Porn site offers $25K scholarship

Pornhub, a leading pornography website, announced last week that it will begin offering an annual college scholarship as part of its new “Pornhub Cares” charity.

“Our scholarship will provide a worthy applicant the opportunity to pursue their educational passions and relieve some of the financial burden of paying for college,” Pornhub vice president Corey Price said in a press release announcing the scholarship. “This year’s recipient will possess leadership, ingenuity and creativity; all qualities we especially value here at Pornhub and ones that have allowed us continued success with our global audience.”

The $25,000 Pornhub Cares Scholarship is open to any student over 18 years of age who is currently enrolled in an accredited post-secondary institution while maintaining a GPA of 3.2 or higher.

To apply, students must submit a 1,000 to 1,500-word essay explaining how they “strive to make others happy,” along with a 2-5 minute video elaborating on the topic. Applications for the inaugural scholarship are being accepted until October 31, with the winner set to be announced shortly thereafter.

“Pornhub takes immense satisfaction in providing happiness for millions of people around the world each and every day,” Price explained. “Consequently, we want to support the recipient of our ‘Pornhub Cares Scholarship’ to realize their goal of doing the same.”

Predictably, the announcement has met with its share of criticism from opponents of the porn industry, including the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which responded with a press release denouncing “this blatant attempt to exploit economically vulnerable young people, and to further normalize the porn industry, which causes neurological and psychological harms to both its ‘performers’ and viewers.”

“Pornhub is clearly using this so-called scholarship opportunity to fuel their own industry”, where the #1 search term in porn is ‘teen,’ claimed NCOSE Executive Director Dawn Hawkins. “If Pornhub truly cared about disadvantaged youth, they could give away scholarship money without exploiting thousands of teenagers.”

Campus Reform reached out to Pornhub for a reaction to that suggestion, but had not received a response at press time.

Hawkins also argued that the age requirement for applicants “makes Pornhub’s motives quite obvious,” calling it “no more charitable in mind than a tobacco company that offers a scholarship to whichever teen can smoke the most of its brand-name cigarettes.”

The conclusion of the press release leaves little uncertainty as to her meaning, calling on Pornhub “to remove this phony scholarship, which is luring teens to send in pornographic videos simply so Pornhub can increase their profits.”

NCOSE also suggests that the scholarship contest might expose Pornhub to legal risks, “as it is impossible for them to discern whether participants in a video are above 18,” and encourages the Department of Justice to investigate the matter.

Pornhub, however, has categorically dismissed such fears, disavowing any financial motivations and saying it is not interested in pornographic submissions.

“Showing how you spread happiness in a sex video is not what we’re aiming for,” Price told The Washington Post. “This is not about you making a homemade porn and winning a scholarship,” he added, though he did concede that portraying nudity (but not sex) in the application video will not necessarily be a disqualifying factor.

“We will not seriously consider anyone if they include explicit material in the video,” he reiterated in an email exchange with CNBC. “We are not looking for that whatsoever.”

Even so, Irene Tsepnopoulos-Elhaimer, executive director of Women Against Violence Against Women, told The Washington Post that the Pornhub scholarship can’t compensate for the damage that the porn industry does to vulnerable women, many of them college-age, even if the parameters of the contest are themselves innocuous.

“The porn industry must be held accountable for violence and exploitation of women,” she said. “This is an opportunity for post-secondary institutions and their leaders to refuse to be complicit.”

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Via LifeSite News