18 ms·

Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time

160 points by danso 8y ago

taxicabjesus 8y ago
I have a friend who used to advertise on backpage. She just did handjobs, not full-service... She was sort-of traumatized by the experience, but learned a lot at the same time. One of my early taxi passengers was certainly a "working girl" [1]. I picked her up at a hotel early in the morning. I called the provided number, asked the hotel operator to give me the room number, and told the man who answered that I was at the lobby. When the passenger came out it was not a dude. She didn't seem like she enjoyed herself very much. [1] https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html Over my 3.5 years in the cab, I had several female passengers who helped me understand more about female attraction. One got in the cab and was speaking German into her phone, so I asked "Sprechen sie deutsch?" My German is not that good, but she insisted in conducting the taxi ride in German. She clearly found me to be intriguing, wondered "what are you doing driving a cab?", and gave me a kiss at the end of the ride. I never heard from her again. Another woman going home from the bar would've been interested in a date and said, "you have my number." Things were complicated at the time, so I never called her back. I told another female passenger about my relationship drama. She concluded that ride saying, "well I was about to ask you to make out...", and commented on how I had a sort of magnetism about me that she found most men lacked. Men frequently have no idea what makes them annoying to women. Even though I'm not taxi driving anymore, I still practice my people skills. The female staff at my fitness club are interesting: some have decided that I'm "safe", while others have their shields up and clearly aren't interested in talking to me about anything that's not work related. A month ago I ended a comment here with this line: "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 IMHO, our dear leaders would be more productive if they looked at the causes behind the sex industries (prostitution/porn/backpage advertisements/etc). I'd suggest they start with my post, "The Difference Between Boys and Girls" [2]. I tell this story to women all the time (when contextually-appropriate), and they all laugh. [2] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-girls.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-... (tl/dr: female passenger didn't understand her new guy-friend's problem with her relationship history. I told her about how women choose who they want to have relationships with, whereas men have to play the numbers game until they find someone who's interested in them, and how some men never get 'picked'.) Sex work is easy money, for women who are wired that way. Like the friend I mentioned at the top of this post, only a few women can do it as a calling; most just find themselves in that line of work because they need money. Another passenger was a stripper that I saw a couple times (randomly assigned by the taxi company's computer system; she never called me directly). The last time she told of being followed home from her strip club, that she'd been beaten up, and that she didn't feel safe at her gated apartment complex anymore... If our dear leaders acknowledged that this "oldest profession" exists for a reason, progress could be made in making 'sex work' safer for women. (I don't have any insights into the male stripper/sex worker's world, certainly they have predicaments too...)
- djsumdog 8y ago
  This is actually fascinating and a pretty fascinating view point. I've been meaning to write something on this topic myself; will check out your blog posts/comments.
  - taxicabjesus 8y ago
    > This is actually fascinating and a pretty fascinating view point. Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating around '0' - I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten. I have lots of anecdotes; only a few have made it into blog posts. Maybe one day I'll mine my notes for a book. A group of three men on a business trip were going to a strip club. One of them had just gotten divorced, iirc. The newly-divorced man didn't actually want to go, but his compatriots insisted. A few passengers invited me to come into their strip clubs with them. I found those to be rather depressing experiences. My theory is that normal human males have an "imagination" that allows them to "fantasize" about getting with their dancer. My imagination is disabled ("aphantasia" [0]), so I choose to spend my own money on other activities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
    - gammateam 8y ago
      > Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating around '0' - I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten. There is a habit where people require you to vilify or express a clearer polarizing opinion about a topic before they determine if you are an acceptable person to listen to, or not. Its more like a disclaimer they look for. If you don't do it, or "forget" to mention how much you don't agree with something, then people will discard everything you have to say. I don't like the habit. Downvotes are effectively censorship, which I would be somewhat okay with if it came from the company itself (hackernews), because then people could disagree with how the company operates, but currently the downvote censorship comes from a mixture of the communities and administrators
      - taxicabjesus 8y ago
tptacek 8y ago
I understand why Reason would want to make a cause célèbre out of Backpage --- libertarian founders prosecuted for a case combining the First Amendment with hysteria over prostitution! How can they resist! But I think they've been bamboozled by their subject. Surely, months after Lacey and Larkin's arrest, in writing a feature story built on interviews with the founders of Backpage, Elizabeth Nolan Brown would have taken the time to read the actual indictment against them. But if she has, she sure doesn't expect you to, because she doesn't expend the slightest effort in rebutting the claims it makes. Take referrals to NCMEC, which Brown mentions 5 times in this piece. The indictment mentions it too, right before quoting an email by Backpage staff saying that referrals to NCMEC are to be capped at 500 per month or 16 per day. The obvious concern here would be that Backpage was not in fact reliably forwarding things to NCMEC; only slightly less obvious a concern is that they had so many problematic ads that they had to manage the volume of stuff they were sending to NCMEC, which takes some of the bite out of Brown's argument that child exploitation simply isn't a major problem in the adult services industry. Rather infamously at this point, Backpage is accused not only of running ads for child sex traffickers, but of doing so knowingly: for years, under Lacey and Larkin's management, their policy --- as Brown writes --- was to check ads for suspicious keywords. What Brown doesn't tell you is that their software then stripped the keywords out of the ads and ran them anyways. Nowhere in Brown's piece does she address or even mention the allegations that Larkin and Lacey and Backpage's whole staff took pains to conceal what they were doing, for years had a policy of denying knowledge of any prostitution on their site at all, or structured transactions and laundered money to conceal their proceeds. That doesn't fit in to her story, so you don't need to know about it. I'm not arguing that the indictment is any more a reliable source than Brown is. I'm simply observing that there is a lot of misinformation out there about Backpage, mostly from people who have read neither side carefully, and you'd be well-served (if you care about this stuff) to read both sides.
- sp332 8y ago
  I understood most of the arguments in favor of keeping Backpage up and running, but I didn't understand anyone who wanted to keep the founders out of jail. (Assuming the indictments had any truth in them.)
- 8y ago
scrollaway 8y ago
What the hell is this outlet? It looks like a staging ground specifically targeted to indoctrinate liberals/center-leftists into hard-right/Trump culture.
- tptacek 8y ago
  It's for 50 years been the preeminent libertarian magazine in the United States; the libertarian version of The National Review or The New Republic. It's very respectable, has featured some pretty excellent writers over the years, and is worth taking seriously. It is not a Trumpian outlet.
  - anon1385 8y ago
    I think we have very different definitions of 'respectable'. Maybe it's an American thing where absolutist free speech is worshipped as part of the cult of civic religion, but where I live Holocaust denial[1] isn't considered respectable or acceptable. If you mean it should be taken seriously because it is influential, then yes I suppose it's worth knowing what they are saying (today that's defending child sex trafficking apparently, but that's not new ground for libertarians). Freep, /pol/ and Stormfront are all influential these days, but that doesn't make them respectable either. [1] https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/ https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r...
    - tptacek 8y ago
      I read Ames's piece, and I read Reason's response here: https://reason.com/blog/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-holocaust-de https://reason.com/blog/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish... ... both Ames and Reason link to a scan of the entire issue. I am with Reason: it's embarrassing for Reason that they ran pieces by people who would go on to become figureheads in Holocaust denial, but Ames is stretching the truth rather dramatically about the content of the actual issue. I don't know anything about Reason and apartheid support. It wouldn't surprise me. The National Review has also been accused of supporting apartheid, and they are the house organ of mainstream conservatism.
seibelj 8y ago
Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Preventing a woman from consenting to sell sex services is immoral and paternalistic. Arguing you should do so because it might cause an increase in abuse or harm to minors is the same logical argument as banning alcohol because it could increase domestic violence and car accidents. Reason magazine and the Reason podcast are important journalistic institutions. They do not parrot right or left ideology. They have a libertarian philosophy. It is a classic truism that if you put 1000 libertarians in a room you will get 1000 definitions of what libertarianism is. In my opinion it is essentially a belief in the individual over the collective and that permeates all ideas, such as a distrust and dislike for the government for many different reasons. Libertarianism is easy to criticize in broad strokes. Many people hear such criticism and assume whatever evil things they want about it. I am used to the criticism and accept that as being neither the stereotype of conservative or liberal my views are easily criticized by people who follow mainstream dogma. If this philosophy is appealing I highly recommend the Reason Podcast. The latest episode on Elizabeth Warren’s plans for corporations is a good summary of libertarian views on populist rhetoric whether it comes from the right or left.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Except the case against Larkin and Lacey isn't premised on "preventing a woman from consenting to sell sex services", but rather on what they did to enable and surreptitiously profit from child sex trafficking. Again, I feel like people with strong opinions about this case generally haven't read either side of it carefully.
  - seibelj 8y ago
    Yes, far better to drive advertising sex services to foreign websites or decentralized platforms. Now everything will be better.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      I don't have a strong opinion about where adult classifieds should run, here or Antigua, but I'm pretty sure that if you knowingly and deliberately profit from child sex trafficking --- as Lacey and Larkin are accused of doing --- you belong in prison.
Animats 8y ago
It's strange. There's a huge anti-sex push from somewhere. Not from the religious right; that was back in the 1980s. Now Trump's sex life is OK with the religious right. The anti-sex movement has taken on a life of its own. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has been revealed as a front for a pedophile organization.[1] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/grand-jury-report-about-catholic-priest-abuse-pennsylvania-shows-church-ncna900906 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/grand-jury-report-abou...
- justin66 8y ago
  > There's a huge anti-sex push from somewhere. Not from the religious right; that was back in the 1980s. Now Trump's sex life is OK with the religious right. You don't really believe that the religious right is incapable of vigorously espousing "anti-sex" positions while simultaneously being "OK" with Trump's sex life, do you? You're assuming a high level of consistency and a lack of hypocrisy. From the religious right.
- DanBC 8y ago
  You don't have to be anti-sex to be anti the kidnapping and raping of children. Most of my pro-sex sex-positive friends find that a pretty clear line.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > You don't have to be anti-sex to be anti the kidnapping and raping of children. Most of my pro-sex sex-positive friends find that a pretty clear line. There are a lot of people who are intentionally conflating consensual sex work with sex trafficking and rape. (From your other posts, you appear to be one of those people, claiming that the "vast majority of women" doing sex work are doing so out of coercion or are being trafficked).
- tlb 8y ago
  The three issues: philandering, sex trafficking, and pedophilia, are pretty different. It's true that there used to be a vocal no-sex-outside-hetero-marriage movement that would have opposed all 3, but you don't hear much from them any more. Condemnation of sex trafficking and pedophilia are much more widely held views, which are not intellectually honest to call "anti-sex".
Scoping_dindus 8y ago
If sex work was legal and regulated it would generate a decent amount of tax revenue and cut down tremendously on human trafficking.
ur-whale 8y ago
A Reason article made it to HN's frontpage? Amazing ... today must be bizarro Dienstag, but I'm not complaining.
gcb0 8y ago
these threads really make me miss the friend/foe system on slashdot. This thread highlights very well all the bigots, rigth wing political shills, that I would love to mark as foe and never have to read again when they are back to maskerading their ways on more technical subjects.

160 points by danso 8y ago

I have a friend who used to advertise on backpage. She just did handjobs, not full-service... She was sort-of traumatized by the experience, but learned a lot at the same time. One of my early taxi passengers was certainly a "working girl" [1]. I picked her up at a hotel early in the morning. I called the provided number, asked the hotel operator to give me the room number, and told the man who answered that I was at the lobby. When the passenger came out it was not a dude. She didn't seem like she enjoyed herself very much. [1] https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html https://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html Over my 3.5 years in the cab, I had several female passengers who helped me understand more about female attraction. One got in the cab and was speaking German into her phone, so I asked "Sprechen sie deutsch?" My German is not that good, but she insisted in conducting the taxi ride in German. She clearly found me to be intriguing, wondered "what are you doing driving a cab?", and gave me a kiss at the end of the ride. I never heard from her again. Another woman going home from the bar would've been interested in a date and said, "you have my number." Things were complicated at the time, so I never called her back. I told another female passenger about my relationship drama. She concluded that ride saying, "well I was about to ask you to make out...", and commented on how I had a sort of magnetism about me that she found most men lacked. Men frequently have no idea what makes them annoying to women. Even though I'm not taxi driving anymore, I still practice my people skills. The female staff at my fitness club are interesting: some have decided that I'm "safe", while others have their shields up and clearly aren't interested in talking to me about anything that's not work related. A month ago I ended a comment here with this line: "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 IMHO, our dear leaders would be more productive if they looked at the causes behind the sex industries (prostitution/porn/backpage advertisements/etc). I'd suggest they start with my post, "The Difference Between Boys and Girls" [2]. I tell this story to women all the time (when contextually-appropriate), and they all laugh. [2] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-girls.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-... (tl/dr: female passenger didn't understand her new guy-friend's problem with her relationship history. I told her about how women choose who they want to have relationships with, whereas men have to play the numbers game until they find someone who's interested in them, and how some men never get 'picked'.) Sex work is easy money, for women who are wired that way. Like the friend I mentioned at the top of this post, only a few women can do it as a calling; most just find themselves in that line of work because they need money. Another passenger was a stripper that I saw a couple times (randomly assigned by the taxi company's computer system; she never called me directly). The last time she told of being followed home from her strip club, that she'd been beaten up, and that she didn't feel safe at her gated apartment complex anymore... If our dear leaders acknowledged that this "oldest profession" exists for a reason, progress could be made in making 'sex work' safer for women. (I don't have any insights into the male stripper/sex worker's world, certainly they have predicaments too...)

djsumdog 8y ago
This is actually fascinating and a pretty fascinating view point. I've been meaning to write something on this topic myself; will check out your blog posts/comments.
- taxicabjesus 8y ago
  > This is actually fascinating and a pretty fascinating view point. Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating around '0' - I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten. I have lots of anecdotes; only a few have made it into blog posts. Maybe one day I'll mine my notes for a book. A group of three men on a business trip were going to a strip club. One of them had just gotten divorced, iirc. The newly-divorced man didn't actually want to go, but his compatriots insisted. A few passengers invited me to come into their strip clubs with them. I found those to be rather depressing experiences. My theory is that normal human males have an "imagination" that allows them to "fantasize" about getting with their dancer. My imagination is disabled ("aphantasia" [0]), so I choose to spend my own money on other activities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
  - gammateam 8y ago
    > Thanks for this response. The score on my comment above is oscillating around '0' - I wonder how many votes it's actually gotten. There is a habit where people require you to vilify or express a clearer polarizing opinion about a topic before they determine if you are an acceptable person to listen to, or not. Its more like a disclaimer they look for. If you don't do it, or "forget" to mention how much you don't agree with something, then people will discard everything you have to say. I don't like the habit. Downvotes are effectively censorship, which I would be somewhat okay with if it came from the company itself (hackernews), because then people could disagree with how the company operates, but currently the downvote censorship comes from a mixture of the communities and administrators
    - taxicabjesus 8y ago

tptacek 8y ago

I understand why Reason would want to make a cause célèbre out of Backpage --- libertarian founders prosecuted for a case combining the First Amendment with hysteria over prostitution! How can they resist! But I think they've been bamboozled by their subject. Surely, months after Lacey and Larkin's arrest, in writing a feature story built on interviews with the founders of Backpage, Elizabeth Nolan Brown would have taken the time to read the actual indictment against them. But if she has, she sure doesn't expect you to, because she doesn't expend the slightest effort in rebutting the claims it makes. Take referrals to NCMEC, which Brown mentions 5 times in this piece. The indictment mentions it too, right before quoting an email by Backpage staff saying that referrals to NCMEC are to be capped at 500 per month or 16 per day. The obvious concern here would be that Backpage was not in fact reliably forwarding things to NCMEC; only slightly less obvious a concern is that they had so many problematic ads that they had to manage the volume of stuff they were sending to NCMEC, which takes some of the bite out of Brown's argument that child exploitation simply isn't a major problem in the adult services industry. Rather infamously at this point, Backpage is accused not only of running ads for child sex traffickers, but of doing so knowingly: for years, under Lacey and Larkin's management, their policy --- as Brown writes --- was to check ads for suspicious keywords. What Brown doesn't tell you is that their software then stripped the keywords out of the ads and ran them anyways. Nowhere in Brown's piece does she address or even mention the allegations that Larkin and Lacey and Backpage's whole staff took pains to conceal what they were doing, for years had a policy of denying knowledge of any prostitution on their site at all, or structured transactions and laundered money to conceal their proceeds. That doesn't fit in to her story, so you don't need to know about it. I'm not arguing that the indictment is any more a reliable source than Brown is. I'm simply observing that there is a lot of misinformation out there about Backpage, mostly from people who have read neither side carefully, and you'd be well-served (if you care about this stuff) to read both sides.

sp332 8y ago
I understood most of the arguments in favor of keeping Backpage up and running, but I didn't understand anyone who wanted to keep the founders out of jail. (Assuming the indictments had any truth in them.)
8y ago

scrollaway 8y ago

What the hell is this outlet? It looks like a staging ground specifically targeted to indoctrinate liberals/center-leftists into hard-right/Trump culture.

tptacek 8y ago
It's for 50 years been the preeminent libertarian magazine in the United States; the libertarian version of The National Review or The New Republic. It's very respectable, has featured some pretty excellent writers over the years, and is worth taking seriously. It is not a Trumpian outlet.
- anon1385 8y ago
  I think we have very different definitions of 'respectable'. Maybe it's an American thing where absolutist free speech is worshipped as part of the cult of civic religion, but where I live Holocaust denial[1] isn't considered respectable or acceptable. If you mean it should be taken seriously because it is influential, then yes I suppose it's worth knowing what they are saying (today that's defending child sex trafficking apparently, but that's not new ground for libertarians). Freep, /pol/ and Stormfront are all influential these days, but that doesn't make them respectable either. [1] https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/ https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r...
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I read Ames's piece, and I read Reason's response here: https://reason.com/blog/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-holocaust-de https://reason.com/blog/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish... ... both Ames and Reason link to a scan of the entire issue. I am with Reason: it's embarrassing for Reason that they ran pieces by people who would go on to become figureheads in Holocaust denial, but Ames is stretching the truth rather dramatically about the content of the actual issue. I don't know anything about Reason and apartheid support. It wouldn't surprise me. The National Review has also been accused of supporting apartheid, and they are the house organ of mainstream conservatism.

seibelj 8y ago

Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Preventing a woman from consenting to sell sex services is immoral and paternalistic. Arguing you should do so because it might cause an increase in abuse or harm to minors is the same logical argument as banning alcohol because it could increase domestic violence and car accidents. Reason magazine and the Reason podcast are important journalistic institutions. They do not parrot right or left ideology. They have a libertarian philosophy. It is a classic truism that if you put 1000 libertarians in a room you will get 1000 definitions of what libertarianism is. In my opinion it is essentially a belief in the individual over the collective and that permeates all ideas, such as a distrust and dislike for the government for many different reasons. Libertarianism is easy to criticize in broad strokes. Many people hear such criticism and assume whatever evil things they want about it. I am used to the criticism and accept that as being neither the stereotype of conservative or liberal my views are easily criticized by people who follow mainstream dogma. If this philosophy is appealing I highly recommend the Reason Podcast. The latest episode on Elizabeth Warren’s plans for corporations is a good summary of libertarian views on populist rhetoric whether it comes from the right or left.

tptacek 8y ago
Except the case against Larkin and Lacey isn't premised on "preventing a woman from consenting to sell sex services", but rather on what they did to enable and surreptitiously profit from child sex trafficking. Again, I feel like people with strong opinions about this case generally haven't read either side of it carefully.
- seibelj 8y ago
  Yes, far better to drive advertising sex services to foreign websites or decentralized platforms. Now everything will be better.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I don't have a strong opinion about where adult classifieds should run, here or Antigua, but I'm pretty sure that if you knowingly and deliberately profit from child sex trafficking --- as Lacey and Larkin are accused of doing --- you belong in prison.

Animats 8y ago

It's strange. There's a huge anti-sex push from somewhere. Not from the religious right; that was back in the 1980s. Now Trump's sex life is OK with the religious right. The anti-sex movement has taken on a life of its own. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has been revealed as a front for a pedophile organization.[1] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/grand-jury-report-about-catholic-priest-abuse-pennsylvania-shows-church-ncna900906 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/grand-jury-report-abou...

justin66 8y ago
> There's a huge anti-sex push from somewhere. Not from the religious right; that was back in the 1980s. Now Trump's sex life is OK with the religious right. You don't really believe that the religious right is incapable of vigorously espousing "anti-sex" positions while simultaneously being "OK" with Trump's sex life, do you? You're assuming a high level of consistency and a lack of hypocrisy. From the religious right.
DanBC 8y ago
You don't have to be anti-sex to be anti the kidnapping and raping of children. Most of my pro-sex sex-positive friends find that a pretty clear line.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > You don't have to be anti-sex to be anti the kidnapping and raping of children. Most of my pro-sex sex-positive friends find that a pretty clear line. There are a lot of people who are intentionally conflating consensual sex work with sex trafficking and rape. (From your other posts, you appear to be one of those people, claiming that the "vast majority of women" doing sex work are doing so out of coercion or are being trafficked).
tlb 8y ago
The three issues: philandering, sex trafficking, and pedophilia, are pretty different. It's true that there used to be a vocal no-sex-outside-hetero-marriage movement that would have opposed all 3, but you don't hear much from them any more. Condemnation of sex trafficking and pedophilia are much more widely held views, which are not intellectually honest to call "anti-sex".

Scoping_dindus 8y ago

If sex work was legal and regulated it would generate a decent amount of tax revenue and cut down tremendously on human trafficking.

ur-whale 8y ago

A Reason article made it to HN's frontpage? Amazing ... today must be bizarro Dienstag, but I'm not complaining.

gcb0 8y ago

these threads really make me miss the friend/foe system on slashdot. This thread highlights very well all the bigots, rigth wing political shills, that I would love to mark as foe and never have to read again when they are back to maskerading their ways on more technical subjects.