Pornhub, the largest online porn site, wants to be the first to make porn in space, and they’re crowdfunding $3.4 million from Indiegogo to pay for it.
On their Indiegogo page they write,
One way or another, there are many elements about life in space that need careful consideration and research…especially sex. As such, Pornhub is teaming up with top ranking adult studio Digital Playground in joining the ranks of Armstrong and Gagarin by pioneering a one of a kind mission to defy gravity, make history, and push the boundaries of intergalactic “Sexploration” by filming the first ever sextape in space. In doing so, we will not only be changing the face of the adult industry, we will also be chronicling how a core component of human life operates while in orbit.
While I don’t think that filming yet another porn, no matter how inaccessible the location, is really going to change “the face of the adult industry,” I do share everyone’s curiosity about what sex in no gravity feels like, and whether humans in those conditions can conceive. Since commercial space flight is not far away, it’s a good idea to start being pragmatic about the details of living in space.
But the sex porn stars have in space probably isn’t going to tell us much about sex in space, but about being a porn star having sex in space in order to make a movie about having sex in space. Still, the project is interesting because it calls attention to all the things we really don’t know yet about life in space, and all the ways porn can’t show us what it really feels like.
Yet being pragmatic about what life will be like in space doesn’t mean we have to stop imagining how this next phase of human life could look. Living like a Nasa astronaut probably doesn’t seem fun for most people, who prefer less regimentation and exposed wiring, and living like a porn star seems just as inaccessible. Sending porn stars as our sexual proxies is yet another example of sending the unattainable to space to represent us. Most likely, sex in space will end up being as varied as it is on Earth, with porn sex being just one of many versions.
