My guess is that it appeals to a sizable minority of people while at the same time not turning off the majority of people because they know it's just actors who aren't truly related.

I prefer my porn not to have any story to it at all, but that doesn't stop me from watching the stuff which hamfists a story into it. I just skip to what I want to see.

Usually the main difference between normal porn and "step-porn" is just the title of the video. Content stays exactly the same.

Well it isn't incest which makes it taboo only on a surface level. Beyond that, it's a quick setup to a story for young or young-looking actors as well as an easy, built-in explanation for someone to walk in on them and get an "exposed" element to their narrative.

Basically it's just cheap and convenient writing. Be disgusted if you want but even within their little narrative it's not incest so you're getting your feathers riled up over nothing.

I think step porn is so popular because it basically establishes a relationship beforehand, even though it is familial. This gives our guy or whatever proxy for the audience they use a preexisting relationship (creates a taboo and and a reason why they know each other), proximity and opportunities for interaction, no need to go to a bar or whatever (makes the script easy to explain why they are forced together in a situation.

I think it makes creating porn easier since it quickly explains why these two or more people are around each other in a lonely house or hotel room (ease of filming venue), gives them a preexisting relationship with maybe hidden desire (no wooing or any modern prerequisites before meeting a potential sexual partner), it's a bit taboo but easily ignored by the majority of the audience, and finally an established easy premise to follow and write with a lot of variation to the formula.

Because it's the easiest way to fulfill a niche while doing absolutely nothing that requires effort.

Content wise it's the same as anything else, they just change the title and the actors say "step bro" like ten times in the intro and then it's just normal porn.

Most vanilla kink

From the view of the actors too - if you had to pick a kink to act in/start in, it would probably be this one. Not too extreme, not too niche, but spicy enough to attract attention. Doesn't need extra props or locations, all you do is change the term you call each other by.

Part of what drives Porn, what makes one setting or situation more popular than another, is taboo. Having just enough of a sense of "naughtiness" in a situation that it makes it more exciting, without going so far as to be offensive to the senses and take the viewer out of it. A generally successful way to do that is to take a normal situation that people are familiar with, something that wasn't sexy, and make it sexy and pornify it.

As an example, imagine you've... ordered a pizza, or had some sort of workman come to repair something at your home. Pretty normal, right? But have you ever paid for that service with sex? Normal, relatable situation, made sexy. Now this is a cliché these days because it's been done to death, but at it's advent the "Pay for thing/get paid for thing with sex" trope wasn't just new, it was Thrilling. It also stops short of presenting the impression of full on prostitution, the goods or services were not presented with the intent to buy sex, which makes it feel less... dirty, to the average viewer. It's taboo, relatable, but not entirely repulsive.

Now, the "Step" concept is the new hotness. Lots of us, maybe most of us, have step-family, so it's widely relatable. Also we generally don't seriously consider sex with step-family, making it taboo. Finally it always stops at STEP family, not blood relatives, so it's arguably not really incest, meaning it's not so broadly repulsive. It makes a condition that we can see ourselves in, it's even more naughty than just sex, but it just manages to dodge the most objectionable subject that it's so close to.

Real talk: I found myself watching step family porn because it's really good for some reason. I don't give a shit about the story and skip past it. I don't have any step siblings and don't have any familial fantasies or anything weird. I just think the women that end up starring in these look hot. I honestly don't know why.

Because you can just mute it and it becomes regular porn, so it does double duty.

Supposedly, it was accidental.

Early on, porn sites were less moderated, and thus more friendly to niche kinks.

But this meant people randomly looking would run across those niche kinks, click on them because it's effectively shock bait, which skewed views. The porn makers saw this increase in views, figured they hit a gold mine, and incest porn took off. As the internet got more moderated, the taboo kinda pushed regular incest to the side, with some sites outright banning it eventually. This left step-porn stuck in the dryer, and the effect spun out of control.

Mind you, this is from some random article I read a few years ago, so it's second hand and unsourced, so grain of salt, etc.

That being said, it jibes with what I've seen over the years. I've never been a big porn user, but even a dilettante like me could see trends in what sites were showing up front. I wanna say the step-porn started showing up in otherwise unrelated searches maybe eight years ago? And it was visible as far back as something like 2005ish as something you'd run across on porn sites.

Mind you, I don't have any issues with step-porn or regular incest porn; it's almost 100% fake anyway. I don't kink shame, even with the really "gross" stuff like scat, as long as I don't have to see it unintentionally. If it was real incest porn, I'd not want to see it, but as long as it's consenting adults, I ain't hating. Step-porn that's real is just regular porn where the performers already knew each other well, it isn't incest in the important ways.

But, dude, that you've never run across any of the ugly stuff just shows how much the internet has changed. There was a time when just being in a non sex related chat room could expose you to some pretty bad stuff. Shit, I still can't get some of the things I saw back in the very early internet days out of my head.

You'd just be talking about random shit, maybe a movie or whatever, and a proto-troll would dump images of kids, or gore, or both, plus whatever else they had saved up. It took a while before videos could be done like that, and thanks be to the tech gods that there were better tools to reduce that kind of fucked up shit on a given chat. But you'd still get clips dumped in of things you can't erase from your head.

By the time commercial porn sites came along, they were able to limit the worst of it, and did. But before that, it was a risky thing to run searches that included some words that would pull hits from porn sites that were either unmoderated, or were intended to host the bad stuff. Ffs, there was a time when trying to figure out how to light a photo you intended to take of a kid was just horrifying.

As much as I hate Google, they really did reduce that, then eliminate it to the point that it really isn't possible to find such things on purpose, much less having it show up like that. Well, I assume so, anyway. Afaik, all that shit went underground, and you can actually search for the Nabokov novel without getting your eyes and soul tainted.

Jfc, I really am glad y'all younger netizens didn't have to go through that era.

Glasses Morty sacrificed something valuable.

I've heard the theory that porn these days is so over the top and intense a lot of the times, that you can just turn off the sound to step porn and get more moderate, missionary, "plain" style porn if that's your jam.

I have zero opinion either way, as I read my porn, this is just a hypothesis I've heard 🤷‍♀️

The most logical answer to this that I’ve come across is production value.

There is a lot of porn out there, and a lot of it is not very good quality for one reason or another. Now go back a decade or more, and remember it was worse then.

Niche fetish porn, however, was typically pretty high quality because that’s what people were paying good money for. It never started out as free.

Because you can, if needed, just skip the talking bit to ignore the incestuous plot lines, it’s basically just straight vanilla porn, that was what people went looking for. It was the closest to vanilla you could get with the high production quality of fetish studios.

Not understanding the why, production companies saw the spike in that specific result and started making more of it, then it started getting memed, and here we are.

Idk if it’s true, but it makes the most sense to me, considering when it started to gain popularity.

Does this guy really think the actors are related in any way? 😭

I feel like originally it was a semi-safe taboo to break that made a standard porn setup seem more forbidden/risqué. It always seemed weird, like how many people have step siblings that also fantasize about them sexually, how big could this be? But it just kept on coming, so to speak.

Now I think it’s just a meme/SEO thing, where you have to include it even if the video is not even pretending to be about that. Also it happened around the same time that websites were pushing/pivoting into more content creator type things, and so it’s probably related to that as well. Like the annoying face+exaggerated reaction thing on YouTube…

Either way, always seemed whacky that everything the sites serve is almost completely step-porn on the front page.

Who's "we", kimosabe?

Scat is a place where credit card processors draw a line. It's vetoed and never produced except in a few very niche cases.

Source: when you listen to kink.com pre and post interviews, you pick up some things about the industry.

Step porn is incest porn in a bad fake moustache.

For my entire life I’ve been able to look at any random porn site and know I wasn’t going to see various things : <...> rape, incest

I see you're not a JAV fan.

The actresses are usually better looking

Incest porn that was actually labeled as such was pretty common about 15 years ago. By which I mean pretend incest, the performers were not really related but were pretending to be.

But there was some case where a woman was posting porn of herself and her son that got really well known. After that, I'm not sure whether because of some new legislation or because of just covering asses, they started calling it step-incest instead of pretending it was real.

In my totally anecdotal experience, incest was getting pretty popular before that time, then it dropped off for a while, and is now picking up steam again. I'm even starting to see slightly more stuff that pretends to be real incest again instead of the stupid step-incest.

It would be nice if it was easier to filter out what you don't like though.

The story is ludicrous.

Weird cluster of socially isolated weirdos who get off on the taboo and/or actually want to fuck a relative but know it would end in like the worst way imaginable if that became known.

Basically picture an entire demographic of George Michael Bluths