Guilty Pleasure

If online pornography is a circus, its tent has been pitched all around us. And we’re not just spectators – we’re the prancing ponies.

Pornography is everywhere. Every day, tens of thousands of hours of sexual content is uploaded to the internet. In a single year, visitors to the world’s most popular adult site will view more than four billion hours of porn—the equivalent of half a million years. This explosion in online pornography is affecting our world in profound and wholly unexpected ways. And yet we know strikingly little about where it comes from, whose pockets it’s lining, or what its lasting effects might be.

In Guilty Pleasure, award-winning journalist Patricia Nilsson exposes how, over the past two decades, this vast, shadowy industry has quietly reshaped sexuality, culture, work, and the internet itself. She tracks how the digital age turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely, as Hollywood moguls gave way to anonymous moneymen determined to profit from our desires – at almost any cost. Today, whether we consume porn or not, we are living in the world they made: in an economy, and a society, saturated by the logic of pornography. We are stuck in its addictive, alienating cycles of stimulation, self-soothing, and craving.

Drawing on years of investigative reporting, and emerging research about the impacts of porn, Guilty Pleasure uncovers the inner workings of the industry that has revolutionized everything. Nilsson brings to light the secretive owners of the companies that dominate it; the complicated realities of online sex work; and the bizarre role payment companies play in legislating what is, and isn’t, acceptable. Ultimately, she shows, the story of pornography in the online age leads us to the most urgent question of all: what does it mean to live in a world where almost everything about us – our attention, our desires, our anxieties – is monitored and manipulated by unaccountable figures who will stop at nothing to keep us watching?