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French equality watchdog finds 90% of online pornography abuses women

15 points by AlecSchueler 3y ago

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Why was this article flagged?
VerifiedJoseph 3y ago
Two questions: Even after "reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international porn sites" how can they get the 90% figure? Only looking at the biggest sites is going to get you a biased sample. Not all porn is on big sites. That's not to say there isn't a problem. And did they talk to sex workers/performers? Governments and anti-sex orgs have a habit of talking about and legislating sex work without actually listening to those who do it. In March, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation published a report[1] labeling all porn exploitation without speaking to any sex workers. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pa9y/porn-sex-workers-exploitation https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pa9y/porn-sex-workers-expl...
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  >Only looking at the biggest sites is going to get you a biased sample. More precisely you get one company. After countless iterations of mergers and buyouts its almost exclusively "ethical capital partners". Producer and sites. Regarding your point of ignoring sex workers, this tends to become quite despicable quickly. There are some crusaders out there that are doing their best to criminalize sexwork entirely as an end in itself. At the cost of the sex workers. It was quite visible with years of sabotage of the liberal German prostitution laws. They turned working from your own home into a bureaucratic impossibility to then argue with economically exploitative situations of bigger brothels against prostitution entirely. Which gets you back to women working from hotels illegally, which gets you back to human trafficking. https://www.donacarmen.de/ https://www.donacarmen.de/ has been reporting about this for 25 years now. How these women are treated out of political calculus is plain disgusting. Which likely explains why none of these people talk to them and just about them. Once you weaponize safeguards meant to protect sexworkers against them there isnt much ambiguity about your intentions left.
- philipswood 3y ago
  Looking for statistics from other sources: This is a pretty dry article: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/5/1243/6208896 https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/5/1243/6208896 Which describes it's methodology quite clearly. Their conclusion is that: "In total, we found 12 per cent (n = 15,839) of the total analysable sample (n = 131,738) of titles described sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence." Their data set comprises of content shown to first time site visitors. 12% is still disturbingly high.
  - sambazi 3y ago
    > of titles described sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence. guess what, porn titles are clickbait class dismissed
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  > Even after "reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international porn sites" how can they get the 90% figure? This is covered on page 20 of the study (the beginning of section 1). It's 90% of the 50 most viewed videos.
arghwhat 3y ago
> After more than 18 months of hearings and reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international pornography sites... I wonder, does this count as the French equality watchdog abusing its employees? We have generally not seen mildly on the mental trauma of such content review when tech companies do it. Content ethics aside, I imagine the these individuals can no longer watch pr0n and might even have a traumatic relationship to it, possibly extending into their real life sexual engagements as well.
WentFullRetard 3y ago
What a ridiculous article. This garbage shouldn't even be posted.
- mcphage 3y ago
  There's a large anti-pornography portion here on HN.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    One can enjoy porn while acknowledging the serious issues in the porn industry.
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      Yes, actual issues of abuse against the actors, not pearl clutching about "objectification". I'll bet most of this verbal and physical "violence" they mention is fairly vanilla rough sex, a harmless thing that a massive amount of the population already do in their own beds (often at the request of a woman). Yes, that even includes consensual non-consensual role play, which is a surprisingly common fantasy (and again, harmless, and again, often coming from women) And that's not even getting into "proper" BDSM, which is subject to monthly "think of the women!" outrage; always by people who've no interest in hearing from the actual women involved I'm quite certain the people performing this "study" had already made up their minds before loading the first video
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        > I'll bet most of this verbal and physical "violence" they mention is fairly vanilla rough sex It sounds like you've also made up your mind before reading it. How about taking a look and making some counter arguments to their findings so that people who disagree can argue on that basis rather than the basis of your speculation?
        didntcheck 3y ago
SenAnder 3y ago
> “women, caricatured with the worst sexist and racist stereotypes, are humiliated, objectified, dehumanised, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary both to human dignity and French law” Is it just me or is this mixing wildly different things? Sexist stereotypes and objectification (note how vague that is) in the same category as (presumably non-consensual?) assault and torture?
- mcphage 3y ago
  "Now, if you two don't mind, I’m going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed or worse… expelled!" — Hermione Granger
- matt002 3y ago
  Hardcore commercial porn is pretty gross, more like a simulated rape than a sex act. I’d rather just enjoy furry art.
  - SenAnder 3y ago
    Do we even know if drawings were excluded from this study? I would guess that more than 10% of all porn is drawn or CGI nowadays. It would not surprise me if they considered purely fictional drawings as "abuse" as well.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Yes, we know that because it explicitly says so on page 11.
mcphage 3y ago
What percentage of pornography is solo? Is that included in the total, or is all solo content in the 10%? What about gay male pornography?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Section 2 of the study is about gay male pornography, and they talk at length about the depiction of violent power based scripts, with what they call "misogynistic underpinnings" where they reproduce a dominant/manly and dominated/effeminate conception of sexual intercourse.
howeyc 3y ago
In other news, French authorities have decided that Hollywood movies should be banned for displays of murder, which is against French law. The "contracts" of the actors is immaterial as murder is illegal in France.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Source for this? A depiction of an act is very different to an act. Can you name a mainstream movie in which an actor is murdered for real? > A significant amount of content amounted to torture. The report warned that any kind of so-called contract was void in legal terms, because a person could not consent to torture and sexual exploitation and trafficking. The women in these videos are actully subject to what is depicted. It's not acting. Can you see how that's different to a Hollywood movie depicting a murder?
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    What is depicted in these works is also acting. Scripted verbal abuse to the point where the recipient takes their own life on screen is considered regular acting in a drama, scripted violence to a certain degree including where mistakes lead to significant or even fatal actor injury is considered regular acting in action movies, and scripted sexual acts themselves are commonly considered regular acting in more "artsy" movies. The planning, execution, willingness, extend and the necessity thereof are important - context is important. Watching the work is mostly useful in this setting for identifying if the content is outright illegal (individuals present who should never have been) or if physical harm endured within it reach visibly unacceptable levels (as we for now do not expect CGI here), both which would likely (would it be weird to say hopefully?) be traumatizing for a viewer to experience. To draw the conclusions they wish to draw, I believe they need to study the work environment, not the works - and that this applies to any industry, irrespective of its output.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      > Scripted verbal abuse to the point where the recipient takes their own life on screen is considered regular acting in a drama Am I reading this right? Are you saying that it's regular acting to be subjected to such a high level of verbal abuse at work that you might take your own life? > scripted violence to a certain degree including where mistakes lead to significant or even fatal actor injury is considered regular It feels like a movie script that leads to fatal actor injury would surely be illegal also in the US? Or do you mean accidental injury/death? That's different that the injry or death being an inherent part of the script and intentional thing that is inflicted upon the actress. Otherwise, can you point me towards a single example of a Hollywood movie where an actress was intentionally killed and this was seen as regular/normal by the public? > scripted sexual acts themselves are commonly considered regular acting in more "artsy" movies. Yes, that's fine and the study even talks about such cases in a positive light. People can absolutely consent to sex acts! Sex is fun. But under French law people can not consent to be harmed, which is what was seen to be happening in the case in 90% of popular videos. Again, that's actual harm, not simiulated harm. > What is depicted in these works is also acting. Yes, to some degree it is. But can you see the difference in acting out being stabbed with the use of an unloaded gun and some fake blood, and being degraded by a queue of 50 men who want to slap you, cum on you and call you a worthless Moroccan who deserves to be treated like this? One of those things is very simulated, the other not so much. Maybe if all the slaps and the ejaculate were faked? Then it could be comparable.
BizarreByte 3y ago
I only watch porn with men in it, so I'm doing my part. Being more serious though, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. The porn industry is well known for being extremely shady if not an outright bad actor. The entire sex "work" industry is hugely problematic.
- xhevahir 3y ago
  As far as I can tell from skimming the study, the 90% figure is about the videos themselves, not whatever shady business happens behind the scenes, and answers to a very contentious definition of "violence"--for example, some porn was judged to be violent simply because the woman was labeled as Moroccan. Everything I've seen in the document, particularly the bolded quotations from the literature, suggests that the authors knew their conclusion from the outset and looked only for confirmation.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    > for example, some porn was judged to be violent simply because the woman was labeled as Moroccan. That's not what it says, though I admit French isn't my first language. It's saying that "Moroccan" was one of the main terms used to search for violent videos. That means, they identified certain videos as abusive and then looked at which terms users used to find them, and Moroccan was one of the top results. Violent videos are defined as depicating non-simulated harm.
    - xhevahir 3y ago
      French isn't my first (or even second) language, so I'm no authority either, but from sentences like "la pornographie s’inscrit dans une haine raciste" they seem to mean that, when they label performers things like "beurette" and "negro," they participate, discursively, in racist violence. If that's the case, their idea of violence is probably far broader than what the average French citizen recognizes. The part that amazes me, though, is that they don't seem to believe that the person being called "whore" or "salope" or whatever can have consented to such "violence." On the one hand, if we believe the offense being committed isn't against the performer herself but against women in general, it makes some sense. On the other hand---wtf?
toenail 3y ago
> The report said: “The women are real, the sexual acts and the violence is real, the suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.” Often perfectly visible? Did this 90% number perhaps come from people who were looking at the material with a specific agenda in mind?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  The study comes from the French High Council for Equality between Women and Men, an official governmental organisation in the French Republic.
  - sambazi 3y ago
    does the report say anything about men in porn?
ekaryotic 3y ago
I really doubt this headline. As a frequent porn connoisseur most videos I have seen have a soft start with the actors chatting pleasantly. The few videos i have come across with grevious bodily harm disappeared from their hosts quickly. If I had to guess at a more reliable statistic I would say that 3% of pornography abuses women, and a far higher percentage abuses men, acts of cbt being the most common, but horses for courses etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  Highly possible your definition of "abuses women" differs from that of the study also. Do they define their standard?
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    They do. The study is linked in the article and the definition is made within the study. They are talking about any kind of non-simulated violence against a woman which includes common things like slapping or choking.
- tennisflyi 3y ago
  I agree but Hookup Hot Shot and Facial Abuse is what they believe all porn is.
danielfoster 3y ago
How can this number be true when probably at least 10% of online pornography features men only?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  That would really surprise me! I would have put it closer to 0.01%. Do you have any source for this claim?
  - danielfoster 3y ago
    It's just my estimate. I think 0.01% is far too low given that between 3-10% of men (probably closer to 5%) are gay. Approximately 1 in 4 straight men also watch gay porn: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/study-you-will-be-shocked-to-know-the-number-of-straight-men-who-watch-gay-porn/photostory/61877499.cms?from=mdr https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships... I'm not able to check exact numbers now, but I remember glancing at total videos once on xtube or a similar site. The number of gay videos seemed to be 10-20% of the number of straight videos. So we can reasonably assume that a reasonable portion of pornography features men only. Even if it's just 5%, it calls the 90% number from the article into question.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Thanks for your explaination! I have no doubt that that proportion of men are gay, but I wouldn't have thought there was a natural follow on between that and the amount of gay pornography produced. I'm seeing elsewhere that roughly 1 in 2 straight men watch porn, so from that we could maybe exrapolate that there's more porn porduced per straight man than per gay man (https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a5280496/straight-men-watch-gay-porn/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a5280496/straight-men-... -- I hope Cosmo is as trustworthy a source as the Times of India). Interesting about the percentage of videos on the unnamed site. But I would wonder: What is the percentage breakdown by views? Also, do note that section 2 of the study is entirely dedicated to gay pornography and goes to lengths in discussion the framing of misogynistic norms that are being represented in gay pornography.
daft_pink 3y ago
You have to imagine that they are using some expanded definition of abuse to arrive at that 90% number that is not in line with the average person's views. I'm sure there is a lot of abuse and torture in online porn though. But just as a counterpoint, most movies contain all kinds of criminal acts and the average person isn't going out committing criminal acts, just because they watched Dexter.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  > You have to imagine that they are using some expanded definition of abuse to arrive at that 90% number that is not in line with the average person's views. They define it as non-simulated harm. So the difference with Dexter is that in that case the actors pretend to have been injured, but in pornography the women are actually being injured. I guess most people's definition of "acting" would inlude something liek "pretend" or "make-believe." > From the article: A significant amount of content amounted to torture. The report warned that any kind of so-called contract was void in legal terms, because a person could not consent to torture and sexual exploitation and trafficking. It comes down to their legal definition of consent. One can not legally consent to being murdered for example. If a movie was made where someone was murdered then that would be illegal regardless of the contract in play. In France one can not consent to being tortured or abused, and most of the popular videos they looked at showed actresses being subject to actual torture or abuse.
  - daft_pink 3y ago
    But they don't actually murder people to make movies. When you watch Rambo are people actually being shot? Do you think they are actually torturing people to make extreme porn? Are people actually being whipped or is it just faked like professional wrestling in the United States? But my point stands that they are probably using a very narrow definition to produce this extreme result like using a very narrow definition of consent or very wide definition of abuse such as mostly using verbal abuse to constitute abuse, which is hardly abuse if you are an paid actor and it isn't real.
    - 3y ago
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rich_sasha 3y ago
> After [...] reviewing millions of videos That must have been a strange job to do.
cf141q5325 3y ago
A bit off topic but since its already flagged, the guardian dropping so low really stings. They never recovered from the Snowden aftermath and it has been downhill ever since. Really a shame, journalism landscape cant afford loosing quality sites. Does anyone know if there are any other quality British newspapers left? At least some of it seems to be due to government interference.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Could you expand on what is low about this/why it was flagged? Was the original study from France also low?
  - cf141q5325 3y ago
    I cant tell you why its flagged. But their methodology is nonsense. Their metric looks at titles (which are close to randomly generated to make identifying the scenes difficult for pirates) as well as "verbal abuse". They also call "Teens" category child porn, racial categories racist and allege illegal sex practices. Not sure how deep you want to dive into the shades of bullshit. Its a smear piece, the study as well as the article. I am hard pressed finding anything that could function as a reasonable base for discussion. And given the amount of nonsense i am not optimistic that this would be time well spend.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      > as well as "verbal abuse". They look at verbal, physical and sexual abuse, which are the three typres of abuse recognised in French law. Should they do this differently? If you don't mind me saying so, this argument feels tautological. You're not telling me why it's an issue, simply that they do it. > titles (which are close to randomly generated to make identifying the scenes difficult for pirates) Do you have a source for this? I've seen a lot of porn in my time and the title almost invariably matched the content. > They also call "Teens" category child porn Which page to they do this on? I can't find it. > racial categories racist They give examples of the titles which they class as racist, including: * War Porn: Russian Solder have No Mercy For Ukrainian Girl * Russian Soldiers Rape Ukranian Bi-atch * 21 Year Old Refugee Fuck Hotel Owner For Asylum * Palestinian teen gets fucked by Israeli guy If that last video is not produced with a racial element in mind then why is it titled that way? Is that the randomer generator? > allege illegal sex practices What is the issue with making such allegations? If someone believes that illegal sexual violence is taking place then I would only ever encourage them to speak up about it.
deleted 3y ago
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cf141q5325 3y ago
Short realitycheck https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-popularity https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-popularity The authors of the french study will likely be shocked and appalled to find out that men werent the target audience for 50 shades of grey. Prudes better stick to reading only the first 4th from the left. She isnt kidding with taboo, human sexuality can get pretty fucked up. Then again, no kink shaming. You do you. Play safe :)
- sambazi 3y ago
  thanks for bringing this up! while informative, i wish this type of study (and analysis) were repeated to address concerns of representation [0]. [0] https://aella.substack.com/p/who-took-my-big-kink-survey https://aella.substack.com/p/who-took-my-big-kink-survey
  - cf141q5325 3y ago
    Yes the selection bias will be extreme. Then again, its worlds above the french study in regards to scientific standards. And while the absolute numbers will be off, the gender ratios and the position on the taboo scale will likely give an overall idea. Just thought i mention it since gender preferences shouldnt be news to anyone who heard of tumblr. Kinky and degrading stuff is just not an exclusively male, or even male dominated domain. Maybe treating women like they have no agency on this is pretty sexist. Again, none of this takes away from the concerns for sex workers safety. Once money enters the picture, consent considerations have to change and safeguards must apply. Which sites like Kink do a great job with to give a positive counterexample. Go check out the 2013 documentary by the same name¹. Here its worth mentioning that they are especially hard hit by signaling pressuring their payment processors. Its a great example for how this kind of unguided actionism by ideologues always harms the people who least deserve it. Yes they do torture porn, but they do it like it should be done. ¹ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2017634/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2017634/
tennisflyi 3y ago
“Mainstream porn” from Brazzers, Bang!,Team Skeet, and similar are so rote.

15 points by AlecSchueler 3y ago

Why was this article flagged?

Two questions: Even after "reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international porn sites" how can they get the 90% figure? Only looking at the biggest sites is going to get you a biased sample. Not all porn is on big sites. That's not to say there isn't a problem. And did they talk to sex workers/performers? Governments and anti-sex orgs have a habit of talking about and legislating sex work without actually listening to those who do it. In March, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation published a report[1] labeling all porn exploitation without speaking to any sex workers. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pa9y/porn-sex-workers-exploitation https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pa9y/porn-sex-workers-expl...

cf141q5325 3y ago
>Only looking at the biggest sites is going to get you a biased sample. More precisely you get one company. After countless iterations of mergers and buyouts its almost exclusively "ethical capital partners". Producer and sites. Regarding your point of ignoring sex workers, this tends to become quite despicable quickly. There are some crusaders out there that are doing their best to criminalize sexwork entirely as an end in itself. At the cost of the sex workers. It was quite visible with years of sabotage of the liberal German prostitution laws. They turned working from your own home into a bureaucratic impossibility to then argue with economically exploitative situations of bigger brothels against prostitution entirely. Which gets you back to women working from hotels illegally, which gets you back to human trafficking. https://www.donacarmen.de/ https://www.donacarmen.de/ has been reporting about this for 25 years now. How these women are treated out of political calculus is plain disgusting. Which likely explains why none of these people talk to them and just about them. Once you weaponize safeguards meant to protect sexworkers against them there isnt much ambiguity about your intentions left.
philipswood 3y ago
Looking for statistics from other sources: This is a pretty dry article: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/5/1243/6208896 https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/5/1243/6208896 Which describes it's methodology quite clearly. Their conclusion is that: "In total, we found 12 per cent (n = 15,839) of the total analysable sample (n = 131,738) of titles described sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence." Their data set comprises of content shown to first time site visitors. 12% is still disturbingly high.
- sambazi 3y ago
  > of titles described sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence. guess what, porn titles are clickbait class dismissed
AlecSchueler 3y ago
> Even after "reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international porn sites" how can they get the 90% figure? This is covered on page 20 of the study (the beginning of section 1). It's 90% of the 50 most viewed videos.

arghwhat 3y ago

> After more than 18 months of hearings and reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international pornography sites... I wonder, does this count as the French equality watchdog abusing its employees? We have generally not seen mildly on the mental trauma of such content review when tech companies do it. Content ethics aside, I imagine the these individuals can no longer watch pr0n and might even have a traumatic relationship to it, possibly extending into their real life sexual engagements as well.

WentFullRetard 3y ago

What a ridiculous article. This garbage shouldn't even be posted.

mcphage 3y ago
There's a large anti-pornography portion here on HN.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  One can enjoy porn while acknowledging the serious issues in the porn industry.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Yes, actual issues of abuse against the actors, not pearl clutching about "objectification". I'll bet most of this verbal and physical "violence" they mention is fairly vanilla rough sex, a harmless thing that a massive amount of the population already do in their own beds (often at the request of a woman). Yes, that even includes consensual non-consensual role play, which is a surprisingly common fantasy (and again, harmless, and again, often coming from women) And that's not even getting into "proper" BDSM, which is subject to monthly "think of the women!" outrage; always by people who've no interest in hearing from the actual women involved I'm quite certain the people performing this "study" had already made up their minds before loading the first video
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      > I'll bet most of this verbal and physical "violence" they mention is fairly vanilla rough sex It sounds like you've also made up your mind before reading it. How about taking a look and making some counter arguments to their findings so that people who disagree can argue on that basis rather than the basis of your speculation?
      - didntcheck 3y ago

SenAnder 3y ago

> “women, caricatured with the worst sexist and racist stereotypes, are humiliated, objectified, dehumanised, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary both to human dignity and French law” Is it just me or is this mixing wildly different things? Sexist stereotypes and objectification (note how vague that is) in the same category as (presumably non-consensual?) assault and torture?

mcphage 3y ago
"Now, if you two don't mind, I’m going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed or worse… expelled!" — Hermione Granger
matt002 3y ago
Hardcore commercial porn is pretty gross, more like a simulated rape than a sex act. I’d rather just enjoy furry art.
- SenAnder 3y ago
  Do we even know if drawings were excluded from this study? I would guess that more than 10% of all porn is drawn or CGI nowadays. It would not surprise me if they considered purely fictional drawings as "abuse" as well.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Yes, we know that because it explicitly says so on page 11.

mcphage 3y ago

What percentage of pornography is solo? Is that included in the total, or is all solo content in the 10%? What about gay male pornography?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Section 2 of the study is about gay male pornography, and they talk at length about the depiction of violent power based scripts, with what they call "misogynistic underpinnings" where they reproduce a dominant/manly and dominated/effeminate conception of sexual intercourse.

howeyc 3y ago

In other news, French authorities have decided that Hollywood movies should be banned for displays of murder, which is against French law. The "contracts" of the actors is immaterial as murder is illegal in France.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Source for this? A depiction of an act is very different to an act. Can you name a mainstream movie in which an actor is murdered for real? > A significant amount of content amounted to torture. The report warned that any kind of so-called contract was void in legal terms, because a person could not consent to torture and sexual exploitation and trafficking. The women in these videos are actully subject to what is depicted. It's not acting. Can you see how that's different to a Hollywood movie depicting a murder?
- arghwhat 3y ago
  What is depicted in these works is also acting. Scripted verbal abuse to the point where the recipient takes their own life on screen is considered regular acting in a drama, scripted violence to a certain degree including where mistakes lead to significant or even fatal actor injury is considered regular acting in action movies, and scripted sexual acts themselves are commonly considered regular acting in more "artsy" movies. The planning, execution, willingness, extend and the necessity thereof are important - context is important. Watching the work is mostly useful in this setting for identifying if the content is outright illegal (individuals present who should never have been) or if physical harm endured within it reach visibly unacceptable levels (as we for now do not expect CGI here), both which would likely (would it be weird to say hopefully?) be traumatizing for a viewer to experience. To draw the conclusions they wish to draw, I believe they need to study the work environment, not the works - and that this applies to any industry, irrespective of its output.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    > Scripted verbal abuse to the point where the recipient takes their own life on screen is considered regular acting in a drama Am I reading this right? Are you saying that it's regular acting to be subjected to such a high level of verbal abuse at work that you might take your own life? > scripted violence to a certain degree including where mistakes lead to significant or even fatal actor injury is considered regular It feels like a movie script that leads to fatal actor injury would surely be illegal also in the US? Or do you mean accidental injury/death? That's different that the injry or death being an inherent part of the script and intentional thing that is inflicted upon the actress. Otherwise, can you point me towards a single example of a Hollywood movie where an actress was intentionally killed and this was seen as regular/normal by the public? > scripted sexual acts themselves are commonly considered regular acting in more "artsy" movies. Yes, that's fine and the study even talks about such cases in a positive light. People can absolutely consent to sex acts! Sex is fun. But under French law people can not consent to be harmed, which is what was seen to be happening in the case in 90% of popular videos. Again, that's actual harm, not simiulated harm. > What is depicted in these works is also acting. Yes, to some degree it is. But can you see the difference in acting out being stabbed with the use of an unloaded gun and some fake blood, and being degraded by a queue of 50 men who want to slap you, cum on you and call you a worthless Moroccan who deserves to be treated like this? One of those things is very simulated, the other not so much. Maybe if all the slaps and the ejaculate were faked? Then it could be comparable.

BizarreByte 3y ago

I only watch porn with men in it, so I'm doing my part. Being more serious though, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. The porn industry is well known for being extremely shady if not an outright bad actor. The entire sex "work" industry is hugely problematic.

xhevahir 3y ago
As far as I can tell from skimming the study, the 90% figure is about the videos themselves, not whatever shady business happens behind the scenes, and answers to a very contentious definition of "violence"--for example, some porn was judged to be violent simply because the woman was labeled as Moroccan. Everything I've seen in the document, particularly the bolded quotations from the literature, suggests that the authors knew their conclusion from the outset and looked only for confirmation.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  > for example, some porn was judged to be violent simply because the woman was labeled as Moroccan. That's not what it says, though I admit French isn't my first language. It's saying that "Moroccan" was one of the main terms used to search for violent videos. That means, they identified certain videos as abusive and then looked at which terms users used to find them, and Moroccan was one of the top results. Violent videos are defined as depicating non-simulated harm.
  - xhevahir 3y ago
    French isn't my first (or even second) language, so I'm no authority either, but from sentences like "la pornographie s’inscrit dans une haine raciste" they seem to mean that, when they label performers things like "beurette" and "negro," they participate, discursively, in racist violence. If that's the case, their idea of violence is probably far broader than what the average French citizen recognizes. The part that amazes me, though, is that they don't seem to believe that the person being called "whore" or "salope" or whatever can have consented to such "violence." On the one hand, if we believe the offense being committed isn't against the performer herself but against women in general, it makes some sense. On the other hand---wtf?

toenail 3y ago

> The report said: “The women are real, the sexual acts and the violence is real, the suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.” Often perfectly visible? Did this 90% number perhaps come from people who were looking at the material with a specific agenda in mind?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
The study comes from the French High Council for Equality between Women and Men, an official governmental organisation in the French Republic.
- sambazi 3y ago
  does the report say anything about men in porn?

ekaryotic 3y ago

I really doubt this headline. As a frequent porn connoisseur most videos I have seen have a soft start with the actors chatting pleasantly. The few videos i have come across with grevious bodily harm disappeared from their hosts quickly. If I had to guess at a more reliable statistic I would say that 3% of pornography abuses women, and a far higher percentage abuses men, acts of cbt being the most common, but horses for courses etc.

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soupfordummies 3y ago
Highly possible your definition of "abuses women" differs from that of the study also. Do they define their standard?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  They do. The study is linked in the article and the definition is made within the study. They are talking about any kind of non-simulated violence against a woman which includes common things like slapping or choking.
tennisflyi 3y ago
I agree but Hookup Hot Shot and Facial Abuse is what they believe all porn is.

danielfoster 3y ago

How can this number be true when probably at least 10% of online pornography features men only?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
That would really surprise me! I would have put it closer to 0.01%. Do you have any source for this claim?
- danielfoster 3y ago
  It's just my estimate. I think 0.01% is far too low given that between 3-10% of men (probably closer to 5%) are gay. Approximately 1 in 4 straight men also watch gay porn: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/study-you-will-be-shocked-to-know-the-number-of-straight-men-who-watch-gay-porn/photostory/61877499.cms?from=mdr https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships... I'm not able to check exact numbers now, but I remember glancing at total videos once on xtube or a similar site. The number of gay videos seemed to be 10-20% of the number of straight videos. So we can reasonably assume that a reasonable portion of pornography features men only. Even if it's just 5%, it calls the 90% number from the article into question.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Thanks for your explaination! I have no doubt that that proportion of men are gay, but I wouldn't have thought there was a natural follow on between that and the amount of gay pornography produced. I'm seeing elsewhere that roughly 1 in 2 straight men watch porn, so from that we could maybe exrapolate that there's more porn porduced per straight man than per gay man (https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a5280496/straight-men-watch-gay-porn/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a5280496/straight-men-... -- I hope Cosmo is as trustworthy a source as the Times of India). Interesting about the percentage of videos on the unnamed site. But I would wonder: What is the percentage breakdown by views? Also, do note that section 2 of the study is entirely dedicated to gay pornography and goes to lengths in discussion the framing of misogynistic norms that are being represented in gay pornography.

daft_pink 3y ago

You have to imagine that they are using some expanded definition of abuse to arrive at that 90% number that is not in line with the average person's views. I'm sure there is a lot of abuse and torture in online porn though. But just as a counterpoint, most movies contain all kinds of criminal acts and the average person isn't going out committing criminal acts, just because they watched Dexter.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
> You have to imagine that they are using some expanded definition of abuse to arrive at that 90% number that is not in line with the average person's views. They define it as non-simulated harm. So the difference with Dexter is that in that case the actors pretend to have been injured, but in pornography the women are actually being injured. I guess most people's definition of "acting" would inlude something liek "pretend" or "make-believe." > From the article: A significant amount of content amounted to torture. The report warned that any kind of so-called contract was void in legal terms, because a person could not consent to torture and sexual exploitation and trafficking. It comes down to their legal definition of consent. One can not legally consent to being murdered for example. If a movie was made where someone was murdered then that would be illegal regardless of the contract in play. In France one can not consent to being tortured or abused, and most of the popular videos they looked at showed actresses being subject to actual torture or abuse.
- daft_pink 3y ago
  But they don't actually murder people to make movies. When you watch Rambo are people actually being shot? Do you think they are actually torturing people to make extreme porn? Are people actually being whipped or is it just faked like professional wrestling in the United States? But my point stands that they are probably using a very narrow definition to produce this extreme result like using a very narrow definition of consent or very wide definition of abuse such as mostly using verbal abuse to constitute abuse, which is hardly abuse if you are an paid actor and it isn't real.
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rich_sasha 3y ago

> After [...] reviewing millions of videos That must have been a strange job to do.

cf141q5325 3y ago

A bit off topic but since its already flagged, the guardian dropping so low really stings. They never recovered from the Snowden aftermath and it has been downhill ever since. Really a shame, journalism landscape cant afford loosing quality sites. Does anyone know if there are any other quality British newspapers left? At least some of it seems to be due to government interference.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Could you expand on what is low about this/why it was flagged? Was the original study from France also low?
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  I cant tell you why its flagged. But their methodology is nonsense. Their metric looks at titles (which are close to randomly generated to make identifying the scenes difficult for pirates) as well as "verbal abuse". They also call "Teens" category child porn, racial categories racist and allege illegal sex practices. Not sure how deep you want to dive into the shades of bullshit. Its a smear piece, the study as well as the article. I am hard pressed finding anything that could function as a reasonable base for discussion. And given the amount of nonsense i am not optimistic that this would be time well spend.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    > as well as "verbal abuse". They look at verbal, physical and sexual abuse, which are the three typres of abuse recognised in French law. Should they do this differently? If you don't mind me saying so, this argument feels tautological. You're not telling me why it's an issue, simply that they do it. > titles (which are close to randomly generated to make identifying the scenes difficult for pirates) Do you have a source for this? I've seen a lot of porn in my time and the title almost invariably matched the content. > They also call "Teens" category child porn Which page to they do this on? I can't find it. > racial categories racist They give examples of the titles which they class as racist, including: * War Porn: Russian Solder have No Mercy For Ukrainian Girl * Russian Soldiers Rape Ukranian Bi-atch * 21 Year Old Refugee Fuck Hotel Owner For Asylum * Palestinian teen gets fucked by Israeli guy If that last video is not produced with a racial element in mind then why is it titled that way? Is that the randomer generator? > allege illegal sex practices What is the issue with making such allegations? If someone believes that illegal sexual violence is taking place then I would only ever encourage them to speak up about it.

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cf141q5325 3y ago

Short realitycheck https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-popularity https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-popularity The authors of the french study will likely be shocked and appalled to find out that men werent the target audience for 50 shades of grey. Prudes better stick to reading only the first 4th from the left. She isnt kidding with taboo, human sexuality can get pretty fucked up. Then again, no kink shaming. You do you. Play safe :)

sambazi 3y ago
thanks for bringing this up! while informative, i wish this type of study (and analysis) were repeated to address concerns of representation [0]. [0] https://aella.substack.com/p/who-took-my-big-kink-survey https://aella.substack.com/p/who-took-my-big-kink-survey
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  Yes the selection bias will be extreme. Then again, its worlds above the french study in regards to scientific standards. And while the absolute numbers will be off, the gender ratios and the position on the taboo scale will likely give an overall idea. Just thought i mention it since gender preferences shouldnt be news to anyone who heard of tumblr. Kinky and degrading stuff is just not an exclusively male, or even male dominated domain. Maybe treating women like they have no agency on this is pretty sexist. Again, none of this takes away from the concerns for sex workers safety. Once money enters the picture, consent considerations have to change and safeguards must apply. Which sites like Kink do a great job with to give a positive counterexample. Go check out the 2013 documentary by the same name¹. Here its worth mentioning that they are especially hard hit by signaling pressuring their payment processors. Its a great example for how this kind of unguided actionism by ideologues always harms the people who least deserve it. Yes they do torture porn, but they do it like it should be done. ¹ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2017634/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2017634/

tennisflyi 3y ago

“Mainstream porn” from Brazzers, Bang!,Team Skeet, and similar are so rote.