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...