CW: Both this video and this video's description contain graphic descriptions of violence, abuse, and non-consensual sex. This content is disturbing.

This is a video investigating and explaining a genre of pornography called 'painal'. It is partially an amateur investigative journalism piece of the painal subreddit, an online community dedicating to sharing and viewing videos of this kind of porn with ~65k weekly visitors and ~400k subscribers. It is also partially a psychological and sociological analysis of why individuals enjoy this content, and how they come to get there.

This video is not a sensationalised, clickbait piece for views: it is an (amateur) case study of a phenomenon (far more popular than one might think). I have done this to shed light on what painal porn is and its popularity, but the wider systemic issues in both the porn industry and societal sex ed that facilitate real life abuse of women.

Painal is a portmanteau of 'pain' + 'anal' but it is NOT just painful anal sex. The role of pain in sex is well-established in the BDSM community and painal is NOT just sadomasochism. Healthy sadomasochism is done for the pleasure of both sadist and masochist, and both parties are concerned for each other's wellbeing and respect boundaries and consent. Painal is a genre of porn explicitly dedicated to the recipient (almost always a woman being penetrated by a man) NOT feeling any pleasure at all; instead feeling real, unfaked physical and psychological distress.

The distress of the woman is the source of the (typically a) man's pleasure- and the more maximised the woman's pain and degradation is, the more arousing the painal porn is. It is essential to note that painal is NOT a 'kink' as it is intended to cause genuine suffering to one party. Painal relates more to concepts like abuse and sexual sadism disorder. Ultimately, painal is all about the power differential between penetrator and recipient, representing an extreme form of domination: the underlying desire for unchecked power and dominance over another individual is generally seen by experts as motivating rape and sexual sadism disorder as well.

The essential narrative is: the porn industry both normalises harmful treatment of women and desensitises consumers to it, doing so because it makes them money. Societies do not provide adequate sex ed to young children experiencing puberty, so they can view the harmful treatment of women in mainstream porn as normal. Porn changes an individual's brain so that they need to seek out acceleratingly extreme and violent porn. The porn industry actively facilitates this and provides this more extreme porn because it makes them money. This porn dehumanises the women involved, allowing consumers to seek out even more violent porn which genuinely (and often lastingly) harms female sex work employees. They are often financially desperate, lied to, or 18/19 years old and groomed. Mainstream porn sites and studios produce this as it increases profits, and huge numbers of female pornstars are abused or raped whilst filming.

Although this video investigates the r/painal subreddit specifically (as of today, 69k weekly visitors), painal content is also found in other parts of Reddit. For example, the r/anal subreddit advertises its 'extreme painal' videos in its description. This is an example of how painal content in general online is now escaping the boundaries of a demarcated niche and is spreading to general, mainstream pornography. As porn algorithms begin promoting painal content more and more, it will not only be shown to young teenagers just accessing porn more and more, but will gradually become increasingly normalised.

Based on the systemic injustices and abuse of the porn industry, I would advise the reader of this description either to actively seek out 'ethical porn' (which you can just google to get loads of results), or to avoid viewing it altogether. Please watch this video with caution and discretion.