What are you doing, step-bro? Understanding one of NZ’s Most Watched Porn Categories

Lachlan Ewing (he/him)

CW: discussions of incest and the portrayal of step-sibling relationships in porn

Chances are, the title question evokes an instant emotional reaction. Different readers may be disgusted, amused, or even turned-on. But they will almost all be thinking about porn. The association of a once innocent phrase with the adult entertainment industry is  symbolic of a 2010s phenomenon—step-porn. Family porn. “Fauxcest” porn. Whatever you want to call it, a genre of pornography centered around familial, non-blood relations has exploded in popularity. Everyone seems to know it’s a thing, but two questions remain largely unanswered: How did it get this way? And, should we be concerned?

In the decade 2008-2018, the proportion of Pornhub videos which included the word “step” in their title increased by 45 times. Not only is more step-porn being made, it’s attracting serious views. In 2018, Component collated words that appeared in at least 1000 Pornhub titles, and analysed which were correlated with videos gaining greater views. The top five? “Step”, “sister”, “brother”, “stepmom”, “daughter”. “Mom” came in at eighth, and “Dad” rounded out a strong performance from the whole family at 13th.

Aotearoa is not immune to the global trend. The Chief Censor released a report in 2019, detailing what was going on in the porn popular with Kiwis. Of the top 200 most viewed Pornhub videos in New Zealand that year, 46% included some sort of family/step fantasy. 

So what’s going on? 

Over recent decades, “till death do us part” has become less of a binding promise before the Lord, and more of a hopeful aspiration. The rates of divorce and second marriages have increased, and more families are now “blended”, or step-families. Perhaps this contributes to the step-porn boom. It makes sense that more people are fantasising about their step-mom, because more people have step-moms. However, step-porn has grown at a far greater rate than step-families. Step-porn is now the dominant genre of porn. Although there are more step-families than ever before, they still only account for 10% of families living together in Aotearoa, according to Victoria University's Roy McKenzie Studies of Families Centre. Furthermore, step-porn’s popularity began to grow exponentially around 2015. Such a trend is not apparent for the amount of step-families. 

Midway through the last decade the porn paradigm shifted a ‘step’ closer to incest.  Around that time, Game of Thrones well and truly arrived in the mainstream. In 2014, it’s fourth season was nominated for virtually every Emmy, became Guinness World Records’ most pirated TV show of all time, and HBO’s highest rating show ever. The season finale featured a particularly iconic sex scene between siblings Jaime and Cersei Lannister, after finally revealing their incestuous relationship, which had been bubbling below the surface for most of the season.

Game of Thrones captured the public’s imaginations in many ways, dealing with every taboo under the sun. It certainly could have helped to turn a few minds on to the incest taboo, and shift the porn paradigm.

However, it seems that not that many viewers are loading up those step-porn videos for the taboo of the storyline. Porn-aficionado Tyran* opened up to me about why he is giving step-porn clicks. Quite simply, “those videos have all the hottest actors.” Tyran explained that he has no interest in the storyline or the kink. He is neither turned on nor turned off by titles such as “Gorgeous Step Daughter Sneaks In and Seduces with Creampie”, but if that’s what his favourite pornstars are appearing in, that’s what he’s watching. I suspect Tyran represents the typical step-porn connoisseur—a very casual consumer. Like-minded people make up the majority of posters on subreddits pondering step-porn, and frequent PornHub’s comments section. 

My best theory to explain the rise of step-porn combines the planks of a growing number of step-families, society’s interest being piqued towards the incest taboo by pop-culture (especially GoT), and casual consumers of porn with the tinder to get this bonfire burning: Big Data. Five to six years ago you may have first noticed increasingly personalised advertisements appearing on your Facebook feed, or YouTube recommending videos that were “so you”. Although nothing is certain in the murky world of online porn, it is suspected industry giants such as Pornhub started deploying these practices of cultivating user data to present them with targeted content around the same time. Say there’s a bit of a spike in the step-porn genre due to the GoT hype. Some people might specifically seek out these kinds of videos, and many more will casually consume them. Either way, Pornhub’s new system thinks that step-porn is a winner, so production companies make more of it, and allocate the genre more of the budget. It appears on the feed of a casual consumer, who watches it regardless of narrative, but Pornhub thinks that's what they’re into. So they present them with more. And suddenly you have a snowball of step-porn, and no one knows how we got there. All the top stars are cast as family members by the top production companies, so the videos continue to be huge hits, and more continue to be made.

Step-porn is a truly bizarre phenomenon, and it highlights many concerns around pornography in general.

Dr Samantha Keene is a critical feminist scholar and lecturer at Vic Uni’s School of Social and Cultural Studies. She observes that step-porn “often relies on regular tropes we see in porn, such as playing with seniority (ie MILF) and naivete (younger, less experienced). In many ways, then, it often depicts the same gendered roles that we see in much mainstream porn generally.” However, what we don’t understand an awful lot about is how people interpret and understand the pornography they view. 

A common concern is that there is an inherent aggression in the step-porn genre, with (usually) male characters persisting to pressure female relations until they agree to sex. Could this have an effect on people’s sexual behaviours in real life? According to Dr Keene, there is a lot of debate as to whether pornography in general causes violence and aggression. She believes that “[...] we should not consider pornography as a separate, distinct media form that has a causal relationship with violence. Instead, it is better to consider pornography as one form of media that could play a role in normalising particular sexual scripts or behaviours that people engage in outside of their online sexual lives.” If behaviours in porn are reinforced by magazines, social media, films (@Clueless, wtf?), it is more likely more people will want to engage in them. 

But what happens when particular behaviours become routine? When not everyone feels comfortable, but societal pressures mean they feel unable to say they’re not ‘down for anything’? This is where Dr Keene sees the problem, and she hit the nail on the head: “[...] it is a critically important aspect to consider in the context of consent education and healthy sex and relationships education more broadly. Ensuring that everyone – and our young people in particular – knows they are entitled to have autonomy over their own bodies, that they do not have to engage in the behaviours that they see in pornography or other mainstream media if they don’t want to, and that they can withdraw consent to sexual behaviours in the moment. Further, we need to educate people about the importance of respecting others boundaries and hearing people’s ‘no’ or withdrawal of consent and respecting that immediately.”

So when next loading up “Step sister gets fucked during her family camping trip”, perhaps hit pause. Dr Keene believes we can “[...] view porn more responsibly by being a bit more aware about what we view, where we view it, and how we access it.” She encourages us to ask more questions. “What are your sexual values? Who produced this porn? What are their protocols to ensure the consent and protection of performers? Can the performers’ ages be verified?”

*Name has been changed