This is a charitable description of the organisation. They wish to abolish the sex industry at large, and have questionable reputation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry
https://web.archive.org/web/20210821140435/https://www.nydai...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-are-hbo-and-melissa-mccart...
The primary issue is that companies value growth above everything else. Measures like strict user verification and ID would stop a lot of these problems in their tracks, but go against the infinite growth model that every other site uses. So instead they farm out content regulation to poorly paid individuals that end up deeply traumatized by the worst content you can imagine while barely doing anything to remove said content when identified.
I'm not sure quite how strict it is, but pornhub now does require ID verification for anyone uploading content.
The nature or even the existence of Exodus Cry can neither contribute nor detract from the claims' trush or falsity.
If I make a claim, the claim is (to adopt your parlance) true or false - correct.
But if you do not/cannot know that as a matter of fact, then it is perfectly reasonable to evaluate the credibility and history of the speaker. If the only source of information is a non-credible source we have no reason to believe the claim, which is all we can do, whether or not it is true.
If the president of the united states tells you an asteroid is about to hit the earth you are likely to take them more seriously than a homeless person on a street corner. But you are correct, in both cases it either is or is not going to hit it.
The appropriate response you are looking for is asking for other sources of evidence. Your comment is just bad epistemic noise to try and undermine a critique.
I just think it's valuable context to the wider discussion, and in particular, I wouldn't want anyone who read just that section of the article to come away with an innacurate idea of what Exodus Cry is really about.
> “Laila was so helpful,” Rachel told me. “She did more for me than any police or anyone in the U.K. ever did.”
You might not like Exodus Cry. You might not believe in everything they believe in. But for the girl in the article, they did something that she couldn't get anyone else to help her with.
But they are helping some people like "Rachel" in ways that, hopefully, you can support as being a good thing.
There are countless stories of men offering to house female Ukrainian refugees, with the explicit goal of getting in their pants. Would you ask me to "support" those men, too?
Further, we can acknowledge Exodus Cry's background and intentions, without letting it detract from the significance of the issues involving PornHub.
I would suggest that type of polarization is very detrimental to society. You may disagree with my opinion on that and may even consider me a "bad person" because we disagree.
In a thread where we are talking about the sex industry and consent, I think we ought to be more careful with our language and assumptions.
I think the above poster merely meant that Mickelwait has ulterior motives, and potentially gains something out of this transaction so we should acknowledge that even while acknowledging the good that is done incidentally.
I see very little difference between these two sentences, and archived links to "reported ties" aren't compelling evidence, nor Melissa McCarthy having an opinion on them.
I'm not personally biased against the sex industry, but I can see how a faith-based group would view the entire sex industry as commercial sexual exploitation.
If you’re willing to sell access to pictures of your naked body because you see it as worthwhile and are not coerced; that’s fine.
If there’s a hint of coercion, (implied, forced economic or abusive (physically or mentally)) then it’s not ok.
Sexual exploitation is not hard to define, let’s not pretend that it is.
Then there is porn which specifically focuses on vulnerability, humiliation, power balances, trust, you name it.
I don't think most porn is nonconsensual, especially not most professional grade stuff, but I know for sure there is a percentage of "consentual" porn that's actually based on faked or revoked consent because human traffickers can make big money on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans. It's the only logical conclusion, you don't need to be a criminal mastermind to think of this.
The legal definition of consent and exploitation is the easy part: there is no consent until it's freely given, and consent can be retracted at any point. Any non-consensual activity is abuse and exploitation. Easy peasy, covers pretty much everything. The verification process is where the actual problem lies. You obviously can't have people sign a document (because people can easily be coerced). Even in full production pornos where the people on screen seemed professionals doing their job, produced by dedicated companies and sold to the public on VHS tapes, turned out to be rape years after the fact, and people who bought those might never find out.
It's a practically unsolvable problem.
I don’t want to rape anyone but I have a rape kink, my girlfriend also has a rape kink- but anything that remotely resembles realistic depictions of rape (rape depicted in movies) is deeply unsettling still.
I think a lot of people don’t understand this, kinks of a thing aren’t direct desires to do the thing, and I can understand why- it’s confusing for me too.
> How do you know an actor or actress is not performing in a shoot because they were forced to? How do you know the editor hasn't cut out the parts where the model revoked consent between shots?
By making it legal and ensuring there are custodians who’s purpose in life is to ensure workplace health and safety. we have this for office workers already
Should such porn be banned? I don't know. Clearly there are couples out there who can live out their fantasies safely with people they trust. Looking at the statistics, it's almost shocking how common coercion, either physically or otherwise, comes up in kink prevalence lists. These topics aren't enjoyed by just the tiny minority I'd personally expect them to, and taking away their porn for theoretical possibilities of abuse seems quite extreme.
> ensuring there are custodians who’s purpose in life is to ensure workplace health and safety
I'd love that, but the fact remains that the people most vocal about these solutions are either extremely opposed to many concepts or perhaps too much into them to make clear judgement calls.
The UK has a list of topics not allowed by porn. Activities like pretend sexual abuse and role-playing as people who can't consent can be defended relatively easily, but the ban also covers spanking, caning, water sports, restraints, female ejacularion, and face sitting. If this is the type of committee that will decide the future of all porn, people like you and your girlfriend may be left disappointed quite quickly.
The government is very reactive on these topics and that usually means they're a bunch of prudes in any society.
Furthermore, a personal vetting system for porn would put a few people who will see quite a lot of porn during their work day in a position of power. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
If most is consensual and certainly most professional grade stuff is, then what's the need to abolish the commercial sex industry as a whole?
I think it's better to drag these sort of things into the light where people can feel safe reporting abuse, and other criminal activity. Right now if you're forced into performing a shoot, it might be very hard for a person to report that to the police.
Apart from the usual worries they'd have in your typical rape incident, they'd have to worry that people wouldn't take them seriously because it happened during their occupation. In fact, many people might start to opine that they are just owed money for 'forced labor' and this is a civil matter.
> It's a practically unsolvable problem.
Crime in general is an unsolvable problem. We can mitigate it. We can reduce it. Yet we can't solve the issue for good.
However, mitigation and reduction start by having good laws that target the actual situation at hand. Look at the case of J. Epstein, where people were potentially forced to have sex with politicians who had no idea their partner was coerced. There ought to be a more specific law against this situation, because at the time everyone was unsure of who would be charged (the politicians who were honeypotted? Epstein? Other workers?).
How do you know $worker isn't performing $job because they were forced to? If you're going to make the pearl-clutching argument that /anyone/ can potentially be in a coercive situation, then apply to to genuinely anyone, not just sex workers.
I don't think the risks of porn and other online content are comparable at all. If I'm watching your average YouTube video, I don't doubt for a second that the content on display was made intentionally by the video host. Your angry ex won't upload your comprehensive four hour Minecraft tutorial or the video detailing how you constructed your own army of garden gnomes.
Coercion might be a risk present in any media but there are definitely areas where the risk and impact are much higher than in others.
Why not? Parents pressuring children to gain celebrity status isn't exactly an undocumented phenomenon.
Human trafficking is almost entirely urban legend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/childre...
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883928-human-trafficking
As far as I know, though I'm clearly no expert on this topic, actual human trafficking mostly seems to involve the physical part of sex work (not necessarily the performing part). It's also usually not even close to the typical depiction of someone getting kidnapped, shipped off, and forced to have sex.
The real world involves modelling/fashion/contract deals that turn out wrong when the victim gets picked up from the airport, financial coercion of family, forms of wage slavery and other "soft" coercion methods. There have been plenty of stories in the news here about men and women signing contracts they couldn't read that claimed they agreed to all sorts of things (though legally that's complete nonsense, of course, but the victims don't know that!) The approach is not very different from the approaches abusers use to make Eastern European people work in richer European countries for far less than minimal wage with barely any worker's rights.
It's a tragedy that needs more nuance and definitely more government action even at its relatively modest real world scale, at least here in Europe. Every abuse case is one too many.
Imagine you had a different employer who got people addicted to some substance and in return for more drugs had them work at some arbitrarily low rate via some contractual arrangement. Maybe, if drugs were all legal the arrangement would be legal --but would the population at large be okay with that? I think most people would cry foul.
All fields of work are routinely subject to “bonuses” and millions of people take painkillers and miscellaneous other medications to function through the workday in order to earn both their base pay and to try and meet targets in order to get bonuses…
Is the manual labourer taking painkillers on the job to get through a day of laying bricks who is ignoring their body telling them they need to stop the work, who is pushing themselves artificially in order to get a job bonus, hurting their body, potentially beginning a cycle of painkillers being necessary to function for their job, not being equally exploited by your logic?
Let us not forget how sexist and ageist the industry is as well.
If you aren't willing to allow any sort of pressures on people to perform what they consider their livelihood, then employing anyone such that they only make enough to live paycheck to paycheck is immoral as well.
There's definitely a spectrum of dead-end careers and employment by debtors with resulting economic exploitation versus desirable jobs that you have to show up to maintain, but it's quite a stretch to say that any hint of economic coercion is not OK. We're not yet a post-scarcity socialist society, the globe is very much capitalistic, and participation in our capitalist society implies some economic coercion.
Basically, unless it is legal to sustainence farm without paying taxes, all employment is selling your body under duress. Being naked only makes the power disparity more obvious.
It’s tempting to consider it a reduction to absurdity but it’s not really. Society in most places around the world has obligations that require us to do things. It’s coercive. Not in a deliberately malicious way but in an apathetic, conformity sort of way.
It feels that way until it is realized that it is enforced by government monopoly on violence.
And despite this rant, I'm not a libertarian or even an anarchist.
I just need us to be honest about the fact Society can only exist with consent under duress. It tends to get obvious when you talk about sex-work because people feel different about bodily autonomy when it comes to sex vs other types of bodily harm.
My question is, do we say "Yes!" to that, or "No!"?
Some societies are less coercive by providing for people in need, be it through welfare, national healthcare, UBI, housing, free food...
Some societies are more coercing even to the point of imprisoning people for being homeless.
I would, and do. Let's remove that coercive pressure on labor and then see who wants to do sex work. I mean this seriously, I'm sure people will still choose it. But probably in different numbers and different forms than they currently do.
Same is true in capitalism, and I will die on that hill too.
If you work in a company town and you’re forced into manual labour then I see that as quite similar honestly.
That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.
But yes, it gets muddy when you have to contend with the idea of your free will not being your own, but I don’t get the impression that girls on onlyfans are forced, that they are unsafe or that they are being put in tenuous situations (like people trafficking them and keeping their passports).
You may be "coerced" into working by the general human condition of needing to earn money somehow to survive, but that doesn't mean your employer is coercing you. That relationship is still voluntary. You can choose to work for them on mutually-agreeable terms, or not—and they can choose to hire you, or not. Neither party is forcing the other to do anything.
> That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.
On that point we agree.
Honestly a big reason I read hackernews is to see the hilarious cognitive dissonance some people have here when trying to twist their ideologies so that the state of capitalist society makes rational and humanitarian sense. There are so many extremely intelligent people here that put all that intelligence into the stupidest box.
There are stories on both sides. Some porn stars say they will quite easily make informed decisions in that situation. But I think that is the minority...
This seems to be a common trope. The poor porn actress didn't know what was going to happen.... In the real world while some producers are complete scum they are not the majority and the outright criminal ones end up in jail (See GirlsDoPorn) .
Most porn stars have agents looking out for their interests at least partially. Look on something like iafd.com and you can see that the major studios have people returning year after for shoots.
While the work might seem horrible it is the choice of the people involved who have made decisions appropriate for THEM. Working for a full month at minimum wage vs 1 week a month for vastly more money etc.
Yeah no.
And that I know is the situation for many in porn.
About half the time they look so messed up that I doubt they even really know where they are.
Have you tried it not metaphorically?
from my experience, we have no way of quantifying that statement because even many “sex work positive” forums will remove and ban any performer talking about their experience in a positive light
this whole discussion is based on bad assumptions partially because everybody with a platform has an angle, so far
Sex workers do.
Because the sentences absolutely are not the same.
And especially, and most importantly, they aren't the same to the affected people, whose interests the "faith-based groups" (and in one word — bigots) purport to protect.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-02-06/super-bowl-...