Don't Fire People for Making Pornography in Their Free Time
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be a problem, but we’re far from that.
I work for a government entity, and am subject to a variety of ethics laws that dictate certain aspects of my behavior outside of work. It’s onerous and heavy handed, but at least there are rules and case law to provide some level of due process and fairness. It still sucks - I actually have a social life, and I have to be very careful about who I’m around and that there is no problematic perceptions.
With private sector employers, especially entities that aren’t publicly traded, you don’t always know where you stand and the rules are subject to the whims of people whom you may not even know.
If you aren’t in a public facing role authoritatively representing the company or using the company to promote your outside activity, it should be a non issue. How many gays were drummed out and persecuted before the law protected them?
That seems like society working as intended!
A properly managed corporation would instill that mindset, stop things from being hostile, remind others of that “right” and then go from there.
The problem is that all corporations ignore this right and hedge proposed changes in profit at the expense of the working class employee’s means to life or insurance or both.
Imo people today do that to make fast money and well… I don’t personally know why I should be forced to accept or approve that kind of way of money making. I don’t respect drug dealers, corrupt businessmen, nor YouTube scammers. I also don’t respect people who perpetuate mental harms by producing porn and contributing to these issues. I do respect startup founders that solve actual problems, teachers who help improve failing schools, or scientists who don’t accept corporate funding to paint an inaccurate picture.
I value persistence, virtue, and meritocracy and no amount of social force will make me accept certain behaviors.
Just being honest with my opinion.
And people are free to disagree with my pov as well, and do whatever they want.
Eg, if you were a person of faith (I have no idea if you are), and I was a militant atheist (to be clear I'm agnostic), and I told you that I thought all religion was harmful and said something disrespectful like, if you believe in an imaginary friend who grants wishes you aren't qualified to be a doctor/engineer/etc (this is not a position I actually endorse or an appropriate way to talk about religion) - can you see how you might tell me to get lost?
Money isn’t the end all be all. Id say if someone can make porn and publish it they can surely do something else with that “creative” energy.
Exactly this. There are plenty of couples out there making videos of themselves having sex, and it's not my place (or anyone else's) to tell them they can't.
This is why “my own time” should be my own time. If I cause harm to an individual, there are already laws to deal with that.
If I have yet to cause financial harm to a corporation and they cannot articulate how my actions during time in which they do not pay me they should not be allowed to even consider firing me.
Things, imho, will improve when the default to seeing a video/post is to think “that’s AI, not Jim.”
Can’t prove it’s me? Can’t fire me.
1. I would argue the bar should be "more harm then good", otherwise most of human activity would be banned.
2. Since you've given no compelling evidence that that is the case, you don't have much of an argument for preventing it.
Well, I was using thought experiments to avoid calling you out, but if you want me to be forthright, I can do that. I don't want to get into an argument though, honestly I don't even want to get into a debate, so I'm gunnuh say my piece and you can take it or leave it. I just don't have the energy to get into a debate. (Not to say you aren't free to respond however you see fit, I just probably won't respond if you defend your position.)
I do think you are taking a position which is harmful. For more reasons than I can get into in an HN comment, but the highlights are, you're exaggerating the potential for harm; you're projecting flat narratives in your head onto real people and using that to justify removing their bodily autonomy (eg, not everyone makes porn because they're desperate - some people are exhibitionists [no, I don't understand why either], some people enjoy that kind of work, some people do it for reasons neither of us have imagined); generally you're trying to impose your moral standards on to others.
> I don’t personally know why I should be forced to accept or approve that kind of way of money making.
but if there's no harm, and porn is consensual, all is good - right?
> Id say if someone can make porn and publish it they can surely do something else with that “creative” energy.
why should they if it, by your metric, is doing no harm?
But besides that, if you think about it. Firing people for doing porn as a side job is effectively forcing people into doing porn as a full time job. OnlyFans doesn't fire people for having a regular day job, so guess what remains as a revenue source.
To state my perspective by way of personal anecdote: I find it shitty that I have neighbors who like to run their errands with pistols strapped to their waists like they want to be Wyatt Earp when they grow up, but my acceptance or non-acceptance of the situation is irrelevant. I don't feel like I'm forced to accept the situation just because I have no right or power to change it by myself. As an aside: I bet if I tried to go get those neighbors of mine fired for their open-carry, I would end up shot.
This is all ok. The problem is when we start firing people or shunning them for stuff we don't like.
Let's say I read paleontology for fun. Can I avoid Young Earth Creationists socially, or am I shunning them?
Not hanging out with someone is obviously fine, and it's your choice.
Firing or publicly shunning someone is a totally different matter.
Why is firing a different matter? If I'm an employer in an at will state, I most certainly can fire someone who's not a member of a protected group, like atheists, say.
And firing is obviously different from "avoiding socially" because you don't pay people to hang out with you.
Do you not see a conflict of interest? How much of a distraction would that be? That's not so black and white to me.
But I agree with the argument "Judge the art, not the artist".
As Camus attempted to portray in "The stranger", the protagonist was on "a trial that judged his character and the ways in which he integrated in the society, not on a trial for killing an Arab".
Businesses themselves rarely fire people out of principle, but rather because of pressure.
(at least in the case outlined by GP, where the cause is "not criminal, not involving employees/customers, not done under the guise of being an employee")
The pressure often comes from the outside, and it's indeed very difficult for a business to fight it.
I don't think GP is arguing for it, I also don't know if I am arguing for it... but... IMO for those cases the only simple "solution" I can see is to legally protect those people from being fired for unrelated reasons, so that business has legal plausible deniability, and hopefully doesn't suffer the consequences itself.
In the rest of the world where you can't fire without a valid reason, it is very easy for them to say "We can't legally fire them for things they do unrelated to their job".
Most importantly, it should be in BLACK AND WHITE in your contract when you start. If you're someone who needs to abide by a code of conduct different from the norm outside of work hours, that absolutely should be something you're made crystal clear about, and are agreeing to.
For both your sake, and the sake of the institution having to clean up the mess otherwise.
At will employment exists for good reason. You can quit your job at any time for any reason and your employer can fire you at any time for (almost) any reason. There are a very narrow set of circumstances for which your employer cannot fire you, and this is by design. The government should have as little control as possible over who you hire and fire and why.
But here's the catch: different people have become more strict about different things.
Same, you will not want to hire a famous womanizer. It will create chaos in your company or with clients. And you can find a huge number of examples to confirm that if what people do outside of work something that is considered negative, even if it is legal, it is a problem to hire them; maybe to keep them.
I've never heard of a free-time pork actor ruining the reputation of a company on its own.
Also, doing something you like doing isn't being a degenerate. That's Trump-speak.
The problem with sex is that its nature is EXCLUSIONNARY: sexual desire is made in part to discriminate who is the more fit or not to reproduce, especially among males. Historically only 60% men reproduced and 80% women... A HUGE LOT of people and especially men are not accesing sex on a regular basis.
In that sense you can't say porn / OF etcc are 'moral' in any way shape of form I think. There are actually many places in the world / religions that promote the idea that REGULATING sex (especially women's sex life) is the MORAL thing (since it allow a 'better' repartition of sex and reproduction in the society, especially for men).
I don't agree with any of it (and 100% share your point of view), but it's important to discuss the underlying reasons of what you observe in societies.. at least to better fight it.
It does Not prevent someone else from disapproving of your actions (making porn), but it Does ensure that their response is limited only to their property/sphere of influence.
He's also got a podcast and has been on plenty of other podcasts, news shows, etc if you want video content.
As he says: "the black flag comes in many colors."
The article makes it clear that isn’t the case. Anyway, the issue is much broader than just porn. Every additional constraint you add on a job means the people leftover are somewhat less competent at their actual job.
Google for example is stuck with worse programmers due to their hazing stile interviews meaning many of the best either don’t apply or get falsely rejected. For companies this this isn’t such a big deal, but it helps explain why political parties rarely pick candidates that people really want to vote for.
YES, this - but 's/probably also too/obviously far too/'.
Plus - recent legal settlements in university sex scandal cases are getting into the 1/2 billion dollar league. Nobody responsible for university finances, however libertine they might privately be, would want a flaming-red-flag idiot like this to be allowed anywhere near their students, staff, or campus.
He clearly stated, he was aware of it:
"We think our sex is beautiful and have no qualms at all about other people watching us make love,” they wrote. “But our establishment colleagues likely would be shocked … and we’re fairly certain we’d be shunned in our community. Our careers likely would be ruined.”"
He simply thinks it should be allright and accepted behavior even for a university chancellor and I agree with that.
>wouldn’t it be simpler to agree that, at least if no laws are broken, one is judged at work only for what one does at work?
Would the author still agree with this sentiment if the activity outside of work was not pornography, but something they themselves find disagreeable? Let's say for example, participating in a KKK gathering. (not public activism, which certainly can interfere with someone in an official position) Please note that the KKK is a stand-in example rather than an actual example. You can imagine but I'd refrain from mentioning more real examples, which people are actually fired or "canceled" for, activities which certainly is far from something like pornography.
From reading other stories by that author at that same publication, I think he'd agree.
He's against cancel-culture in general, and has been writing against it for the past few stories, at least.
So I suspect that if an affair made national news, the chancellor would be fired as well.
Any change to the current ways of doing things would need to be societal, as otherwise whatever institution is employing the person would pay a high price.
But yet we live in a society where any form of open sexuality is shunned. If you want to play along you sort of have to pretend these things don't exist. Why is that?
How so? No one is forcing you to watch porn. Apart from pornographic ads, porn is very different from someone having sex in public.
People do it all the time privately (at least historically) because it was considered an intimate activity, not a banned activity (again, historically and generally speaking).
People's actions outside of work are still an indication of who they are as a person, and being an effective leader generally requires that your subordinates have some level of respect for you. As the article itself admits, the majority (58%) of Americans consider porn to be immoral. Most people aren't going to have much respect for someone who engages in behavior they view as immoral, particularly if the individual has a long history of such behavior (as is the case here).
The leader of an organization is also viewed by people as a representative of the organization's values. If people view the leader of an organization as immoral, it will deter them from engaging with that organization.
is this a case of closing the barn door after its been filmed in the Senate Hearing chamber?
If this guy was a long-haul truck driver, who would ever care?
Vs. a public university leader, in a country where porn addiction is seen as a major mental health problem for young people?
Porn doesn't affect employee performance.
Not directly, and not more than any other outside activity.
Being of the opinion that someone should be fired or not hired because of something that doesn't affect work performance is a handicap on your leadership and collaboration skills. IMO.
You are basing your whole argument on an unsubstantiated assertion.
This is not an academic paper, this is an internet forum.
Obviously, an interviewer shouldn't reasonably hold this against a candidate, but it's in the back of their head. As a candidate, the bar to impress is made slightly higher in order to overcome that subconscious bias. One of my best friends is in this exact situation of looking to switch jobs (outside of tech, in sales) and holding a degree from UW-LAX, and he's legitimately punting his job search for a few months until this is out of the news cycle.
That's just completely unacceptable. You could be the most competent chancellor in the world, but it doesn't matter if your lifestyle choices can have that kind of negative impact on alumni. It's unbelievably selfish. If you have some inner need to publicize your sexual encounters, that's fine and well, but you owe it to the thousands of people you represent to resign from your job. The only way that I can explain this sort of blatant disregard for the impact this would have on others is that he found the risk he was taking (risk both to himself and the community he represented) to be sexually thrilling.
It's a reflection of your privilege that this either isn't obvious to you or that you think my friend should simply refuse to work for such people.
60 years ago you can't deny the reality that some bigot had power and interviewed people and he didn't like "fruity" men (or whatever he'd have said back then).
Or the reality that he wouldn't have hired a woman. Or a black person.
And somehow it's privilege to point this out? Excuse me?
Admittedly, when it comes to sex, my view of the US is that of a prudish and cruel cultural backwater.