Maggie MacDonald Interview: The Researcher Behind ‘Porn, Platforms & Sex Panic’

It’s not easy to sum up the landscape of modern internet porn in less than 15 minutes. But that’s exactly what researcher Maggie MacDonald did in a buzzy recent YouTube vid that’s turned heads in porn and mainstream circles alike. We caught up with this University of Toronto researcher to take the pulse of modern pornography in our latest Adult Empire Blog interview. She provides insight into the evolution of porn platforms, including the impact of Adult Empire and other web pioneers.

Tell us a little bit about your background, what you do, and the focus of your research.

I’m Maggie MacDonald,  a researcher working in the discipline of platform studies, which broadly considers the impact that these relatively small – but extremely powerful – technology firms now have over our global communication, economy, cultural production and more. Currently I’m based at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information where I’m completing a dissertation on the political economy of Pornhub, specifically surrounding their 2020 CSAM scandal and subsequent demonetization.

How did you choose pornography platforms as your area of emphasis?

I’ve always been interested in sexual expression and before returning to grad school I caught myself wondering many times over the years: ‘why does porn today look like that?’. Especially considering the diversity of older formats like stag films or golden-age narrative features, it was curious to me that Internet porn could be found easily in vast quantities, but that the content itself seemed mostly repetitive and homogenous. As a casual consumer, I felt that porn lacked its former sense of humor and creative narrative play… and I wanted to understand why. When I began studying communications and media theory, I attended several talks by platforms scholars who addressed similar industry shifts that were consolidating production in video games, streaming media, Hollywood and more. During these lectures, I kept thinking “this is happening in porn too!” and while there was  a great deal of phenomenal work to be found on porn history, labour, technologies and digital economies, I wasn’t seeing anything written specifically on platformization of the porn industry. That gap in research offered such an inviting challenge, so I quickly decided to focus my graduate studies on pornography platforms.

Have you encountered any pushback for focusing on a subject as contentious as pornography?

When I started out (circa 2016) I received a lot of warnings about staking out an academic career in pornography research, and was told it would be an uphill battle for securing any institutional respectability. There were many frustrating early barriers that discouraged my topic, largely because funders, reviewers and other bureaucratic processes tend to mirror the antiporn bias we see in the population at large – meaning many consider the porn industry dirty, disreputable and not worthy of serious critical inquiry. For the first couple of years, I was turned down for almost every funding source I applied to, and received some sharply biased peer-reviews which clearly regarded my topic as ‘icky’ but didn’t engage with the quality of the research. Luckily, I had found a wildly encouraging MA advisor in Fenwick McKelvey who (despite not working in the area of porn studies) encouraged me to keep at it, and provided essential support through my early research days. Porn researchers tend to be spread out across many disciplines like film studies, history, law and more, so during my MA a few of us sought each other out and formed a little supportive community at Concordia University in Montreal via a ‘porn studies reading group’. High-quality work being published by established porn heavyweights like Mireille Miller-Young and Patrick Keilty (my current PhD advisor at UofT) truly paved the way, allowing a new wave of porn researchers to make further inroads today. In the end, letting my work’s quality speak for itself meant that following a few years of conferences, publications and media engagement, many of those early barriers evaporated. There’s a clear need for more research in this underexplored area, and while I still field occasional hateful DMs, they’re mostly from anti-pornography people (panicking because peer-reviewed evidence refutes most antiporn claims and exposes their grift).

Since pornography is often ignored by mainstream news outlets, it’s sometimes absent from the “first rough draft of history” journalism provides. How did you surmount some of the research challenges of your project?

Much of my research operates in terms that un-exceptionalize porn, treating it just like any other media production sector. Despite the wry jokes and the way people’s ears perk up when they hear ‘porn researcher’, the bulk of time spent actually doing said research is rather dry and process-oriented! A PhD forges you into a leading world expert… but on a highly targeted topic requiring a surreal deep-dive into available information. My work relies on digital methods, discourse and policy analysis, and original interview data. That means approaching porn’s digital infrastructures, governance and markets through pretty bland – but easily available – documentation. I spend tons of time reading through research journals, federal regulations, legal and policy proceedings, terms of service, end user license agreements, and many other dense documents. Responsible investigative reporting can also set up surprising data leads (luckily, I’ve seen a significant shift in better mainstream porn coverage over the past 5 years!) and work from industry outlets like AE, XBIZ and AVN offers an especially great resource. When in doubt on any subject, I ask creators… It’s ghastly to me that so many outside the industry don’t recognize the staggering entrepreneurial, technical and market expertise of many folks working in porn today. Finally, I’m fortunate to be part of a supportive global network of researchers, sex workers, advocates, journalists and other savvy porn sources who routinely share helpful insights and resources.

What were some of the most surprising things you learned as part of your research?

I wish more people understood that the foundational law of today’s Internet – Section 230 of the CDA, AKA ‘Safe Harbour’- was passed in 1996! In Internet time, it may as well be written on stone tablets! 230 gives platforms liability protections for content circulating on their sites. It’s a critical free speech precedent, but the only meaningful exception to those protections (2018’s FOSTA-SESTA) has specifically targeted sex work. Violent extremism, hate speech and harmful misinformation carry on while sexual expression has been deemed a more serious threat. Sexual expression online – especially marginalized forms – has been under constant threat since. The amount of sex panic and whorephobia baked into platform governance is quite alarming, and I wish there was more public awareness about it.

Your website prominently quotes Constance Penley, one of the most noted academics to study porn/media. In what ways did she influence your work?

If I wasn’t a porn scholar, I would almost certainly be researching fandoms and media culture, and Connie Penley is a crossover queen in both realms! Shallow anti-sex framings of porn always insist on its potential to incite violence, exploitation or misogyny. Penley was among the first academics who refused to conflate pornography with harm and unapologetically pushed for more critical engagement with porn in a university setting. Penley rules. She taught one of the early popular courses on porn – and is still teaching it! She recognizes the agency of creators and audiences. Her methodological range is, frankly, staggering – drawing from psychoanalysis, fan studies, science and technology studies and more. A favourite Penley quote of mine drawn from an Interview with Lynn Comella sums it up: “As a society, we debate, legislate, regulate pornography in almost a total vacuum of knowledge about what it really consists of historically, textually, institutionally.” With increasingly puritanical and sex-regressive policies being levied at curriculums and departments across North America, classrooms like Penley’s that encourage more robust media literacy are more desperately needed than ever.

Who else has been a big influence on your work and philosophy?

I have an ever-expanding list of porn research icons: Heather Berg’s stunning Marxist-feminist analyses of labour in Porn Work; Mireille Miller-Young’s work on Hoe Theory, respectability vs. pleasure, and Black feminist politics; Laura Kipnis’ acidic writing on fantasy policing and low/pop-culture; Bo Ruberg’s innovative work on historical imaginaries of sexual technology in the delightful Sex Dolls at Sea. I’m guided by interventionist scholars like Penley, Lynn Comella, Tristan Taormino, Tom Waugh and many others who embroidered their academic work with regular engagement in policycraft and porn production. No one speaks to the industry quite like the pros, so work by Annie Sprinkle, Zara Stardust, and Mistress Blunt has been hugely inspirational to my research. Brilliant new work is coming out of platform studies including Carolina Are on objectionable content moderation, Katrin Tiidenberg and Emily van der Nagel on sex and social media, and Paasonen on porn affect. I’m very fortunate to work closely with Val Webber, an occupational health scholar who not only churns out sharp publications but also works hard to maintain a supportive and meaningfully interventionist porn research community. There’s a deep sense of solidarity among our global cabal of emerging porn-academics thanks to people like Val. Finally, I’m something of a Haraway-loving STS acolyte and am deeply inspired by the unapologetically horny prose of Sam Delany and Angela Carter.

Tell us about the creation of the YouTube video that summarizes some of your research.

The video began life as a capstone project with the University of Toronto’s Connaught PhD’s for Public Impact. I was a member of the inaugural cohort for this fellowship, created in 2022 to support public scholars at the UofT.  There is an absolute swarm of porn misinformation across platforms like Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. Just about anyone can make unfounded claims about psychology, health and industry practices to rack up views. I wanted to combat some of those baseless claims by using reliable sources and summarizing key issue takeaways. Research that only appears in paywalled outlets or peer reviewed journals has limited reach, and I’m much more interested in seeing my work made accessible – distributed through more digestible formats. I hired professionals to handle the actual filming and editing, and they definitely nailed the tone I’d aimed for in my script! The video has been really well-received as a teaching tool, so hopefully I’ll have future opportunities to create more in the same vein!

How has your own attitude toward pornography evolved over the years?

So many sensationalized headlines about porn circle around recycled anxieties while refusing to make the connection that most concerns are byproducts of common capitalist exploitation rather than issues unique to porn. When I was starting out, I constantly felt the need to engage bad faith detractors head on. Now, I recognize these lazy claims simply distract from the more productive work of serious original research, so these days I rarely engage with easily disprovable antiporn propaganda. I find puritanical censorship culture both alarming and somewhat sad. My staunch position is that there should be MORE sexual expression in media, not less – that means reduced sexual censorship and greater access to accurate education, increased diversity in content and circulation options, and more creative exploration in all sexy media.

Because I’m immersed in Pornhub, my job emphasizes the most common, dominant commodity form that the industry is largely recognized by. I’ve (perhaps counterintuitively) developed a much deeper appreciation for weirder, creative, bespoke porn that’s highly resistant to algorithmically curated modes of production. Specifically, I love animated & illustrated erotic work by independent artists relying on crowdfunding and patronage campaigns, and am developing a modest collection of vintage and small-press porn comics!

In what ways have internet porn retail platforms like Adult Empire (formerly Adult DVD Empire), HotMovies.com, GameLink.com, and Sugar Instant (formerly Sugar DVD), et cetera influenced internet porn?

The era of direct-to-consumer home video consumption signaled one of porn’s notable distribution shifts. By the ’90s, people had more access to affordable technologies, so were able to create their own videos and own the hardware (VCR’s, DVD players etc) that brought adult entertainment into the privacy of the home. Changes in that delivery format put audiences in control of playback functions. No longer anchored to viewing a complete production front-to-back or viewed in a group setting like a theater, they could jump to favorite scenes or replay preferred segments, which ushered in new standards for content production. Namely, we saw fewer feature length productions and a sharp uptick in anthologies or montage films that don’t rely on narrative-driven continuity. Porn on platforms is an acceleration of that private retail trend, with audiences spending just minutes on any given video before clicking through to the next. Algorithmic optimization now promotes individual scenes without requiring larger context, but that scene-based shift began long before, in the era of home video retail.

On your official website, you mention a porn archive called the Bonham Sexual Representation Collection. Tell us a little bit about that. What have been some of your most interesting discoveries there?

During my PhD I had the amazing opportunity to work as an RA processing archival materials for the SRC, which is Canada’s largest collection of sex work and adult film history, based out of UofT’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. My work mostly involved digitizing VHS tapes from the Brian Pronger Collection. Pronger donated roughly 1,000 gay porn videocassettes he’d collected across North America spanning the 1980s – 1990s. That project meant I was watching literally hundreds of hours of vintage gay film during the summer of 2022 while cassettes processed in real time. A personal highlight was the surprising amount of non-hardore material, including lots of sweaty wrestling match footage, and my personal favourite title: ‘Canadian Muscle Dancers’. The SRC also has a fantastic collection of pulp erotic novels! Curious porn enthusiasts can peruse the catalogue online:  https://sds.utoronto.ca/sexual-representation-collection/

Porn got its own academic journal in 2014 (Porn Studies). Do you think pornography is gaining greater traction as an area of academic study?

Absolutely! Fantastic work on porn topics has been available for decades, but porn’s terrain is so vast that academic publishing on it was dispersed across outlets in history, sociology, film studies and many other disciplines. Having a dedicated interdisciplinary arena for our work to congregate around is a gift to researchers like myself. By widening the conceptualisation of porn as a homogenous media category and putting previously discrete methods and disciplinary approaches into more direct productive conversation with one another, the whole field has benefitted through Porn Studies. Outside of the journal, I’m seeing more curious and responsible journalistic coverage on the porn industry, clear pushback and more data refuting inaccurate claims paraded by antiporn lobbies, and much more respect  at large for the work of sex.

Porn and academia share a fondness for buzzwords and specialized vocabulary. Give us some buzzwords you love (or hate) in both areas.

At the risk of being too obvious, I’m a huge fan of “Sex Work” being mainstreamed to largely replace more outdated language. The “work” of sex work “is self-evident to anyone who has undertaken the labor in question, including porn creators. These workers face endless demeaning and uninformed suggestions that they’re being uniquely exploited or duped, can’t possibly consent, can’t advocate for their own conditions and more demeaning nonsense. Language has power and unambiguously calling porn ‘work’ is a move in the right direction.

That being said, there is a lot of damaging and unhelpful language that has been industry standard in porn for too long. Industry terms like “interracial” or troublingly inaccurate terms to shorthand Trans porn deserve to be overturned in favour of less damaging and generic language.

What are some essential books or documentaries for people wishing to learn more about the evolution of internet porn?

For those new to the topic, The Feminist Porn Book (2013) is a great place to start. It includes writing from producers, actors, consumers and scholars, and it’s a fun read!

The recent Netflix documentary Money Shot did a phenomenal job of laying out the stakes surrounding the Pornhub scandal in 2020. Not only was it well produced, but the creators featured in the doc are SO charismatic and fun to watch!

Heather Berg’s Porn Work (2021) is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand labor dynamics in the contemporary industry (Berg hilariously teases that she considered titling it Fuck Jobs instead, which tells you a lot about the book’s political framework and clever writing). Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant and Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes are also strongly recommended.

Finally, I very strongly encourage hearing insights directly from porn creators who know the industry best – if you need a place to begin, check out a collection like We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival and work from the Hacking/Hustling collective, Jiz Lee, Jessica Stoya, Conner Habib, Jessie Sage or Olivia Snow.

What’s next for Maggie MacDonald?

Right now, I’m focused on my dissertation and trying to wrap up this PhD within the year. Beyond that I plan to continue researching the impacts of policy and technology on porn labour and creative production. In the near future, I’d love to produce a whole series of short informative videos to help combat rampant antiporn misinformation circulating online.

The thing I’ve been most excited about lately is beginning to work more directly with Pornhub, where I serve as a Board Advisor to the platform’s new parent company, Ethical Capital Partners. I’ve seen some promising developments emerging from ECP’s significantly more creator/advocacy-engaged approach and have high hopes it can create positive ripples through the industry, so I’m looking forward to many generative projects this year and beyond!