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, which is and this is it's a little bit long, so bear with me. Quote, I see Courtney is describing here a desire for a type of relationship transition from purely explicit relationship focused entirely on a performer's body, what we might call a parasexual relationship, shifting to a relationship that tries to see them as real people, that they can maybe hang out with, or are hanging out with as a parasocial relationship. Another reason that I found Courtney's example of Mia Khalifa interesting is that in between her transition from porn to becoming a sports podcaster, which she eventually did, at that exact same time was the launch of OnlyFans. So it started in 2016 in London, and it was a new platform that at that time was quickly being adopted by adult performers so that they could have this direct financial and also communication connection with their fans?

On OnlyFans, there are influencers who people pay to watch them do dishes. People pay to watch them just take the trash out or eat their dinner, cook. Right? So the safe for work content just gives you more intimate access to a person's day to day life, and that can be just, hey. I'm on my way to the gym.

This is my workout. This is my Spotify playlist. Connect with me here. These are some of my favorite video games, and these are just, like, little nuggets of opportunities for people to attach and connect to and feel more connected to the person.

This connection makes a lot of sense to me. It's one of the main reasons that people go to places like OnlyFans or cam sites from a video site. You get to do more than just watch, and I don't think of those sorts of sites as safe for work platforms. But what people are buying on those sites is not really nakedness, it's something else. So when we come back from the break, we talk with some folks who can help us take Courtney's intimacy ideas beyond the arena of Pornhub.

It's it's funny. It's a huge misconception. I think that everyone on platforms like OnlyFans or, you know, the fan site equivalents to it are selling explicit content only or that that's the bulk of what we do. Really, what we sell is access to us.

We'll be right back after a quick detour to Dublin and the North Circular Road. To put Courtney's theory about intimacy to the test, I wanted to run it past two folks.

So I'm Melrose Michaels. I am a veteran adult performer in the adult space for about fourteen years. I also launched a company called SexRick CEO. It's an educational company that's completely free for adult performers and creators. And then I cofounded a company called SWR Data with Mike Stabil, where we survey adult performers and creators to get platform data of our industry.

So I'm Mike Stabil. I am a twenty plus year veteran of the industry, cofounder of SWR Data along with with Melrose, which we built to try to better understand the industry and and understand the way that the industry is changing.

As folks who run a study about the adult industry, Mike and Melrose were familiar with the data from Pornhub. So I ran them through Courtney's logic about increased safe for work searches pointing towards this growing desire for intimacy, Melrose immediately agreed. She sells access because that's what she sees people asking for.

We live in a world right now where parasocial connection is one of the only connections most people have on a day to day basis. And so I think really what we're selling is just an intimate look at who we are as people and what we're really like. And you're not gonna get to know me as a person through explicit content. So in order to have connection, you need access to me, and access is the ability to see what I'm eating for lunch in a photo. It's the ability to see me on a lot, like, a livestream.

It's the ability to DM me and have me DM back. It's the real day to day of what your life looks like. You know, me on a farm wrangling cows out of my front yard because they all got out. Like, you're not gonna see that on social. It's not something I'm posting about.

I would love if you could I'm gonna put something in the chat here. So this is from 12/06/2025. This is your your account on X. And if you could just read me what you wrote there.

Okay. So it says, if you ever catch feelings for me, tip one one one, which is a $111, and I'll give you the underqualified therapist experience and teach you about parasocial relationships or how they work. And, yeah, I think that's a this is something because, you know, it doesn't get talked about enough, but a lot of adult creators and performers end up being underqualified and overpaid therapists for a lot of their fans. You know, they come to you about challenges they're facing, losses they've had, really intimate details of their lives. And a lot of it, especially for a male demographic, they just want someone to talk to.

Okay. That's why I did not expect that answer from you. I thought that you were gonna be like, oh, no. It's totally a joke of things. But this is you're being like, no.

Actually, this is what No. Part of just my work is.

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. It's not just here's a nude topless photo of me. It's actually getting to know these people and treating them like people and helping them navigate their lives a lot of the time.

That's a part of what it's become this in this day and age.

Melrose shares content and access to her on several different platforms. And the annual study that she does with Mike at SWR Data called the state of creator study that covers a lot of those same platforms. So it's fan sites, like loyal fans, fansly, sext panther. Those are the biggest ones that are in the dataset that they collect. But there are also cam sites like Chatterbait or any of the streaming services.

And there are also clip sites like clips for sale, and those allow content creators to earn money while they sleep. They're just video clip aggregates. Mike and Melrose have put out the state of Creator every year since 2022 so that they can better understand this ecosystem and the creators that work in it.

How do we figure out what this community looks like? Because finding out what they look like helps us find out what they need, right, and helps us report on them in a a more realistic way. So over the years, we've talked about things like banking access. Right? We've talked about things like what types of content are you making?

Where are you located? You know, how much money do you make? What platforms are you on? And I don't know that we have, you know, an exact map. I know that we don't at this point, but we're getting contours of what this looks like.

And what we've seen in the past couple of years is a couple of things. Okay. You know, one is there were a lot of people got into this industry in 2020. The lockdown Yeah. People did not have another way to connect.

And this type of content really filled that gap, and I think that it fill still fills that gap. Right? Where people who are they may not have a social life the way that you might imagine historically. You know, I think there are a lot of people who do seek out that connection. I think that this industry provides that connection to be able to talk about desires that they have in a nonjudgmental way is not accessible to most people anywhere else.

Right? And our sexualities are valid. So one of the things that we we've seen is a huge jump in things like kink and fetish. Right? People who are trying to, you know, explore their sexuality and then do it.

And a lot of that is safe for work. You think about things like ASMR. Right? Yeah. That is sexuality adjacent.

And so there is a lot of vanilla content out there, and a lot of it is free. So the stuff that makes money often is the stuff that is more tailored to someone's specific desires.

Mike called these sites, these sites like Pornhub, the the tube sites, Mike called them a launch pad. You go there because it's what comes up when you feel a desire, but you don't know where to go except Google. In the first two years of the study, they found that on fan and cam sites, the number of folks offering kink and fetish content increased by 70%. So if we're seeing more safe for work searches on the Launchpad platform, maybe, like Courtney is saying, maybe that reflects a growing desire by more users for something more.

People really want something that feels authentic to them, that resonates with, you know, their body. Things like kissing fetishes, right, have risen dramatically. Like, all of this stuff that is produced outside of the notion of, like, oh, everything is going to be hardcore sex. Most people what we found in our survey is most people are producing solo content. 70% of creators are not doing anything with a partner.

You can't make explicit content day after day after day. It's really wearing. And so people come up with ways to how do I fill this? How do I do this? What do I look like in this dress?

What do you think of this? And I think you see that on social as well as in in the chats. People wanting to engage with their creators because it's not always about just making a sale. It's about building a relationship.

Right. Well, the gaze is a really interesting way to to think about that. Like, a solo performer in front of the camera is going to have a different relationship with the camera gaze, and especially if they're aware that there are literally other people on the other side of that camera in real time and that there's a venue for communication back and forth between the two of them. It's more like interdiegetic or like like a documentary style way of looking at gaze than it is a theatrical performative way of looking at gaze. And, Naraj, do you think about that differently when you when you are in different spaces?

Yeah. No. I find that to be true completely. And the thing about it is is, like, we've had this huge pendulum swing. Everything was super pretty, super polished, super edited, super, like, unachievable.

And we had that pendulum swing way back where it's like, I want people I relate to. I wanna see you, you know, looking silly. I wanna see you being silly. I wanna feel like you might be my friend. And that's why like even the the super, you know, crazy beautiful performers that are like really conventionally attractive also tend to not do as well as like the girl next door types that are crushing it on these platforms because they seem more attainable, they seem more relatable.

And that's just obviously for the female creator lens, but but that this swing towards less polished, more real, more authentic has been huge. And and I think that speaks to why fan sites have done so well.

Relatable is not just physical. As soon as someone is more than just a body on your screen, you're gonna start looking for commonalities. Right? Like, when we can express our affection, we want to. Love language is not a phrase that I like using because it's it's pretty restrictive, it's ultimately the love languages are pretty random.

But it is a helpful rubric because it is true that we wanna share affection in a way that's meaningful to us.

There are lots of relationships, especially in heterosexual relationships, where men are used to get pleasure from buying things for women, right, or giving them things or, you know, feeling seen by them. And I think that, you know, looking at some of the stuff that does really well, clothes may not come off at all. Right? It's something like financial domination, right, where, you know, someone may just ask, listen. You know, you're my sub.

I want you to pay me a $100. I'm going to brunch. Who's gonna buy this for me? Or I want a new pair of new shoes. They send a pair of new shoes, and then they send a picture of them on.

So it's women taking charge. It's men feeling like, hey. Listen. I this is an uncomfortable situation for me. I would like to have some of the pressure off me.

You tell me what to do.

Yeah. And then to that point too, with that kink specifically, financial domination, a lot of that is a a fan coming to you asking you to help them make a budget so that they can spend on you in a way that is reliable and consistent for you. So you actually help them budget their finances, which actually helps them. People like to think financial domination as like you're just draining someone's wallet and like using them. But a lot of it comes with a lot of care and a lot of kindness and also helps them get on track in their own lives.

So there's two sides to a lot of a lot of kink and fetish specifically.

Do you find that that, like, if you expand that dynamic out of that specific fetish into some of the other ones, that that sort of pattern repeats itself in some of the other spaces?

I think to some degree, yeah. Like, another really big one is jerk off instruction. Suggesting or instructing a fan on how to pleasure themselves. You can also maybe suggest or say things that they haven't done before, which lets them be exploratory with themselves and kinda grants them this permission because they're just following the instruction, then that takes a little bit of the pressure off too. I think that there's a lot of common themes like that.

Yeah. You look at, like, a lot of things like make me buy, and it gives you the permission to say, oh, I didn't come up with that. I'm not doing that. Goddess has asked me to do that. And often, they're entirely clothed.

They are just giving you permission to explore.

When I start thinking about permission to explore and mapping that against the idea of intimacy and parasocial authenticity, it starts to make sense to me that folks often find a need for those to be hand in glove. It's a building of trust, not just in the performer, but in yourself. And I don't know, but I don't think that trust is as easily accessible through impersonal mass broadcast content.

People want something that is a little bit more custom. Right? They want custom content. They want clips that speak to them. And so that's really where we we sort of see the growth is in this really specific articulations of sexuality that resonate with you.

It's not just about playboy, and it's not just about one body type. Right? They have this idea that the adult industry is a monolith and that everybody looks like Jenna Jameson did in 1990. And because, you know, in those days, you had to sell to the greatest common denominator. Right?

What was the easiest thing to sell to the most people? Now that doesn't sell nearly as well as things that are specific to, you know, an individual, and that's lots of different body types. That's lots of different genders. That's lots of different sexualities.

With a lot of individual denominators and everyone looking for the one that speaks to them, one of the markers that becomes important in differentiating them is authenticity. Courtney Melrose and Mike all talked about being real and authentic, But I was hearing them use those words and those concepts differently than I had previously heard. Because the conversation about authenticity has been a part of the porn literature for literal decades, But that conversation has mostly revolved around the realness of the performance. Was she faking it? Can he really go that long?

Is she always that ready to go? The number of books and papers that I looked through that were dicing, scrutinizing, analyzing the quivers and moans and eye rolls and trying to hold frankly mostly women accountable for being real while performing a sexual act, most of it was focused on mainstream heterosexual porn produced by production companies and the authenticity of the performer's physical desire. I did not see any of that performative authenticity from Melrose. She never, when we were talking, gave me the impression that she was cultivating an aura of always on or hypersexuality. And in fact, she was doing the opposite.

When I asked her directly about how she thinks about authenticity, her answer had nothing to do with explicit performance. It was all values based.

I don't ever want to give someone advice that's going to harm them. I don't want to ever mislead someone. I don't wanna ever betray someone's confidence.

This is a different valuation of authenticity than porn scholars have historically noticed in consumers or creators. And I heard Melrose return to this frequently. How she wants to show up as a person is how she wants to show up with her audience, and it has nothing to do with her clothes being on or off. She is selling authentic humanity as opposed to authentic performance. But it's also the case that as with any parasocial relationship, sharing that much to that many that often is a challenge.

There's a huge emotional and mental labor that comes along with this job that wasn't necessarily true a decade ago. And how do we navigate that? What do we do for it? I'm charging for it. That's what I'm charging.

Hey, disclaimer, I'm not your therapist and I you don't have to take my advice, but this is what I would do and I'll I'll listen to you. And a lot of creators are kind of taking that route forward. Yeah. We're seeing a shift there, would say for sure.

And even with the financial exchange, there can still be a lot of risk.

There is the parasocial aspect to it. It's like how real can you be within safety and how how genuine can you be while respecting your own boundaries? And that's kind of the line we work. That's the that's the work that we do.

Even with safety, constant access is just a tough thing to sustain.

Creators are like, listen, I don't wanna do the constant access. I'm tired of being constantly accessible. Yeah. And they'd rather start building a passive library on a clip store that pays them while they're sleeping. Which is, you know, that's one way to approach the business.

It's a great way to approach it. Also, stores clip are gonna have a lot of internal traffic. A lot of creators have been deleted off of social media. They don't have a way to drive traffic anymore. So that pushes them into these other kind of verticals that can support the business they're trying to build.

It's important to remember that these are businesses. Melrose is a successful businesswoman, and so are the folks making explicit content, fetish content, girlfriend content, niche content, even studio content. They're all business people. And Melrose bringing up traffic, driving traffic, finding content, marketing. One of the things about coming to this question of safe for work through Pornhub is that their report evaluates search terms, and those search terms often correspond to the established categories that Pornhub has already set up, which revolve around nationalities, body type, ethnic type, or sexual act.

When you're focused on the explicit business, you need explicit categories to sort it, which leads to explicit titles and explicit descriptions to maximize SEO, which leads to more searches for those same keywords. But you can't really search on Pornhub for what Melrose and Mike are talking about. Not really. You can't search for friendly or approachable or cares about animals or help me do a budget.

Right. When you're talking about just going to a site and searching, a lot of people, it's like they don't know what to look for. Right? This is the beginning of their journey. You have a lot of people that end up on the site, and they

look, I

don't know, big boobs. They're trying to figure out what they want. And I think that that's a way to connect with desire that maybe falls outside of those big categories. Right? You're looking for something.

And what is it that turns me on? What is it that I'm drawn to in someone like Melrose? And I think that that is hard to search for on a generic platform because there's so much there.

I think that's where adult performers have really served their purpose in the market too. It's like, you can go to Pornhub, search a term, one, if you're to a big site like that, you're probably trying to get in and get out. You're not really trying to like scroll for hours. Yeah. But on the flip side, when you're with an adult performer or creator and you're doing like a fan site kind of interaction, almost you have like a concierge or like a tour guide to your sexuality.

It's a very different thing than searching a term on Pornhub.

This idea of a concierge or a tour guide is really interesting to me as a way to look at what people are really looking for. And, okay, I buy it. I buy what Courtney is saying. I buy what Melrose and Mike are saying in corroboration with it. It feels like we are looking for a little bit more intimacy.

It feels like we're looking for a little bit more connection. Well, my next question then, of course, is, like, why now? Have we not always been looking for this? So when we come back, let's ask that. Let's reckon with the why now of this.

Why is this happening in 2025? We will be right back after we return from Lamai Beach in Thailand. I think this growing interest in the parasocial aspects of porn has something in common with a thing we talk a lot about at our editorial meetings on Neverpost and that we're starting to see talked about more widely, And that thing is friction. The cut talks about friction maxing. So does journalist and mental health writer PE Moskowitz and friend of the show and beauty know her about Jessica Defino.

Friction maxing is often framed as a reaction against escapism. So our impulse to avoid the thing that might feel hard, like talking to someone, moving around, or reading, and instead opting for a slightly easier alternative, posting, not moving, and scrolling. You can think of it as a pendulum swing back from the adulting is hard phase of millennial meaning that we all went through. It's a realization that sometimes you want something to be a bit challenging. That is where you find the value.

And that's how we talk about it when we talk about friction at Neverpost. Less about escapism and more in terms of an antidote to the convenience that minimizes the steps taken between impulse and fulfillment, which allows your habitual self to run your decisions. Right? In a frictionless environment, there's less between you and the outcome.

Yeah. Pornhub is a pretty frictionless experience. You can find something. You can go to the home see what's trending. It's gonna be algorithmically catered to whatever you've been engaged with in the past.

So it's likely to be what you're looking for anyway, then you can, you know, get off and get off the site.

Look. I just want to acknowledge the irony or at least dad jokey ness of where we've arrived and what I'm about to say, porn is better with a desire for more friction. In porn, can imagine friction might look like content that isn't always on, but instead warming up. Not characterized by getting the job done, but by making a connection. It's searching for more than just the money shot.

And one component of the search for friction might be bespoke or unique. Putting in the time, the energy, the resources into making something feel like yours that seems to be growing as a tempting choice compared to the free, frictionless thing off the shelf. It's a little bit more work to get to know the food preferences of your favorite performer, but when you invest that work, doesn't it change how you see them when you see them naked? Friction makes you pay a lot more attention to where you are and to where you're going, which makes you pay more attention to how you're getting there, and to what else might be an option. You find alternate routes, and suddenly you're in new places you never thought you'd be.

We're seeing a more complex, rich ecosystem emerge, and I think probably the most complex and rich ecosystem for the adult industry that has ever existed. Right? It used to always be it was studios. Studios. It was this top down thing that was created by people who were filming, thinking what they knew what people wanted.

Then there was this sort of explosion of content and the explosion of creators. And I think that what we're seeing now is it is just a much richer buffet of content there. Right? That that you're looking at clips, and you're looking at cams, and you're looking at customs, you're and looking at video calls, and you're looking at free content, and all of that works together. And whether you're a fan or whether you're a creator.

I mean, that's beautiful. I gotta say it's one of the most surprising things about doing this story. I did not expect to have this level of enthusiasm for the current state with everything swirling about, like, how much of Pornhub's map was dark and how much, you know, they're coming down on us for COSA and they're coming down on us for age verification. And it just it feels a little bleak out there in terms of being able to have a nuanced, sophisticated, interesting, compelling, passionate, diverse conversation about desire. And I'm just I'm really floored by the three of you being so aggressive that things like intimacy, things like passion, things like connection are things that you're seeing increasingly valued and increasingly used by people online, I'm I'm floored.

Well, as someone in one of those dark states, which is where I live. Yeah. There is still hope at the bottom line. I think we've always been, you know, on the leading forefront of innovation of technology, of all of the things. So while it's a little daunting and, you know, where I live, especially at times, it's like, well, holy shit, how many times can you write your senator?

Like how's you know, I have an army of creators at my disposal. How many times can we all write my senator? But I think at the base of it, people need connection. Like, people need people. Like, that's not going anywhere.

So Absolutely.

You know, when the entirety of, you know, the the administration and and conservative culture and and sometimes left leaning culture is saying, you know, this is really bad. This is really terrible. You you start maybe to react and say, you know what? I think maybe you're wrong. I think that that sexuality is a is a a way to break sort of that dominant paradigm.

Right? It's a way to say, oh, wait. You know what? I don't think that way. I don't think that the way that I feel is terrible.

Maybe the rest of what they're saying is wrong. I think that it's it's a a really revolutionary aspect of society that that is underrated.

Going into this story, I was not expecting talk of revolution. But when the levers of power go after sex workers, the audience moves closer to them. When avenues to connection are shut off, people are looking for choice, variety, and exploration. I really do believe that people are looking for intimacy in a time when intimacy feels less and less encouraged or maybe even more and more discouraged. And maybe that's a little bit too big a weight to put on the sixth biggest change in the numbers from Pornhub last year.

Probably. But also probably not. I keep thinking about this analogy that Mike made while we were talking.

Consuming adult content is like consuming food. Sometimes you wanna cook it. Sometimes you want takeout. Sometimes you just are in a hurry. You want something quick.

And sometimes you really wanna enjoy it and savor it. And those are gonna be at different price points. Right? Uh-huh. Those are gonna be different experiences.

And I think that, you know, we thought for so long that it was just as as as Melrose said, you just get on real quick and you get off. And that's not what everybody wants, or it's not what they want at all points. Sometimes they want a three hour cam show. Sometimes they want a personal interaction Yes. And they want the the chef's table in the restaurant.

Right? And sometimes they are just on the road, and they want something at McDonald's. This is not a shameful thing to consume. Right? All of that are ways in which to get in touch with your authentic sexuality.

As he said this, I was literally pumping my fists in the air. I'm shaking my fists in the air. I'm yes. Just like I can imagine the quarterback Sam Howell might have thought to himself as he walked into the locker room

of the Philadelphia Eagles, which

was his fourth team in four years after the Washington Commanders, Seattle Seahawks, and Minnesota Vikings, we actually might be getting somewhere. We exercise our power through our collective desires. And our collective desires are showing us, like with so many things right now, that the current state of pornography is not enough. That we want more pornographies, varied pornographies, exploratory pornographies, we want personal pornographies, and intimate pornographies. We want our performers to know us, and for us to know them.

Platforms can help us do that, but they are not the solution at the end of the day. I don't know that this is the new face of porn, but I do believe that more and more of us want to take off from the launch pad. More and more of us want to find something new. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you to Courtney Brame, to Melrose Michaels, to Mike Stabil for coming and talking with me about all of this. We covered so much, and all of it really expanded my thinking. Thank you all. You can find them, Courtney at s p f p p dot org.

That's something positive for positive people. You can find Melrose Michaels on all the socials and Mike Stabil on Blue Sky. And you can find and follow SWR data and the state of creator study at swrdata.com or on their Substack. Please do go follow them. They're gonna continue to release data and analysis of this study and have an upcoming study on AI and the adult market later in the summer.

And you can find us in all the normal places. Phone, email, air table, all the details you'd ever need on getting a hold of us are all in the show notes. A very special thank you to this episode to America's National Football League, who I can only assume has only the best wishes for my longevity.

That is the show we have for you today. We're gonna be back here in the main feed next week with a segment about the Internet as a place. But what ordinal number place? Is it a third place? Fourth place?

Fifth? The kids these days, they got a lot of places. Too many, if you ask me. We're also going to be streaming a team chat at twitch.tv/ The neverpost on Monday, February 16 at 11AM eastern. An edit of that conversation will go out to the member feed only shortly after, so do not miss it.

Or if you do, hey, consider becoming a member for $4 a month at neverpo.st. You can help support your favorite Internet pod and the weirdos who make it, and you can do that for the cost of a convenience store egg sandwich. Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and The Mysterious. Doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.

Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. The dream is to be moved by anything at all. By this Garfield fan comic in which John collapses on the kitchen floor, linked triangles and hoops painted onto a wall stretching three storefronts, mannequins in full plate clutching their scabbards, folded t shirts, the shape of a dreadnought through glass wearing all denim. Pass through a cloud of vape smoke in the canned Isenglass department, exit bawling at the beauty of all manifest creation. You will aspire to enter into labor translucent, like a paraffin sheet, wet and flammable light passing through shape.

Alchemy is based on such fluidity of exchange, all my affect splattering out into the public sphere, cathecting onto every measly beloved thing. Excerpt of Secret Mission Orders for Goblin Romantic by Holly Raymond. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.