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How Incest Porn Is Making a Comeback

Almost two decades after its grand exit, the cheesy, feel-good family show Full House is back with the spin-off series, Fuller House. Netflix aired the entire first season late in February to confused, critical reviews and fans that were excited enough that Netflix announced a second season. The infamous Tanner family—sans Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen—are just as they once were, except the kids are all grown up and have problems that Uncle Jesse and Uncle Joey can’t always solve with a hug and a silver-lining one-liner.

With so much anticipation for the Fuller House debut, so it was no surprise that Pornhub created a porn parody feature, Full Holes.

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Full Holes cuts out the wholesome familial love and replaces it with not-wholesome familial fucking. Uncle Jesse is recast as “Uncle Jizzy” (complete with a ridiculous black wig), Michelle as “Muffchelle” and “Clamchelle” (there are twin in this fantasy flick, to reflect the reality of the original cast), DJ as “BJ,” Uncle Joey as “Uncle Blowey,” and annoying, goofball neighbor Kimmy Gibbler becomes “Kimmy Gobbler.” The actors camp up the already cheesy show to the maximum, complete with all the original taglines (“How rude!”) and laughable character quirks. The sets are designed to mimic every detail of the original series, right down to the red bed frames in the Tanner girls’ shared bedroom and the 80s boy band posters that hung over them. There’s something about taking a strictly PG television classic based on child actors and stuffing it full of raunchy, purportedly incestuous adult sex scenes.

The Full Holes debut comes at a time when incest—often referred to in porn as “fauxcest”—is having an improbable moment. Although sister-on-sister has always been regarded as the stereotypical male sexual fantasy, two weeks ago, Pornhub and Vocativ released a study revealing that, though it has nothing on lesbian (the top-ranking category for Pornhub viewers across America), the word stepsister was the most searched term in Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Ohio, and Maine. Stepmom stories were overwhelmingly popular in Washington, New Hampshire, Kentucky, and Alaska.

Fauxcest is currently a very popular genre that allows viewers to explore socially taboo fantasies and desires in a very guilt-free manner.

Adult Empire releases fauxcest porn (or, as they call it, “family roleplay“) by the boatload. I Love My Sister’s Big Tits, Me, My Brother and Another, Sisterly Love, I Came Inside My Sister, and Family Business are just some of the titles that center around tales of fantasy incest by adult performers that look about as related as two totally different individuals wearing the exact same clothing. One of the most popular movies, Tanya Tate’s Lesbian Family Affair, clumps “mother-daughter” teams together (based on hair color alone) and boasts cheeky lines like, “I told you we didn’t need boys to have fun, right mom?”

Jeff Dillon, the vice president of business development of eLine.com (which handles popular porn hub GameLink), says that interest in fauxcest porn has increased by over 1,000 percent in the last five years. “This niche was really popular in the 70s and 80s,” he says, noting the striking popularity of 1980 fauxcest feature Taboo—in which a sexually frustrated mother whose husband has recently left her ends up turning to her son, who, despite being asleep at the time, ultimately reciprocates—and other fauxcest films that were so unique, the public became fascinated.

“But [fauxcest] faded out in the 90s,” Dillon says, in part because incest stories are based on relationships between characters, and narrative in porn started to fade out of fashion. “I believe it went away in part because of the rise of B&B—big boobs and blonde hair. The 80s were the beginning of the glamorous porn superstars and contract studio stars. It led to many different genres of porn, many of which weren’t story-driven.”

However, the past decade has seen a resurgence in narrative porn, setting the stage for a fauxcest comeback. “We’ve revisited a lot of older genres,” Dillon says. “Parodies had their revival already, and now it’s like producers and consumers are rediscovering the fauxcest genre, and it’s back in style.” Two years ago, adult studio Forbidden Fruit Films began exclusively featuring family role-play scenes. Millennial porn viewers—and especially women—have taken to the genre with a surprising appetite.

“Females make up 38.9 percent of our customers that view faux-incest porn,” says Dillon. “This is up from our average [proportion of] female customers, which is around 27 percent, so faux-incest porn is very popular with our female customers.

“One of the reasons why fauxcest porn tends to be more popular with women is it has more of a storyline than your typical porn that shows a striptease and then goes right into the action,” he continues. “We have noticed our female customers tend to gravitate to story-based movies with a better production value.”

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While the narratives inherent in incest porn may have something to do with its increased popularity—it was recently announced that 1999’s Cruel Intentions is getting a TV reboot—there’s also the fact that fucking a family member remains a pretty big taboo. “Fauxcest dances around the idea of sexually taboo family-type relationships,” says Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, a sociologist and the author of Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment. “The genre is marked by step- narratives, such as stepmothers or stepsiblings, and by dialogue and other production elements that establish the fantasy relationship as non-incestuous.” Tibbals explains that porn companies carefully acknowledge characters like “daddy” as “stepdaddy” and often have a disclaimer warning the viewer that regardless of the narrative showcased, none of the performers are actually related.

“Humor and comedy are complex,” she continues. “Fauxcest is currently a very popular genre that allows viewers to explore socially taboo fantasies and desires in a very guilt-free manner. Because the taboo itself in the depiction is, quite clearly, faux. Layer on top of that the humor that comes with a comedic parody, as well as the nostalgia that Full Holes may trigger, and what you have is a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek way for viewers to experience a narrative that they had probably always been thinking about.”