Jon Ronson interview: “Everybody's watching pirated porn now”

[Len]

on Ronson has met some very odd people. The soft-spoken journalist has chewed the cud with pop stars, psychopaths and people who believe the world is run by 12-foot lizards. Most memorably, for a book that inspired a 2009 film starring George Clooney, he met the men paid by a secret branch of the US military to stare at goats.

But the millionaire at the heart of Ronson’s new audio documentary, The Butterfly Effect, has perhaps changed the world more than any of them.

Fabian Thylmann may have a vast underground aquarium and a taste for luxury cars, but – as Ronson assures me more than once – “he’s not a Bond villain”.

From 2010-2013, Thylmann owned a company now called MindGeek (formerly Manwin). The name may be unfamiliar, but there’s a strong chance you’ve visited one of their websites this month. About 39 per cent of the British population have, but few would admit it.

By 2013, more than than 80 per cent of all pornography watched anywhere on earth was being watched on a Manwin site. The most popular is PornHub. This “Youtube for porn” hosts more free videos than anyone could watch in a lifetime – and millions of them have been uploaded by fans illegally. In Ronson’s words, trying to remove all the pirated films would be “like trying to cut down a forest with a butterknife.”

 

“Everybody’s watching pirated porn now,” he continues. “Tech utopians have decimated a community. Everybody’s complicit, and nobody wants to think about it.”

PornHub’s success helped Manwin build a near-monopoly, as it gobbled up rivals such as RedTube and YouPorn. It also ruined the livelihoods of the actors and filmmakers who found their work had been stolen, and that inequality rankled with Ronson.

“A porn performer finds it really hard to even to get a current account at the bank, because they’re deemed disreputable,” he says. “Whereas Fabian – who wanted to build an empire based in part on the handling of those people’s stolen porn – because he wasn’t a porn performer but a male tech entrepreneur, he got a $362 million loan.”

The shame around the industry means few people are interested in sticking up for porn performers’ rights. “Everybody’s complicit, and nobody wants to think about it,” says Ronson. “It’s within that hypocrisy that exploitation lies.”

“I met this girl called Dakota,” he says, “who told me that she watched PornHub all the time. I said, ‘Did you ever learn their names?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s like when you kill a deer – you don’t name it because then you can’t eat it.’” The subtext was obvious: “I can’t be curious about these people because it would make me feel bad.”

It was Ronson’s frustration at that hypocrisy that inspired The Butterfly Effect. “A lot of the things I’ve done have been about how people trick themselves ignoring the bad things they do. It’s what my public-shaming book [So You’ve Been Shamed] is about – how we trick ourselves into destroying people online, and not feeling bad about it. And it’s what the movie Okja’s about,” he continues, referring to the acclaimed sci-fi comedy he co-wrote about a genetically modified pig, which caused a minor furore this year at Cannes. “To eat meat, you need to ignore the slaughterhouse.”

For The Butterfly Effect, Ronson spent a year in the slaughterhouse – or in this case, Florida’s San Fernando valley, home of America’s adult film industry since the Seventies. Once there, he stumbled on something unexpected: “There’s this really sweet and adorable world of bespoke porn!”

The internet may have left porn producers scrabbling to make a living, but it’s also given them a way to make connections with their customers – and there is money to be made from videos tailored to an individual’s tastes.

Anatomik Media, a company run by a middle-aged married couple called Dan and Rhiannon, is at the forefront of this new pocket industry. For Anatomik, “nothing is too weird”. Surprisingly, many of their videos feature no explicit content at all. For certain clients it’s less about sex than about the opportunity to deal with their personal issues. One person asked to see a fully-dressed model swatting flies, while another wanted to watch performers burn his stamp collection.

“It’s a kind of therapy,” says Ronson, recalling a bespoke project that moved the Anatomik team to tears. “They received a request for a porn performer to sit cross-legged on the floor and say into the camera, ‘You are loved, things are bad now but they won’t always be, and suicide is not the answer.’” For Ronson, it was a revelation. “I had no idea that world existed. It is a really sincere and heartfelt world of people – probably pretty damaged people – finding each other and helping each other.”

But it’s not the only way that learn that the tech revolution has changed the kind of films being made. “When [prolific director] Mark Quasar started in porn his films were called things like Women of Influence,” says Ronson, “and now one of his films is called Step-Daughter Cheerleader Orgy. That’s because of search engine optimisation – everyone has to adhere to key-words. Everyone’s looking to see what the most searched phrases are, and then they give them back.”

The result is a shrinking pool of labels, a feedback-loop which only works out well for performers who can be moulded to fit into a popular category. “People are only searching for ‘teen’ and ‘Milf’ [an acronym for “Mother I’d Like to F---“], so there’s a sort of fallow period between teen and Milf where 25-year-old adult film actors aren’t getting any work.”

Ronson sees this need to label and compartmentalise as part of a wider problem with post-internet society. “In social media, it’s the same thing. It’s why we’ve got Trump – to get heard or listened to, you need to be either an aggressively authoritarian left-winger or an aggressively authoritarian right-winger. Those of us sort of gentle people in the middle are getting kind of lost, you know?”

It’s telling that he proudly defines himself as one of the “gentle people in the middle”. On the radio, Ronson comes across like Hunter S Thompson as played by Alan Bennett – an odd mix of gonzo chutzpah and cuddly politeness. He charms and is charmed by his interviewees. As a result, he has a rare gift for revealing the human side of people who have been dehumanised.

His whimsical approach, applied to such a taboo subject, makes The Butterfly Effect an unusual proposition. “I don’t think Radio 4 would ever have taken this”, he tells me. Instead, it’s being it’s being released for free on Audible and as a podcast on iTunes.

Documentaries about pornography are a more crowded field on TV, but Ronson’s not too impressed by the harrowing takes on the subject he’s seen there. “A lot of porn people are very pissed off with [the Netflix documentary] Hot Girls Wanted, because it took a sort of sleazy corner of the porn industry in Miami and elsewhere, and tried to make it look like this was porn. And a lot of people in the [San Fernando] valley were like ‘No, we’re a respectful community, we treat each other nicely.”

He readily admits that the industry has its dark side, but consciously avoided it here. “I think a lot of other people have done stories about revenge porn, and I sort of felt I don’t need to tell that story because it’s been so well told,” he says. “And honestly, I never thought I’d feel this way – and it’s just because I’m getting older – but sometimes I think if a story’s just too awful, too upsetting, maybe instead what I should be doing is trying to find stories that uplift people. And I think the stories in [The Butterfly Effect] are ones that haven’t really been told before. Who would have expected to find these lovely stories in the world of porn?”