It appears that the refugee crisis, which hit Europe in 2015 when tens of thousands of people fleeing the armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa flocked to the region, has affected the world of pornography as well.
According to InfoMigrants, data provided by adult content website "xhamster" shows that up to 0.2 percent of its monthly searches "pertained to refugee porn" in 2017, which amounts to about 800,000 search queries per month.
"Sexuality is a means to familiarise yourself with things that are alien to you. By approaching new phenomena from a sexual angle we get to understand these things better," Professor Jakob Pastotter, a cultural anthropologist, explained. "Pornography doesn't simply just show sex. People want to experience at the very least a rudimentary link between the sexual acts they view and themes from everyday life, as is the case with refugee porn."
The majority of "refugee porn" content features “female protagonists in subjugated roles", the media outlet notes, with said females often portrayed "being dominated by white males" and wearing a hijab, which is “frequently fetishized as a symbol representing female migrants as a whole".
While some of these films apparently focus on the humiliation of women, Prof. Pastotter argued that those are “only a small minority of so-called refugee porn films”.
"Think about the likelihood of actually meeting a refugee woman, let alone having sex with one [given] that the majority of migrants to Europe are men. It's even less likely to actually happen than that common porn cliché about the pizza delivery boy who happens to also offer sexual services for a tip. This is all just about fulfilling fantasies, and should really be communicated as such," he said.
Since 2015, Europe has been struggling to cope with the effects of an influx of refugees fleeing war and social crises in the Middle East and Africa.
While Spain, Italy and Greece appear to be the most affected countries as they serve as the main 'safe heavens' for undocumented migrants who reach Europe by sea, Germany alone welcomed nearly a million migrants amid harsh criticism of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open borders policy,” including her failure to resolve migrant crisis-related crime following mass sexual assaults staged by migrants in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015.
