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Guilty Pleasure

The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else
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Guilty Pleasure

By: Patricia Nilsson
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Brought to you by Penguin.

If online pornography is a circus, its tent has been pitched all around us. And we’re not just spectators – we’re the prancing ponies.

Pornography is everywhere. Every day, tens of thousands of hours of sexual content is uploaded to the internet. In a single year, visitors to the world’s most popular adult site will view more than four billion hours of porn—the equivalent of half a million years. This explosion in online pornography is affecting our world in profound and wholly unexpected ways. And yet we know strikingly little about where it comes from, whose pockets it’s lining, or what its lasting effects might be.

In Guilty Pleasure, award-winning journalist Patricia Nilsson exposes how, over the past two decades, this vast, shadowy industry has quietly reshaped sexuality, culture, work, and the internet itself. She tracks how the digital age turned the business of erotic art into something else entirely, as Hollywood moguls gave way to anonymous moneymen determined to profit from our desires – at almost any cost. Today, whether we consume porn or not, we are living in the world they made: in an economy, and a society, saturated by the logic of pornography. We are stuck in its addictive, alienating cycles of stimulation, self-soothing, and craving.

Drawing on years of investigative reporting, and emerging research about the impacts of porn, Guilty Pleasure uncovers the inner workings of the industry that has revolutionized everything. Nilsson brings to light the secretive owners of the companies that dominate it; the complicated realities of online sex work; and the bizarre role payment companies play in legislating what is, and isn’t, acceptable. Ultimately, she shows, the story of pornography in the online age leads us to the most urgent question of all: what does it mean to live in a world where almost everything about us – our attention, our desires, our anxieties – is monitored and manipulated by unaccountable figures who will stop at nothing to keep us watching?

© Patricia Nilsson 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Human Sexuality Media Studies Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Sexual & Reproductive Health Social Sciences
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Critic reviews

A fascinating and terrifying read about the history of porn - and the unsettling ways it has come to shape our everyday lives and desires, whether we realise it or not. Nilsson’s thorough research illuminates dark corners of the internet, revealing truths that shouldn’t be ignored (Sophia Chetin-Leuner)
A brave and remarkable journey into a dark world, and a remarkable feat of investigative journalism. This is a book everyone should read - especially parents (Johann Hari)
From streaming video clips to creators broadcasting themselves for money, pornography pioneered much of what we know and (sometimes) love about the internet today. Patricia Nilsson's vital volume makes an important argument that we're living an online life created by porn, even if we're not all on OnlyFans. Revealing and insightful, this book offers a key to understanding not just digital technology but the way we are all but forced to commodify our selves online. Some people just embrace the commodification more than others (Kyle Chayka)
Patricia Nilsson has cracked open an industry most have squeamishly dismissed – and, with a cool incisiveness, convincingly argued how it has laid the rails for the entire online economy. She takes the reader for a wild ride, where her forensic and colourful examination of pornography reveals a chilling truth about the co-optability of our attention and desires. This is a foundational work if you want to understand how capitalism has come for pleasure and how the commodification of the self in the name of intimacy has, in fact, fractured real connection. Nilsson has threaded the needle here with a perspective that is unflinching and which carefully avoids relying on easy, obvious narratives (Sarah Manavis)
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