How Fake Podcasts are Influencing Sexual Fantasies

Words: Lois Shearing

The podcast industrial complex has seeped into every aspect of our lives, from our gym routines, to politics, to clips all over our TikTok FYP. In the UK, an estimated 15.5 million people consume them. Podcasts have become so popular that pretending to be on a podcast has become a common form of content production.

Now, fake podcasts, or fauxcasts as you could call them, have started popping up on porn sites like PornHub and XHamster. These aren’t erotic podcasts – audio-only erotic content that is primarily popular among women – but porn videos set up to look like they’re taking place in a podcast studio. According to insight from PornHub, there are currently 1076 active videos with ‘podcast’ in the title and 1910 tagged with ‘podcast – of those, 1110 were uploaded in the past two years. The videos are set up in a similar style to a lot of bro-y podcasts; several chairs in a neon-lit studio with high-quality mics, a male host asking female guests provocative questions. The main difference between these videos and say, Whatever.com is the payoff – the interviewer gets to “fuck” the guests (or the guests fuck or masturbate while the interviewer watches and commentates). 

Mainstream internet porn responding to digital cultural trends isn’t exactly new. As well as the porn fauxcasts, tube sites are now awash with Streamer and reaction-style videos. “Most of the time trends in the adult industry are responding to wider trends in media and society,” says Noelle Perdue, a Porn historian and writer. “We've been seeing a boom in video podcasting in the mainstream because of the priority put on short-form video content platforms, so it makes sense that it would trickle into pornography. People want to see their fantasies play out, and people's fantasies are often dictated by what they're already consuming. It's also relatively efficient for production; it's easy to rent a podcasting studio space that comes with all the props.” 
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You could think of these porn fauxcasts as the 2020s answer to the Casting Couch videos of early internet porn; in one way satirising the public's imagination of porn production, and in another confirming it while providing sexual gratification. “Consumers think the porn industry is this seedy, back-alley business, and producers and performers sometimes play into that narrative- both for fun and because they know that element of taboo is what interests some people in porn in the first place,” says Perdue.

While podcasts once had a reputation of being the content choice of nerds and Tumblr-girlies, the medium has seen a boom among a certain breed of man in the past few years, partly thanks to the legalisation of sports betting in the US. 

In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which effectively banned sports betting nationwide (except in a few states). The change meant that Americans no longer needed to visit in-person bookies to make bets but could now gamble online, and in response a myriad of sports betting apps and websites popped into existence. 

“While podcasts once had a reputation of being the content choice of nerds and Tumblr-girlies, the medium has seen a boom among a certain breed of man in the past few years, partly thanks to the legalisation of sports betting in the US.” 

Many launched content production operations, with commentary and interview-style podcasts becoming a staple. From there, an entire internet ecosystem catering to a fratty audience – that was once considered too busy “touching grass” to bother advertising to online – sprung into existence. 

Tech reporter Max Read dubs this digisphere ‘the zynternet’, explaining: “There have always been college-sports fans on the internet, [...] but it’s only in the past decade that the internet has become so ubiquitous and culturally hegemonic that it’s been able to sustain a large population of current and former fraternity members, degenerate gamblers, and Southern party girls, and in turn to convince those people to participate actively in the culture of social media.” Read credits the zynternet – a portmanteau of ‘Zyn’ the snus brand and ‘internet’ – with the popularity of Hailey Welch, the Hawk Tuah girl, thanks to its penchant for sleazy humour and cute girls. 

Several of the fratty podcasts that sit at the edges of the zynternet, not necessarily podcasts produced by sports media outlets, but appealing to a similar audience, have honed in on this strategy of blue jokes and hot women by regularly asking OnlyFans creators and sex workers to appear as guests. 

But, given the zynternet’s small-C conservative leanings, these episodes tend to be openly misogynistic and antagonistic towards those guests. In this way, the podcast gets to feature a titillating image of a woman in their thumbnail, while still ‘putting her in her place’ in the episode. A recent explosive example of this saw Only Fans creator Rebecca Goodwin walk out of an interview on the Reality Check Show after the all-male hosts instantly demanded she explain how her job contributes to society. According to Goodwin, the hosts asked her to “wear something slutty” for her appearance on the show. 

“Away from porn sites, fratty podcasts are becoming increasingly more hostile, as clips with more emotionally fraught interviews tend to perform better across social media.”

“A lot of the time when people are outwardly hateful towards another type of people, that's the kind of porn and content they like to consume at home in secret,” explains Reed Amber, intimacy coordinator and sex worker advocate. “So I imagine going on a bro podcast like this actually is pretty good for a lot of these sex workers financially.” The porn fauxcasts then, fulfil the ultimate fantasy of these fratty podcasts; in the minds of the audience, the guest agrees to the appearance for money, which entitles the hosts (and by proxy, them) to not only mock her but also to see her perform. 

Given that 28% of young people said they learn about sex from porn, how do trends and specifically, algorithmically-driven porn trends, impact our sexuality? “Porn, and the way it's produced, can steer people in a direction that may be unexpected for their sexuality,” explains Laura Clarke, an award-winning sex and gender educator, pointing out how many straight women prefer to watch lesbian porn, as it tends to focus on women’s pleasure in a way straight porn doesn’t. 

As with recommendation algorithms that push increasingly extreme political content, porn sites may recommend increasingly more hardcore versions of whatever situation they started watching. “Someone interested in spanking might simply be looking for a video of somebody being spanked with a hand, but the recommended videos alongside this may feature spanking by paddles, flogs or whips,” notes Laura. “Many people who also get off on porn that is considered more ‘taboo’ might find that, the more they watch this type of porn, the novelty wears off and they need to progress to something more hardcore to satisfy their needs.”

While it’s hard to imagine how porn fauxcasts as a concept could become more extreme (unless they start claiming to be filming two podcasts at once), the acts within them could. Despite the moral panic it caused, the step-sibling porn trend of a few years ago was not driven by a sudden, societal-wide interest in incest, but by recommendation algorithms that could not differentiate between someone clicking a video because they were interested in the set up, or the acts within it. (Perdue also points out that like podcast porn, step-family scenarios are easy for writers as “you can cast a bunch of people, you don't have to worry about costumes. It's efficient.”). Away from porn sites, fratty podcasts are becoming increasingly more hostile, as clips with more emotionally fraught interviews tend to perform better across social media.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying hardcore or BDSM content, but we must continue to question the role (blackboxed) algorithms are playing in influencing our sexual tastes and the overall landscape of the internet. 

The impact that digital culture and algorithms have on our understanding of our lives is a hot topic at the moment, but the discussion is still mostly focused on politics and identity. The role digital culture plays in our understanding of sexuality is still fairly under-discussed, but as Perdue points out, this is not a new phenomenon. “Pornography is digital culture,” she says, adding: “Porn built the internet and most of the technologies and systems we use to interact with it- so nearly every element of digital culture has roots in pornography.”