Bree Mills was taking a victory lap.
While the adult film director and producer had been nominated at last year’s AVN Awards, which is often referred to as the Oscars of porn, this year’s ceremony was a coronation. At the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas in late January, Mills took home the top award, movie of the year, for Half His Age: A Teenage Tragedy, a film about a student-teacher relationship and a pair of raunchy step-siblings. She also won "Best New Imprint" for her company Pure Taboo, which produces films that feature, among other topics, “family role play.” And she picked up another win for "Best Taboo Relations”—a category that didn’t even exist until 2015—for Dysfucktional: Blood Is Thicker Than Cum.
Incest porn, it seems, is having a moment.
"You can ask any young female performer what bookings she has this month, and she’ll tell you she’s playing 17 step-daughters," Whitney Wright, who’s filmed three performances for Pure Taboo, told Esquire. Since she came into the industry in 2016, the majority of her roles have involved some sort of family element. "Everybody has become pretty used to it."
Incest isn't new territory for porn, but the floodgates have opened lately. In 2014, incest terms started showing up in Pornhub's top searches—"stepmom" came in 4th place, "mom" in 5th—and have been popular ever since. On the front page of Gamelink you’ll find new releases like Mommy Blows Best and My Dad, Your Dad: Calm Down, There Are Enough Dads for Everyone. Nearly every popular studio now features a family-style imprint too, from Team Skeet's Sis Loves Me series to Brazzers' Mommy Got Boobs.
It’s like the feeding frenzy that happened among record labels after a certain style of music broke—"Get me the next Nirvana," but the horny uncle version.
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy
From the Bible to Back to the Future, incest has been an ever-present element of storytelling, and one that has always been frowned upon. Every state in the U.S. has a prohibition against incestuous relations on the books, which explains why a significant percentage of "family role play"-style films tiptoe around actual incest. Instead, they frame characters as non-blood relations. Technically speaking, it's "fauxcest."
"Every scene I do is always a 'step,' it’s never my real father," explained Riley Reid, one of the most popular adult actresses in the business. "And usually they're fairly new [relations]—like, 'my mom's new husband,' so it's not somebody who has raised me."
"I think you legally have to say, 'This is crazy, you’re my step-brother' a certain number of times," Wright added. "You also have to somehow fit in there that both are over the age of 18, like, 'Now that so-and-so's back from college.'"
Production companies that don’t draw such a line can run into problems legally, performers and directors I talked to explained. Some credit card companies won't even process payments for that type of material. But that hasn't stopped smaller niche outfits, or independent performers themselves, from eschewing even that disclaimer—in large part because there's such a high demand.
This latest trend is just a natural progression in our society's relationship with porn, according to Paul Wright, Ph.D. of the Media School at Indiana University.
“As types of pornography that were less common in the past—for example violence, this or that fetish—become more and more common and easily accessible, consumers get bored by them and need the extremity and deviance upped a notch to once again become aroused and excited," says Wright. "Few sexual acts are more extreme or deviant than incest."
Lonnie Barbach, a doctor of clinical psychology who has written numerous books on sexuality and female sexuality in particular, echoes Wright's sentiment.
"Pornography keeps pushing the boundaries—it’s been doing that for a number of decades, to now where it’s gotten to incest," she said. "Sex has alway been about the forbidden, and here it’s just about as forbidden as you can get."
Did we influence porn or did porn influence us?
Does porn reflect our innate desires or influence what we desire in the first place? It's a complicated question, and one that we now have to apply to incest porn. Think of it like a pornographic "chicken or the egg" scenario.
"I think [porn websites] were able to spot trends in family role play, pump out a lot of content that met that demand, and then put that into all of their advertising, which influenced what people were watching," Mills said. "It became a closed loop—go to Pornhub and all the ads are about family stuff. That helped propel it to the mass popular interest it is now."
Companies like Mindgeek (the internet giant that owns Pornhub) compile reams of data about what erotica their users search for and often release it to the public. By knowing what people want, nimble studios can then rush more and more of it into production.
"We are the supply to your demand," said Tasha Reign, performer, director, and advocate for the adult film industry. "What we create has a lot to do with what is popular. It is a business. But all of us have a lot of power in creating content that paves the path for what is accepted and popular."
While Reign is the rare actress who hasn’t dabbled in incest-style roles, she says she is a consumer of it herself and can understand the appeal.
"There are many things we like to watch that we would never want to do in our personal lives," she said. "I think that’s what is positive about the adult industry: We give you an outlet to channel these feelings in a safe environment."
Is incest porn dangerous?
Incest in the real world is often extremely traumatic and criminal and can have profound mental health implications—namely, because the victims are so often children. In the 63,000 sexual abuse cases substantiated to Child Protective Services every year, 80 percent of the perpetrators are a parent, and 6 percent are other relatives, according to RAINN. Even after the age of 18, factors of youth, emotional immaturity, and the power dynamic between say, a father and daughter figure, are no easier to reconcile.
There's such a sharp difference between the often humorous, sanitised version of incest presented in porn and its grim reality that some performers need to draw a mental wall between the two. That's especially true as a newer wave of incest-style films can get pretty dark. Mills tries to mine the very real psychosexual subtext that would take place in these situations, unlike porn of the past, which she describes as jokey "tee-hee my step-dad caught me masturbating" scenarios. She says she hasn’t had many issues with people being uncomfortable on set, but occasionally, she has to have discussions with performers about their characters' mental state for a given scene.
"That’s what, as a writer, is so interesting about taboo subjects," said Mills. "If it was real, that would be a crime; you’d say, 'Is that person okay?' There would be guilt. But when it’s disassociated, even if you don’t support that in real life, you want to take a peek in the room and see what’s happening."
Reid, for her part, is unsure whether or not these types of films lead to people wanting to engage in the behavior depicted, or if it’s the other way around.
"I think it’s a mixture of both," she said. "I think some people do want to do it. It’s like when a girl wants to go after a guy who has a girlfriend, but as soon as he breaks up with his girlfriend for her she's not attracted anymore. Sometimes the fantasy alone makes the idea more erotic."
But why? What does it say about us that it's even a fantasy in the first place? Are we so oversaturated with porn that we can't even get the same kick out of watching two people having sex—they have to be related? (Or at least, we need someone to tell us they are.) And if this is the final frontier, where do we go from here?
No one can say for sure if what we choose to peek at affects our behaviour in the real world. The experts can't even decide if porn in general is bad to watch, let alone "family role play." As for the porn industry, the producers and performers stick by their craft—we don't put all the blame on violent Hollywood films for mass shootings, so why should they be held to a different standard?
In a perfect world, we could all recognise that there are differences between realistic sexual norms and the heightened reality of porn, and adjust our behaviour accordingly. But in this one, it's tough to say what the long term effect of eroticising incest might have on society. One thing's for certain, though: As long as we keep clicking, the cameras will keep rolling.
Luke is a writer from Boston who writes the newsletter Welcome to Hell World and author of a book of the same name.
