how did "step" porn become so popular when we did such a good job keeping scat and insest porn out of the mainstream for so long

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.

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.

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

Glasses Morty sacrificed something valuable.

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.

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.

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.

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

They're not related so it's not weird

for some poeple, taboo is the fetish. whatever it is, as long as it's forbidden

One of my favourite features on pornhub (probably exists on other sites too, but only found it there) is that you can actually exclude categories/tags.

Funny thing to be mad about but yeah, annoying.

I answered this in another thread, so I'm just gonna copy and paste my answer here. Sorry if the context comes off slightly odd, like I said it was originally elsewhere:

I've thought about the topic and I think I can answer why there has been a rise in step-porn.

I think it's pretty simple: people are more isolated, and people now socialize online.

We're simply seeing less of each other than we ever have (especially during the pandemic, but this isn't specific just to that timeline). Whereas we used to go out and socialize and develop crushes in the real world, for a lot of people, especially a lot of young men, these days the vast majority, if not all, of the non-online social interactions they're having with the opposite sex are within their own homes. And while our brains may be adapting to this new internet landscape well enough, I think our bodies are still lagging behind. When you're an 18 year with raging hormones, the sexual drive extends beyond the reasonable brain. And so it attaches to what your libido recognizes as the other sexually viable candidates regularly in your sphere of influence: the women inside your own home. And thus they develop crushes on their mothers, their siblings, their stepsiblings, and are turned on by pornography that lets them indulge in this taboo but still very real crush.

And to be clear, I am attempting to explain the phenomenon, I am not attempting to excuse or justify it. Incest is gross and faux/step-incest may be biologically better but is still pretty socially/culturally fucked.

I'm just glad I grew up in the 90s before our lives had moved so heavily online.

The same people who popularized fucking their cousins, of course.

Yeah, this is the same problem I have with ugly people seeking validation and the woke kids feeding them in the web pages where I'm trying to get my dick hard. Get your yuck out of my yum.