Rivals Wagatha Christie for its lowbrow twists: FT’s Hot Money – Who Rules Porn? reviewed

It was recently reported that almost 8 per cent of global internet traffic is to pornographic websites. The rise of working from home may make this statistic less startling than it might have been three years ago, but still, that’s an awful lot of procrastination and, well, not much WFH.

Given the dominance of the porn industry, it’s a wonder there hasn’t been an exposé of the kind produced by the Financial Times before now. The newspaper’s investigation into who lurks behind the webcams and controls this business took more than six months to complete and has now been turned into a riveting eight-part podcast series. Hot Money: Who Rules Porn? rivals Wagatha Christie for lowbrow twists.

The investigation was led by reporter Patricia Nilsson, who narrates each episode like a diary. Every now and then, her editor, Alex Barker, comes in with his own reflections and editorial steers. We swing back and forth between the here and now and the investigation in progress via extracts from interview tapes and casual voice-notes recorded on location everywhere from Cologne to LA. It all feels very immediate, with plenty of teasing about the surprising place we’re going to end up, and few spoilers along the way as to where that might be.

The first thing that strikes you is how ordinary many of the people involved in the porn industry sound. Fabian Thylmann is a Belgian-raised German businessman who established a major conglomerate of porn sites named, I kid you not, ‘Manwin’. He was a hoodie-wearing thirtysomething when he outed himself as a major industry player at ‘the Davos of porn’ in Las Vegas in 2012. By the end of that year, he had been arrested on suspicion of tax evasion, something he speaks about with almost gentlemanly candour on the podcast.

‘Bernard’, the former Goldman Sachs financier Thylmann sold his empire to, is less forthcoming. He had successfully concealed his identity for more than a decade when Nilsson came knocking. He refused to give her an interview. Still, it’s not hard to form a picture of him, with acquaintances speaking unanimously on the podcast of his clean-cut appearance.

As for the father and son behind user-generated site OnlyFans, Nilsson and Barker can’t get over the thatched cottages and bucolic setting of their former company HQ.

It’s necessary for Nilsson to speak to such individuals as she follows the trail to the centre of the porn labyrinth. What’s clever, though, is that in bringing them out into the open, she is also consciously addressing the inequality between power brokers and performers. Several of the porn stars she talks to describe the injustice they feel at being so exposed while the people pulling their strings are largely reclusive. In this podcast the tables are turned, to the extent that one artiste even gives the FT advice over the direction of their research.

The series lags a little in the middle – episodes four and five are comparative fillers – but is worth listening to all the way through, especially if you’re of the school of thought that a career in porn can be in any way liberating for women. More might have been said about the pressures the industry has placed on women outside it through altering male expectations. I won’t give away Nilsson’s ultimate findings here, but I shall divulge the two surprising things disallowed on most porn sites. One is a lit joint of weed. The other is menstrual blood.

Women’s rights to privacy and to controlling their own bodies is also at the heart of Caroline Criado Perez’s podcast for Tortoise Media. Visible Women, echoing the activist’s book Invisible Women, is particularly concerned with the ways in which data is being used against the female population. The hook for a recent episode was the overturning of Roe vs Wade and a woman’s right to abortion and privacy. Within days of the ruling, there had been a flurry of posts on social media by women urging each other to delete their period-tracking apps, for fear that their data could be used against them.

Criado Perez and her team outlined just how easy it could be to obtain this kind of information. They gave the example of a journalist who was recently able to purchase, for just $160, a week’s worth of location data for 600 abortion clinics in the US. This data revealed things such as where the women visiting had come from, where else they went, and where they had slept that night. Prosecutions for suspected abortions have already soared in recent decades. It’s hard to disagree with the guest who came on to argue that women now need a civil right to privacy.

The podcast is at its best on weighty issues like these, but if you need some light relief, episode five is dedicated to answering the very important question of why women’s M&S Percy Pig pyjamas lack pockets, while the men’s don’t.