- To be clear pornhub just deleted like 60% of all videos on one of the largest porn sites on the internet by flipping a switch
Updated number of removed videos seems to be increasing as it goes on.
It makes me wonder a few things -
- What information Visa et al have that pushed them to act now, and not years ago when there were other underage allegations and suits
- What kind of chilling effect this will have on the sex work industry
- What that says about American culture right now.
LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLERSKATES at your freeze peaches Y'all young'uns know the Tale of Traci Lords? Sure, Crybaby, sure, neckbiter in Blade. Hey let's cue up that video real quick we could use a soundtrack. Traci would approve after all she cut an album with Juno Reactor as her backing band So here's Traci back when she was Nora Kuzma, a 14-year-old getting raped in Ohio while visiting her estranged dad Her alcoholic mom was dating a dude who molested her but he had a heart of gold; he hooked young Nora up with a friend of equally loose morals who hooked Nora up with a fake ID and took her to a bunch of auditions Traci? Traci was big. I was in fourth fucking grade and I knew who Traci Lords was. Pinups, videos, she did all the dirty stuff. We were just starting to negotiate puberty and we wanted Traci lords. THE GIRL WITH THE HAMMER IS SIXTEEN "I won't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day" - Linda Evangelista, four years later "Tried to quit the industry" is such a laden phrase. Let's review. We've got a seventeen-year-old kid who has "tried to quit the industry" who is only there because her molester hooked her up with an ex-girlfriend who got her a fake ID so she could get an abortion without telling her mom. She's got high school classmates who tried to whistle-blow but nothing happened. What happened next is... some of the most fraught language I've ever seen on Wikipedia: Yep, blame the 16-year-old kid for breaking the rules for money and approval. Oh well if RON JEREMY says she wasn't coerced Make no mistake: Traci Lords ANNIHILATED the porn industry. She was Penthouse Pet in the September 1984, the issue in which Bob Guccionne ran nude photos of then-Miss America Vanessa Williams against her consent The black-and-white photos dated back to the summer of 1982 (after her freshman year at Syracuse University) when she worked as an assistant and makeup artist for Mount Kisco, New York photographer Tom Chiapel. At the time, Williams stated that Chiapel said that "he had a concept of having two models pose nude for silhouettes, basically to make different shapes and forms. The light would be behind the models. I was reluctant, but since he assured me that I would be the only one to see them and I would not be identifiable in the photographs, I agreed. Owning this magazine is a felony. It cost the porn industry tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to clean it up. In my mind? Young Nora realized at some point that the clean start no one would give her was hers for the taking if she was willing to burn her abusers to the ground. So she did. And helped out fellow sex industry victim Vanessa Williams while she was at it. And her actions shook some shit up. Every disclaimer you used to see in porn? Traci Lords put it there. We may not call Section 2257 the "Traci Lords Act" but it's the fuckin' Traci Lords Act. Traci Lords legit flew a figurative airliner into the figurative World Trade Center of the porn industry, surveyed the rubble, said it was good and enrolled at Lee Strasbourg. The only reason she's not a goddamn DC Comics superhero is all the scummy old men who run Hollywood are still pissed. But that was then, this is now. Then, there were forms, there were lawyers, there were scummy old men. Now? Now there's freedom and sweetness and light and "chilling effects...on the sex work industry" and "literally the "think of the children" argument finely weaponized against the open internet yet again." Up until that New York Times article, you could find thousands of hits for Traci Lords on Pornhub. This is like the FBI not screening for Osama bin Laden. This is a lackadaisical freedom from harm so deep that the most obvious, most immediate, most thunderously bad consequences aren't even screened at surface level. This is a company so completely unconcerned with liability that they aren't motivated in the slightest to do the barest due diligence. Could they? Sure - you couldn't find Paris Hilton on there. Why? Her lawyers are meaner. Pornhub was filtering Paris Hilton, whose videos carry civil consequences, and carrying Traci Lords, whose videos carry criminal consequences. And if you don't think that was a conscious, deliberate decision you're fucking high. And if you're more worried about hypothetical threats to sex workers than actual threats against underaged girls, FUCK YOU.
At age 15, Kuzma became pregnant by her high school boyfriend. Afraid of her mother's reaction, she went to Hayes for help. He arranged for her to have an abortion without her mother's knowledge. Looking for a job to get some money, she was introduced to his friend and started working for her as a babysitter. The woman offered to improve Kuzma's job opportunities by helping her get a fake driver's license. She provided Kuzma with a new birth certificate on condition that if she were ever caught she would say that she had stolen the phony identification. Kuzma now had the alias Kristie Elizabeth Nussman and a new driver's license that stated she was 20 rather than 15 years old. In February 1984, she answered a newspaper advertisement for Jim South's World Modeling Talent Agency. Posing as her stepfather, Hayes drove her to the agency. After signing a contract, she began working as a nude model and appeared in magazines such as Velvet, Juggs, and Club. During August, when she was selected to model for Penthouse magazine's September 1984 15th-anniversary issue, Kuzma was asked to choose a stage name. According to a 1988 interview, she chose Traci—one of the popular names she had longed for growing up—and Lords, after the actor Jack Lord, since she was a fan of the television series Hawaii Five-O, in which he portrayed the character of Steve McGarrett.
After appearing at age 16 with John Leslie (an actor 23 years her senior) in the porno parody Talk Dirty to Me Part III (which won the AVN Award for the best movie), Lords was hailed as the "Princess of Porn". She became one of the highest-paid porn actresses of that time, earning more than $1,000 a day.
Lords continued making more movies until late 1985 when she tried to quit the industry at age 17, but returned a few months later. Afterwards, she met Stuart Dell, who became her boyfriend, manager, and business partner. They formed the Traci Lords Company. Dell and Lords made a distribution deal with Sy Adler, an industry veteran who ran Vantage International, that they would produce three movies for the company.
Two adults who knew Lords, but who requested anonymity, said they saw her picture in the adult magazine Velvet during July 1984 and telephoned the district attorney's office to inform authorities that she was underage, but that an investigator told them, "There isn't anything we can do about it."
During late May 1986 (around three weeks after Lords' 18th birthday), authorities were informed that she had been underage when she appeared in the porn movies. She had lied (according to Lords, it was a "white lie") to law enforcement, photographers, producers, directors, co-workers, and the general public for two years.
Government prosecutors declared that Lords was a victim of a manipulative industry, maintaining that she was drugged and made to do non-consensual acts. Industry insiders, including Ron Jeremy, Tom Byron, Peter North, and Ginger Lynn said they never saw her use drugs and that she was always fully aware of her actions.
In July 1984 (two months before the end of her reign), Williams learned that nude photos of her, taken before her involvement with the pageant, would be published without her consent in a future issue of Penthouse. Williams believed that the private photographs had been destroyed; she stated that she never signed a release permitting publication or use of the photos in a public format. In contrast, Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, was also given the opportunity to publish these photos but turned it down stating: "The single victim in all of this was the young woman herself, whose right to make this decision was taken away from her. If she wanted to make this kind of statement, that would be her business, but the statement wasn't made by her."
One afternoon in 2012, I went to lunch in the Valley at a Hamburger Hamlet with adult veteran Bill Margold, who’d codirected Traci, and adult agent Jim South, who’d represented Traci. Traci, and what happened 25 years ago, was the topic of conversation between these two. Not for part of the lunch, for the whole lunch. The way they told the story was as a noir, with Traci as the ne plus ultra of femmes fatales: She’d scammed the adult industry with a fake ID; had made one movie after the age of 18, a movie she owned the rights to; and then she’d blown the whistle on herself to make more money and become more famous. And the anger of both these men was still, all these years later, hot to the touch.
i originally posted that article because it's something that hit uncomfortably close to home - i sent pictures of myself variously naked to people online, including ones from when i was underage, and i have no real way of confirming that they aren't in circulation i know someone who started camming for money and got kicked out of the house by her mother - she was living in her car for like a year and didn't end up going to college, and hasn't cammed since as far as i know - but everything she posted online is still up it is shockingly easy to find child/underage pornography and nonconsentual pornography online and you don't even have to delve far - you just need to go to communities with a lot of young marginalized people, people like me as a 16 year old, and just sit around
And I have an axe to grind because the entire industry is based on power and exploitation. I have seen it break people and they weren't underage. They had all their choices. There's a dying generation of adult workers who didn't have to deal with anything more scandalous than polaroids when they were kids, and naked polaroids just weren't a thing kids did. Mistakes you made as a kid stayed mistakes you made as a kid. And these people are in power now, and they want you to know that taking your clothes off for money is empowering, is freeing, is young, is liberal is hip is cool is certainly not something you could regret the rest of your life. So what you get are these hipster pearlclutches over how censorship of any kind is obviously the PMRC born again. You get this attitude that spankin' it to Hungarian ambush cams is edgy rather than exploitive. And you get these analyses demonstrating that while porn has gone more amateur it has also gone more violent, more exploitative, more power-hungry and more cruel, obviously it's what the public wants who are you grampa to comment on my teen choke videos. And everyone decries the "regulations" on the "porn industry" without recognizing that the "porn industry" we have now was designed to skirt the regulations and normalcy the former porn industry fought for decades to build up. We all wring our hands over the horrible videos the algorithms serve up for our kids - what the fuck are those exact same algorithms doing to porn? And we're not talking about some bad HTML5 rendition of Peppa Pig or Finger Family or some shit we're talking about real live humans who are valued about the same. Women in porn used to smile.
It's strange that all the focus is on whether this is a good decision, but no one is looking at why it happened. PornHub did this solely because they were set to lose a lot of money, and so they are not heroes. But it also raises major questions about how much power payment processors hold. It's always unpopular speech that is targeted first.
This is what I'm concerned about. PornHub rightly deserves to burn. But it also raises major questions about how much power payment processors hold. It's always unpopular speech that is targeted first.
Early on in the pandemic I saw many friends go without work... actors, sex workers, performers of various ilks. I decided I could do something to help these people, so I decided to "ethically source" my porn. I reached out to my various friends and asked who I could support via OnlyFans. It wasn't a commonly known site back then... very fringey... and before you could search for "accountant" and find sex workers. ;-) I signed up for 8 different OF accounts of friends and friends-of-friends. Not all of the content was my flavor, but for $3/month, or whatever, I was happy to help keep them in ramen. (My total payment to OF monthly is less than $40. Or about 2 latte's per week.) The benefit here is that you are doing business directly with each person. They create as much as they want, of the type of content they want, and are in full control of what they produce. (In addition, when someone is in full control of their own content, they tend to produce much more genuine content, which is far sexier than the "performative" porn the mainstream porn industry produces.) Two of them I know have purchased homes, and have income over $30k/month. I still give them $3/month. Good for them. "Ethically sourced porn." It's a thing. And it's not available from PornHub.
Absolutely. I definitely have content I source from OnlyFans or Patreon because they are people I actively want to support - Ethical porn consumption is something I think about quite a bit. But the problem is that this issue doesn't go away if everyone migrates to OnlyFans - these groups just target OF instead. then Mastercard, Paypal, et al pull their support for OF, and all these people are left in the lurch. That's the issue that really concerns me.
The only incentive here is financial. Pornhub exists because by making 0.00016 cents per view through whatever pathetic CPM they're charging, they pull in $300m a year in revenue. They pay out some pathetic amount like $3/1000 views or some shit which means if you aren't uploading beaver shots like a fur trapper with a gatling gun you will never make enough to buy a pizza. But when there's a million of you and one of pornhub they earn half a million pizzas. My loser roommate in LA is a "content moderator." He makes a whopping $16 an hour after 4 years on the job. He started at $12 and that's in LA. Mindgeek is in Montreal but fukkit let's shoot the moon. $16x40x52x80=$2.6m, tops, on content moderation. Presume Mindgeek charges $20 an hour to provide moderators to Pornhub and we're at $3.25m. Hey maybe it's the most lucrative gig in Montreal and Pornhub is paying a thousand an hour. Each and every one of those videos represents a two dollars and forty cents investment to make sure that content is kosher. But they're not paying a thousand an hour. They're paying an order or two of magnitude less. ALL this pearl-clutching is over a company that can't afford more than a few nickels per video to make sure they aren't exploiting children. And I'm sorry but if your business model can't afford to spend more than a few nickels to make sure it isn't a toxic minefield custom-designed to exploit the powerless? GO OUT OF FUCKING BUSINESS. Porn used to be expensive. There were tapes. They came in the mail. And by "expensive" I mean "you could get 200 of them for $50 shipped." 2 hours of John Holmes fucking a girl in the ass who legitimately passes out in the middle of it she's so fucking high was yours for a goddamn postcard. But we aren't even there anymore. Not even Vivid can make a living. Instead we've got Youporn paying teenaged boys seventeen cents to upload videos of the shy girl in chemistry class. And it should fucking burn.Her autobiography, Traci Lords: Underneath It All, was published during July 2003 by HarperCollins. In the book, Lords chronicled her childhood, career, and two-year stint in the x-rated industry. The book received positive reviews from critics and was a commercial success, making The New York Times Best Seller list. It was criticized by pornographers, who claim they were the victims. In the book, Lords revealed that she received about $35,000 as total compensation for all her porno movies, including the $5,000 for her underage appearance in Penthouse. Lords continued to use the now-famous stage name that she had given herself as a minor and ultimately made it her legal name. She explained, "I chose to stop running from it. Instead, I won it, legally changing my name to Traci Elizabeth Lords. That's who I was, and that's who I was going to be." In her interview with Oprah Winfrey she stated: "I found you can run, but you cannot hide."
I fully concur that Pornhub (and its ilk) deserves to burn. It's a shitty company with shitty ethics. My primary point in posting this is that you couldn't get them to move until the credit card companies did something about it. That should be, of course, unsurprising, if perhaps something that has continually surprised everyone as it's occurred over the past century that is 2020. See also - sports teams with racist logos not doing a damn thing until their sponsors threatened to pull funding. my other reason to post this is that I do have a concern that social conservatives have used this strategy before, and will again, with success. Yes, PornHub deserves to burn, but it only existed in a form as shitty as it was because of all the restrictions we impose on sex workers of all kinds. We make them deal with shitty companies if they want to make a living, and we do it over and over again. Filing taxes as a sex worker sounds like a fucking nightmare. Imagine, however, if we just like ... decriminalized it and put in health and safety regulations like any other job? We'd have way fewer companies that are able to host child pornography because they're supported in the main by people who just want to get off. If you set the industry up like any other, it makes it much more difficult to traffic people, to film sell and distribute child pornography, to abuse actors, to engage in non-consensual acts. But social conservatives aren't actually interested in those things. They just want to control people. Just like they're also not actually interested in the aborted fetuses of women, they just want to control the women. Same shit, different pile. And that's why this shit worries me.
Sure. Been there, done that, got the life-long hatred of Tipper Gore to prove it. Important to note, though - attacks on prurience are always leveled at an industry, not an industry player. The PMRC went after music, not Warner Brothers. The CCA went after Comics, not EC. Those attacks are now fundamentally worthless; in an era of social media, any culturally-based attack encounters the Streisand Effect early and often and before too long that idiot with the AR in the pink LaCoste shirt is speaking at the RNC. Purse-strings attacks are third-party and don't work the same way. The Family Research Council came at Walmart to keep them from stocking PMRC-stickered albums and Walmart knuckled under. End result? The vast majority of rural America (and rural Canada) suffered under the PMRC's de-facto censorship. Comics took it in the nuts when the ECC wouldn't really approve anything more daring than Archie, which led to the downfall of the medium (Frank Miller and Alan Moore gave it a bump not unlike hipsters have given a bump to vinyl - yes it exists, no it's not financially relevant). If you wanna drag payment networks into it, Wikileaks and Paypal are your example. Again, there was nothing keeping Wikileaks from taking money, they just couldn't accept donations from the most obvious means. Shitty? Maybe. Hot button? Sure. But that wasn't Paypal taking a stand against secrets it was Paypal taking a stand against Julian Assange. I had to put up with 2 Live Crew, freedom fighters, once in my life. You can't make me do it again. No, it exists in that shitty form through regulatory arbitrage. There is no part of Pornhub's business model that exempts it from all the 2257 stuff that literally everyone else had to put up with but since they're on the Internet they were able to Uber their way through all the regulations. I was there a the fucking beginning. People used to confuse me for Seth Warshavsky. I've worked fifteen years in the San Fernando Valley. Porn has never not attracted power-hungry scumbags who take advantage of and abuse women because power dynamics are a big part of sex and attraction. And I mean fuck - I'm just going to quote you in rapid succession: ... The restrictions ARE the health and safety regulations. Warshavsky made women share fucking dildo cams. Didn't even clean 'em. Gave an entire floor of sex workers, who weren't allowed to go to the bathroom more than twice a day, gonorrhea. I'm sorry, sunshine, but if you don't inspect that it's gonna keep happening. And if you do inspect that you have to regulate it. And if you do regulate it, shit's gonna get shut down sometimes. It is fucking hilarious to pretend that somehow nobody can make a living in porn because it's over-regulated or some shit but also pornhub is striking a blow for individual expression by paying 0.3 cents per view for revenge porn. Maybe Visa coming down like a shithammer on PornHub is the system working. And maybe throwing out some dumb shit "social conservative" canard when we're talking about eighteen year olds addicted to meth and living in their car because they can't get away from the upskirt they sent the cute boy in 8th grade is just a little too much. This is fucking delusional. I can call up the city, pay $25 and get a permit to shoot in a park. Then I put up signs on the sidewalk saying "we're filming, walking through this entitles us to profit off your image" and I'm fucking done. People with their clothes on? It's reality television. People with their clothes off? Girls Gone Wild. Difference? Appearing in the background of Tiny House Nation has never cost anyone their livelihood. There is nothing liberal, compassionate or woke about always defending pornographers. Just because James Dobson hates it doesn't mean it's good.my other reason to post this is that I do have a concern that social conservatives have used this strategy before, and will again, with success.
Yes, PornHub deserves to burn, but it only existed in a form as shitty as it was because of all the restrictions we impose on sex workers of all kinds.
Yes, PornHub deserves to burn, but it only existed in a form as shitty as it was because of all the restrictions we impose on sex workers of all kinds.
Imagine, however, if we just like ... decriminalized it and put in health and safety regulations like any other job?
We'd have way fewer companies that are able to host child pornography because they're supported in the main by people who just want to get off. If you set the industry up like any other, it makes it much more difficult to traffic people, to film sell and distribute child pornography, to abuse actors, to engage in non-consensual acts.
Right. It's only a matter of time before some Svengali props up some girl as the "owner and creator" for an account on OF and the same ole porn merry-go-round starts again. I suspect the content will be markedly different - "generic male-directed porn" - than the other OF creators... but that'll only be a matter of time until there are hundreds of Svengalis with their own young girls to pimp out. The only thing saving OF from a full-on exodus from PornHub is how utterly terrible the OF tools and interface are... there is something to be said for a totally useless Search feature, and the only way you can find people to follow is searching for "accountants" on TikTok. :-D
Like all philosophic terms, I think what constitutes "ethical" porn could be debated ad infinitum. However, I think that any definition automatically excludes rape, children, revenge, and surreptitious recordings. I hope Kristof gets a Pulitzer for his writing. Can't think of another time an opinion writer has had such an immediate and dramatic positive effect on society.
No disagreement (assuming that OF has some verification protocol, which I imagine they must given that there is significant money changing hands). But I also don't think it's the only way to make porn ethical, just one way. My basic point was all the bellyaching that's coming from places like Proud Boys Media is hard to take seriously when you consider what it is they're defending. This isn't "controversy" and no one is "limiting speech."
Verification isn't hard when there is a bank account and taxes need to be paid. Once you make anything a business that handles actual currency (and not just free uploads for the lulz) things suddenly get a lot more serious. Sure, at a certain echelon there are ways around that too, but offshoring money with dodgy legal schemes is not accessible to your usual paramedic or college student. So there's a window of opportunity for people to "do better" in there...
Much like FOSTA-SESTA before, this is a massive strike against user-generated content online, and the free expression of controversial speech. This is literally the "think of the children" argument finely weaponized against the open internet yet again. Just as Visa and MasterCard were able to extrajudicially convict Wikileaks, we see them again being used as the cudgel to bring Pornhub in line with nonexistent regulations.
Not even remotely. All PornHub did is require you to create an account and verify your identity to upload content. That's the no-brainer first step in stemming the tide of illegal content: make an individual responsible for every account, and what that account uploads. It is, frankly, a step that should have been in the original release of the platform.
But that's the point -- this is always the argument used to justify actual censorship. Just look at the paramedic in NYC who was having to do an OnlyFans to make ends meet, only to shut it down out of fear of backlash from her employer once her identity was made public. And if you think the information PornHub stores is going to remain private, a website called Ashley Madison would like a word. It's basically kink-shaming on a massive scale. Meanwhile, it may stop some jilted boyfriend from uploading revenge porn (and even that remains to be seen), but it's not going to do anything to stop anyone with some resources at their disposal.That's the no-brainer first step in stemming the tide of illegal content: make an individual responsible for every account, and what that account uploads.