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Pay cuts are just one factor: working conditions are also getting worse and that’s bad for both staff and students
Since late April, staff at 145 UK universities have been refusing to mark students’ work. The marking and assessment boycott is the most recent action by the University and College Union (UCU), which represents academics and other university staff. With graduation ceremonies now upon us, the boycott is causing significant havoc. Just how significant is a matter of some dispute. But what is indisputable is that many students have had their marks delayed, and some will be unable to graduate as normal this summer.
Industrial action by (mainly) academic staff is always a hard sell. Lecturers are seen as relatively privileged people. The students being hit by their latest action have already had their studies disrupted by a pandemic and a series of strikes. Seen this way, the current marking boycott can look like a selfish step too far.
Lorna Finlayson is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex
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When premium e-bike maker Cowboy introduced its Adaptive Power update earlier this year, Engadget’s Mat Smith wondered when a new model would arrive. We have the answer today as the company announced the Cowboy Cruiser. The new variant encourages a more upright design for a relaxed Dutch riding position. It also includes a wider saddle — a feature that was at the top of our wish list for the Belgian company’s latest iteration.
The Cowboy Cruiser weighs 19.3 kg (42.5 lbs) and includes comfort grips and a “distinctive raised and curved handlebar to facilitate a natural hand position.” Its saddle is wider and has an increased gear ratio compared to previous models. The e-bike has a wireless charging phone mount, and, like with all of its models, its companion app integrates with Google Maps. In addition, it has a removable battery, carbon belt, mudguards and “puncture-resistant” 47mm tires. Of course, all of the company’s models have crash detection.
With its lineup getting more crowded, Cowboy renamed its existing e-bikes, “making it easier for customers to find the e-bike which best suits their personal needs.” The original C4 model is now called the Cowboy Classic, and the C4ST becomes the Cruiser ST.
The Cowboy Cruiser is available starting today for an “introductory price” of £2,690 ($3,393.43). You can buy it in black and sand colorways from the company website. And if you're looking to browse in person, the company plans to roll out the e-bikes, eventually, to 300 bike retailers across Europe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cowboy-cruiser-e-bike-offers-a-more-upright-ride-000010102.html?src=rssCowboy Cruiser e-bike
Marketing photo of the Cowboy Cruiser e-bike split into a main panel (left, showing the full bike), top-right box showing the handlebar view with mounted phone and lower-right box revealing its wide saddle.
Global climate institutions have embraced the primacy of capital, private firms, and markets—and in so doing have fatally undermined their own efficacy.
University says about 20% of final-year students will face delays if industrial action continues
More than 1,000 final year students at Durham University could be left without a degree this summer because of the marking boycott disrupting universities across the UK.
Durham, one of 145 universities affected by the industrial action over pay and working conditions called by the University and College Union (UCU), said about 20% of its 5,300 final year students would “at the moment, face delays in receiving all their marks and final classifications”.
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A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.
Ministers are ultimately responsible for weakening the arts and humanities. They are taking the country backwards
The announcement that the University of East Anglia is to cut 31 arts and humanities posts – out of a total of 36 academic job cuts – has rightly prompted anger as well as dismay. UEA became a literary flagship among the new universities that opened in the 1960s. This year is its 60th birthday, and since 1970 it has been home to one of the most famous creative writing courses in the world: founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, its students have included Anne Enright, Ian McEwan and the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.
There is shock, among alumni and observers, that the financial problems of the UK’s higher education sector now threaten such prestigious institutions. Once celebrated for their innovative approaches, 1960s campus universities were where different kinds of courses were developed. Creative writing is one example; media, development and women’s studies are others. In cutting the arts and humanities in these universities, managers and policymakers are turning back the clock – at a time when, arguably, there has never been a greater need for courageous innovation. Any idea that the risks are limited to the post-1992 universities should be junked.
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Small number could attend graduation but later be told they have failed as pay dispute affects assessments at 145 universities
Tens of thousands of university students are being left in limbo without their final degree results this summer, including some who could attend graduation ceremonies only to be told later that they have failed.
About a third of the UK’s 500,000 final-year undergraduates are thought to have been affected by the marking and assessment boycott at 145 universities, part of the pay dispute between the University and College Union (UCU) and employers that has strained relations between staff, students and management.
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We would like to hear from people who have left university without a degree classification or with ungraded work
A marking and assessment boycott has affected 145 universities, meaning that some students will leave university this summer without degree classifications, or with work ungraded. Students at the University of Edinburgh, for example, say they will be given an “empty piece of paper” when they graduate.
Are you leaving university without a degree classification or with work unmarked? How will this affect you, for instance when applying for jobs or other courses?
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For those students sitting final university exams like me, this summer’s graduations are clouded by chaos and uncertainty
This year’s graduations, universities claim, will be indistinguishable from those of previous years. Except there’s one glaring problem: as a student there isn’t much to celebrate. Currently, a marking and assessment boycott is affecting 145 British universities and, like many of the thousands of students graduating this summer, I am set to leave without a formal classification.
For the class of 2023, the same year-group whose GCSEs were reformed in 2018 and A-levels cancelled in 2020, this marks the end of a deeply dispiriting educational journey.
Kimi Chaddah is a student at Durham University and a writer on education and politics
This article was amended on 13 June 2023. An earlier headline said that the writer would be left “without a degree”; this is not the case for students at Durham University. An earlier subheading implied that negotiations had halted at Durham University, while they are ongoing. Engagement in negotiations varies (an earlier version said there was “no negotiation from university management”) and all marks do not have to be received before a final degree can be awarded. A comment from Durham University denying that inexperienced people are marking exam papers has been added.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
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For many years now, I have been accused of “shaming” people for their sexual pastimes. This is in large part because of my criticisms of porn and the sex industry.
To be fair, I probably have written and said less than positive things about various kinks and fetishes, particularly of the violent nature. I’ve never been particularly shy about my view of men who need costumes, skits, creepy scenarios, or pornographic performances in order to get off. Your body is quite literally built to enjoy sex: just regular old penis in vagina sex. Now, of course, this “regular” sex is called “vanilla” in defense of the people who have conditioned their bodies and minds to need a bunch of bells and whistles just to do what nature intended, long before the invention of smart phones and Hentai. But requiring a silly costume or a near death experience for either you or the object of your ejaculation signals a problem to me.
While in the past porn was something you had to go out of your way to find, often in rather embarrassing ways — stealthily going into Red Hot Video after dark or purchasing a plastic-wrapped magazine from behind the counter at your local corner store — today, it is not only easily accessible, but unavoidable. You really can’t exist online without porn being pushed on you in one way or another — via porn bots in your comments or dms on social media, pop ups on torrent sites, or what is simply embedded into pop culture — music, movies, late night jokes, your fav Twitch streamers, etc.
It is far from taboo — rather, it is expected. Men will often tell women that any man who claims not to use porn is lying.
The overriding message is that porn is a normal — even healthy — part of men and boys’ lives. It is a long running joke in comedy films and locker rooms, but also something girls and young women expect to have to participate in. For the younger generations, “sending nudes” is part of dating, watching porn with your partner is recommended as a fun and sexy way to get in the mood, and performing pornographic scenarios in the bedroom is expected. For young women today, one’s social media feed is an opportunity to display one’s fuckability in exchange for validation from men and OnlyFans is viewed as little more than a side hustle.
Unfortunately, much of the fault lies with third wave feminism. Modern faux feminism embraced “sex work is work” as a mantra, insisting that porn and prostitution are just jobs “like any other.” Anyone who suggested these were not spaces of freedom, neutrality, or empowerment was guilty of “slut-shaming.”
The reality is, of course, that young women who get into the sex industry tend to get used up and spat out quickly, with little to show for it financially, but instead stuck with a lot of regret, often some trauma and additional mental health issues. The eternity of the internet becomes a lot more upsetting when there are videos of you at your most vulnerable out there for life. The lie told to young women by this industry-approved “feminism” is meant to empower them to feel proud of their choices but fails to tell them the truth: that some choices are harmful, even if you shroud them in a veneer of sexual liberation, and actual self-worth never comes from the superficial.
It isn’t, let’s be honest, sexually liberating to perform unpleasant, degrading, or painful sex acts with men who don’t care about you, that you would never engage in voluntarily. That’s someone else’s sex dream — not yours.
But while women often leave the sex industry with a heaping of shame, what of the consumer?
Men’s relationship to porn tends to leave out the woman factor. Odd, considering the whole point is meant to be the woman on the screen. But to the consumer, the question of how she got there, how she is being treated on set, whether or not she is in fact enjoying herself, or what mental, financial, or emotional state got her there is erased from path towards the main event: orgasm.
Considering the messages we are bombarded with — that porn is normal, a harmless fantasy, and a healthy release for men who can’t access the real thing — you would think men and boys (as I think we all know, most young men start watching at around 11 years old these days — sometimes earlier) would have let that old-fashioned shame go. But they haven’t.
If you talk to men about their porn use, as I do quite often, most will tell you that the minute they orgasm, the sense of shame rolls in. It is often, I’m told, quite nauseating — a sense of disgust with oneself: “What have I just done, I am an animal” kind of thing.
You might chalk this up to shame around sex, as some attempt to, but that doesn’t make much sense. It’s not as though after having sex with one’s partner you feel a sense of regret. In fact, sex is (if done properly) the thing that bonds us and brings us closer in an intimate relationship or marriage.
I posed a question about porn-related shame in my Substack chat yesterday, curious to see what insight men might offer, asking:
“I want to hear from you (men, in particular): why do men feel ashamed of their porn use? Porn has been fully mainstreamed and normalized–we are told it’s nothing more than a harmless fantasy, perfectly natural, and even a healthy outlet that reduces male sexual violence (this is a myth, for the record), yet I hear over and over again that men and boys feel shame after masturbating to porn. Why? Be honest.”
A number of responses stood out. One man named Des told me that “A lot of men have some pretty confused attitudes towards arousal,” pointing out that “Boys can become aroused by the weirdest of things… including things that are taboo or otherwise ‘wrong.’” He went on to say:
“The thing that is especially personal to me, because I wasn’t especially ashamed of my interest in porn when I was younger, is the insidious, creeping increase in the ‘extremity’ of pornographic content. It took an experience of being traumatised by some video I stumbled upon in my search for something “new” to make me stop and withdraw from porn altogether. I used this experience as an opportunity to learn about the problems porn presents and to work through the residual feeling of shock and disgust from the awful video I saw.”
This made a lot of sense to me, considering what male friends have told me about their sense of shame around porn use. Essentially, the nature of internet porn is that it drags you deeper and deeper down evermore extreme and gruesome holes. You are fed videos you might not be seeking out, but masturbate to anyway, leaving you with the knowledge you just jerked off to “daddy-daughter” porn, “step-brother gives unsuspecting sister a surprise,” or some facial abuse video, wherein a young woman (and hopefully not an actual girl) is choked and violated until she is brutalized and crying.
If you didn’t feel shame around watching this kind of thing there would be something seriously wrong with you. Yet this is mainstream porn now. It’s not some niche fantasy. It is what will pop up should you end up on Pornhub crusing for something “normal,” whatever that means…
A man named Jacob said:
“Shame serves a social function. I don’t think you do feel shame unless you anticipate/experience social alienation. The excuses and justifications are just defenses of people who are hiding feelings of insecurity. Porn itself is marketed as ‘naughty,’ ‘taboo,’ and ‘barely legal.’ That it’s shameful/anti-social is part of the engine that drives its compulsive use. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think if it really was normalized/mainstreamed to the point someone didn’t feel ashamed, i.e., still felt socially supported and connected, it would just become apparent that it’s not very satisfying or fulfilling. You’re punching a chemical reward button in the brain of a social animal that’s supposed to bring you closer to other humans. You need to feel disconnected first before porn provides any relief. It’s like the Rat City experiment. I don’t think men in really connected relationships would even want to use porn.”
I found this quite insightful. Sex is designed to bond us: our bodies release oxytocin, which is called the love hormone for a reason, bonding mothers with babies and couples with one another. If your body is producing oxytocin on account of watching porn, you’re bonding with a person who isn’t there, isn’t bonding with you, and in a way isn’t even real. You aren’t actually connecting with anyone. Instead, you’re training your brain to crave and seek out the scenarios and imagery you see in porn, which are often abusive or immoral, but also leave you lacking. You have the orgasm but the bond with another human doesn’t follow, so you end up feeling alone, empty, and isolated when you are meant to be feeling the opposite.
What follows is the addiction cycle, wherein you continue to seek the oxytocin, so use porn, get the rush, but then feel alone, empty, ashamed so must seek it out again.
In this context, the shame makes sense: you’re doing a thing that is meant to make you feel good but doesn’t in the long term, only for a blip. It’s never satisfying the thing it’s meant to satisfy.
But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.
The fact so many women normalize this as nothing more than a harmless fantasy that has nothing to do with them has always baffled and troubled me. To start, those are real women and girls in the videos your partner is consuming — women and girls who are possibly being trafficked, abused, or raped. They are at very least mentally unwell, and are probably suffering physical consequences from what happens on porn sets as well. One would think you wouldn’t want your partner supporting the abuse and exploitation of women and girls, at least.
But beyond that, why on earth would you be ok with your partner “bonding” sexually with other women?? This doesn’t strike me as any different than cheating. Sure, you won’t end up with an STD, but your partner is engaging in sex acts with strange women regardless. Have a boundary. Come on. You deserve it.
Men in relationships, no matter how much they’ve told themselves porn is their right (After all, she’s not up for it all the time — what is he supposed to do while she’s tired or grouchy or out of town? Suffer?) must know, deep down, that jacking off to 18-year-olds in the basement is not a respectful or ethical act within a relationship. And because you’re probably hiding your porn use from your partner, knowing she won’t be happy about it, even if she is playing out-of-sight-out-of-mind, the porn use functions as an ever-growing mountain of lies, creating guilt — an emotion akin to shame. You might be hurting her, the person you claim to love; you’re hurting your own mental health and ability to connect sexually and otherwise in your relationship; plus you’re actually hurting a whole bunch of women and girls you don’t even know on the other side of the screen.
Not a great recipe for self-respect!
It’s almost like mantras can’t alter biology and people’s inherent sense of ethics. And it’s almost like these industries and ideologies are going out of their way to mindfuck you into being an unhealthy, unethical person so you’ll keep coming back.
Don’t let em.
The post There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention appeared first on Feminist Current.
I started composting a couple of years ago using two bins in my yard. Ever since then, I’ve dutifully collected fruit and veggie scraps, egg shells, and coffee grounds, alternating these “greens” with layers of “browns” — dead leaves from the oak trees in our yard. This spring I will harvest my first batch of compost and I don’t know if it’s possible to be more excited about moist mulch. That’s why Clio Chang’s Curbed story caught my eye. I’ve always wondered what happens in the industrial composting process and Chang’s piece does a terrific job going behind the scenes of a compost collection service that begins under the cover of darkness in Queens, New York.
This is the sorting phase of the process, and no fewer than six Waste Management employees have been assembled to take me around. First, we watch as the trucks line up to be weighed, since customers pay by weight to dump. “Is it priced by pound?” I ask. “Tons,” everyone responds in unison, and we all laugh at my inability to grasp orders of magnitude. One-third of the residential trash — some 4,000 tons daily — that New Yorkers throw away is food or yard waste that could be diverted from methane-emitting landfills. The heap of food scraps we are looking at, which has cartoon-like steam rising off the top, is massive, but only constitutes a tiny fraction of what it could be. There are pigeons resting and scavenging on its peak. Darryll Persad, the site manager, tells me that they have an air-filtration system and a deodorizer that puts out a scent to help control the odor. There are multiple scents to choose from, but Persad says, with a decisiveness that I can only dream of, that he “just orders cinnamon.” (Since all I smell is trash, I’ll just have to take his word for it.)
NASA has launched an innovative air quality monitoring instrument into a fixed-rotation orbit around Earth. The tool is called TEMPO, which stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument, and it keeps an eye on a handful of harmful airborne pollutants in the atmosphere, such as nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and ground-level ozone. These chemicals are the building blocks of smog.
TEMPO traveled to space hitched to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. NASA says the launch was completed successfully, with the atmospheric satellite separating from the rocket without any incidents. NASA acquired the appropriate signal and the agency says the instrument will begin monitoring duties in late May or early June.
Spacecraft separation confirmed! The Intelsat satellite hosting our @NASAEarth & @CenterForAstro#TEMPO mission is flying free from its @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and on its way to geostationary orbit. pic.twitter.com/gKYczeHqV5
— NASA (@NASA) April 7, 2023
TEMPO sits at a fixed geostationary orbit just above the equator and it measures air quality over North America every hour and measures regions spaced apart by just a few miles. This is a significant improvement to existing technologies, as current measurements are conducted within areas of 100 square miles. TEMPO should be able to take accurate measurements from neighborhood to neighborhood, giving a comprehensive view of pollution from both the macro and micro levels.
This also gives us some unique opportunities to pick up new kinds of data, such as changing pollution levels throughout rush hour, the effects of lightning on the ozone layer, the movement of pollution related to forest fires and the long-term effects of fertilizers on the atmosphere, among other data points. More information is never bad.
TEMPO is the middle child in a group of high-powered instruments tracking pollution. South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer went up in 2020, measuring pollution over Asia, and the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite launches in 2024 to handle European and North African measurements. Other tracking satellites will eventually join TEMPO up there in the great black, including the forthcoming NASA instrument to measure the planet's crust.
You may notice that TEMPO flew into space on a SpaceX rocket and not a NASA rocket. This is by design, as the agency is testing a new business model to send crucial instruments into orbit. Paying a private company seems to be the more budget-friendly option when compared to sending up a rocket itself.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-launches-powerful-air-quality-monitor-to-keep-an-eagle-eye-on-pollution-170321643.html?src=rssNASA TEMPO launch
The NASA TEMPO launch seen at night from a distance, with the rocket blazing as it takes off.
It’s possible to retrieve forensically relevant information from human DNA in household dust, a new study finds.
After sampling indoor dust from 13 households, researchers were able to detect DNA from household residents over 90% of the time, and DNA from non-occupants 50% of the time. The work could be a way to help investigators find leads in difficult cases.
Specifically, the researchers were able to obtain single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, from the dust samples. SNPs are sites within the genome that vary between individuals—corresponding to characteristics like eye color—that can give investigators a “snapshot” of the person.
“SNPs are just single sites in the genome that can provide forensically useful information on identity, ancestry, and physical characteristics—it’s the same information used by places like Ancestry.com—that can be done with tests that are widely available,” says Kelly Meiklejohn, assistant professor of forensic science and coordinator of the forensic sciences cluster at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
“Because they’re single sites, they’re easier to recover for highly degraded samples where we may only be able to amplify short regions of the DNA,” Meiklejohn says.
“Traditional DNA analysis in forensics amplifies regions ranging from 100 to 500 base pairs, so for a highly degraded sample the large regions often drop out. SNPs as a whole don’t provide the same level of discrimination as traditional forensic DNA testing, but they could be a starting place in cases without leads.”
Meiklejohn and her team recruited 13 diverse households and took cheek swabs from each occupant along with dust samples from five areas within each home: the top of the refrigerator, inside the bedroom closet, the top frame of the front door, a bookshelf or photo frame in the living room, and a windowsill in the living room.
Utilizing massively parallel sequencing, or MPS, the team was able to quickly sequence multiple samples and target the SNPs of interest. They found that 93% of known household occupants were detected in at least one dust sample from each household. They also saw DNA from non-occupants in over half of the samples collected from each site.
“This data wouldn’t be used like traditional forensic DNA evidence—to link a single individual to a crime—but it could be useful for establishing clues about the ancestry and physical characteristics of individuals at a scene and possibly give investigators leads in cases where there may not be much to go on,” Meiklejohn says.
“But while we know it is possible to detect occupants versus non-occupants, we don’t know how long an individual has to stay in a household before they leave DNA traces in household dust.”
The researchers plan to address the question of how much time it takes for non-occupants to be detected in dust in future studies. Meiklejohn sees the work as being useful in numerous potential investigative scenarios.
“When perpetrators clean crime scenes, dust isn’t something they usually think of,” Meiklejohn says. “This study is our first step into this realm. We could see this being applied to scenarios such as trying to confirm individuals who might have been in a space but left no trace blood, saliva, or hair. Also for cases with no leads, no hit on the national DNA database, could household dust provide leads?”
The NC State College of Veterinary Medicine funded the work. Additional coauthors are from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NC State.
Source: NC State
The post Household dust harbors forensic DNA info appeared first on Futurity.
Archer Aviation and United Airlines announced a partnership today to launch a commercial air taxi route in Chicago. The companies plan to open the flight path between downtown and O’Hare International Airport in 2025.
Besides being United’s headquarters and largest hub, Chicago's airport commute makes it an ideal testbed for flying taxis. For example, the drive to or from O’Hare, in the western suburb of Rosemont, can take anywhere from 35 minutes to over an hour, depending on traffic; even in one of the city’s elevated trains, it can take around 45 minutes. But Archer estimates a flight in one of its air taxis will only take 10 minutes to travel from O’Hare to its destination at a downtown helipad. The program will initially be limited to the mainline O’Hare / downtown route, but the companies eventually plan to add smaller paths to surrounding communities.
Archer describes the upcoming route as “cost competitive” for passengers without going into specifics. But even if it’s initially limited to deep-pocketed business travelers, the program should be good for the environment. Archer’s air taxis use electric motors and batteries and don’t produce emissions. “This exciting new technology will further decarbonize our means of transportation, taking us another step forward in our fight against climate change,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot. “I’m pleased that Chicago residents will be among the first in the nation to experience this innovative, convenient form of travel.”
The partnership is the latest in United’s aggressive investments in flying taxis. Last year, the airline ordered at least 200 electric flying taxis from Eve Air Mobility; that followed a $10 million deposit it placed with Archer the month prior.
In addition to Chicago’s (ground-based) taxis and ride shares, the city has a robust public transportation system built around elevated trains and buses, the latter of which the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has committed to converting to electric by 2040. (The CTA already deploys 23 electric buses.) If all goes according to plan, the flight path will help decrease emissions and traffic congestion, something most Chi-town residents can get behind.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/united-and-archer-will-open-an-air-taxi-route-to-chicagos-ohare-airport-in-2025-191352804.html?src=rssArcher Aviation air taxi
Rendering of a fleet of Archer Aviation Air Taxis (with United branding) taking off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. We see one taxi taking off in the foreground with several others grounded behind it.
Industrial action going ahead despite hopes of breakthrough on pay, conditions and pensions last week
Universities in the UK have been hit by strike action once again, despite hopes of a breakthrough last week with an offer from employers on pay, working conditions and pensions.
Tens of thousands of staff at 150 universities pressed ahead with planned strikes on Monday in the first of three days of industrial action this week, with many branches claiming big turnouts on picket lines.
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On Wednesday, Netflix released a new documentary looking at how Pornhub came to be and the controversies (and lawsuits) that ensued. Directed by Suzanne Hillinger, Money Shot: The Pornhub Story features interviews with both porn stars reliant on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans for income, as well as with the anti-trafficking activists who sought to stop the rampant exploitation, rape, and non-consensual imagery (including videos of minors) on the site.
The film begins with a cutesy complilation of porn stars sharing their first experiences with porn. A number of these stories are pre-internet, meaning they do sound quaint in comparison to what kids see now, at ever younger ages, online. We’re talking 80s Playboys and fairy tale-themed “erotic movies” on Cinemax. Even I found such things confusing and disturbing when I accidentally encountered them as a kid, but apparently people think this stuff is cute and kitschy nowadays — ah the fond childhood memories of adult sex. A young woman named Noelle Perdue, though, grew up in the internet age, and describes going onto Pornhub at 11 years old, where she discovered “an eight person geriatric gangbang” — more fitting of the modern day norm.
Perdue worked in the porn industry for a number of years — namely, she worked as a writer, producer, and talent acquirer at MindGeek. Despite this apparent conflict of interest, she served as a “consultant” on the Money Shot. Perdue appears not to be the only industry representative to have had input.
Though the documentary can claim to show “both sides,” the narrative is shaped by industry advocates disguised as “independent sex workers.” One interviewee, Asa Akira, is in fact Pornhub’s spokeperson and brand ambassador. The other porn performers interviewed may not literally have that job title, but are reliant on these kinds of sites for their income and are invested in ensuring their industry and the sites they profit from don’t get a bad rep or get shut down entirely.
While including industry voices in a documentary purporting to expose or at least delve into accusations of serious criminal activity and sexual exploitation is reasonable, allowing those invested in ensuring the industry is not shut down or that profit is not restricted in any way (say, by blocking consumers from using their credit cards on porn sites) to control the narrative is going to compromise the final result. No one working directly for Pornhub is going to admit the company and the industry as a whole profits from trafficking, exploitation, rape, and child porn.
Missing from the film are women who have left the porn industry, now free to tell the truth about their experiences; researchers who might offer data and insight into who goes into porn and why, mental health, STDs, and addiction in the industry; psychological or physical impacts on the women involved; and trafficking victims themselves. Even porn producers, as evidenced by Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot’s series, Beyond Fantasy (in particular, the third episode in the series, “Hardcore,” which drops March 23), can offer insight into the manipulation, coercion, and sadism behind the scenes claimed as “consensual,” provided you ask the right questions. The producers could have asked the “consenting sex workers” featured about their pasts and experiences — how and why they ended up in porn, and what’s happened to them in the industry — but they chose not to.
The primary voices featured in the documentary who offer a critical view of the industry are connected to the anti-trafficking groups going after PornHub — namely Exodus Cry (founded by Nolot) and NCOSE — who are dismissed as Christian fundamentalists with ulterior motives.
Like many debates, the porn debate is treated as two-sided: there are the “sex workers” fighting for the right to sell sex legally, free from “censorship” (the little guy), and then there are the moralistic, anti-sex, religious conservatives who wish to repress sexuality and are campaigning against the little guy’s freedom.
We are offered “choice” or “no choice.” “Freedom” or “North Korea.” Pro-sex or anti-sex.
But this is not the story. It’s not even a story. In truth, porn is a multi billion dollar industry that uses a few “happy hookers” as politically convenient representatives to speak on their behalf, disguising the dark truth behind the sex trade.
There are many reasons to oppose the sex industry — including impact on users’ brains, mental health, and relationships, as well as impact on the women and girls in porn — yet most the critical are framed as “hating women’s bodies,” “trying to control women’s sexualities,” or “ being prudish/anti-sex.” Dismissing critics as religious extremists is always popular, as it scares off liberals and progressives from engaging with anti-porn arguments. Including voices like mine — a free speech and civil liberties advocate who comes from a leftist and feminist background and is far from “anti-sex” — complicates the narrative. Broadening context to include women’s stories about their pasts and experiences in the industry disrupts the simplified “consenting adult” narrative. Talking about men’s choices to consume abusive and dehumanizing pornography, or porn that sexualizes “teens” or childern is almost always left out of the conversation.
The “let adults do what they like” almost always applies to women, except when framed as “policing people’s sexualities,” which implies a form of thought policing, but conveniently excludes the fact that porn is not relegated to people’s imaginations.
Industry advocates are sure to restrict the discussion of disturbing categories like “teen” to one of “consenting adults” who are free to imagine whatever they like. Perdue claims the “teen” category “doesn’t necessarily refer to teenagers,” and that “it’s more in reference to a body type” — a rather genius defense, because it ignores the fact that sexualizing minors and encouraging men to masturbate to their degradation creates a market for actual teen porn and encourages men to view teen girls as sexual objects.
Siri Dahl, a porn performer featured extensively throughout the film, seems only to be concerned about categories like “teen,” in terms of finding “solutions to tagging” that don’t “police people’s sexualities, which they’re allowed to have because they’re a legal adult.” In other words, it’s not the content itself, it’s that the “teen” category doesn’t sound great on paper. Unfortunately, Pornhub’s customers love it, so what can you do, eh?
Just to hammer in the point, the producers include another performer, Cherie Deville (playing a creepily stepfordesque character), saying:
“We’re providing entertainment within the legal bounds for consenting adults, and within that buffet of pornographic content, that adult, if they choose to consume it, can choose… anything.”
It all felt incredibly rehearsed, as though Pornhub lawyers have fed lines to these women. By carefully presenting performers as “independent, empowered sex workers,” the film’s producers construct a conversation about “free choice,” and are able to avoid the fact porn sells abuse, objectification, and exploitation, regardless of “consent.” And that within that “consent” — those contracts signed, what happens on set involves a hell of a lot of coercion.
When we talk about porn, we aren’t talking about independents — we are talking about a massive, multi-billion dollar industry. Shoving “independent sex workers” to the forefront to pretend as though holding Pornhub execs to account is really an attack on these empowered women, just trying to get by so–please-be-nice-and-stop-talking-about-trafficking-it’s-awkward-for-us is gross.
I don’t know if the makers of Money Shot were simply naive, or if they had biased intentions from the get go, but they buy into the manufactured David and Goliath narrative full force.
The intent behind Money Shot is to argue that porn is a clean, happy industry full of enthusiastically consenting women, and that the “dark side” — child porn, trafficking, and nonconsensual content — is completely separate from that and only a tiny minority of the industry (in fact, they claim it’s not a part of the industry at all) — an accident led by bad actors who are dragging the industry’s reputation down unfairly.
This is not the case. The happy hooker fantasy has always only represented a tiny minority of women, and usually doesn’t tell their whole story anyway. The few stories of exploitation and abuse that make it into the mainstream represent only a sliver. Indeed, even the so-called “consenting” women tell horrific tales once they are free to do so and able to reflect back honestly.
~~~
The documentary does of course acknowledge that a few bad things went down on Pornhub.
MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, was sued by numerous plaintiffs who accused them of distributing and profiting from child pornography and nonconsensual sex videos. The company was undoubtedly aware that this content was displayed on Pornhub, as numerous women and teen girls had emailed them, desperate to have their images removed from the site, but the company was not pressed to do anything about it. Nonconsensual videos would stay up for months after complaints were filed, and when they were removed, they would immediately pop up again on the site.
MindGeek claimed it “instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history,” but until the lawsuits had only 30 human moderators employed to monitor millions of videos on Pornhub and did not have any verification process in place for users uploading content. Even after a verification process was put into place (which women like DeVille and Perdue claimed “sex workers” were begging for, as it would resolve the problem of pesky rape videos popping up on the site), there was still no age or consent verification required for the women featured in the videos. Anyone with an ID could still upload what they liked.
~~~
In an article for Rolling Stone, a DeVille writes, “anti-sex-trafficking campaigns are anti-porn campaigns in disguise.” She complains that the “war on Pornhub is a proxy war to take down the entire legal sex work industry” and that “what they really want is to shut down Porn Valley.”
And honestly she’s right.
I don’t want to just stop child pornography or trafficking on Pornhub. I don’t want to just see Pornhub shut down on account of isolated incidences of rape and nonconsensual videos found on the site. I want to make it next to impossible to profit from pornography, because I want it to be next to impossible to profit from the exploitation, abuse, and dehumanization of women and girls. I don’t want to simply “take down” the “legal sex industry,” because of course much of what happens in the sex trade is not legal — I actually believe that the porn industry as a whole should be illegal. I do not think it should be legal to pay another person for sex or to profit by coercing another person to engage in sex acts.
Realistically, I don’t believe we can end porn or prostitution entirely. But we could make it impossible for companies like Pornhub to exist, make profiting from porn illegal, and ensure a porn set must comply with labour standards, including health and safety standards and laws against sexual harassment and assault, thereby rendering everything that happens on a porn set illegal.
One of the common threads throughout Money Shot was the one of the empowered independent performer, making her own content happily, from the comfort of her home, under attack by these attempts to go after trafficking and abuse in the industry. And while I feel very badly for women who feel dependent on porn for survival, I don’t feel bad for the women who could choose something else — who have the means, education, options, and privilege — but instead choose to shill for a vile industry responsible for the trauma of countless women and girls around the world. The idea that the horror of the industry should be accepted because one woman managed to buy a house with her earnings is not good enough for me.
Whether they intended to or not, the filmmakers did little more than produce propaganda for an industry that hardly needs a boost.
For further discussion of this film and the debate surrounding the industry, you can watch a conversation between Benji Nolot, Alix Aharon, and myself which aired live on YouTube Thursday, March 16th.
The post Money Shot’s big lie appeared first on Feminist Current.
Unions and UCEA declare agreement ‘on terms of reference for detailed negotiations’ on pay and conditions
University staff have made a breakthrough in their months-long dispute with employers during which lecturers have gone on strike, worked to rule and refused to cover for absent colleagues across the UK.
A group of five higher education trade unions and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) announced agreement “on terms of reference for detailed negotiations covering a review of the UK higher education pay spine, workload, contract types and equality pay gaps”.
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The disdain shown to us by Queen Mary University of London inspired me to redouble my efforts on the picket lines. Staff and students have had enough
On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.
I hadn’t always felt so jaded. I finished my PhD in law in 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research, working in the subject I cared passionately about. But several things quickly became clear. There was the increasing precarity of university labour: one-third of academics are on fixed-term contracts, 41% are on hourly paid contracts and there are still 29 institutions employing at least five academic staff on zero-hours contract. In 2021, it was reported that pay had been cut by 20% in real-terms over the past 12 years, while changes to the pension scheme mean that we’ve taken a 35% cut to our guaranteed retirement income despite contributing more. Meanwhile, university and college staff are doing the equivalent of two days’ unpaid work every week on average. It’s an environment that leaves me feeling, like many others, disillusioned and questioning my future.
Dr Tanzil Chowdhury is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
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Cerebral, a telehealth startup that gained popularity during the early days of the pandemic, disclosed this week that it shared the personal data of more than 3.1 million US patients with social media companies and advertisers, including Google, Meta and TikTok. As first reported by TechCrunch (via The Verge), a recently uploaded notice on Cerebral’s website reveals the company had been using “pixels,” tracking scripts companies like Meta offer to third-party developers for advertising purposes, to collect user data since it began operating in October 2019.
Following a recent review of its software, Cerebral “determined that it had disclosed certain information that may be regulated as protected health information under [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act].” Among the data Cerebral shared are names, phone numbers, birth dates and insurance information. In some instances, the company may have also exposed information it collected through the mental health self-assessment patients completed to schedule counseling appointments and access other services. According to Cerebral, it did not disclose social security numbers, bank information or credit card numbers.
After learning of the oversight, Cerebral says it “disabled, reconfigured, and/or removed” the tracking pixels that caused the data exposure. “In addition, we have enhanced our information security practices and technology vetting processes to further mitigate the risk of sharing such information in the future.” The US Department of Health and Human Services is investigating Cerebral. News of the data exposure comes after the Federal Trade Commission fined discount drug app GoodRx $1.5 million for sharing patient information with Meta and Google. Earlier this month, the agency announced a $7.8 million settlement with online counseling company BetterHelp and said it was seeking to ban the company from sharing health data for ad targeting.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mental-health-startup-cerebral-shared-private-patient-data-with-google-meta-and-tiktok-223806251.html?src=rssCerebral
Screenshot from Cerebral's website.
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