Vice.com recently ran a story that I think many can relate to.
There’s Now a Porn Genre About How Broke Millennials Are
The PropertySex porn series reflects the ugly landscape of real estate for millennials. It serves as a troubling aspirational RPG about greedy landlords using their power to trade rent for blowjobs from broke young women.
You’re an on-site landlord, and also a horny straight dude. Yesterday, you kicked out some obnoxious tenants and want to fill that vacancy as quickly as possible, but you also realize you’ve got a desirable space in a nice area, which, in the words of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, is “a fucking valuable thing.” You can’t just give it to the first person you interview.
But the first applicant is a gorgeous brunette named Sophia, and it never hurts to live with attractive ladies. She’s also in a desperate situation, having just been kicked out of her previous place. You’d like to help her out, but all she has is $1,200 for first month, last month, and security deposit. “I feel bad that you’re in a tight spot,” you tell her, “but there’s nothing I can do.”
“Well,” she says as she slides open her shirt, “is there anything I can do to change your mind?” And suddenly, you think of something.
Of course, this is not real life. This is the world of PropertySex, a porn series that “puts you behind the camera as you make dirty sex videos with the naughtiest of desperate tenants and with the most alluring real estate agents.” Currently, it’s the 7th most popular channel on PornHub, boasting more than 54,000 subscribers and 369 million views in a little over a year. In the realm of genre-specific adult-themed series, it’s a real hit.
“I had another site called BackstabbingSluts.com, and it didn’t do half as well,” Lizz*, owner of PropertySex, told VICE.
Every fetish seems to have a place on our beloved worldwide web. But the big question that comes to my mind when thinking about this sub-genre built on the sexual exploitation of young women who can’t afford to pay rent, is why it’s so appealing.
To figure it out, I hit up Dr. Rebecca Sullivan, a professor at the University of Calgary who’s written extensively about pornography. “It’s worth investigating trends [like property porn] because porn is a part of our everyday culture, and often a part of people’s everyday lives… [This niche genre] seems to be this generation’s answer to the pizza delivery boy fantasy. Two strangers meet in a private home and the woman suddenly drops to her knees, overcome by horniness.”
Thinking more about the rise in popularity of old-school everyman porn scenarios like the pizza delivery guy example that Sullivan mentioned, the connecting tissue seems to be relatability. It’s ever-present in the handheld gonzo movies of the 90s that mirrored the family home videos made during the camcorder’s heyday and the “rough sex” sites from the early aughts that brought to mind the gross-out content of the early internet. I’m sure some porn in the 1930s took place in breadlines.
The rise of PropertySex, then, seems portentous. It reflects the ugly landscape everyone realizes real estate has become, serving as a troubling RPG about landlords using their power to trade rent for blowjobs.
These days, rent is taking up a larger portion of our paychecks. Using that income-to-cost ratio as a barometer, a recent study by RealtyTrac shows that my hometown of San Francisco (unsurprisingly) is the least affordable market to rent in, with Honolulu, Washington, DC, and New York City rounding out the rest of the top tier. In these millennial meccas, average rents cost more than 60 percent of the average wages. But the cost of living isn’t just rising in big cities. According to data from HUD, rents on three-bedroom properties across the country are expected to rise 3.5 percent from 2015 to 2016. Those making an average salary should expect to piss 37 percent of it away on rent. That’s not good.
For a generation of young people who are watching a real estate mogul vie for the presidency as they struggle with housing, PropertySex also offers an aspirational fantasy. As one of the series’s many fans, a PornHub user who goes by the screen name Shane1993, told me in an email exchange that “I think what really gets me to click is the fantasy. Who wouldn’t like to go buy a house, collect rent, and get laid in the process!?”
Despite PropertySex‘s depiction of young men wheeling and dealing in real estate, as Forbes details, millennials are pretty wary of home ownership, because they’re saddled with student loan debt and they lack trust in the country’s financial state. Instead of owning lavish estates they use to score blowjobs from broke girls, a third of millennials are living with mom and dad—the first instance in 130 years that choice is more likely than cohabiting with a partner.
And so as you, disheartened millennial living at your parents’ house, wait for things to steady themselves in this era of stagnant wages and heightening rents, at least your folks have a fast enough internet connection to allow you to fantasize about the sexy situations you’d certainly have if you could afford to own your own place.
