You know who watches a lot of porn? Pretty much everybody.
According to PornHub’s Year in Review, the site had 33.5 billion visits in 2018, with an average of 92 million visits per day. In case you’re worried that the supply might not meet that level of demand, rest easy — if you started watching the videos that were uploaded to PornHub just last year, it would take you 115 years to watch them all. That’s a lot of porn.
Even so, the stigma attached to watching porn — not to mention making it — is hard to shake. But that’s changing one audience at a time, thanks to Dan Savage’s sex-positive Hump! Film Festival.
Is it a tall order, upending the stigma attached to porn? Sure, but Savage says Hump!, now in its 14th year, is up to the task.
“We’ve had people come to Hump! who’ve objected to porn,” Savage tells the Scene via phone, “because [they think] it’s dehumanizing or misogynist, thinking they can’t enjoy porn because they’re worried that the people in it have been coerced, or are only doing it because they’re under economic duress. And the porn you see at Hump! is nothing like any of that. These are films that people make with their friends and lovers, and it comes from a place of joy.”
Savage is a longtime sex-advice columnist whose “Savage Love” has been a staple in alt-weekly newspapers since the early ’90s, and who hosts a podcast by the same name. He’s also the co-founder and creative director of Seattle’s beloved alt-weekly The Stranger, and the lovingly created basis for a character played by John Cameron Mitchell in the new Hulu series Shrill. He’s staunchly pro-porn, and he wants you to be too. That’s why he started Hump!, which showcases a different kind of porn. Each video is less than five minutes long, and the whole package includes “a cornucopia of body types, shapes, ages, colors, sexualities, genders, kinks and fetishes — all united by a shared spirit of sex-positivity.”
An example of the kind of porn Hump! has to offer is “My Cathartic Release,” an animated short about a woman discovering her affinity for kink, which Savage notes is one of his favorites.
“It’s about this woman’s experience with sensation play and BDSM,” he says, “and how healing that’s been for her, and how cathartic. It’s sexy and the drawings are hot, but it’s really educational, it’s really smart, and it’s entirely about this personal experience. Is it pornographic? I guess so, but it is an honest, joyful, personal account and response to sex. You don’t see a lot of that on PornHub, but you’ll see that at Hump!”
Even if BDSM isn’t your thing, there’s something to gain by coming to the Hump! fest. In fact, Savage says that sometimes the best Hump! viewers are the ones who might not otherwise engage with that content.
“There’s a thing that happens that I love to watch,” he says. “What we see happen with audiences is, you’ve got gay guys watching cunnilingus. You’ve got straight guys watching gay sex. You’ve got cis people watching porn made by trans and gender-nonconforming people that was made to express themselves, not made to cater to cis viewers. And you’ve got vanilla people watching kink porn.
“About a third of the way through [the screening], everyone’s laughing, everyone’s cheering for every film, and nobody seems to be knocked back in their seats anymore,” Savage continues. “Even if the film that comes up is, like, bananas and off-the-wall, or something they haven’t seen.”
That kind of social and emotional bond is the driving force behind the Hump! fest. Since the festival’s inception in 2005, its main mission has been to change the way America sees — and makes, and shares — porn. Because porn has become so pervasive with the advent of the internet (Savage is known to say that the internet was invented for porn), the rift between people’s private and public lives has grown exponentially. Even though human beings have been creating erotica and pornography for as long as we’ve been creating art, the scale at which we’re producing and consuming it is unprecedented. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“You can’t separate humanity from porn, or porn from humanity,” says Savage. “And it should be embraced and celebrated. I don’t think it should necessarily be broadcast on the sides of buildings of major urban centers, but there’s a place for it in our lives.
“Porn can’t bear the weight we heap up on it, whether we’re condemning it or whether we rely on it,” he continues. “Because in the absence of good, decent, comprehensive kink- and queer-positive sex education, porn has to do it. There’s a lot of bad attitudes and bad ideas that people pick up from porn.
“People will not pick up those bad attitudes and bad ideas at Hump! ... Hump! is a corrective.”
