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To the people who want to pretend like pornhub is just another tech company, or who think it's cute that they might hold business meetings in front of pornograp

To the people who want to pretend like pornhub is just another tech company, or who think it's cute that they might hold business meetings in front of pornography scenes: I would just ask you to read some of the stories of the women who are abused by this industry. They're not uncommon, and they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job. Some of these stories sound like these women are essentially being raped, over and over, for profit, and then their abuse is being viewed by millions of people on the internet every day. It's not cute, and there is a reason why the founder of this company would want to hide his name. He is trafficking in what is often times videos of the worst moments of some women's lives. Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out, or Stoya, or girlsdoporn, or "exploited college girls", or watch the documentary "hot girls wanted". This stuff is horrible, and "mindgeek" appears to have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the toll that their exploitation of these women takes on them.

nicbou 6y ago
Even if you completely ignore the rape and abuse, the front page routinely features some pretty brutal stuff. I'm not sure it's the sort of stuff that should be normalised.
- cwwc 6y ago
  sad to see this so highly downvoted. seems people don't want admit what they themselves have normalized
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    Policing other people's sexual preferences is something I don't want to see normalised. And I say that as someone on the nofap train.
- doubleunplussed 6y ago
  Consent is consent. Don't tell people what they can and can't enjoy. I know it's counterintuitive, but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into. It's not just in porn.
  - thepasswordis 6y ago
    Uninformed consent is not consent. You should take a workshop. >but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into. There is a difference between being "in" to fetishes, or being "in" to the trust play surrounding something like rape fantasy. But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated. Tom Cruise isn't really getting shot in Mission Impossible. In many of the videos on pornhub, the women really are being coerced into performing sexual acts that they don't want to. And that isn't even the point I'm making. In some (many) cases, these women are being literally raped, and then pornhub, and their employees, are profiting off of people enjoying seeing them be abused. Read some of the accounts from "girls do porn", or like I said above, watch the "hot girls wanted" docu.
    - camdenlock 6y ago
      If someone ever admonishes you to “take a workshop”, run away very fast.
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      >But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated. There are different levels of simulation, though. It may not in fact be a requirement to be turned on by the acts one is partaking in, despite consenting (or even enthusiastic consent). We do things for other people, for money (this is obviously the big one) or for some other motivation (someone may not enjoy deep-throating, but may enjoy the fact of being seen on video). Tom Cruise likewise has probably been unenthusiastic about some roles. His stuntman may enjoy some stunts but not all of them. Some stuntmen probably enjoy very few. Do we demand that the actor in a horror movie is as horrified as the viewer? That the children's TV presenter is as enthusiastic about the alphabet as his audience? The simulation is on two levels which are easy to conflate: story simulation, in which a rape scene, for instance, is played out (and just like Tom Cruise, he doesn't get shot and the actress isn't raped), and act simulation (as you point out, Tom Cruise isn't really shot, but the actress still takes a facial). The second is worthy of moral discussion, but there are several empirical questions to answer: * Is there anything wrong with it? We may think the actress suffers, but we can't know that in many cases. That's the wonder of acting. It's also "toil" (as in Adam Smith's "toil and trouble" to produce a good). The sewage treatment technician toils in some particularly horrible work. Some such jobs could be described as degrading, and some may not even be as necessary as sewage treatment. I feel empathy for them, but I'm unconvinced that banning such jobs or heavily regulating them is a good solution. * The act really happens, but the morally problematic part of the act, as performed, may not. An ordinary person may feel humiliated and degraded, but the actress may not. This can be true even if the actress doesn't enjoy the act (but still consents to it). * What happens off-scene? BDSM practitioners will tell you the importance of after-care. Surely some porn production also affords this. Feminist pornography prides itself on aftercare when needed, for instance. There are many instances where things "really happen" in acting outside of porn. Leonardo DiCaprio cut his hand in a scene of Django Unchained. Actors becoming so emotional and feeling sadness or loss may cry on stage. People react to media and negotiate their limits and deal with moods in different ways. Actors are uniquely placed to do that even better.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  There is some strong academic debate as to whether it is "normalized" and in what contexts. Contrary to popular belief and anti-porn activists, porn is not getting more violent, and, in general, people aren't either. Longitudinal studies have failed to verify the results found in lab settings (though there are methodological problems on all sides and questionable assumptions). On the other hand, I also think that talking only about consent is missing the point of the criticism - that porn shapes desires as much as it satisfies them, and it can create new desires and fetishes. It's not at all unreasonable to suppose that there would be fewer people interested in degradation and humiliation (fetishes consistently associated with lower than normal empathy in the available research) if porn hadn't fed into that desire. Whether it should be socially acceptable to participate in a market which creates people (typically women) who find erotic pleasure in their own subservience and subordination is a valid point to raise. The solution, if that concern does motivate you, may lie outside of regulatory measures - regulation on sexually explicit materials tends to harm those at the margins first.
polote 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, raping girls is not normal. But how is that different from any other illegal business? It is the same thing with drugs? people who smoke cannabis are aware of people in Colombia being killed for them? Making porn legal and accepted is the way to go to solve those problems. Not making it forbidden. The more you will try to make it illegal or to hide it the more harm you will do to those girls. I'm not sure pornhub is encouraging people to upload rape videos, child porn on their platform, and actually it is pretty rare to see that kind of content on pornhub. Contrary to telegram, periscope, vk, and small porn websites
- haram_masala 6y ago
  First of all, it’s not just women appearing in pornography. Some people believe that pornography is inherently harmful; that viewing it degrades the viewer and psychologically harms them. Making pornography “acceptable” would be accepting this harm, inflicted on countless millions of people, in order to protect the relatively tiny amount of people who perform in it.
  - polote 6y ago
    How many many of the people telling this message publicly watch at porn privately?
    - haram_masala 6y ago
      Probably a similar percentage as the people with drinking problems who will tell you to abstain.
  - doubleunplussed 6y ago
    And we call such people "puritans" and don't let them dictate our moral norms.
    - haram_masala 6y ago
      We also call them “behavioral psychologists.”
drevil-v2 6y ago
> Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out But she was posting amateur porn on Reddit way before she became a porn star. This is going back to 2013-ish, she posted on r/cuckold and r/hotwife very detailed descriptions and photos of her first sexual encounter in her new open relationship with her husband at the time (or maybe it was fiancé?). Like literally in real time.. she posted text "Waiting for him to arrive" along with pictures of herself ... all the way to the finish as it were. This was the first encounter of many that she willingly posted. Along with verification photos. A lot of this feels like having your cake and eating it too. You created this persona and you promoted it and shared with the world when it suited you and enjoyed the wealth and fame.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  This is Consent 101. She consented to all those activities, and had agencies in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8
  - drevil-v2 6y ago
    What is your point? Did she consent to and get paid for the porn she made in later years or not?
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      The point is that she consented to the creation of the content and the distribution. As with GDP, part of Mia's issue was that the content was distributed outside the terms she agreed to.
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        GirlsDoPorn involved more trickery/fraud/misleading/coercion than distribution terms.
        gamblor956 6y ago
trianglem 6y ago
Abuse is a term that can be easily applied to anything in this industry. Don’t like how much you were paid? Rape. Want better or more scenes? Threaten rape.
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
I agree these are unacceptable situations. If you think some people being exploited in an industry should poison the entire industry and outlaw it then careful. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democratic-republic-congo-cbs-news-investigation/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democrat... The cobalt used in all of our modern mobile devices is mined by children in dangerous situations. The Chinese (well regarded in all labor matters I’m sure we will agree) are doubling down buying these mines: https://www.reuters.com/article/cmoc-congo-m-a-idINKBN28N0D9 https://www.reuters.com/article/cmoc-congo-m-a-idINKBN28N0D9
jimbob45 6y ago
I’m not sure Mindgeek can be held responsible for that though. They don’t associate with studios that are known to be unethical and break contact with unethical studios immediately. What more would you have them do? I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions but there remains hordes of players that take steroids, haze others, sustain concussions, etc. Should the NCAA disband by the same logic you’re asking Mindgeek to disband by?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions That's a rather controversial claim about the NCAA; a fairly common alternative view is that not only does the NCAA do little to identify and punish institutions which exploit beyond it's overt rules, which include a very large number of it's constituent institutions, including the biggest names, but the overt rules themselves are systematically exploitive.
  - jimbob45 6y ago
    My biggest piece of evidence is the large number of institutions that self-punish themselves because they’re afraid of what the NCAA would do. You’re right though. We could fill up six pages of comments with all the corruption of the NCAA.
leakybit 6y ago
This is such a conservative take. Instead of accepting porn as a legit job, you vilify them, so of course the entire industry is gonna be secretive.
xwdv 6y ago
A lot of software work these days is dirty money. If you’re not building a porn site then you’re working on a social network that erodes the privacy of users until they’re basically stripped naked or building some mobile app that keeps eye balls glued to a screen and cued for the next hit of dopamine from some random notification.
Beldin 6y ago
> To the people who want to pretend like pornhub is just another tech company Quick search for argument seen before: https://mobile.twitter.com/DesireeLsk/status/1337887729305137152 https://mobile.twitter.com/DesireeLsk/status/133788772930513... Seems that more of that stuff ends up on FB & twitter than on pornhub. So yeah: sadly this is very much just another tech company :( All of these companies should work much harder to address this.
belorn 6y ago
> they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job. Deaths, slavery, kidnappings, permanent disability. Those kind of abuse is common in the three highest risk zones for human trafficking, ie mining, construction and fishing. Sex and drugs has a common themes when it comes to making them illegal. If you want to forbid drugs that are harmful, you must first make an exception for drugs like alcohol and nicotine. If you want to make the sex industry illegal based on harm to workers you must make exceptions to industries that are worse. The common response to human trafficking for non-sex related industries is to focus on regulation and enforcement of regulations. Sadly the crime rate is so high that last year, the police here in Sweden announced that they would stop investigating human trafficking in the construction industry. The reason was that such reports outnumber all other human trafficking to the point that they would have no resources to do any other investigation unless they dropped them. Unsurprising there are regularly news about slavery, passports being taken, fraud, threats of violence, and of course physical harm.

nicbou 6y ago

Even if you completely ignore the rape and abuse, the front page routinely features some pretty brutal stuff. I'm not sure it's the sort of stuff that should be normalised.

cwwc 6y ago
sad to see this so highly downvoted. seems people don't want admit what they themselves have normalized
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  Policing other people's sexual preferences is something I don't want to see normalised. And I say that as someone on the nofap train.
doubleunplussed 6y ago
Consent is consent. Don't tell people what they can and can't enjoy. I know it's counterintuitive, but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into. It's not just in porn.
- thepasswordis 6y ago
  Uninformed consent is not consent. You should take a workshop. >but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into. There is a difference between being "in" to fetishes, or being "in" to the trust play surrounding something like rape fantasy. But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated. Tom Cruise isn't really getting shot in Mission Impossible. In many of the videos on pornhub, the women really are being coerced into performing sexual acts that they don't want to. And that isn't even the point I'm making. In some (many) cases, these women are being literally raped, and then pornhub, and their employees, are profiting off of people enjoying seeing them be abused. Read some of the accounts from "girls do porn", or like I said above, watch the "hot girls wanted" docu.
  - camdenlock 6y ago
    If someone ever admonishes you to “take a workshop”, run away very fast.
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    >But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated. There are different levels of simulation, though. It may not in fact be a requirement to be turned on by the acts one is partaking in, despite consenting (or even enthusiastic consent). We do things for other people, for money (this is obviously the big one) or for some other motivation (someone may not enjoy deep-throating, but may enjoy the fact of being seen on video). Tom Cruise likewise has probably been unenthusiastic about some roles. His stuntman may enjoy some stunts but not all of them. Some stuntmen probably enjoy very few. Do we demand that the actor in a horror movie is as horrified as the viewer? That the children's TV presenter is as enthusiastic about the alphabet as his audience? The simulation is on two levels which are easy to conflate: story simulation, in which a rape scene, for instance, is played out (and just like Tom Cruise, he doesn't get shot and the actress isn't raped), and act simulation (as you point out, Tom Cruise isn't really shot, but the actress still takes a facial). The second is worthy of moral discussion, but there are several empirical questions to answer: * Is there anything wrong with it? We may think the actress suffers, but we can't know that in many cases. That's the wonder of acting. It's also "toil" (as in Adam Smith's "toil and trouble" to produce a good). The sewage treatment technician toils in some particularly horrible work. Some such jobs could be described as degrading, and some may not even be as necessary as sewage treatment. I feel empathy for them, but I'm unconvinced that banning such jobs or heavily regulating them is a good solution. * The act really happens, but the morally problematic part of the act, as performed, may not. An ordinary person may feel humiliated and degraded, but the actress may not. This can be true even if the actress doesn't enjoy the act (but still consents to it). * What happens off-scene? BDSM practitioners will tell you the importance of after-care. Surely some porn production also affords this. Feminist pornography prides itself on aftercare when needed, for instance. There are many instances where things "really happen" in acting outside of porn. Leonardo DiCaprio cut his hand in a scene of Django Unchained. Actors becoming so emotional and feeling sadness or loss may cry on stage. People react to media and negotiate their limits and deal with moods in different ways. Actors are uniquely placed to do that even better.
claudiawerner 6y ago
There is some strong academic debate as to whether it is "normalized" and in what contexts. Contrary to popular belief and anti-porn activists, porn is not getting more violent, and, in general, people aren't either. Longitudinal studies have failed to verify the results found in lab settings (though there are methodological problems on all sides and questionable assumptions). On the other hand, I also think that talking only about consent is missing the point of the criticism - that porn shapes desires as much as it satisfies them, and it can create new desires and fetishes. It's not at all unreasonable to suppose that there would be fewer people interested in degradation and humiliation (fetishes consistently associated with lower than normal empathy in the available research) if porn hadn't fed into that desire. Whether it should be socially acceptable to participate in a market which creates people (typically women) who find erotic pleasure in their own subservience and subordination is a valid point to raise. The solution, if that concern does motivate you, may lie outside of regulatory measures - regulation on sexually explicit materials tends to harm those at the margins first.

polote 6y ago

Don't get me wrong, raping girls is not normal. But how is that different from any other illegal business? It is the same thing with drugs? people who smoke cannabis are aware of people in Colombia being killed for them? Making porn legal and accepted is the way to go to solve those problems. Not making it forbidden. The more you will try to make it illegal or to hide it the more harm you will do to those girls. I'm not sure pornhub is encouraging people to upload rape videos, child porn on their platform, and actually it is pretty rare to see that kind of content on pornhub. Contrary to telegram, periscope, vk, and small porn websites

haram_masala 6y ago
First of all, it’s not just women appearing in pornography. Some people believe that pornography is inherently harmful; that viewing it degrades the viewer and psychologically harms them. Making pornography “acceptable” would be accepting this harm, inflicted on countless millions of people, in order to protect the relatively tiny amount of people who perform in it.
- polote 6y ago
  How many many of the people telling this message publicly watch at porn privately?
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    Probably a similar percentage as the people with drinking problems who will tell you to abstain.
- doubleunplussed 6y ago
  And we call such people "puritans" and don't let them dictate our moral norms.
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    We also call them “behavioral psychologists.”

drevil-v2 6y ago

> Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out But she was posting amateur porn on Reddit way before she became a porn star. This is going back to 2013-ish, she posted on r/cuckold and r/hotwife very detailed descriptions and photos of her first sexual encounter in her new open relationship with her husband at the time (or maybe it was fiancé?). Like literally in real time.. she posted text "Waiting for him to arrive" along with pictures of herself ... all the way to the finish as it were. This was the first encounter of many that she willingly posted. Along with verification photos. A lot of this feels like having your cake and eating it too. You created this persona and you promoted it and shared with the world when it suited you and enjoyed the wealth and fame.

deanCommie 6y ago
This is Consent 101. She consented to all those activities, and had agencies in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  What is your point? Did she consent to and get paid for the porn she made in later years or not?
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    The point is that she consented to the creation of the content and the distribution. As with GDP, part of Mia's issue was that the content was distributed outside the terms she agreed to.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      GirlsDoPorn involved more trickery/fraud/misleading/coercion than distribution terms.
      - gamblor956 6y ago

trianglem 6y ago

Abuse is a term that can be easily applied to anything in this industry. Don’t like how much you were paid? Rape. Want better or more scenes? Threaten rape.

gogopuppygogo 6y ago

I agree these are unacceptable situations. If you think some people being exploited in an industry should poison the entire industry and outlaw it then careful. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democratic-republic-congo-cbs-news-investigation/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democrat... The cobalt used in all of our modern mobile devices is mined by children in dangerous situations. The Chinese (well regarded in all labor matters I’m sure we will agree) are doubling down buying these mines: https://www.reuters.com/article/cmoc-congo-m-a-idINKBN28N0D9 https://www.reuters.com/article/cmoc-congo-m-a-idINKBN28N0D9

jimbob45 6y ago

I’m not sure Mindgeek can be held responsible for that though. They don’t associate with studios that are known to be unethical and break contact with unethical studios immediately. What more would you have them do? I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions but there remains hordes of players that take steroids, haze others, sustain concussions, etc. Should the NCAA disband by the same logic you’re asking Mindgeek to disband by?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions That's a rather controversial claim about the NCAA; a fairly common alternative view is that not only does the NCAA do little to identify and punish institutions which exploit beyond it's overt rules, which include a very large number of it's constituent institutions, including the biggest names, but the overt rules themselves are systematically exploitive.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  My biggest piece of evidence is the large number of institutions that self-punish themselves because they’re afraid of what the NCAA would do. You’re right though. We could fill up six pages of comments with all the corruption of the NCAA.

leakybit 6y ago

This is such a conservative take. Instead of accepting porn as a legit job, you vilify them, so of course the entire industry is gonna be secretive.

xwdv 6y ago

A lot of software work these days is dirty money. If you’re not building a porn site then you’re working on a social network that erodes the privacy of users until they’re basically stripped naked or building some mobile app that keeps eye balls glued to a screen and cued for the next hit of dopamine from some random notification.

Beldin 6y ago

> To the people who want to pretend like pornhub is just another tech company Quick search for argument seen before: https://mobile.twitter.com/DesireeLsk/status/1337887729305137152 https://mobile.twitter.com/DesireeLsk/status/133788772930513... Seems that more of that stuff ends up on FB & twitter than on pornhub. So yeah: sadly this is very much just another tech company :( All of these companies should work much harder to address this.

belorn 6y ago

> they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job. Deaths, slavery, kidnappings, permanent disability. Those kind of abuse is common in the three highest risk zones for human trafficking, ie mining, construction and fishing. Sex and drugs has a common themes when it comes to making them illegal. If you want to forbid drugs that are harmful, you must first make an exception for drugs like alcohol and nicotine. If you want to make the sex industry illegal based on harm to workers you must make exceptions to industries that are worse. The common response to human trafficking for non-sex related industries is to focus on regulation and enforcement of regulations. Sadly the crime rate is so high that last year, the police here in Sweden announced that they would stop investigating human trafficking in the construction industry. The reason was that such reports outnumber all other human trafficking to the point that they would have no resources to do any other investigation unless they dropped them. Unsurprising there are regularly news about slavery, passports being taken, fraud, threats of violence, and of course physical harm.