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The issue of prostitution in Canada has been left mostly uncovered. The debate in the public sphere tends to centre around questions of “women’s choices,” and the left chants “sex work is work” in an effort to frame the problems in the sex trade as being resolvable via regulation and labour standards. Meanwhile, the men who pay for sex and exploit women in trade are ignored.
In this episode, I speak with Andrea Heinz and Kathy King, co-authors of a soon-to-be-released book, When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays? Canadian Stories of Exploitation, Survival, and Advocacy.
Andrea Heinz is a Canadian feminist who spent seven years in Edmonton’s licensed and regulated sex trade. She is completing a University degree in Governance, Law & Management and is married with three young children.
Kathy King is a clinical social worker (BA, BSW, MSW) with over five decades of professional employment and volunteer advocacy. In 1997, her passion became personal when she lost her only daughter to drug addiction, mental illness, and exploitation. Her story is shared at MissingCara.ca. Kathy lives in Edmonton with her husband.
The post Beyond a woman’s choice: the real story of prostitution in Canada appeared first on Feminist Current.
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.
Last week, a scandal errupted after a male Twitch streamer known as Atrioc (Brandon Ewing) was caught watching AI-generated deepfake porn of two female Twitch streamers. The two streamers were understandably upset, with one of the women, Pokimane, tweeting, “Stop sexualising people without their consent. That’s it, that’s the tweet.”
stop sexualizing people without their consent.
that’s it, that’s the tweet.
— pokimane (@pokimanelol) January 31, 2023
The controversy lead people to the site selling the deepfakes, and AI-generated porn of other female Twitch streamers was also discovered. One woman, Sweet Anita, tweeted: “I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead… Don’t know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point.”
This story was how I found out that I'm on this website. I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead. Don't know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point. https://t.co/voNoxRyVBd
— Sweet Anita (@sweetanita) January 30, 2023
QTCinderella — another streamer who discovered deepfake porn of her was being sold on the site — appeared most distraught, streaming a reaction video where she says, through tears:
“Fuck the internet, fuck the constant exploitation and objectification of women — it’s exhausting… Fuck Atrioc for showing it to thousands of people. Fuck the people DMing me pictures of myself from that website. Fuck you all.
… This is what it looks like to feel violated. This is what it feels like to be taken advantage of, this is what it looks like to see yourself naked against your will being spread all over the internet.
… If you are not able to look at women who are not selling themselves, or benefitting off of being seen sexually — they’re not benefitting, they’re not selling it, they’re not platforming it themselves — if you are able to look at that, you are the problem. You see women as an object. You should not be ok doing that.”
Atrioc posted a tearful apology, explaining that this is not a “pattern of behaviour” and that “it was just one video.” It was at 2AM, he explained. His wife was out of town, and he was on Pornhub — “a regular-ass, normal website” — when he clicked on an ad that “was on every fucking video” for a “deepfake thing.” Atrioc was deeply upset with himself, as a man who “wants women on Twitch to feel safer,” insisting his behaviour was “disgusting,” adding, “I don’t support this stuff… I regret it, I would never do it again as long as I live.”
It’s clear why deepfake porn is disturbing — imagine discovering images of yourself engaged in degrading, humiliating, graphic acts, being viewed by thousands online, and you didn’t even do those things. You have no control over these images, you can’t take them down, and not only that, but some creep is making money off of this. It would be incredibly disorienting. Certainly it would feel like a violation. I get it. Probably most women get it.
Yet, the responses have been strange.
There are complaints about “objectification,” but tied only to lack of consent, and the fact that the women are not being compensated or “benefitting” from the porn.
In a podcast conversation including QTCinderella, Hasan Piker, one of Twitch’s most-watched streamers, Will Neff, and Mike Majlak, they discuss what happened, and hear QTCinderella explain how badly it impacted her, psychologically. The men engage in a 20 minute long discussion of porn and prostitution, which they view as innocuous, while condemning “objectification” and nonconsensual deepfakes as terrible.
Piker tells a story about having visited a megabrothel in Germany called Artemis, complaining that the internet has never let him forget that it was raided in 2016 on account of rampant exploitation and trafficking. He claims it was in fact raided on account of tax evasion, but this charge is connected to the exploitative structure of the brothel. Artemis designated the women working in the brothel as “self-employed,” though they were in fact “regular employees with set work hours, price rates and instructions to perform specific sexual acts.” Many lived in the brothel. Anywhere where there is prostitution there is trafficking and exploitation, and this is applicable to all of these German megabrothels. Indeed, a flat-rate brothel chain called “Pussy Club,” which saw 1,700 men lined up to get in on its opening day in 2009, was shut down a year later for human trafficking. Michael Beretin, manager of the famous Paradise brothel chain, was arrested in 2015 on suspicion of human trafficking, forced prostitution, and fraud.
Despite leftists claiming legalization will “keep women safe,” the truth is that this only creates more prostitution, which means more trafficking, more abuse, and more exploitation. Someone has to fill the brothels after all, and there simply are not enough women who volunteer. The women in the famous legal brothels of Germany are full of Roma women, trafficked from across Europe to fill demand. The Roma are among the poorest, most marginalized, most discriminated against, and most vulnerable women in all of Europe. They are, according to reports, “treated like animals.” In 2019, The Guardian reported that “the huge growth of the sex industry post-legalization has fuelled a rising demand for women.” Augsburg’s chief police inspector, Helmut Sporer, estimated that more than 90% of the women working in Germany’s sex trade come from south-east Europe and Africa, and that half are under 21. Any man who goes to one of these brothels is participating in exploitation and supporting the trafficking of women.
Piker, who has, according to Neff, “fucked a lot of porn stars,” continues to insist his fanaticism for the sex trade equates to “defending sex workers,” chalking criticisms up to the fact “America is very puritanical and patriarchal.”
When asked if he had ever paid for sex, Piker said, “I’ve gone to a brothel, Artemis, in Berlin, and had sex with the workers there. I don’t hide it. I don’t give a shit. Why would I?”
Sex work is work, after all. No shame, no stigma.
Thanks to the progressive push to normalize and “destigmatize” prostitution and pornography (rebranded “sex work”), men not only need feel no shame about paying women for sex, they can feel proud. They are helping these women. They are fighting the patriarchy!
In truth, the left has simply decided that payment equates to consent. They don’t ask questions about what got that woman there to that brothel or onto that porn set, who the money is going to, how she feels about the things men do to her in exchange for payment, and how that might impact her down the road. A clean conscience is what they desire, not ethics. Reality is replaced by cult-like mantras like, “sex work is work” and critical thought-ending statements about “consent.” Modern leftist clownworld ideology has gifted men who use porn or buy sex with the ability to see themselves as feminist heros, uplifting and empowering women every time they cum.
The entire conversation among Piker, Neff, and Majlak conveniently lacks any deeper thought about their platitudes. “Consent” allowed for a self-congratulatory circle-jerk, with a few first year gender studies jabs at “patriachies” and “puritans” thrown in, in exchange for reflection and genuine analysis.
Neff seemed baffled at his realization that once he met porn stars in real life, and engaged with them as regular human beings, he could no longer “jerk off” to them.
The obvious conclusion to anyone willing and able to make such connections is that pornography is about objectification, regardless of “consent” — the entire point is to treat and view the women in porn not as full human beings who have complicated and unsexy things like families, feelings, interests, and desires of their own, but as living sex dolls. Were these women actual full human beings to the men watching (women who would, in reality, may be very unlikeable, annoying, troubled, or insane, or who actually have sexual preferences outside being choked with a dick), it would break the fantasy.
Objectification has nothing to do with consent, it has to do with how the viewer sees (and consequently treats) the object. And, to be clear, this is not about “finding women attractive.” Of course men find women attractive. Which is great. But there’s a reason you don’t want to see your girlfriend or your sister getting gangbanged in “Step-dad and uncle fuck teen babysitter.” The women you know and love are human to you, and, alas, you care about their feelings and wellbeing, and want them to be treated with respect.
Majlak, who dated Lana Rhoades, Pornhub’s most-searched-for porn star (even after having left the industry after just eight months, saying porn should be banned), complained to his co-hosts that “PTA mom-esque” types online were picking on him for promoting porn stars in his content.
Piker helpfully defends Majlak, telling him, “Anti-sex work sentiment has always existed, it’s just you’re humanizing adult workers.” as if anyone has a problem with “humanizing” these women aside from men who jack off to them in porn. The problem isn’t that Majlak is “humanizing” women in porn, it’s that he’s promoting an industry that abuses and exploits women, and selling an idea of the porn industry as a fun and cool place for women. (Notably, to an audience largely made up of teenagers.)
He of all people should know better.
Rhoades went into porn at 19, having no idea what she was getting into, thinking she was following in the footsteps of the “glamorous and beautiful” Playmates she watched on The Girls Next Door. She didn’t know she was going to have to engage in sex acts at all, never mind with a string of strange men, pushed into scenes that would leave her traumatized (but that the white knights of Twitch would surely call “consensual”).
Rhoades explains, as numerous others have, that the entire industry and career of a porn star is based on pressure and coercion. In a 2021 interview, she tells Playboy:
“You could get into the industry and say, I would never do a gang bang and I would never do this. You know that getting into it. But [agents] say things to you over time to sort of—what would the word be?—groom you into doing more… They’ll say things like, ‘Oh, all the good sluts do this. That’s how people are going to love you. If you do this, you have to do this and that.’ You don’t want to let anyone down, so you end up doing it over time.”
Rhoades came from a traumatic background, and was further traumatized in porn, used, abused, and spat out, left with money, sure, but also panic attacks, anxiety, and zero sexual desire. After leaving the industry, she famously told the truth women in the industry are meant to hide, saying, “I don’t think it’s good for anybody. They should make it illegal.” She described feeling like she was performing “circus acts” and that the industry was “infested with drugs and alcohol abuse.”
Consent is a joke for the young women being coerced and bullied into doing evermore extreme stuff, moving out of their comfort zones before they even have a chance to process what’s happening, pressured to continue with scenes that are painful, violent, and/or traumatic, under threat of not getting paid, losing future jobs, and causing everyone on set to lose a day’s work if she can’t or won’t complete the scene. “Consent” truly flies out the window afterwards, as those videos and images remain online for eternity, regardless of whether she wants them there or not.
Rhoades called pornography “a life sentence,” saying, “I can’t hide from it and everywhere I go there’s someone who’s seen my films.”
While the woke men and women of Twitch offer condemnations and tearful apologies over AI deepfake porn, the real bodies of women whose lives have been destroyed by the sex industry are ignored on account of an analysis that ends with “consent.”
It has been interesting (and frustrating) watching the emotional and dramatic reactions to this scandal, as my view is that, while AI deepfake porn is indeed morally repungnant and signals a disturbing new frontier in porn culture, “regular porn” is worse. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of women and girls who are being abused, exploited, and traumatized, for profit, across the world, for the temporary pleasure of men who don’t give one single shit what happens to those women and girls after they cum.
There is nothing redeeming about this industry. It doesn’t matter who “chooses” or “consents” to what, because this isn’t just about either the individual watching or even the individual being watched. This is about a multi-billion industry that exists because women and girls are pushed past their limits, manipulated, taken advantage of, exploited, abused, and forced. It impacts all girls and women everywhere, as well as men, and their relationships with the women and girls around them.
QtCinderella herself seems to know this, having complained about “hot tub streams” that began appearing on Twitch back in 2021, explaining that when women on the platform are sharing sexualized, porny videos of themselves, it puts pressure on other female streamers to do the same:
“I’m sick of being harassed and being told to get naked in a hot tub because it’s late at night [and] when I’m just chatting, I’m surrounded by other girls in hot tubs so it’s expected of me to be in a hot tub. It’s exhausting. I just want to wear a hoodie and watch a YouTube video.”
This isn’t about just you, or even about just her. Porn is such a massive industry, and so massively normalized, consumed by countless people around the world, so deeply incorporated with everything we see and do — online, in ads, in pop culture, all over Instagram and Twitter — it’s wholly unavoidable. Kids today start looking at porn as early as 11, shaping their sexualities before they even know what sexuality is. Men expect their female partners to participate in the fantasies and acts they’ve seen played out on screen. Young women perform for men based on what they think those men want — based on what they’ve seen in porn, ignoring their own desires, pleasure, and emotional/psychological wellbeing. Men like Piker and his fellow pontificators like to claim only those who grew up in “puritanical and patriarchal” households objectify women, while they promote an industry that exists to profit from the objectification of women, growing their followings and profits in doing so.
Piker summarizes the entire analysis offered by the woke, telling QT Cinderella, “It’s because there’s no consent — you didn’t consent, it’s completely outside of your control, and that’s what the problem is, right?” But that’s not the whole problem. The problem is porn, and that men have been groomed by porn to believe any woman is up for grabs — we can and should all be pornifiable, hence the deepfakes. And none of this will be addressed so long “consent” is allowed to end the conversation.
The post ‘It’s because there’s no consent — that’s what the problem is’ appeared first on Feminist Current.
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