Pornhub’s $25,000 scholarship to arouse students’ passion for education

“How do you strive to make others happy?” is the million dollar question. 

If you have yet to hear, one of the most popular porn sites in the world, Pornhub, is offering a $25,000 scholarship to students who can answer how they strive to make others happy and, surprisingly, no nudity is required.

Pornhub Cares, the philanthropic branch of the site, has decided “to help support the recipient of the first annual Pornhub Cares Scholarship to realize their goal” since the student and the site share the same passion for others happiness. 

The scholarship requires the same requirements as most traditional scholarships: The student has to be 18 or older at the time of submission; have at least a 3.2 GPA; be enrolled at an accredited college or university;  write an essay that answers the prompt; and shoot a video of themselves answering the question. The site encourages students who fit the criteria to apply by Oct. 31.

According to Time, Pornhub gets around 78.9 billion video views per year (not including views that come from their other branches like their contests or blog links). 

That is approximately 216,164,383.562 views per day. Clearly people have a lot of time on their hands. 

Putting aside the nature of the site, most would agree that $25,000 dollars is a generous amount of money that could help any struggling college student. But some just cannot get past the fact that a porn site cares about students.

Though their humanitarian effort seems to be getting a lot of attention from the public, hence the Time article and posted video submissions on their site, I cannot help but wonder just how many people are uncomfortable with the idea of this. And on the other hand, how many people are comfortable with this?

If Pornhub’s intent was to help students accomplish their goals, then it would make more sense for them to offer scholarships or financial assistance to the girls that enter the porn industry in order to pay for their education. 

In recent years, there have been more stories and reports about students, mostly women, who turn to the porn industry, stripping and other sex-related work to pay for their education and suffer great ridicule for their decision. 

For example, Miriam Weeks — also known as Bella Knox — is a Duke University sophomore who works as an adult film actress to pay for her $60,000 tuition.

In June 2014 she wrote an opinion piece for Time defending her choice to work in porn instead of going into thousands of dollars worth of debt. 

Weeks claims that the only reason her work can cover the bill is because “demand for porn actresses, especially extremely young ones like myself, far exceeds supply.” 

Would it not behoove Pornhub to donate the money to Weeks so that she could focus on her education rather than having to work so she can pay for school?