SIO274: A Pornhub Rebuttal with Tom Curry

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 274. I'm Thomas, coming at you on the weekend. A little different scheduling, but that's because this one is long overdue. You may recall a few episodes back, Eli Bosnick came on to discuss Nicholas Kristof's op-ed for the New York Times that criticized Pornhub. It brought a lot of condemnation, it brought some boycotting, it brought Amex, and I think Visa said they would no longer allow payments through Pornhub, all kinds of stuff. Go and check that episode out if you haven't heard it already, and today, it's interesting because, not to rehash the entire episode, but Eli talked about the religious influence and the fact that there's a kind of a radical anti-porn Christian group behind some of the examples in the article.

0:01:19 Thomas: And also Eli talked about the harms done to sex workers at a time, especially during a pandemic when that of anyone needs their income. I mean, so there was a lot of talk from that angle and sort of a sex worker advocacy, sex positive kind of angle. And you know, it's interesting. There was almost no pushback that I saw to that episode. Almost none. I did see a comment later on that somebody said they, they thought that Pornhub didn't have a good way to report it one time when they saw something awful on PornHub, which again, I don't, I don't really use PornHub, so that's kind of hard. I can't really evaluate that, but I take their word for it. But other than that, almost no pushback, which I thought was interesting. I thought that was going to be perhaps a little more controversial, except Tom, turns out there is somebody who does really disagree with Eli's take, and that is Tom from Cognitive Dissonance, and of course they share a podcast, Citation Needed, Tom Curry from those shows.

0:02:14 Thomas: Disagrees with that episode pretty strongly and wanted to come on and give his side of things, and I think this will be very interesting to see things from that angle. So without further ado, I will note this was recorded a while back and then all the Georgia news and the election news, that and the insurrection. So it did get delayed. Apologies to Tom for that, but it's a vital evergreen topic. So here we go with Tom Curry from Cognitive Dissonance about Pornhub.

0:02:50 Thomas: And I'm joined by Tom of Cognitive Dissonance and, of course, Citation Needed. How are you doing, Tom?

0:02:57 Tom: Tom uh well wait can we have two toms on the same well no because you're thomas so we don't get to

0:03:00 Thomas: One of us has to have a mustache, I think, is the key. And it's got to be you, because my mustache is bullshit.

0:03:01 Tom: Okay all right so don't we oh is it my mustache grows at three times the speed of my beard there

0:03:10 Thomas: Oh, well, I Think We've Found a Win-Win. This is perfect. So you have a moustache.

0:03:13 Tom: It is there it it is

0:03:14 Thomas: I can't. I'll shave mine. I'll have just the beard part.

0:03:14 Tom: Okay do both of both of my teenage sons are starting to grow the shitty you know dish waiter mustache you know like the the the weird and they refuse to shave it off because they I think they think it looks cool and they look oh god it's the only reason I'm glad for the pandemic thomas is so that nobody can see these horrible people

0:03:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. It does not. Yeah that was the only advantage of me having no mustache growing ability is I didn't have so I had I had a bit of the chops you know in high school I had about the sideburns yeah I was like that was fine that doesn't look that's silly but like yeah oh

0:03:40 Tom: Oh did you you had see I was I was a teenager of the 90s so of course I had a goatee I had a shitty goateee in high school I have actually not been clean shaven since high school so I had No idea what I look like under this thing.

0:03:52 Thomas: My god yeah that's no good oh man nice so We've gotten the facial hair discussion sorted out, you're going mustache, I'll go not, uh, in two times, but Yeah, you uh, you feel really passionate about responding to Eli Lie in on the last episode, and I am very excited to hear what you have to say, so why don't you just go sure

0:04:11 Tom: I do I Do, yeah, thank you so much. So, um, you props to Eli for for taking the subject on, and I, and I, and I'm going to say some things here, and I made sure to actually call Eli and let him know that I was doing this so that he wouldn't feel, uh, sort of personally called out, but I'm gonna personally call him out. I think Eli missed the boat almost entirely on his discussion about the Children of Pornhub article, and I thought a lot about this over the last few weeks and about how to respond to the issues that he has with the article. And then I listened to your show the other night, and I thought about this, and I really think the way to talk about this, or to begin structuring the conversation about this, is to do something that I think Eli should have done in the very beginning, which is to take on the content of the article rather than pulling out one or two relatively small pieces of the the article, and then not addressing the points that are illustrated with those examples.

0:05:04 Tom: And what I mean by that is, in the last show, Eli spent a huge amount of time, a huge amount of times, dissecting the connection between one example that's given by Christoph in the article and the connection that that has to a Christian organization, none of which I'm disputing. It's fine. But all of which misses the point of the article and is actually in volume, a relatively small amount of the actual article.

So if we start with the article itself, the article makes the point in the very beginning that Pornhub attracts a huge number of people. It's one of the most powerful, largest websites on the Internet. It's got 3.5 billion visits a month. We're going to use some other numbers as we talk about this a little bit. It. It's a massive, massive website. 6.83 million new videos posted each year to this site. Eli spends a huge amount of time talking about one example. So the example, and I want to start there. The one example that he takes issue with is the example from Trafficking Hub, which again is connected to Exodus Cry, which is a Christian organization. And that's only a tiny part of the the article, and it's illustrative of a point.

It is not necessarily problematic in and of itself that it comes from a Christian organization. What I mean by that is, if a Christian organization says, hey, there's a thousand homeless people on the street, and we want to feed them all so that we can proselytize to them and turn them to Jesus, that would be the wrong motivation. But it doesn't change the fact that there's 1000 homeless people So the fact that something is connected to a Christian organization is, if we're being entirely fair, it's something that we should probably disclose. And Christoph didn't disclose that. I think that's a failure on his part.

0:06:56 Thomas: Well and the part that uh for me was the stupidest thing ever was the tweet he specifically linked that was obviously a fake porn set and he linked it as though that's

0:06:57 Tom: No, see, I'm going to fight with you on that. So let's fight about that. That. So first of all, what are you supposed to do? If you find something, let's say that you are a 20-year veteran of the New York Times or two Pulitzer Prizes, and you find something and you source it, you can't actually link to somebody's rape. You can't do that. You're going to link to things that people can actually click on, right? You're gonna link to things that exist somewhere else in the Twitter sphere or you can't possibly link to somebody's rape, it's not a standard we hold any other accusation to, we don't, we know in 2017 when the Me Too movement came out and there was example after example after sample after example of women coming forward and saying, I was raped, I was harassed, when I, when, when Fox News had its big, big sexual harassment scandal.

0:07:04 Thomas: Sure go ahead that's

0:07:59 Tom: We took women's word for that, right? And we look at allegations and we decide that they're credible in part by saying, is there one example or are there five examples? Are there five examples or are other 10 examples? And if there's multiple examples of something that adds credibility to an allegation, there are so many examples, so many samples in this article alone, but also in dozens of corroborating articles, which are very, very elementary to find, which shows that there is a pervasive cultural problem at Pornhub of uploading videos that are non-consensual. So linking to like one Twitter video and saying like, well, that looks like a porn set. I'm going to fight with you on that.

0:08:45 Tom: Just because something looks like porn set doesn't mean that everybody on that set agreed to the actions in that porn.

0:08:52 Thomas: True but I think that linking this uncritically from as you say somebody who is a pulitzer are you

0:08:57 Tom: How do you know it's uncritically though? Like what if he sourced this, and just the source material that would otherwise back up this claim would be unethical to post a link to? We're we're assuming that this guy, again, all of a sudden, somebody who's been writing for the times I

0:09:10 Thomas: Telling me there's no better way for a Pulitzar Prize winning reporter to to cite an example than to link not to any sort of source material but to a tweet from a religious fundamentalist, characterizing something that, to anyone who has ever watched porn, it's very, very easy to see that this is a porn and set not something that happened organically that was filmed. I mean, come on, I feel like that's pretty reasonable to say this was not a good example to use.

0:09:22 Tom: Well, the maybe It was not a good example, but I think it's still a fair illustrative example of the problem that Pornhub has, where Pornhab has plenty of material on the the site that you can't vet the consent for, right? That's the whole point

0:09:52 Thomas: Yeah, that's fine. Well also if you're going to talk about me too they They actually, reporters do go to great pains to make sure things are sourced, and they, I don't believe they would link if, if we weren't in the opinion page, you know, because mind you, this is the opinion page, as, as Eli emphasized, this is where Bari Weiss did all her bullshit writing, this is where Brett Stevens writes, this know, we can sit there and assume that he's vetted it, but I, I don't know that the opinion page necessarily warrants that for sure, you know, like when he's citing a religious fundamentalist who has a bullshit institution and she, this is a link to a tweet, I mean that's not reporting, I mean let's come on, like if, if this, if you're saying this is going to be vetted, he should have, uh, interviewed her, found the source of it, gone to that source, and, uh, you can link something in black bar all over it if you want or something.

0:09:55 Tom: Of that.

0:10:42 Thomas: Find some better way to cite it rather than, uh, tweeting out promoting a fundamentalist religious person, sure.

0:10:48 Tom: Yeah, I don't know that this is necessarily promoting the fundamentalist religious person at all, but, and I intended to do this movie, I'll grant you that that was clumsy. I'll just grant that that wasn't the bulk of this article. The bulk of the article, the vast bulk of of this article, deals with people that he presumably has spoken to because he's quoting them directly. It also speaks to direct experiences that Kristoff has in engaging with Pornhub's site and the material that he finds on that site. And it deals with this, and I think most importantly, in the piece that we didn't talk about or Eli didn't talking about, is it deals with the structural problems of sites like PornHub, PornHub specifically, but also sites Sites like Pornhub, which cannot be made to deal ethically with the issues of sex and consent.

And because structurally they're unable to ethically deal with the issue of sex and consent, as consumers, which is what this is aimed after, right? He's not calling for regulatory change. None of his suggestions are calling for laws or regulations. This is an article aimed to say, hey, man, when you go to PornHub,

0:11:06 Thomas: I agree on that yeah yeah yeah

0:12:03 Tom: It's not, as he puts in the very beginning of the article, it is not the cheery winking face of naughty that's how he opens up this article, right? I think that's really important for people to know, because I'm not entirely convinced that up until article of this, this article, this opinion piece which opened up a national dialogue around porn and porn tube sites, I'm not sure people gave that as much thought as they, as they should have, or maybe as they would have. Eli talks a lot in his first piece with you, which we'll talk about, about the sort of chilling or deadening effect that MasterCard and Visa and Discover's action has taken and the damage that's done potentially to sex workers. But those are private companies taking private actions. That's not regulation. That is not sex abolition. That are

0:12:10 Thomas: Sure sorry what

0:12:55 Tom: Private companies.

0:12:55 Thomas: So what's what's the argument are you saying that it's so well okay I guess I don't understand the argument you're making go ahead let

0:13:00 Tom: I think that's a red herring and a distraction, and I think it's dishonest, in terms of the sort of moral calculus that we apply to other companies. But let's go through the article a little bit and establish a few things. So last year, Pornhub, according to their website, allowed for the upload of 6.83 million videos. 6.8 million videos is about 116 years worth of material. That's from PornHub's year in review site. So that's 116 years worth of video. Eli claims that all of those videos have been viewed, that the human moderator watches them. They watch them all on Fast Forward, but they watch them.

0:13:48 Tom: I would contend that that is a meaningless interaction, that you might be able to watch them and find a toddler. Toddler, can you watch 116 years worth of videos on fast forward, um, and find out, and see if somebody is 16 versus 18? Do you have any idea when you watch that video whether it was created with consent? Do you have any idea whether it was uploaded with consent? Do you have any idea whether the actions in that video were actually a sexual assault versus a staged sexual assault? It's literally impossible it

0:14:27 Thomas: Me ask you this is there a way that other porn would be dealing with that that you know like why wouldn't this apply to any porn we're going to watch anywhere

0:14:34 Tom: Would apply to any share site all it would apply it's Pornhub is a great example because they've made themselves the Kleenex or McDonald's of online pornography. No,

0:14:41 Thomas: But you are you saying that like old school porn set wouldn't be subject to these problems? We wouldn't, we would be totally certain that women have given consent on it

0:14:51 Tom: We wouldn't be totally Certain, we would be more certain, but we would not be totally certain, and that's problematic, right? I think so. So here's here's something where that this article, I think, brings to light that I want to talk about is I'm not at all convinced convinced particularly that the structural, the way that tube sites deal with the ethics around consent, should be acceptable to any consumer of pornography. I I would liken this to blood diamonds. I think diamonds are cool. I like diamonds.

Sometimes I buy diamonds for an engagement ring, right? So you buy diamonds, diamond earrings, diamond whatever they're beautiful. But if I found out I was buying blood diamonds, I would want to stop buying those blood diamonds. You have an an ethical responsibility as a consumer. You don't have to have pornography. It's not food or water. So you have an ethical responsibility, right? You have a responsibility to make sure that when you consume a good or a product, that you are consuming that good or product only if that good or product is produced in an ethical way. And if you can't be sure that it's produced in an ethicalway, that should give you pause about your consumption of that product. And I think the Children of Pornhub article, I think the intent of it is at the consumer level. It's not at a regulatory level.

0:14:52 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:16:11 Tom: We're really dishonest about this issue because I think people want free pornography. I really think it's a motivated reasoning problem. I think People really like free porn.

0:16:16 Thomas: Yeah well that's so funny that you're coming up from from From this angle, I actually was was coming at from a different angle, where I was thinking I would want some regulation on this. Like, I I think it might be true that, and and I have no no idea if Eli would agree with this or what, but it's something I was thinking about subsequently. I think I mentioned it on a stream or something, but I don't know. I think maybe when you talk about sex and consent and porn, maybe it's so important that, you know, there should be strict regulation on this, that you should have, maybe we should make it so that if there's a site like this, they come up with some mechanism of not just consent, but like ongoing consent, sent, you know.

Like some some way yeah and that's only going to happen through some sort of government regulation, I think. I don't know that there's any realistic way that any they would ever have the incentive. I mean, they're going to do things that they've already done, you know, that like Eli already mentioned, they're gonna do things here and there if they get sued or if they get negative press attention like they did, um, but I think my, my feeling on, on the whole credit card thing is that I think it is a bad thing if an article, um, is incorrect in what it's saying in some way and is relying on bad sources and there is a catastrophic response to very vulnerable people from credit card companies.

0:16:54 Tom: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, man. Yeah,

0:17:34 Thomas: I think that's a bad think I'm not saying they don't have the right to do it

0:17:34 Tom: So Yeah, so let's go through the article then, because I think you have exactly one bad example, and I think you have from this article many other examples, all of which are illustrative of larger issues, and all of which are borne out by many other corroborating articles. So if you go through the article from the very top, it relays the story about how you can go on a search for girls under 18, no space, or 14 year old leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren't of children being assaulted, but too many are. One thing that Eli pointed out or said, and I don't want to say pointed out, one thing Eli said was that Kristoff is saying that because he doesn't know how many child porn videos are on there, that he's just making some assumptions. If I went and purchased any other product and there was a non-zero amount of child pornography, that was involved in the making of any other product, I would stop buying that product.

0:17:37 Thomas: Sure yeah

0:18:37 Tom: You would too. You would stop buy that product specifically from a site which allows for search terms to do anything other than come up with no results found, what the fuck is wrong with you when you type in things, right?

0:18:44 Thomas: Yeah actually I agree with that yeah well I was gonna say like my response to that is my yeah I don't search for 14 year old on porn site that doesn't mean that you can't use a porn site you know what I mean like I

0:18:56 Tom: So of course you don't, right. Yeah. But that's what I'm saying thing is that Pornhub structurally returns results. Now, even if they returned, even if they return, well, they, they shouldn't, they should be creating filters, but I think that they're very purposely not creating these filters Because they want to drive traffic to their site because that's how they make all their money. And they want to return results for something called 14YO. You can't tell me that like Chris thought that nobody at PornHub, whose entire business is selling sex and selling access to sexually explicit material. No one's going to sell me the idea that like, oh, I didn't think to type in 14YO so I didn't create an anti that filter. PornHub

0:19:05 Thomas: Think is it the no space thing yeah hmm yeah well

0:19:39 Tom: Even suggests topics like young girl, exploited young girl. That's in their algorithm. They're building it into the structure of their organization. They are encouraging people to search, to click, to go down YouTube style rabbit rabbitholes on PornHub that leads people to videos which they have no idea because they have no vetting mechanism. They have no ideia if those videos are returning results which are consensual or not. And I have to think that if you are a consumer of pornography and you're sitting there with your fucking dick in your hand and you are about to pleasure yourself, you should want to know whether you are pleasuring yourself to someone's rape. And PornHub doesn't give a shit about that because they have not built any of the structures to guard against that in meaningful ways but

0:20:31 Thomas: That's a big claim that they haven't done it at all, I mean, Eli, you know, give some examples. And I think that I, and you also mentioned, you said that it suggests exploited

0:20:38 Tom: I'm going to say that I think they're terrible examples verified doesn't mean Anything

0:20:39 Thomas: Yeah hold on you suggest that it, well, I don't, if it, if they require, you know, photo ID for everybody in a video, that's, that's meaningful, that is I mean you might say there's problems with it that's certainly meaningful that's

0:20:49 Tom: I yeah I I don't know, I don't how meaningful it is, because to Eli's own point, um, he's, you can, you can get a fake ID, I could, I could upload a video of myself I could up people don't go through a lot of effort in order to trade child porn

0:21:02 Thomas: A lot of effort no you're so You're you're approaching it from a point of view that if something doesn't work 100, then it's not meaningful. I think it's meaningful if it works a lot of percent, you know, like 80, that's meaningful, that's not meaningless

0:21:08 Tom: Yeah.

0:21:19 Tom: I I think The the problem is when you're selling sex and you're selling sex, um, and sex work, and you're selling sex in bulk, um, to the tune of seven million, nearly seven million new videos on a site every year, that you've got, I mean, what, what would, what would a 10 error rate mean? A 10 percent error rate would be

0:21:19 Thomas: Yeah I would still say it's meaningful that you went from a hundred percent possibility to 10 that's meaningful I'm just picking up yeah

0:21:40 Tom: Yeah as a as a consumer yeah would want to know that, you know, if I was going to buy a blood, if I was gonna buy a diamond and they said, Oh, there's a 10% chance you're going to get a blood diamond. Would I buy a dime or would I just say, I'm not buying these diamonds?

0:21:48 Thomas: Well Also, it's complicated by the fact that, like, in this analogy you have the ability to be searching for, you know, like, all right, okay, I will go to the not blood diamond part of the website. You know, the part of this is, I guess, if people are really trying to find stuff and they're using these search terms, um, there's also, there's so much to talk about here, but But there's another component of this, which is, you know, our society and, and I don't know, maybe just the mentality of a lot of people looking for porn are looking for, I guess I can't say they're looking for like, know, real exploitation or whatever that per se, but they're, they're certainly looking for that as a fetish. Like they're Looking for a portrayal of certain things as a fetish and I Don't know what, you Know, like I suppose we, we, yeah,

0:22:35 Tom: Yeah. But, but you're right To access that content ends as soon as that content has no meaningful way to be verified as to whether or not it was produced and uploaded consensually. We,

0:22:51 Thomas: I, to finish my thought I'm saying that I don't know where so like that's why I want the government to get involved with regulating this Because if, if we're relying on, um, like some sort of market pressure is what I was going to say, like the market might want this stuff, you know, like honestly, like the market might just want there to be awful exploitation uh on the website. So the, you know, I actually, that's why I do come from the end of like, well, then we should maybe be taking a look at this and regulating it. Not that there's much chance of anything happening, that's, that's one of these problems.

Maybe the, the fact that, you know, it's so hard to get anything done in government because of Republicans means that I guess we have to try to use these very inaccurate tools to make change, you know. And like, the problem is, you know, a lot of very vulnerable people get hurt in that process, um, and then I guess if, if you're saying that's okay because there's some other vulnerable people who were getting hurt with the old ways, that's a, that's an argument and I get, maybe, maybe it's accurate, but it's also, it sucks that it, I don't think it's so clean cut, you know, if a lot of people are losing their source of income during a pandemic, um, that sucks, uh.

0:22:57 Tom: Yeah, yeah.

0:23:57 Tom: Yeah, it does. But I think the loss of jobs compared to rape and child pornography is in terms of moral calculus. Do remember the Hobby Lobby decision? I'm sure you do. The Hobby lobby decision came out, many people on the left, myself included, called for a boycott of Hobby Lobbie. And we called for a boycott of Hobby Lobby because we thought, geez, that's horrible to women, right? That's a horrible decision. It has wide-ranging effects. And, you know, ultimately, that is terrible to women. Hobby LobBY employs 43,000 people who, if a boycotts were successful, Hobby LobBy would be out of business, right. That is why you boycott something, is to try to create pressure. Once the decision was made, Hobby Libby could not do anything to roll that back. That was fucking Supreme Court precedent. But I still support a boycott on Hobby Lobby, even though if that were successful, 43,000 people would lose their jobs. It's a huge number of people. I recognize that the moral calculus doesn't change here. The same is true of Chick-fil-A. I don't eat at Chick-Fil-A, why? Because they have terrible anti-LGBTQ policies and positions, but most of the

0:24:11 Thomas: Oh right yeah I would

0:25:10 Tom: Employees don't have those positions. Politicians still I encourage people not to eat a chick-fil-a I do it publicly and Adamantly

0:25:16 Thomas: Draw a bit of a distinction here, okay? So let me, let me, it's a good argument, let me draw a little of a distinction because when you're talking about boycotting a profitable company for making a a bad decision, what I think we're all hoping is that their profit margin gets cut into, and that therefore executive shareholders, those kind of people are like, well shit, this policy or this moral decision we're making, if you want to call it that, is costing us more money, you know, then it's it's it's not worth costing us that money, so therefore we got to change our minds. I, I don't, I guess maybe I'm approaching it differently.

0:25:47 Tom: Yeah.

0:25:47 Thomas: But I don'T take the view that they're going to go out of business. I mean, these are very profitable companies, I assume, it'll just some some executive will get less of a bonus and then maybe they will try to change their decision um whereas

0:25:47 Tom: But yeah. But that's but hobby lobby is the perfect example because the ship had already sailed once the supreme court precedent was made it it doesn't make any difference what hobby lobby wants anymore

0:26:01 Thomas: Well no not necessarily yeah the the well no they could they could still go back on their decision. No, it gave well that decision gave them the ability to not cover certain thing or night, like right like, not pay insurance to cover certain things, but they could very much go that didn't mean every company had to not covered that stuff, it just meant companies had

0:26:05 Tom: No, But it established a precedent that allowed for that so that's now beyond hobby lobby

0:26:20 Thomas: Right so if you were were boycotting them out Of if you were boypotting them out of vindictiveness for that decision, then then yeah, but if your boycott is "please cover the uh reproductive uh health costs of your employees," then that is still a decision they can, they could still go back on that decision, um, but let me let me finish the thought because With Pornhub, the comparison I was going to make is when these credit card companies drop Pornhub, on one hand, yes, that is cutting into to Pornhub's bottom line, of course, but also, like, they very directly were allowing sex workers to get paid on the site. So it's more, it's like, it's more direct, I think, a little bit more direct than cutting into the, to the bottom line of the company. It's also that, that just took completely took away, when Pornhub did this, I think it keeps, according to Eli, anyway, it completely took away the ability for many people to get paid, like, that, like, instantaneously.

0:26:39 Tom: They they could I you know no Yeah.

0:27:16 Tom: So so let's let's chat about that a little little bit because what Pornhub did is they took off unverified users, right? So if you're making your living on PornHub, why would you not be a verified user?

0:27:25 Thomas: You should be verified. I know I totally agree

0:27:28 Tom: That doesn't actually make any sense to me. I'm making my living on Pornhub. I've monetized my channel on Porthub and yet I'm not a verified users. So are you not?

0:27:28 Thomas: With that yeah yeah and I think I did I ask you you listened to it more recently I thought I asked you I like well why why when they you know like I do think so my stance is and I agree with you and this is a diddy okay this is good, you know, we can agree on this. I think all users should be very, like I said earlier, if sex and consent and porn, it's too important to be left to, you know, to that. I think that every user, every person who appears in a video on Pornhub should, should have, uh, at least at the least identity validated, right?

0:27:40 Tom: I did. And he skirted the issue. Yeah.

0:28:06 Tom: Yeah, I think that. But that's a minimum standard that should be upheld for any site. I guess I would argue the same as I think Christoph is arguing, that it is very probable that any kind of user-driven porn site is going to be almost impossible to manage and maintain in a meaningfully ethical way. I don't know that you can create a site where users are the ones who upload content. It's just some random guy from their basement. I mean, it's so rife for abuse and it's so easy to abuse. Let's talk about revenge porn, because you can move this out of the child porn problem fairly quickly. Not that that's not a big problem, and I do want to go through those issues, but let's talk about revenge porn. First of all, revenge porn isn't pornography, right? That's a sexual assault.

0:28:56 Thomas: Yeah it's a bad word for it it's not a good term yeah

0:28:58 Tom: That is just another sexual assault. So we phrase it in exactly the wrong way And I do think words matter, but it's not revenge porn. And the easiest, there's so many examples. There's an article from the New Yorker, which I'll share with you. And I think it's actually in the notes that I have. So there's Article from the new Yorker about a man who raped and abused his wife and then uploaded that shit to Pornhub. No problem.

0:28:58 Thomas: Yes right yep I

0:29:23 Tom: Becoming verified on PornHub is a joke. It's an easy process. You can become verified and then you can post videos of shit that's not even pornographic in nature. You can post video. People post videos themselves playing video games. On Pornhub because they don't have another home for it otherwise. The verification process isn't all that difficult. I could go upstairs and take a copy of my wife's ID and then post a video of me having sex with my wife, and that would pass muster.

0:29:22 Thomas: Mean I don't know the the details of it is that all it is like if you upload a copy with the thing

0:29:56 Tom: You upload a copy OF an ID, That's it. The problem with PornHub is they have no idea if the material was produced consensually. There's no verification to make sure that the material that you're consuming was produced and that consensually that everybody in the material is consenting to exactly What it is that they're doing. They don't have any way to verify that the upload is consensual. And then structurally, and this is important because it changed, but it only changed with this article. They allowed people to download it. And to your point before about like, and I agree with you that if you can solve, if you can like build filters, it makes a difference, right? If you can resolve 80% of a problem, you know, creating barriers makes a difference. We know this about suicide and other things that we try to prevent, right? So

0:30:12 Thomas: So Yeah. Right.

0:30:40 Tom: If I can just click a button and download something versus having to go out and get a program and to do you know, screen capture, in order to download something, the easier you make something, the more it proliferates before you

0:30:46 Thomas: Yeah. And I think That was a no-brainer decision, and I agreed with that decision. And it's, and when you're talking about millions of people, this is the thing with anything, this, the global, you know, I do not believe you're going to get to a hundred percent anything. And I, you know, I also, so I do think it's meaningful to talk about things that will cut it from, you Now, the, the error rate, you know, from 80% to 10%, like that's super meaningful, or whatever it might be. But I wanted to say, too, that when you look at it from this angle, and I agree there are differences, but I think it is also important. There, there is a big problem with, especially with child porn. And I wish I could find the article that I read, it's probably like a year ago, just something like Facebook Messenger. You know, you mentioned that you could go grab your wife's ID, etc., etc., do all that stuff right now. Well, someone could film some sort of awful, you know, consent-violating material and send it to a bunch of people on Facebook.

0:30:53 Tom: Yeah.

0:31:46 Thomas: And there would be, not only would there be no problem with that, there'd be no identity verification, anything, there'll be nothing on that. And I think we can draw distinctions, but I think it's also important to look at where the burden is, because, you know, we don't think of the burden in that situation being on Facebook to have done something to like prevent that. We think, well, okay, but then clearly, like, the police need to get involved, and this, you know, this person should be prosecuted I

0:32:09 Tom: Okay. But I'll I'll I'll say it shame on facebook for not having policies and technology that that that prevents that. If that's the case, sure.

0:32:17 Thomas: Could you could you have a technology that prevents that that wouldn't prevent

0:32:20 Tom: Part of the reason, yeah, I know the article you're talking about. The article, one of the issues, oneof the reasons that Messenger is used to move this material is because they've got end-to-end encryption, right?

0:32:20 Thomas: All kinds of other exchanges that happen every day the

0:32:33 Tom: They don't have to have end- to-end-encryption. They don' have to build that.

0:32:31 Thomas: End-to-end encryption yeah well so should there not be such they're they're not the only one to have end-and-encryption should there be such a thing as end-end-enc encryption in the internet yeah

0:32:40 Tom: No, they're not. Maybe There should be, maybe it shouldn't be something that's this easy, right? Like, we're, we're talking about, we're in a space, Thomas, where we are assuming that we are going to have to, and well, geez, you know, in order for me to have the things I like, I have to let these companies build platforms which allow for the sharing of this material. Well, I, I guess I, a part of the argument I would make here is, well, no, you don't, you don't have to incur, you don't have this at a consumer level. If I know that Facebook Messenger is built in such a way that it allows for this and this material proliferates on Messenger, then maybe I should be taking a hard look at whether or not Facebook is a company I want to encourage the use of as a consumer. Why do we not go down that road?

0:33:30 Thomas: Well, I think that there's a bit of a paradigm shift here, you know, I think we've gotten to the point where this technology is too, it is too easy to film and upload and send and whatever point, you know, uh, not to use the bad, the wrong term, revenge porn, or, you know, some sort of consent violating anything. I think it's, I think we're past the point of no return on that. And I don't know that we're putting that, you know, genie back in the bottle or whatever. And, I Guess, the place I'm coming from is, we need to have firm, you strict laws and enforcement on things like, quote unquote, revenge, porn, and any consent violating behavior like that.

We need to rely, rather than assuming, you know, like if it were back in the day and people were using old-timey cameras to take photographs and then developing them, rather than say, like, okay, we need to get to every photograph developing hut and, like, make sure that that, you know, rather than do that, I, I think it's, it's the fact that, like, okay, this technology is not going away, it's, we can't contain the technology for this purpose, so therefore we need to rely on, um, police power and and other things like that and and actually do everything we can to, when, when something does go wrong, when some consent violating video or whatever

0:33:57 Tom: No. Yeah.

0:34:44 Thomas: Is uploaded, that we have, uh, you know, structures in place to prosecute whoever did it and try and track down the material as best we can. Absolutely.

0:34:53 Tom: I don't disagree. I guess I would draw a distinction that companies like Pornhub are unique in that they only sell sex, right? That is an important distinction. If all you sell is sex, you have a responsibility to sell only ethical sex, or you shouldn't be, as a consumer, you should not be going there. Articles like Christoph's article are important because people don't think about these things until something causes them to think about these Things.

0:35:01 Thomas: Yeah yeah for sure so yeah I agreed so let me Let me explain the standard, like the the use of that comparison. My argument is Pornhub has the obligation to make it as difficult as they can, but I do not believe they have an obligation to make it 100% error-free, because the comparison to Facebook is Facebook wouldn't be 100% error-free and we seem to be fine with that. So that's how that's functioning in my argument. They absolutely have an obligation to do everything they can, but holding them to a standard that we wouldn't hold any other service online where you could violate it just as easily, I think is unfair. So that's the argument I'm trying to make there.

0:35:52 Tom: And I think that I would come at this from a consumer angle and say, if I know that a website has resisted for years even the most common sense efforts to try to reduce this, as you said, then that's a company we should declare as unethical and stop promoting their use. Stop pretending that they're this cute, kitschy company, that they are, as Christoph, I think, very rightfully said, the cheery, winking face of naughty, when in fact, they are not the cheery, winking face of naughty. When in fact they have resisted for years the structural changes, which are relatively simple and straightforward because they were instituted almost overnight when they had economic pressure from Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. So any pretense that

0:36:04 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. Well,

0:36:41 Tom: This was difficult to do was always just, hey, it's not in our financial best interest to protect you, the public, from this kind of specific exploitation.

0:36:52 Thomas: Totally agreed there, but let me know if I have this wrong, but one of the things that I think was a little frustrating about this is if I have the timing of it right, I thought Pornhub made these changes, which I think I agree with all of them. I don't know. I couldn't get quite a straight answer from Eli. I thought that all the changes they made were pretty much no-brainer changes, um, and I I can't remember what he said on that, but it seemed like he wasn't, you know, necessarily happy with him, but anyway, the timing is this article comes out, they make these changes, and then later the credit card companies still drop them, and that felt a little weird to me, like, well, you got them to make the changes, it's only verified users, etc., um, you know, like, why are the credit cart companies still dropping them after that, so

0:37:36 Tom: Yeah. And I don't know because I can't speak for the credit card companies and I haven't seen their statement. I would say that just because they dropped all these things, I as a consumer would not ever consider the use of a tube site because, again, you still don't know, you still don't know even with the verification process that the porn that you're consuming on that website was, and that's the whole thrust of this article. The nitpicky stuff that Eli pulled out is a distraction. The whole thrust to this article is you don't know when you go to Pornhub. You have no idea. I'll read from the article because I think Eli actually made fun of it, and I think it's actually one of the most important things in the article. It is impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18.

0:38:23 Tom: Neither, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal. I think that is an extremely true statement. I think there's absolutely no reason to believe that that's not true. And as a consumer, why in the world would you support the use of any company where you might be sitting there with your dick in your hand watching someone get raped? That is the thrust of the whole article. The examples from the article serve to illustrate. And again, I think that that Christoph says it. He says it extremely clearly that the issue here is the issue of consent. And he says the issue is not pornography, but rape. Let's agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable. The problem with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Estine was not the sex, but the lack of consent, and so it is with Pornhub.

Pornhub and tube sites do not have the structural ability, nor clearly the desire, to deal with the ethics of consent around sex, and as a consumer, we ought to at least know that, and this article brings that to our attention, and because it brings that, that to our attention, I think a lot of people say, "Oh, holy shit, that is icky," and

0:38:46 Thomas: Well

0:39:39 Tom: Maybe I should never click on that again, because, man, it would be really weird to think I might be pleasuring myself to somebody's rape. I don't understand how that's even remotely controversial or problematic. Sure.

0:39:51 Thomas: I I agree, and if if that's, you know, truly what's going on here, I think it's it's all the more reason why you shouldn't reference an obviously fake porn-set, you know, tweet of a religious fundamentalist in your article early on. That's probably a bad way to do this and it might make people doubt the veracity of the rest of it

0:40:03 Tom: Yeah. I'll yeah I'm Yeah, I agree with you that that was a bad example. So let me let me, let me just say that that was a Bad example. But it is a tiny, it's tiny part of the article, he also, you know, yeah.

0:40:14 Thomas: No I'm not harping on you I'm I'm yeah yeah no I'm just saying it That's why I was so, like, just absolutely flabbergasted by that. It just seems so stupid, like, why just don't even include that part? Um so

0:40:24 Tom: Yeah. Yeah I agree. But like, let's let's set that aside and deal with the issues of the article

0:40:26 Thomas: Uh yeah I know I know yeah so um well I mean, that is one of issues of the article, and we've dealt with it, so, um, but yeah, like, I think that, um, a lot of these examples in the article, which are horrible, by the way, and I said that at the time, and they still are horrible. They seem to involve, for one, I think a lot of the conflict of this in that there's also an overlap with, like, slut shaming in our society too. Like, somehow all of this is about girls who were in these videos, you know, like young girls who were put in videos.

Somehow there's nothing in our, our society, there's no, somehow, no consequences, it seems like, for the, for the men involved, which is, which is mind-blowing, that's a societal issue we have, you know, like, why is it that the entire weight of this comes down on the heads of these poor girls, you know, and like, nobody even, was not even mentioned in the article who it is or what happened to any of the, the boyfriends or whoever it was. Like, it's, it's weird, that, you know, so that's, that's an overlap there. I'm not saying that's the whole issue, but like, there is on some level, like, societally we have, we have a huge problem here.

And also, uh, what I want, what I want to ask you after all this, is, like, mentioned that porn is not like a necessity, it's not like food, it's not like water, and I agree with you there, on an individual level, but as a society, it seems foolish to believe that porn is something that we're largely speaking just going to, like, give up, if it's

0:40:29 Tom: Yeah Yeah, yeah No,

0:41:47 Thomas: Slightly problematic so I so what I'm to ask is like, what, what porn is it, just the tube site part, part of it, is that the issue, like, what, what porn is there that you, like, think would be immune from these potential consent violating things? It seems to me that you could always say, no matter what it is, you could almost say, you know, if someone, if you're just a person and like someone sends you a nude, you know, like in a relationship, you can always think like, well shit, what if someone's just has their phone, you know, and like sent them, you know, there's... there's always going to be some level of uncertainty, so like, where, where's the line that you draw to where it's like, okay, this, this level of uncertainty is okay. And this level isn't.

0:41:48 Tom: Of course we won't yeah Yeah.

0:42:24 Tom: Sure, so, uh, let's, let's start with tube sites, so tube sites are incredibly problematic, right? They, they are, they are most of how pornography online is consumed, so that's most of where I think we We should pay attention. Xvids, Pornhub, those are the primary consumer-driven locations that aggregate the bulk of pornography. Tube sites definitionally cannot manage the ethics around sex and consent. They just have an inability by structure to be able to do that. And so I think as consumers, we ought to look at that and say, yeah, tube sites are not how I'm going to consume any kind of sexually explicit material, any kind.

I think that holds for YouTube. Sexually explicit material on a user-driven site that in no way works to verify consent, you should feel squeaky about that. You should not consume that because you have no way to vet the ethics of it. And I think the standard you should hold yourself to is the same standard that you would hold yourself to in any sexual relationship, right? If you don't believe strongly that there is enthusiastic, positive consent, that's sexual material you shouldn't consume. You just shouldn't. You probably need to pay for your pornography, right. I think part of

0:42:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:11 Thomas: But

0:43:49 Tom: The problem is that it's like, maybe it doesn't.

0:43:49 Thomas: Even how does that solve the problem? Who are you paying? Yeah.

0:43:52 Tom: Maybe. Yeah. But I'm not saying that there's a solution to this problem, Thomas. I'm saying that pornography online may be so problematic that it should give you real pause about your consumption of it as a consumer. You know, I know that, and I'm not going to go down this road too far, but I know you recently went vegetarian and I respect why you did that. Because on a personal level, the pleasure that you might get from eating meat does not in any way ameliorate or mitigate your concerns about how that meat is produced. This is not fundamentally different than that your desire to have pornography, which I understand and am sympathetic to, but your desire to have pornography does not change the moral ethics of how you choose to

0:43:53 Thomas: Well,

0:44:38 Tom: Consume it, and we may be in a place online where we are not able to vet the ethics. The answer is not throw your hands up in the air and say some amount of rape and non-consent is okay as long as I can jerk off to the stuff I want to jerk off to. That's not a morally justifiable position. There are times when we have to look at the things that we enjoy and that give us pleasure and say, geez, the structures that are involved in getting me the things that I want are such that I can't justify the ethics of their production. And if we aren't honest about that, if we don't look at that and we don't make a hard decision about that, then all we do is say, well, you know, sometimes bad shit happens. And I, I, you can't sell that to me as an ethically viable position to take on.

0:45:25 Thomas: I think you can separate out what's going on here. I think that seems like a lot of your focus on this is on the individual levels that do I, you know, is that right? I mean, is that it's, yeah, on the consumer level?

0:45:35 Tom: The consumer level, because I think that that's what this article is driven to is I think the article is calling our attention as consumers of pornography to a site that, so, and I think That's, that's the part that, that, that was not dealt with.

0:45:37 Thomas: Yeah, sure.

0:45:50 Thomas: Yeah, well, for me, there's a there's an interesting contradiction in there. Well not a contradiction, but there's an interesting quirk in that in that it's like, well, you know, if you're not already somebody out there searching these horrible terms, then like I don't know that you're part of the problem, you know what I mean? Like there's...

There's a, let's let's suffice to say, like there's obviously a wide range of what people are looking for in porn, and if if you were somebody out there who's like into searching certain terms that are like by definition exploitative, and the only way to consume them is if they are definitely, you know, fictional depictions kind of thing, like that's something that you are risking, and I don't know if that's something that is news to those people, like it does that segment of the population care is what I'm wondering, and if you are somebody who is is, you know, on some other area of the massive amount of different fetishes people have, and all all that, and in the things that you are consuming aren't really lending themselves to that, like, aren't the kinds of situations that are that, that don't have consent kind of thing, like, are you already sidestepping the issue largely? Yeah.

0:46:36 Tom: Right.

0:47:01 Tom: Yeah. So let's, let's let's draw a comparison that, that that I think might be. So let's say you went to a grocery store, and you went to the grocery store, and what you wanted to buy was fair trade coffee. And so you could walk into that grocery store, they sell 10,000 different things at the grocery store. They sell fair trade coffee, which is not ethically problematic, let's assume that it's not, it's not ethical problematic. And then they, so they sell torture beef three aisles over. When I buy fair trade coffee at that grocery store, I'm supporting torture beef, right? Even if I didn't buy the torture beef, because the store sells it, I could go buy my fair trade coffee from the fair trade company. That's the point I'm making. You shouldn't, it doesn't matter that you're not specifically searching for this awful shit. If you are supporting sites whose business model specifically allows for this structurally and intentionally, despite years?

I mean, from this article, from sex workers themselves, they have been pressuring Pornhub to make the same changes that they only made when Visa, MasterCard, and Discover pulled their support. Sex workers have been pressuring them for 10 years to make some of these common sense changes to protect the public from this kind of awful shit, and they resisted it for a decade.

0:47:26 Thomas: So

0:48:17 Tom: That is not an ethical company. You shouldn't buy your fair trade coffee from the same place that sells torture beef three aisles over. You're supporting that organization. You got to go buy it from the fair trade coffee guys.

0:48:29 Thomas: Well, we, we've, I think we've been talking about this on slightly different terms at different times, and so if that's the deal, if the, if the idea is that the way that tube sites, quote-unquote, are doing their business is just definitionally inadequate, then yeah, that's a different story. It sounded like at times in this conversation that porn itself was possibly too problematic, uh, to be consumed online, like you can never be sure, so that would be, that would be like saying there's, there is no fair trade coffee beans so

0:48:58 Tom: Yeah. So so I think I'll draw the distinction just so I'm clear I think tube sites tube sites 100 by definition cannot be made to be ethical I think I'm happy with with that conversation I think a Because tube sites, tube sites, don't produce the content, and since they don't produce the content, they have no way to vet the content. That's, that's their business model, right.

0:48:59 Thomas: Sure go ahead hmm so why is that

0:49:20 Tom: Right. So I

0:49:20 Thomas: So any so ethical porn has to be produced by whoever is hosting it is that the so

0:49:25 Tom: Think I think the, I think the closest way that you're going to get to what we should expect as a extraordinarily high standard around the ethics of sex, I think the closest we're goingto get is to try to get as close to the point of production as possible as a consumer.

0:49:39 Thomas: Then what about something like only fans only fans doesn't produce I

0:49:41 Tom: Only fans is I don't I've never been to only fans, so I'm not I'm only marginally familiar with them. So you'll have to forgive. I'm reasonably ignorant about only fans. I don't, I'm not 100% sure how they're structured is what I'm saying.

0:49:54 Thomas: Um I I guess I'm not, now, now that you say it, but I believe, you know, I believe it's as simple as, like, like you have an account and you upload videos and then people pay you for that. Or you upload whatever pictures and people can pay you directly for that?

0:50:05 Tom: Yeah, I would say you shouldn't be casual about it, right? I would Say that if you're going to purchase sex products, sex work of any kind, you probably ought to do a little homework before you buy it. So if only, yeah, so if I go to OnlyFans, I don't think everything on OnlyFan's, I have no way to know if everything on only fans is produced consensually. I've never been there. I genuinely don't know, or without coercion or in ways that are sexually ethical. So let's say I were to go to OnlyFans and find out that OnlyFans has structural problems the same as Pornhub. Then I would say OnlyFans as a company, OnlyFans is not a good place for you to buy your sex work. Because

0:50:18 Thomas: Sure. But like, so what I'm saying is, is there, go ahead.

0:50:30 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. The point I'm

0:50:50 Tom: Again, but if

0:50:50 Thomas: Making is if not OnlyFans, like I can't think of anything that's more direct than that. So I'm having a, so I think Eli's concerned that this inevitably brings us toward porn abolition. I'm having a hard time finding the line that you're drawing I don't

0:51:04 Tom: It's abolition through the consumer, that's why I brought it up before. If it's abolition from consumers because we are uncomfortable with a world where our purchasing of sex work is ethically ambiguous, that's not sex abolition. That's the market saying, man, I feel weird about this. The world has changed, and the way that the world has change, it's made the purchasing of sexual work really ethically difficult. And if that means that you stop purchasing sex work, that is not sex. That is not abolition. Abolition would be government regulation. And that would be a law being passed saying you can't have it. That's not the same thing as you saying, geez, when I when I examine my purchasing of sex work, I'm having a difficult time finding ethically produced sex work. And as a result, I'M GOING TO NOT BUY SEX WORK.

0:51:52 Thomas: Want to get hung up on the term abolition and whether or not that means the government is doing It's not really an interest, an important distinction to me, because the government isn't going to, or should, you know, I don't think we're close to that, but I still think it's meaningful that, you know, now it sounds like you are coming from the angle that there should not be porn, there should there is no ethical ethical porn consumption.

0:52:01 Tom: Right.

0:52:10 Tom: No, but but I but that's I'm not

0:52:13 Thomas: I don't

0:52:13 Tom: Coming from that angle. What I'm saying is that, again, it is an important distinction. I recognize that it may mean that you don't know where to get your porn. Right. It may mean that you have no idea where to get your porn and you always feel awkward about it. OK, that's OK. Then that's that. But it's not untrue. It's not less true because it results in a conclusion that you're unhappy about.

If as a sex work consumer, you are unable to navigate with clarity and certainty the ethics around how that is produced, shouldn't that give you pause even if it results in the answer of, geez, I really feel uncomfortable buying any sex work? Let's say you wanted to get a prostitute and you have no idea that that if that prostitute is doing this coercively or not coercively would it be ethical to fuck that prostitute? I don't think I have an issue with prostitution in abstraction, but if the only, if I have no way to purchase a prostitute's services in a practical way that makes me feel like it's ethical, then as a consumer, I ought to pause before I do that. And if at the end of the day you find

0:53:26 Tom: Yourself unable to do it, I don't think that that's a bad place to be in.

0:53:25 Thomas: I'm not sure that this is a sustainable worldview. I mean, all of our fruits and vegetables are, are produced in a way that is incredibly exploitative. And in fact, there is no ethical way to, I guess, under this definition, we all should be not eating. I mean meat, meat as well, actually.

0:53:49 Tom: No, no, because you die if you don't eat. That's silly.

0:53:50 Thomas: Yeah. So so because this this is something that, in your view, is not a necessity to live, then therefore, I

0:53:58 Tom: That's not in my view. It's recreational. It is obviously recreational. You don't die if we don't have pornography. We didn't have online pornography for most of time and humanity got a lot just fine right

0:54:05 Thomas: Guess, well, there still was plenty of pornography. And there's nothing in your definition that means the onlineness of it makes any difference.

0:54:11 Tom: Yes yeah right it's yeah that's true no that's that's true it's just how it's consumed mostly so I I apologize for that but yeah it's recreational

0:54:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, so let me just outline my view here and we'll see. I guess I'm having a hard time putting my finger on where the line is here and what you're saying. So you tell me if there's, you know, what you think. I mean, I think that it is absolutely true. And I agree with many of the points you made that we ought to put a heavy, heavy burden on sites like Pornhub to meet. But I think that in anything in life, is always a calculated risk to everything or uncalculated.

There's always a risk to anything. I mean, you mentioned vegetarianism. I mean, there's always the risk that like, okay, the vegetables I just switched to, you know, it turns out that whoever's producing them also in his spare time is like, you know torturing animals for fun and I'm funding, you know, like there's... there's always questions like that that you will not solve and and they can't be solved and so getting consumption of anything as with a lot, you know, comes with the cost and we try to get that as close to you nothing as we can like as close to manageable or by the way when it comes to fruits and vegetables, we just don't we don't care. When it comes to, you know,

0:55:20 Thomas: The, the awful exploitation of people have to work in meat plants who we've killed of COVID, you know, like we just, as a society, somehow we don't care. There should be more attention on that. But I agree with you that there is a distinction that we all do have to eat to live. So like there's, there's far less room for us to sit around and be like, well, shit, I can't eat anything. Like what, how am I going to manage that?

Um, so my view is sites like OnlyFans or other, other, um, I, you know I I don't know other other services where you you're very direct to like the the producer of it and there's a connection there that um I I think that's a level of ethical that is fine.

Like that's within, yes, it could be true that somebody is somehow being coerced into making an account and whatever, like that could happen, but that's, of that's within the margin of error of anything else in my opinion. Like that, that could happen and it's a an acceptable risk and you would hope that like what would happen in that situation is you would hope that the police would get involved. Like that's, that's the part where we should solve this. Like I think perhaps your view is putting more, more burden on consumers than should be. There should be some burden on consumers, but at a certain point you gotta be like, well, let's trust that if someone is truly being exploited, we have a justice system. Like Let's, let's hope that on some level that can do something. And so that would be my view. I don't know, how does that strike you? Yeah.

0:55:20 Tom: Right sure yeah So I want to back up a little bit. What I, what I said about OnlyFans is, I don't know how they're structured, so I don't, I don't have the ability to say. I think if OnlyFans is OnlyFans themselves, not the, not the individual channels on it. But if OnlyFans itself, themselves, is structured in ways that are problematic, then OnlyFans the site would be ethically problematic. If they are not structured in really egregiously awful ways, like Pornhub is, then I agree with you, it's closer to buying from the source. Right it's like my fair trade coffee example

0:57:06 Thomas: We should do some we should do some research on that because only fans may be less uh regulated than Pornhub at this point you

0:57:08 Tom: Yeah and I so So that's why I was unwilling to say, like, hey, go to OnlyFans, guys. Like, I literally don't know.

0:57:14 Thomas: It It might me that, well, that that's why, like, after these changes of PornHub, like I'm kind of I don't use PornHub, but I after the changes they made, I'm like, all right, it's probably close enough, or, or, you know, we mean to put more pressure on them to, you know, because they're already cooperating with agencies that, you know, are responsible for, like, reporting and removing stuff. I don't know if there's more changes that need to be made, I've definitely all ears about that, but when it comes to only fans and how it's functioning, functioning now, I wonder if it's not dissimilar from a verified PornHub account, like, it honestly might be the same thing

0:57:51 Tom: Yeah, genuinely. Maybe it is. Again, I don't I don'T know OnlyFan's well enough to speak to it. If it is closer to the source, I think you get closer to an ethical consumption. That was my point. You have to get close to the resource when it comes to something like sex and ethics and consent. And the further we remove ourselves from the source of the work, the more difficult it's going to be for us to know as consumers that we're pleasuring ourselves to something which was produced ethically. That's that is something that should give us all real pause. Places like Pornhub, you know, go back to the article like Christoph says himself, and unless I'm calling the man a liar, that he went on PornHub and found videos of women who were on.

He says he found them that were unconscious, where you tap on the eye to make sure there's no corneal reflex before they're raped. Those videos were, according to Eli, supposedly watched by a human moderator before they were allowed to be put up. What the fuck? How can that possibly be a place where you can go and feel like, yeah, what I'm touching myself to when I'm here is ethical?

0:58:06 Thomas: Right

0:59:01 Tom: It can't. It just can't when they removed the unverified sites, Thomas, they took down most of their website. Most of the content on their website, not a little bit, not 20%, it was like two-thirds of their website had to come down in order for them to make these changes. That's why they didn't want to do it, because it takes down two-thirds of their web site, which wasn't going to happen if this article wasn't written. If I'm to believe the dozens of accounts of the dozens of articles of women who said like, hey, you know, I was 14 and my material was put up there. That's the ruining of their lives. Isn't that's not like that's not because we live in some puritanical culture. It's because the putting them up on that Web site is a sexual violation. They were sexually violated when their when their personal private lives, their sexual lives was made public without their consent.

0:59:10 Thomas: Yeah yeah I agree with you there yeah well so that agreed but I I just want that The point I was making there was that often these are like, two well, children, the same age, you somebody put up a video and somehow only the the girl's life. You know, that's a weird societal thing.

1:00:08 Tom: Oh, yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah, I agree with you there. Yeah women are disproportionately Unfortunately, yeah, yes, And yes. I want to address the, like, when we're talking about something like food, food is a necessity. We're going to have a different standard. When we're Talking about recreation, our recreation should have a very high standard, because we can hold off, right? We can't hold off on eating indefinitely. You're going to have to make some compromises in order to eat. What strikes me as crazy is like, I don't want to take any calculated risks when it comes to rape. I just don't. And I don'T think any of us really do. AndI don't think that porn is so important that we should accept anything other than the very, very highest possible standard. And if we are anything short of the highest as possible standard, then maybe as a consumer, just as a consumer, that should give you pause.

1:00:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:03 Tom: If we're not very, very close to the point of production of sex work, it's impossible for us to know that that was created consensually. In 2017, we had really important conversations about consent and Louis C.K. We canceled that guy. We had really important discussions about consent, and Aziz Ansari. We understand that in our personal sex lives, when it comes to what our hands touch, we understand that sex and consent is not a really hard, that those lines are difficult to navigate. We have conversations, big, important national conversations about what we should do and what consent means and how consent can be given and how content can be taken away.

1:01:50 Tom: Way. And if we don't apply the same standards when we're purchasing sex work, I think we're not being honest with ourselves about our own sexual requirements. This article is important because it opens that national conversation. It has one bad example, but all the rest of the examples in it are either firsthand accounts from the author, or they are accounts of other people which are corroborated in many, many dozens of different articles, from Rolling Stone to Vice to CBC. This is, it's non-controversial that porn hub and sites like porn hub contain revenge porn and spy can porn, and, you videos of people being raped. That is not, that is not even open for debate. It's there, and Up until they were pressured by Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, two-thirds of their website was filled with shit that you had no idea if it was produced, produced consensually.

1:02:46 Tom: And we miss the point of the article if we don't focus on the point of the particle.

1:02:45 Thomas: Yeah. Well, fair enough. I mean, I think I can let you have the last word and we can leave it there. What do you think?

1:02:57 Tom: Yeah, thank you, man. I appreciate you having me on. I know it's a difficult topic and it's an complex topic, but I'm grateful to you for giving me the time.

1:03:05 Thomas: Absolutely. I think that's great. Great discussion. I'm looking forward to what people think. All right, Tom, thanks so much for coming on. As usual, people can find you on Cognitive Dissonance, Citation Needed. Let's see, anything I'm missing? That's it.

1:03:17 Tom: No, that's it, man, that is where I am at.

1:03:19 Thomas: All right. Only two podcasts.

1:03:22 Tom: Lazy.

1:03:23 Thomas: We're just a hobbyist, huh?

1:03:25 Tom: I am just a hobbyist, yes.

1:03:28 Thomas: That's. All right Tom, great discussion and talk to you soon.

1:03:32 Tom: Buddy, thanks so much.

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