The ‘hustle’ is neither gross nor cruel when the commodity is the whore ─ or video vixen, if you like. Profit is neither sinful nor inhumane when the exploited is an underage child presented as a piece of flesh.
Free enterprise is fair game when creatives defy religious and tribal strictures to commercialise genitalia for your viewing pleasure. The new pornography is democratic and interestingly daring.
Consider, for instance, the curious case of a Nigerian skit-making duo─mother and her son─who have become popular among high school children.
Just recently, a widowed neighbour sought my attention, urging me to counsel her grandsons and “set them straight.” She had stumbled on the 12 and 13-year-olds, respectively, while they watched videos of the Nigerian mother and her teenage son dry-humping each other.
The mother, presumably in her late thirties or early forties, is seen frolicking with her son in a sexually suggestive way in a series of videos. The woman, evidently driven by her taboo sex fetish, has produced a series of videos in which she is playfully groped, smooched and dry-humped directly on the butts by her teenage son.
The boy, apparently in his early teens, goes after his scantily clad mother as she performs house chores or reclines in bed, hops on her back and dry-humps her buttocks with feverish gusto. This takes place in a series of skits in which the mother parades in a flimsy wrapper or shorts.
And as is often the case with purveyors of decadent media fare, they have gotten more daring. A more recent video shows the mother bathing with her son, naked, in the bathroom. The boy is seen sponging her back with delight. Predictably, her timeline gets flooded, as you read, with the commentary of viewers egging them on, some applauding their closeness, some pleading desperately for a video in which the mother eventually has sex with her son.
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Apparently, the ‘hustle’ is neither abominable nor gross when the Nigerian mother molests her adolescent son, subjecting herself to playful, intense smooching─anything to generate online engagement, while sating netizens’ unconcealed and hidden sex fetishes.
Forget the mother-son duo; there are more daring skit-makers masquerading as “content creators” in Nigeria’s virtual space. Just this morning, a skit-making couple posted a video of themselves. In the clip, the male’s head is buried between the naked thighs of his female partner. A few seconds afterwards, he lifts his head to show his mouth and nose dripping with milk-like fluid suggestive of female ejaculation.
And you must have encountered perhaps more daring videos of married couples self-identifying as “content creators” even while producing soft porn. The new porn arena features the participation of the Nigerian family men and women, boys and girls, grannies, wives and husbands.
The rise of sexually suggestive video skits in Nigeria is linked to content commodification, digital sexual objectification, and the pursuit of viral popularity on social media platforms. This trend is the new pandemic, corrupting youths and clashing with traditional mores.
Porn is the new plague across Africa, as evidenced in the number of lewd content produced by Africans and broadcast on Facebook, Tiktok to mention a few. There is a current viral narrative of a Zimbabwean girl who flashes her bare genitals before the camera to the viewing pleasure of her numerous fans on Facebook.
The newfound erotica, fondly dubbed “soft work,” is a vast virtual graveyard where morality has gone to die. Nigerian “content creators” personify more than a mere change in taste or a rebellion against prudishness. They constitute a civilisational signal flare, showing how moral imagination is being commercially repurposed, to the detriment of personhood.
In Nigeria and much of Africa, the human body is constantly remodelled as a punchline. Sexual humiliation is rebranded as humour, and intimacy, once a modest human affair, is commercialised. The public sphere has been turned into a decadent peep show all in the name of skit-making, satire, and digital entrepreneurship. This did not begin with the internet. The internet simply removed the gatekeepers.
Skit-making now revolves around simulated sexual acts, voyeurism, and the theatrical violation of boundaries. Couples perform intimacy for clicks and families appear as ensembles in productions that blur the line between play and exposure. Privacy is monetised and defended as hustle; even children are sometimes used as props and participants in skits that should never require their presence.
It’d be lazy to simply describe this as moral decay and move on. Decay implies passivity, as though something simply rotted on its own. What is happening here is more deliberate. It is a new economy of attention that feeds on shock, rewards extremity, and punishes restraint. It is capitalism stripped of shame, mining the intimate zones of the human body for a profit.
Pornography has always been political. Not because it shows sex, but because it shows power. Andrea Dworkin once argued that porn is not about pleasure but possession—about reducing the human being to an object that can be consumed without consequence.
That argument may sound old-fashioned to a generation raised on filters and fast data. But its relevance has only deepened in an era that dresses filth as empowerment. Women are told that they are choosing visibility and matching their male peers in relevance. Youths are told they are choosing “survival” through “ingenuity.”
Yet, choice without morality belies freedom; it accentuates drift. This drift had gotten so bad as far back as 2023, when a Nigerian teenage girl made a sordid show of riding a cucumber─cowgirl style in her mother’s kitchen till she orgasmed. Afterwards, she waved the cucumber thick with her milky discharge in front of the camera, before sauntering off.
One of the most uncomfortable truths in this moment is that many women and girls are not merely victims in this economy but also its drivers, anchors, and beneficiaries. This fact is often avoided for fear of appearing judgmental. But avoiding it only infantilises women and strips them of moral agency. Participation in one’s own commodification does not erase the harm; it intensifies it.
The themes that dominate most skits are telling: simulated rape, voyeurism, incest, adultery, and transactional sex. Power games are played for laughs as violence softens into farce. What has shifted is not merely who plays the villain but the thrill of playing one. Transgression is now marketed as equality and progress.
This is why the argument that “youths are just being creative with the tools available to them” is unjustifiable. Creativity is not value-neutral. Every creative act intones an ethic or vice, whether acknowledged or not. The same mentality that justifies digital smut as survival justifies drug trafficking, cybercrime, ritual violence, and other predatory economies as means to preferred ends.
The internet, in this sense, is not the cause but the amplifier; a glittering façade, like the casinos and brothels of older empires, promising escape while numbing society to its cost.
A 2025 study by Raymond Asuquo of Nasarawa State University, Evaluation of Social Media Skits and Emerging Behaviours among Youths in Nigeria, examined widely shared skits across major platforms and found a clear pattern: sexually explicit content and risky portrayals are increasingly normalised, driven largely by the quest for monetisation and online visibility. The study warns that such content reshapes youth behaviour, blurs ethical boundaries, and raises urgent questions about responsibility, regulation, and cultural survival. Creativity, the research notes, has become entangled with harm.
And that is as bad as the story gets.
