Why is PornHub trying to get me to fuck my siblings?
“But you’re my brother – what if our parents find out? This is so wrong.”
If you’ve been on PornHub recently, you’ve probably noticed the influx of ‘Fucking My Hot Step-Mom’ or ‘Giving My Brother a Blowjob’ videos. Needless to say, it’s, uh, really fucking weird.
This genre of pornography is called ‘fauxcest’. Although I don’t watch fauxcest myself, I wanted to get to the bottom of its rather unexpected and unusual popularity. Having read multiple comment threads on said PornHub videos, a large part of why fauxcest porn is so popular is because of its scandalous and taboo nature.
Pornography, for the most part, is largely based on transgression – overstepping boundaries. Kinks and fetishes are said to be like hot sauce – it gives your food a kick and, in this case, the fauxcest kink is the sauce – the sauciness of having sex with someone you aren’t meant to is a turn-on for some people. And by some, I mean an alarming number of people. Seriously. This kink is the ultimate transgression when it comes to, not only pornography, but life in general.
The birth of fauxcest is not recent. I used to think that the popularity of HBO’s Game of Thrones was responsible for the genre, however, though it may have been the cause of more clicks, the show is not where fauxcest began.
I tried to find the very first occurrence of inter-familial media, and I was taken back to Year 12, when I studied Oedipus in literature, which just goes to show that inter-familial relationships in the media have been around for centuries. Though I’m not sure the nature of fauxcest porn could ever compare to the complexity of Greek mythology, it’s just something to think about.
Perhaps the most famous example of fauxcest is the film series Taboo, which was first released in 1980. The film involved many father-daughter and mother-son sexual encounters. Would you believe me if I told you that the film series has actually won an award – sorry, seven awards? Since then, they have made 22 more films, the most recent in 2007, thus completing the series at 23 fauxcest films.
I decided to do some investigative journalism of my own, so I asked one of my porn-watching friends why they think the fauxcest genre is so popular. They said that “people often fetishize what they can never do in real life, and so, the genre of fauxcest porn thrives in our world where it’s wrong to fuck anyone in your family. It’s also not necessarily the fact that people want to fuck their family, it’s the taboo of it all which drives people wild.”
Every year, PornHub releases its statistics. I had a field day taking a look at them – they’re actually really interesting! When looking at last year’s top searches, the terms ‘Step Mom’, ‘Step Sister’ and ‘Mom’ are just below ‘Lesbian’, ‘Hentai’ and ‘MILF’. I was quite shocked to see that the familial terms were not higher up in the ranks despite their recurring presence in many (many) categories. In fact, although the statistics showed how popular fauxcest pornography was, there was not one comment about it in the analyses. A commenter even pointed out that despite the high rank of various familial terms in many categories, the taboo is still present – even in PornHub’s annual statistics report – so much so that they haven’t made a remark about it.
I can’t stop you from getting off to fauxcest if that’s your thing. My personal philosophy is that there are different strokes (get it?) for different folks, just as long as you’re not harming yourself or anyone else, and, if I may be candid, doing it with your own family.