Did you know that there's a not unsubstantial corner of YouTube devoted to pornographic videos that aren't pornographic? And did you know that thousands of people click these painfully unsexy clips daily?


Welcome to The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus, a weird pocket of YouTube where the most stultifying videos rack up millions of hits, thanks to the clicks of the bored and the horny. Is this the future of online content?

Last May, YouTube reported that 48 hours of new video are uploaded every minute. And unless you want to upload pornography, graphic violence, hate speech, or copyrighted material, you can generally get away with whatever total nonsense you wish to foist upon strangers.


To get a sense of how much unwatchable pap exists on YouTube, give the Dadabot video aggregator, which creates a randomized playlist of YT's least watched videos, a whirl. Never before did I appreciate just how much blurry footage of Bangladeshi cricket matches roams the digital ether.

Anyway, YouTube's ban on naturism inspires some bizarre behavior amongst its users. Every now and again, the "Related Videos" sidebar (which normally fails to live up to its name) will display a video boasting A.) a titillating thumbnail; and B.) several million views.

Clicking on this thumbnail inevitably leads to 1.) an excruciatingly unsexy video; and 2.) yet another sidebar jammed with highly viewed, misleading recommendations. And yes, most of these recommendations lead to even more ersatz erotica.


I have no idea how deep this netherworld of simulacrum smut goes — one would likely die of disappointment trying to plumb its depths — but I do know it abuts infinity.

Yes, dear readers, The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus is out there, and its tendrils ensnare more Related Videos sidebars every day.


For example, take a look at the sidebar above. Notice the video titled "Tit Ange" with over one million hits. Well, that thumbnail leads to a montage of a nice Francophone couple's baby photos ("tit ange" = "petit ange" = "little angel" in English). The nudity-promising sidebar thumbnails adjacent to "Tit Ange" lead to such saucy clips as a PG-rated Cameroonian music video. (Top Comment with 45 Likes: "thumbs up if u just wiewed it becouse u thougt u were﻿ going to see tits")


And this phenomenon isn't isolated to "Tit Ange." Thousands of randy web browsers accidentally stumble into The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus daily, experiencing blue balls on a global scale.


As I type this, Nirvana's music video for "Lithium" has 12,843,412 views. Compare this with the 14,565,134 views for the trailer for the $10-budget indie film Search for Son (NSFW), which somehow snuck bare breasts into its thumbnail. The Top Comments for Search for Son:

"do not﻿ waste time ....go to 1:06," 77 Likes. "It seems more enjoyable to﻿ see boobs on you tube than to simply type porn into google," 38 Likes.


This latter comment sums it all up. Despite the fact that the internet is essentially a shadow dimension weaved out of gossamer receipts of lost pizza boys and cable repairmen, YouTubers still act like confused adolescents thumbing through the Caldors lingerie catalog. They desperately hope that the half-frowning brassiere model on Page 7 will disrobe entirely on Page 8. (Spoiler Alert: There is a sale on Kenmore dutch ovens on Page 8.)


How did I discover The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus? Touché. Last Sunday evening, I needed a YouTube clip to accompany a post about the orang minyak, Malaysia's oil-covered sex monster. (I eventually settled on a clip from the Shaw Brothers' sleaze classic Oily Maniac, but that's neither here nor there.)

Oily magical prowlers haunt Malaysian town In the Malaysian town of Kampung Laksamana, reports of a supernatural creature known as the orang… Read more


I started by searching for "orang minyak Malaysia," which led me to this video, "orang minyak or thief with underwear."

And in the sidebar for that video (above), I noticed something called "Aksi Terlampau Sharifah Sofia Di Sofa," a 21-second video with 170,855 views and an attractive woman in the thumbnail.

Curious how this video deserved ~8,135 views per second, I clicked on it, only to discover an out-of-focus, fully clothed montage of Ms. Thumbnail (also a video review by mrcooljaybee85, "bull shit this﻿ video"). In that sidebar, I saw the asleep-at-the-wheel thumbnail for the aforementioned Search for Son (at left). My journey down the rabbit hole had begun.


Search for Son led to the Brazilian short film 台北電影節【惡女部落格】中文字幕預告 Camila Jam trailer (3,186,882 views; Top Comment: "never let your﻿ dick choose for ya´") to this non-topless Jennifer Aniston video (18,842,389; "We all know why we clicked on this﻿ video, right?") to "Lake" (2,205,109; "i should stop letting﻿ my dick choose the videos") to this horrifying medical dummy (28,462,473; "those are some strange﻿ cpr dummies"). And so on.

The internet is full of smut, so what makes The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus special? When I was 12 years old, some friends and I discovered a porno mag treasure trove hidden in a tree behind the neighborhood pool club. Horrified by our own sexuality, we lit the crusty magazines on fire.


In retrospect, this was a shitty thing to do, as these XXX periodicals were likely some poor homeless guy's collection of fine topaz and lapis lazuli. But what I'm saying is The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus is my childhood Porno Oak for the entire internet (if the tree was full of an adult bookstore's heating bills, that is).


We've reached a point where thousands of bored people stumble upon what is essentially an invisible, giant shoebox full of stained Redbooks and the carefully folded UK album art for Electric Ladyland. It's a communal experience, but atomized across continents. Furthermore, I've only explored a fraction of The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus that has organically coalesced to cater to heterosexual males. There are literal miles of misleading thumbnails out there to be unfulfilled by! Some of you must need dissertation topics!

It's as if we're all in the same prehistoric cave, hiding behind thousands of stalagmites and ogling Oog's auroch-blood drawing of two woolly mammoths rutting. But the cave is dark, and we are drunk on fermented bananas. In reality, Oog actually scrawled two sabertooth tigers doing their taxes. Also, taxes haven't been invented yet. That's where civilization is, and that's fucking insane.


PS: By labeling this article NSFW and only offering a one-nippled screenshot of Search for Son and Tim McGraw barely unbuttoned, io9 has become a de facto outpost of The YouTube Fake Porno Nexus.

PS, Part II: Top image from the worst virtual reality sex scene in history.