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> [About SV] An observer might note that all of these companies are dominated by men, in an industry dominated by men, tightly interwoven with a venture capital

> [About SV] An observer might note that all of these companies are dominated by men, in an industry dominated by men, tightly interwoven with a venture capital industry that is super-dominated by men. So it’s curious why none of these men have shown any interest in addressing the massive and lucrative sex work industry that overwhelmingly serves, well, men; until you consider who pays the real costs of that industry’s brokenness: women. It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking. The real explanation is that SV doesn't care about the plight of porn actresses not because they're women, but because people in general mostly care about themselves and their closest ones only. Just see that the SV also doesn't care about the plight of rare earth miners (which SV needs for their electronics), even though they're mostly men. I.e. the gender is not a factor here, and yet article authors try very hard to make it look like it is.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Men are expected to sell their bodies in manual labor. Women are not. Seems a double standard.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  One type of work is called "the oldest profession". Not sure how that is consolidated with a double standard view.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Also, this isn't historically true; women were and are a historically significant part of the industrial labor force, and before that did a good share of agricultural work as well. Certainly industrial labor had gender divides, but it's not a strange fluke that, say, most of the people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were women.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Somewhen in the last two centruries, the general population seems to have internalized the view that making money = work, keeping a house functioning = not work. It's peculiar, if you think about it, given how big a multiplier the latter is to the former. I'm guessing this is one of the early case of society falling victim to metrics - making money is easy to quantify and compare, housekeeping isn't.
      - ralph84 6y ago
        Feminism stigmatized keeping a house functioning. “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” became a slur thrown at women who had the nerve to not serve a corporate master.
        api 6y ago
        One of my rules is: society always over-corrects. I think it’s because bombast and mockery gets more attention than rational and balanced thought. We went from “women can’t do what men do” or “women should never have careers because it’s bad for the family” to “any woman who stays home is letting herself down,” or is stupid, etc. How about this: women who want careers can have them, women who don’t can stay home, and both are okay because people have the right to choose their course in life.
        Anthony-G 6y ago
        I’m not going to downvote because it’s true there are feminists (including second-wave feminists who fought the really tough political struggles) who have shared the view that working in the home / building a family has less value than that of earning a wage / building a career. However, feminism is a (very) broad church and the majority of feminist that I’ve come across would argue for legislative and other societal barriers be removed so that a woman is free to choose between motherhood and career – or whatever balance works best for her own inclinations and circumstances.
        Chris2048 6y ago
        > However, feminism is a (very) broad church and yet, feminists will talk about feminism in overall positive terms without qualification. If it's a broad church, it can't be all positive.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  If you wanted to take a stab at that sort of argument, make it along the lines of men being disposable gender: hard manual work with high risk of death, lower life expectancy, women and children first, if you're not making serious money you are a failure etc. Historically, virtually all women passed on their genes, but 60 % of men did not. (Numbers approximate) At the same time the whole reason women had gold jewlery was because they weren't allowed to have money, so take it as you will
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I dunno... my Grandma had to pump well water and boil it to wash clothes, prep meals for Grandpa and their 11 children (would have been 13, but one was stillborn and another died as a baby). She was a tough old bird. Married at 16. First kid at 18. Last child at 44. Grandma didn't get a washing machine until 1970, if I recall. Had she not been there to take care of the kids and the farm, Grandpa couldn't have worked at an industrial bakery from 4 a.m. to noon. Then from noon to around 3, he'd come home and sleep, then take over work in the fields until dusk. Grandpa sold his body in manual labor, but Grandma was right beside him. It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids.
  - dsohn0 6y ago
    People don't look down on your grandma they just recognize she had a hard and pretty shitty life and don't want be a ox that can speak English. Stop being such a incel loser jesus.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      Everyone had a hard and pretty shitty life in 1932. From the people living in New York City to the people living in rural Mississippi. > Stop being such a incel loser jesus. I'm not even sure how you got here, from what I posted... other than having to assume you have some significant psychological issues. Talk to someone, please. Your mental attitudes aren't healthy. I have had plenty of women in my life judge my Grandma, forgetting she was a teenager during The Great Depression, and forgetting that women of rural Mississippi had very little avenues of fulfillment beyond child rearing and household administration available to them. Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line.
      - dsohn0 6y ago
        "Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line." "It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids." When it's your grandma who cooked for you and made you happy its a happy home but even you can realize when its not your grandma its some sad dump getting her ass kicked by drunk hillbillies. No shit modern women look down on your stupid rose tinted nonsense. You can't seem to fathom that your grandma had a really shitty and garbage life from your own description no shit people do not want that life. Stop being such a incel loser.
monkin 6y ago
SV doesn’t care about porn, because it’s a bad PR, at least for now. There’s no “Larry Flynt” kind of guy there, that would like to move it forward. Or have courage to fight for it. Other then reputation nightmare of doing that kind of business, most of SV would jump in without hesitation. There’s shit tone of money in it, worth of grabbing for them... :)
travisoneill1 6y ago
Yeah it's such a dumb argument. The obvious explanation is that all of those companies are ad supported, and advertisers don't want to advertise next to porn. If advertisers suddenly wanted to advertise on porn pages, how many seconds do you think it would take for FB to change that policy? But let's pretend it's because they're men.
_huayra_ 6y ago
This feminist take was definitely uncalled for in this article. The author's bias about how the women, _who are actually getting monetarily compensated_, are the victims completely misses the costs to the purchasers, who are almost all men, in terms of their money and the neurologic changes that such sex work consumption has. Having the "algorithm" suggesting and enticing these men back to buy more subscriptions / pics or however it works on these things is just as much a negative side effect as the women experience in social stigma.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  Not really? I can't think of the last time a prominent newspaper named & shamed a random working man for spending money on porn, whereas that happened with the NY Post and a paramedic with an onlyfans just last week. Your view of reality is wildly distorted.
  - Fargren 6y ago
    Poe's Law is a terrible thing. I assume what you are replying to is sarcasm, because I can't fathom it being earnest.
    - computerphage 6y ago
      I don't know enough to decide with certainty if the post in question is right, but it definitely seems earnest. I believe the poster sincerely holds those beliefs.
      - Fargren 6y ago
        People seriously believe being advertised at is "just as much a negative" as the stigma from being a porn actress? I have no appreciation for the advertising industry, but this is hard for me to believe.
        ALittleLight 6y ago
watwut 6y ago
I think that the argument is that male tech workers consume porn as much as other men and therefore solving issues of porn industry could be solving issues they have too. E.g. selfishness of tech males should lead them to care about porn. Your contra argument implicitly assumes that tech makes are special kind of males that don't use porn.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  Essential issue isn't about solving their problems. Essential issue is about making them more money. Which opportunity makes them the largest amount of money, with the least amount of risk to their investment? Porn doesn't compare favorably to their other opportunities. Full Stop. If it did compare favorably, they would be putting money and resources in porn.
  - noahtallen 6y ago
    One of the biggest examples of this is probably Tumblr banning and removing porn and other NSFW content from their platform.
- lumberjack 6y ago
  The argument holds no water and it is pretty disgusting of this uber-for-porn pimp to pretend he is doing good. Porn is like weed. If you want to consume it ethically you need to verify your sources. These cam sites have their own serious exploitation issues that are completely being ignored. If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex slaves. There are actual ethical porn producers of various flavours (also featured on HN quite a few times). Onlyfans is not one of them.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Like weed, which many people actually grow themselves?
    - techdragon 6y ago
kryogen1c 6y ago
> It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking its especially a nonsense argument when you note that porn is one of the few industries with a huge pay gap - and in favor of women. its so significant that top tier actresses pay scale has a floor that is higher than the ceiling of the equivalent male talent.
- hshshs2 6y ago
  sure but the actors aren’t making the most money, the men running the companies are
  - linspace 6y ago
    The people running the companies provide something that requires some capital investment and moderate technical sophistication. Meanwhile most people, and actually most sexual life forms in this planet, can perform sex. Unless sex workers unionize supply/demand economics will crush them. I don't see the need to involve male/female dominance in companies to find an explanation, but it seems fashionable nowadays.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Okay, think about the person who goes into porn. Have you seen Hot Girls Wanted? What was the average salary of female porn talent, annually, again? Less than $40,000 if I recall correctly? If even that much? It might have been $35,000. That's $17.50 an hour. That's a line worker at an injection molding plant making car parts. And that's a job that gets you health, dental, vision, life, short-term disability, long-term disability insurance, and a few other perks. That's in Arlington, TX. I know that because I have a family member who works there. She also gets every holiday that the corresponding GM assembly plant gets, because after all, why do they need to be at work if GM isn't making cars? And this is a job that is so "demanding", you don't even have to submit a resume. You literally just show up, take a drug test, get 2 hours of training in a classroom, get 4 hours of training on the factory floor, and you start the next day. She did. If porn actors and actresses had the wherewithal to actually set up all the necessary shit to run their own studios... they wouldn't need to do porn. You have to understand cameras, optics, lighting, video and sound editing, advertising, search engine optimization, website creation, front-end development, back-end development, etc. and so forth. The "whole package" stack for a single person, or even a small group of people, wanting to get into porn, is significant. Anyone who has even a few of the skills I listed above, doesn't have to get fucked on camera for money.
rubicon33 6y ago
Welcome to 2020 where identity politics is the name of the game. It seems everything these days can be explained based on your race/gender and yet this is supposedly the most "woke" time ever. Cue the downvotes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  You mean "Cue"...
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    Cheers
- jstummbillig 6y ago
  I want you to know that any downvotes might have less to do with 2020 or identity politics and more so your sloppy style of conversation. Throwing out a wildly undifferentiated blanket statement and ending on a passive aggressive "cue the downvotes" is bad content in my opinion. It enjoy being subjected to different views. I hope we can uphold a certain standard for expressing them around here.
  - googlethrow3134 6y ago
    Your meta comment is also boring and unoriginal. GPT-3 itself could’ve generated it
    - not_really 6y ago
      Your throwaway username that was created 3 days ago is also boring and unoriginal. GPT-3 itself could’ve generated it
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    I want you to know that my "blanket statement" (as you label it) was itself a criticism of "blanket" generalizations we see all too often in this era of identity politics. How telling that you had nothing to say about the rampant use of identity politics to target and discredit people, but did feel it important to express your discontent with my "content".
bbrree66 6y ago
When all you have is a hammer....
jjeaff 6y ago
You may be right, but it seems plausible that men are also much less likely to understand the potential for and existence of abuse that happens to women in the porn industry. So it may not be that they don't care about women. Simply that they don't understand and recognize the harm to women.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  I think that the harm, abuse, maiming and occasional deaths happening to millions of factory workers is well understood. However we are doing very little to seriously address it. I haven’t heard any stories of woman loosing their arms, legs, or lives shooting porn in the porn industry. Have you?
  - industriousthou 6y ago
    Dude, the labor movement has been around for over a hundred years. We've made mind blowing progress on workers' rights. There hasn't been anything close to this for sex workers.
cbozeman 6y ago
When you're a Social Justice Hammer, everything looks like an Oppression Nail.

alisonkisk 6y ago

Men are expected to sell their bodies in manual labor. Women are not. Seems a double standard.

Supermancho 6y ago
One type of work is called "the oldest profession". Not sure how that is consolidated with a double standard view.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Also, this isn't historically true; women were and are a historically significant part of the industrial labor force, and before that did a good share of agricultural work as well. Certainly industrial labor had gender divides, but it's not a strange fluke that, say, most of the people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were women.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Somewhen in the last two centruries, the general population seems to have internalized the view that making money = work, keeping a house functioning = not work. It's peculiar, if you think about it, given how big a multiplier the latter is to the former. I'm guessing this is one of the early case of society falling victim to metrics - making money is easy to quantify and compare, housekeeping isn't.
    - ralph84 6y ago
      Feminism stigmatized keeping a house functioning. “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” became a slur thrown at women who had the nerve to not serve a corporate master.
      - api 6y ago
        One of my rules is: society always over-corrects. I think it’s because bombast and mockery gets more attention than rational and balanced thought. We went from “women can’t do what men do” or “women should never have careers because it’s bad for the family” to “any woman who stays home is letting herself down,” or is stupid, etc. How about this: women who want careers can have them, women who don’t can stay home, and both are okay because people have the right to choose their course in life.
      - Anthony-G 6y ago
        I’m not going to downvote because it’s true there are feminists (including second-wave feminists who fought the really tough political struggles) who have shared the view that working in the home / building a family has less value than that of earning a wage / building a career. However, feminism is a (very) broad church and the majority of feminist that I’ve come across would argue for legislative and other societal barriers be removed so that a woman is free to choose between motherhood and career – or whatever balance works best for her own inclinations and circumstances.
        Chris2048 6y ago
        > However, feminism is a (very) broad church and yet, feminists will talk about feminism in overall positive terms without qualification. If it's a broad church, it can't be all positive.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
If you wanted to take a stab at that sort of argument, make it along the lines of men being disposable gender: hard manual work with high risk of death, lower life expectancy, women and children first, if you're not making serious money you are a failure etc. Historically, virtually all women passed on their genes, but 60 % of men did not. (Numbers approximate) At the same time the whole reason women had gold jewlery was because they weren't allowed to have money, so take it as you will
cbozeman 6y ago
I dunno... my Grandma had to pump well water and boil it to wash clothes, prep meals for Grandpa and their 11 children (would have been 13, but one was stillborn and another died as a baby). She was a tough old bird. Married at 16. First kid at 18. Last child at 44. Grandma didn't get a washing machine until 1970, if I recall. Had she not been there to take care of the kids and the farm, Grandpa couldn't have worked at an industrial bakery from 4 a.m. to noon. Then from noon to around 3, he'd come home and sleep, then take over work in the fields until dusk. Grandpa sold his body in manual labor, but Grandma was right beside him. It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids.
- dsohn0 6y ago
  People don't look down on your grandma they just recognize she had a hard and pretty shitty life and don't want be a ox that can speak English. Stop being such a incel loser jesus.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Everyone had a hard and pretty shitty life in 1932. From the people living in New York City to the people living in rural Mississippi. > Stop being such a incel loser jesus. I'm not even sure how you got here, from what I posted... other than having to assume you have some significant psychological issues. Talk to someone, please. Your mental attitudes aren't healthy. I have had plenty of women in my life judge my Grandma, forgetting she was a teenager during The Great Depression, and forgetting that women of rural Mississippi had very little avenues of fulfillment beyond child rearing and household administration available to them. Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line.
    - dsohn0 6y ago
      "Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line." "It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids." When it's your grandma who cooked for you and made you happy its a happy home but even you can realize when its not your grandma its some sad dump getting her ass kicked by drunk hillbillies. No shit modern women look down on your stupid rose tinted nonsense. You can't seem to fathom that your grandma had a really shitty and garbage life from your own description no shit people do not want that life. Stop being such a incel loser.

monkin 6y ago

SV doesn’t care about porn, because it’s a bad PR, at least for now. There’s no “Larry Flynt” kind of guy there, that would like to move it forward. Or have courage to fight for it. Other then reputation nightmare of doing that kind of business, most of SV would jump in without hesitation. There’s shit tone of money in it, worth of grabbing for them... :)

travisoneill1 6y ago

Yeah it's such a dumb argument. The obvious explanation is that all of those companies are ad supported, and advertisers don't want to advertise next to porn. If advertisers suddenly wanted to advertise on porn pages, how many seconds do you think it would take for FB to change that policy? But let's pretend it's because they're men.

_huayra_ 6y ago

This feminist take was definitely uncalled for in this article. The author's bias about how the women, _who are actually getting monetarily compensated_, are the victims completely misses the costs to the purchasers, who are almost all men, in terms of their money and the neurologic changes that such sex work consumption has. Having the "algorithm" suggesting and enticing these men back to buy more subscriptions / pics or however it works on these things is just as much a negative side effect as the women experience in social stigma.

ahelwer 6y ago
Not really? I can't think of the last time a prominent newspaper named & shamed a random working man for spending money on porn, whereas that happened with the NY Post and a paramedic with an onlyfans just last week. Your view of reality is wildly distorted.
- Fargren 6y ago
  Poe's Law is a terrible thing. I assume what you are replying to is sarcasm, because I can't fathom it being earnest.
  - computerphage 6y ago
    I don't know enough to decide with certainty if the post in question is right, but it definitely seems earnest. I believe the poster sincerely holds those beliefs.
    - Fargren 6y ago
      People seriously believe being advertised at is "just as much a negative" as the stigma from being a porn actress? I have no appreciation for the advertising industry, but this is hard for me to believe.
      - ALittleLight 6y ago

watwut 6y ago

I think that the argument is that male tech workers consume porn as much as other men and therefore solving issues of porn industry could be solving issues they have too. E.g. selfishness of tech males should lead them to care about porn. Your contra argument implicitly assumes that tech makes are special kind of males that don't use porn.

bilbo0s 6y ago
Essential issue isn't about solving their problems. Essential issue is about making them more money. Which opportunity makes them the largest amount of money, with the least amount of risk to their investment? Porn doesn't compare favorably to their other opportunities. Full Stop. If it did compare favorably, they would be putting money and resources in porn.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  One of the biggest examples of this is probably Tumblr banning and removing porn and other NSFW content from their platform.
lumberjack 6y ago
The argument holds no water and it is pretty disgusting of this uber-for-porn pimp to pretend he is doing good. Porn is like weed. If you want to consume it ethically you need to verify your sources. These cam sites have their own serious exploitation issues that are completely being ignored. If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex slaves. There are actual ethical porn producers of various flavours (also featured on HN quite a few times). Onlyfans is not one of them.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Like weed, which many people actually grow themselves?
  - techdragon 6y ago

kryogen1c 6y ago

> It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking its especially a nonsense argument when you note that porn is one of the few industries with a huge pay gap - and in favor of women. its so significant that top tier actresses pay scale has a floor that is higher than the ceiling of the equivalent male talent.

hshshs2 6y ago
sure but the actors aren’t making the most money, the men running the companies are
- linspace 6y ago
  The people running the companies provide something that requires some capital investment and moderate technical sophistication. Meanwhile most people, and actually most sexual life forms in this planet, can perform sex. Unless sex workers unionize supply/demand economics will crush them. I don't see the need to involve male/female dominance in companies to find an explanation, but it seems fashionable nowadays.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Okay, think about the person who goes into porn. Have you seen Hot Girls Wanted? What was the average salary of female porn talent, annually, again? Less than $40,000 if I recall correctly? If even that much? It might have been $35,000. That's $17.50 an hour. That's a line worker at an injection molding plant making car parts. And that's a job that gets you health, dental, vision, life, short-term disability, long-term disability insurance, and a few other perks. That's in Arlington, TX. I know that because I have a family member who works there. She also gets every holiday that the corresponding GM assembly plant gets, because after all, why do they need to be at work if GM isn't making cars? And this is a job that is so "demanding", you don't even have to submit a resume. You literally just show up, take a drug test, get 2 hours of training in a classroom, get 4 hours of training on the factory floor, and you start the next day. She did. If porn actors and actresses had the wherewithal to actually set up all the necessary shit to run their own studios... they wouldn't need to do porn. You have to understand cameras, optics, lighting, video and sound editing, advertising, search engine optimization, website creation, front-end development, back-end development, etc. and so forth. The "whole package" stack for a single person, or even a small group of people, wanting to get into porn, is significant. Anyone who has even a few of the skills I listed above, doesn't have to get fucked on camera for money.

rubicon33 6y ago

Welcome to 2020 where identity politics is the name of the game. It seems everything these days can be explained based on your race/gender and yet this is supposedly the most "woke" time ever. Cue the downvotes.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ericson2314 6y ago
You mean "Cue"...
- rubicon33 6y ago
  Cheers
jstummbillig 6y ago
I want you to know that any downvotes might have less to do with 2020 or identity politics and more so your sloppy style of conversation. Throwing out a wildly undifferentiated blanket statement and ending on a passive aggressive "cue the downvotes" is bad content in my opinion. It enjoy being subjected to different views. I hope we can uphold a certain standard for expressing them around here.
- googlethrow3134 6y ago
  Your meta comment is also boring and unoriginal. GPT-3 itself could’ve generated it
  - not_really 6y ago
    Your throwaway username that was created 3 days ago is also boring and unoriginal. GPT-3 itself could’ve generated it
- rubicon33 6y ago
  I want you to know that my "blanket statement" (as you label it) was itself a criticism of "blanket" generalizations we see all too often in this era of identity politics. How telling that you had nothing to say about the rampant use of identity politics to target and discredit people, but did feel it important to express your discontent with my "content".

bbrree66 6y ago

When all you have is a hammer....

jjeaff 6y ago

You may be right, but it seems plausible that men are also much less likely to understand the potential for and existence of abuse that happens to women in the porn industry. So it may not be that they don't care about women. Simply that they don't understand and recognize the harm to women.

mbrodersen 6y ago
I think that the harm, abuse, maiming and occasional deaths happening to millions of factory workers is well understood. However we are doing very little to seriously address it. I haven’t heard any stories of woman loosing their arms, legs, or lives shooting porn in the porn industry. Have you?
- industriousthou 6y ago
  Dude, the labor movement has been around for over a hundred years. We've made mind blowing progress on workers' rights. There hasn't been anything close to this for sex workers.

cbozeman 6y ago

When you're a Social Justice Hammer, everything looks like an Oppression Nail.