SIO514: No Part of the "62 Million Men Enrolled In Online Rape Academy" Claim Was Correct

Transcript

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

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 514. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and got a... fun? What? No. Got an episode today. So I was sort of expecting to do a third episode on the Trump shooting conspiracy theories, because I didn't even get to talk about the ballroom one. But I feel like I pretty much said all I wanted to say on that. I mean, there's some more specific to that shooting ones that I want to go through. But I don't feel like I want to do a whole other episode on that. So I think I'm going to do what I was going to do before that happened. I was actually set to talk about this on that weekend that the shooting happened and then that just felt way more immediate. But depending on how things go, maybe I'll save some comments about the shooter and also his manifesto. I think it's really interesting. I might comment on that at the end of this. We'll see. But what I actually want to talk about, which you probably have seen from the title, is this 62 million men online rape academy claim and also how it overlaps with, you know, something I've been talking about and thinking a lot about, which is our information environment, because it just feels like it's getting worse and worse and I don't know how it could possibly be made better. But I'm just kind of wanting to talk about it and note it as we go and you know after full societal collapse it'll at least be here as a record so before I get to our first break and then get to the main discussion you might have heard about this or you might not. It's hard to gauge you know this claim the CNN article made waves I don't know how many waves the debunk made and then I don't know how many waves like the counter backlash to that made but if you saw this this top line claim, and I'm going to start with the most false version of it, which I actually think spread quite a bit. This isn't even the niche version of it's pretty mainstream. It was that 62 million men enrolled in an online rape academy where they could learn to drug and rape their partners. The problem with this is that it's not that that's a little bit wrong, or it's not that that's just a matter of, well, actually it was visits or blah, it's not that. It's that no part of that is true. No part of that sentence is true in the way that it's presented. I'm going to go so far, and I'll explain later, I'm going to go so far as to say this particular thing, this one article, I am not saying this about the whole concern about men being rapists. I am NOT saying that. But this particular article and the outcry it caused is eerily similar to the child trafficking, human trafficking panic that Lydia and I debunked over on Where There's Work. And just like that, I trusted my audience that when I was talking about why that was overblown, nobody was going to sit there and say, oh, are you saying it's okay when a child gets abducted and sexually assaulted? I trusted that no one was goingto say that because if they are going to be the kind of people to say that. I've gotten to the point I don't care about having them as an audience. But I think this is a little trickier because this is something that is more adjacent to a genuine social problem that requires a social movement that I support, for one. And for two, I think it was probably easier for my audience to hear about how the MAGA are being dumb about something than it would be to hear that people that we care about are getting something wrong. I think that's naturally going to be harder. And so I expect probably more backlash to this. And I fully mean this with 100% sincerity. I think there's going to be plenty of people who might not want to hear someone with my voice debunk something like that because it's obviously incredibly sensitive. And obviously, it is part of a wider truth, which is there is a real problem with men and with rape culture and with consent or lack thereof, and also, you know, Me Too having been almost completely demolished, which I think is a real shame. I mean, so many of the gains that maybe we thought were made, I think have really disintegrated because of, I mean really because of electing Trump again. I just think that killed so much. So all this is to say that I've reached a point in my life and my podcasting where I'm just going to trust the audience. I'm going to trust that they know who I am. I know who I am and that's that I think it's kind of life's a little too short for some small content creator like me to hedge every single word with and I know there's a problem and I know there is a problem because I do know there's a problem. I absolutely know that there's a problem. You know that I know THERE'S A PROBLEM but the big but is I am still very sensitive to how this comes across as a dude and I'm going to make a recommendation. So if you are somebody who was under the impression that the 62 million men rape academy thing was true and you are sensitive to hearing a dude like be debunking it I totally I get that I totally get that uh because it you know most often I mean 90 of the time plus that's done in bad faith um if you're sensitive to that I would recommend check out the ICYMI podcast by slate and you can hear two women who are awesome Kate Lindsay and Kat Tenbarg talk about this. It's an episode called R62 Million Men in an Online Rape Academy. And this is a genuine recommendation. Like I don't, I am very sensitive, especially if anyone's been like the victim of something and you just don't want to hear me debunk stuff first, maybe. I totally get that. And This Is A Heartfelt Recommendation that A, if you're super sensitive and don't wanna listen, like a hundred percent, just turn my episode off. No hard feelings. One million percent. If you're a little skeptical of hearing something like this from my voice, I get it. Check out that podcast. I think it'll probably do this job pretty well. But there's a reason I'm still going to be talking, and it's that I don't even think that podcast maybe went far enough in terms of how badly this CNN article, intentionally or not, you know, I just, I don't, CNN is a corporation owned by people who were happy with Trump because Trump made them money. You know? So it's like, I get that this is a feminism issue and that kind of thing, but also keep in mind like the financial incentives of something like CNN. I just don't think they did a good job with this. I think that this could have existed in a way that was totally fine, but it caused needless confusion. I want to talk about that. And again, I also want to talk about the meta kind of information environment stuff. So So if you'd like to, again, if you like to hear two women debunk the claim first, hit pause, check out the I See Why Am I episode, then come on back if you would like to. All right. Well, I'm going to take the first break and then we're going to really dig into this because I think even if you've heard some debunking of this, I think it's maybe even worse than you think. There's even more about it that I don't know that people have looked into like I did. So that's what I want to talk about. And so we'll take a quick break please support the show patreon.com/seriouspod thank you so much to the patrons who make this possible and make it so that I feel like I can look for the truth wherever it goes wherever it leads and uh do a podcast about it I really appreciate you okay

0:07:47 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:07:47 Thomas: So let's start with what you might have seen just being on the internet I just went and looked at some of the popular I guess I wouldn't say memes but like posts and you know it's just a photo or infographic or just a screenshot of someone else's, that's the whole internet. Anyways, those things, whatever you call those. This one, all caps, an online rape school. They had a fucking online rape school, a rape school, no, no. Read it again. A rape school? I don't think people understand what that fucking means. They were teaching and helping and fucking showing others how they raped six and then not caps 62 million visits. They were partners and husbands. Like one victim said, quote, we have to look over our shoulders on the streets, I never thought I'd have to be careful of the person I lay in bed with. End quote. 62 million visits has me questioning, must be a million, how many men I cross paths with daily have seen those videos. And that's something to keep in mind for later. This idea that like, okay, now I have, now that my very husband, could the person I go to sleep with, wow, is that, could they be one of these people? Another one, 62 million men logged onto a rape academy website to learn how to drug women and to share videos covered by at CNN. You know, it's got thousands of shares. Here's some examples of the viral videos.

0:09:03 Clip: A million men a month, 62 million men, a month visiting a site designed to teach them how to drug and assault their wives and their partners a little tip on how to make sure you don't end her life accidentally by giving her an overdose and then 20,000 videos of men assaulting their unconscious wives filming it and then putting it on the internet for other men to give them applause men leaving comments about how long they've wanted to do it to her how it felt to get it done the first time 62 million men and you want to say we don't have a fucking problem you want to claim it's cuz women chose poorly who's she supposed to trust then the person who's supposed to love and cherish her entire life that she has breakfast with every morning and you what's fucking nuts the website that hosted this faces no legal problem because of section 230 from 1996 that says they aren't liable for what's illegal turns out the 62 million visits to a

0:10:16 Thomas: Well, I'm going to stop right there. I mean, there's, I know it's hard to hear this stuff, but like virtually everything she said was wrong. I'm not trying to pick on any one person, but I just had to stop there because it's just too much compounding misinformation. I'm not going to be able to clear it all up, but just, I stopped there because section 230, this website is not American and no one ever claimed it was. 230 has no relevance on it. Again, it's so easy to be wrong in so many different ways. Then we've got going even further here.

0:10:44 Clip: Rape academy in february was a slow month because this is march nearly 82 million visits to the online rape academy where men taught other men about what kind of doses to use on their partners as to make sure they didn't OD so that they could incapacitate them and then assault them on camera or live stream. Where men uploaded tens of thousands of videos or even charged people $20 per viewer to watch them assault their partners. Where they continue to provide tips on how to do it.

0:11:21 Thomas: I think I'll stop there because you probably get the point, but there's tons more. As for me, I saw this article and I sort of took it for granted. I can't remember when I read it, but I did see people I know and love posting about this. They were really angry. I saw people suggesting there was going to be almost like a Me Too again, which I jokingly said that we're doing it. A me three, I guess people are going to do it. Uh, and I fully support that. I don't really know. It seems like just one post that I saw that was suggesting that. And then I look now and that doesn't seem to be part of the conversation. It just goes to show like how impossible it is these days to know what is happening in the world. We just get our little snapshots based on our algorithms. And it's so easy to just look at that and be like, I guess that's what's going on. I guess that's what people think. I don't know now. So I don't know how many women were in response to this outing their rapist, something that I thought was happening quite a bit based on that post that I saw. But the weird thing for me on this was that I actually did read this article or at least kind of skimmed it when it came out. Apropos of nothing, it just kind of saw it, skimbed it. And I really didn't I didn't detect much with it. And then when someone said suggested to me like, hey, that kind of was off, that article might have been off. And I wanted to start looking into it because I had seen so many posts about this. I'm definitely interested if something was wrong. I was kind of disturbed by how much I had just made these assumptions that I guess aren't explicitly said in the article, but the way the article is framed, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I just thought was true that wasn't true. And I've been kind of grappling with that myself. So let's go to the source here. I'm not going to like read through the whole article, But I think I need to go through enough of it to kind to get an indication because I really, I'm trying to grapple with like, how much do I think this is intentional or even wrong? Cause like if, if the, by the letter of the law, they said everything right, but virtually everyone who read it got the wrong impression. Like who is that on? So anyway, the title is exposing a global quote, rape Academy. So right there pin in that, because as we'll come to find out there's, it's not a global rape Academy that right there. I, that title is enough to make me think like, okay, I think CNN should have been a little more responsible. The sub heading, in shocking group chats, men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives and swap tips on getting away with it. Sounds horrible. That is horrible. Like I said, I read this and was horrified at the time, didn't really question it. And again, I just want to drive that home because at no point did I read this looking for ways to debunk stuff about it. I really didn't because that's not what I'm ever trying to do. Like it's just my hackles aren't raised or whatever ever, when it comes to this stuff, I, this pretty much accords with what I think. So I didn't question it. Uh, it was only later when I kind of saw something that made me think something might be up that I read this article with a more, like more attention and more skepticism when I realized this stuff. So, I know, I Know a lot of the, you know, a lot of the people you'd hear from debunking this stuff are people who are just looking to undermine any claims like this. I promise you I was. And again, I said, I was going to trust my audience. Like I I really like, I honestly, I read this and then I didn't start reading it skeptically until days or I don't even know, a week later. So like when I originally read this for me myself, I thought it was right. Posted one thing that I thought was kind of like in support of it. Not, I didn'T directly quote the article, but I was just referencing what people were talking about and that's it. Like I did, there's nothing in, there'S no part of me that's like going around wanting to debunk this kind of thing or anything like that, just to make that very clear in case people haven't listened to me for a long time, but this is the kind of thing where the reason I'm doing this is not because it was off by a little bit or off by even a moderate amount. It's because it Was so wildly off that I think it's like, it becomes like, okay, that's too far. It's one thing to be like, Hey, don't be pedantic. Don't be trying to correct people's statistics on sexual violence because absolutely a hundred percent agree with that sentiment. I'm not going around looking to nitpick, but This is not a nit. This is like the whole thing is wrong. And I don't think it's good. I think it is bad to do a thing that's this wrong. Okay. So the CNN article starts talking about the Pelico case, which is absolutely horrific. That's the French woman whose husband was drugging and raping her and inviting other men to rape. Just horrible. Absolutely horrible. Raped over 200 times by 70 men, not all of whom could be tracked down by police. A very famous case. I'm sure you know about. Absolutely disgusting, horrific stuff. And of course, Pelico declined to be anonymous. She wanted to make sure to be identified and identifiable and speak up about it, which is an incredibly brave decision. I can't even imagine that amount of bravery at something people are crediting with doing a lot of good, like normalizing this. She could have opted, apparently in the French legal system, I think, or it's probably how it works here somewhat, but she could have opted to be totally anonymous. She didn't. Really brave, incredible stuff. I'm sure you know about that case. If you don't, I mean, you do now or maybe look more into it if you'd like. So then the article transitions to it was on a so -called dating website in a chat room called, quote, without her knowledge that Pelico was able to, and by Pelico, they mean the husband or ex -husband, I guess, was able able to connect with dozens of other men to instigate the rapes of his then wife, Giselle. So horrible, horrible, terrible stuff. And this is the kind of the introduction to link it to a dark corner of the internet, it'll say. So the Pelico case briefly shown a spotlight on this dark corner ofthe internet. It goes on, but while Coco, the website involved, oh, that's the dating website, was shut down and public attention moved elsewhere, this behavior did not disappear. And It's like their initiative thing they're doing. Investigation has uncovered a hidden online world where the commodification and amplification of sexual violence against women is flourishing. So that sounds horrible. I mean, any of that that's real is horrible. And I know there's real amounts of this. But here's where things get a little tricky, because I found that, especially publicly, when you look at like broadly society, a lot of us have very different ideas about porn. And it's important to talk about because that's actually what we're talking about here. I know it doesn't seem like it yet, but spoilers, that is kind of what we are going to be talking about. It's just a porn website. Now it goes without saying that the porn industry is incredibly problematic in many ways. It's also not in every way, but I think a lot of people disagree on that. I think there seem to be people who are under the impression that like all porn is in some ways sexually coercive or wrong or immoral and encourages violence against women. And it's interesting because like I think that those things are certainly true to some extent. And I don't know how to put like a number on it, but like absolutely I would agree all day long if it's like, yeah, porn, especially at an early age, especially certain types of porn, it's going to be a bad influence on men. It's goingto contribute to rape culture. I agree with all of that, 100%. But it's also I found that depending on who you're talking to, it's I think sometimes people are under different assumptions and we don't know it because I think there are some people under the assumption that like 100 percent of porn is that that like there's no good kind of porn. And often we've seen this back with the Pornhub discussions and how they've tried to outlaw like OnlyFans and the credit card companies kind of like, well, I'm realizing this was years ago because my memory of discussing it was in my previous house. So before 2021 or whatever, I'm realizing I'm trying to recall it, but we did some episodes on it, some discussions because I think it was Christoph wrote an article on New York Times about how bad these porn sites were and the credit card companies were kind of canceling them. And there's definitely truth to it. There's problematic instances. There's probably tons of awful videos that shouldn't exist that probably exist on these tube sites. And there'S got to be something to be done about that for sure. Sure. But then it felt like a big overcorrection to me and that now all of a sudden credit card companies wouldn't even you couldn't do business as any sort of sex workers, any sort of adult models. And, you know, there's a huge overcorruction there that I think and a lot of people think is too much overcorrecting. And the problem is that when it comes to this kind of thing, there are people on the left who are very well intentioned, who then end up in the same kind of cause as a bunch of Christian radicals who want to get rid of all porn and, you know, inflict Christianity on everybody and force Christianity on everybody. There's often a weird marriage there. And that's bad because we're already just losing the battle to the Christian nationalists like we're just straight up losing. Now, I don't think there's more of them than there are of us, but they are winning somehow. And so when you look at something like this, anytime that they're able to peel off a significant percentage of people on the left to their cause, then it's like, man, is it an uphill battle? And I don't blame people on the left who are very concerned about it. I'm very concerned about it, but it's hard because I think the Christians know what they're doing here. And I think they know how to talk about porn in these causes and in these uproars. I think they know to talk it in ways that sort of disguise their, it's like hiding their power level a little bit kind of thing where they disguise what they really believe and they try to make appeals in a Mott and Bailey tactic that kind of appeal to people on on the left, like, yeah, that is problematic. That is misogynist. You know, they appeal to the things that we agree with. And then ultimately though, their goal is shutting down all porn, all only fans, all anything being horrible to anyone who does sex work and, you know, a whole bunch of stuff that I don't think most of us, uh, and I say us, I just broadly mean like the progressive left. I think, I don'T think we would agree with all that stuff. The reason I bring that up is because I think that's what's happening here. I Think that that's where this this article went wrong. Because now we get to the key, like these couple paragraphs have like the, it's the mother load. It's like the epicenter of all this misinformation. So the article continues. One porn site, motherless .com is home to more than 20 ,000 videos of so -called sleep content uploaded by users with hundreds of thousands of views. The website, which had around around 62 million visits in February alone, and whose core audience is in the United States, describes itself as a moral free -file host where anything legal is hosted forever. Then it says the legality of some material posted is in serious doubt. Now, here's what sucks. I am unable to research a lot of this because right after this article was published, Motherless .com banned that section of the website. Site. They ban sleep content. They banned any of the tags that are like passed out, hashtag passed out, I check. They band all of that right away. But I was able to go to the site. I was able to do a lot of research. I want to pause here and talk about, again, this is another reason why I am concerned about this. I promise it is not an effort to like debunk that there's rape culture and there's horrible men and all that. It's not about that. For one, it's about, I do think I think whenever we're talking about stuff like that, it is good to be afraid of the right things. I think that's where I see the big overlap of the child trafficking panic. It's because when you actually look at what this is, I think it would be very detrimental if all of a sudden every woman is suspicious of their male partner at night because they're going to be drugged. About. Like that, if you look at the numbers, that's just not at all what anyone should be worried about. We should be worried about a whole bunch of other stuff about men and consent and rape culture and all. Like there's a ton of really disturbing things just that are true, statistically, that I've looked at too about this. I mean, that we all know consent and not taking no for an answer, that coercive behavior, all that stuff, 100%. But instead of that, now you already heard me give some of these quotes that people are like, well, can I even sleep at night? You million men who are learning how to rape their wives at night secretly without them knowing, that's not good. It is not good for anyone to be afraid of that because it just bears no resemblance to the actual amount of things we should be afraidof. And again, I will ask you to consider when we're debunking the child trafficking panic. Every single time someone would say, well, one is too many. And there is, here is this story of child sex trafficking that happened. And yeah, that's absolutely true. It is horrible. And I would argue there's almost really nothing worse than child sex trafficking and child rape and all that stuff that we discussed on Where There's Woke. And we were debunking the panic about it. No part of that meant we thought that was fine if it happened. No Part of It. And I just would encourage you to consider that here too. Nopart of this means that I think it's okay or that anyone calling this article into question thinks it's okay I mean maybe some people do but but like just you and I this is a small show with a small group of listeners that I think have known me a long time that's not at all what I'm not here to condone any of that and in the cases that are real it's fucking awful and some of the most awful I mean that trial was was horrendous horrific absolutely but that is so parallel when I started looking to this it's so parallel to the child trafficking panic where it's like yes that is horrible the time there and there are way more instances of that child trafficking that are real that you can point to than what we have here. And yet it is still, I think, inappropriate to be so worried about trafficking that you're talking about how they're going to get abducted any and every which way from Target and from whatever, when the real concern should be other things. And similar, the real concerned should be elsewhere. That's very different, I think than saying there shouldn't be any concern about men toward women. That that's not what I'm saying. The real concern I think is elsewhere. I think this is panicking people people unnecessarily. But I digress a little. That's one component of why I think it's worth talking about this, debunking it. And I've barely even begun. Don't worry. There's a lot more to debunk about this. A lot more talk about. The other reason is this porn component. And this is another thing that was really, really similar to the child trafficking thing. So remember when Tim Tebow, if you listen to that series, I hope you did. Tim Tebo has that map before Congress. He's like this dot. Every single one of them is a child predator, sex predator, essentially. Essentially, and so many people are like, I don't get it. You can see the dot. Let's go find those people, hunt them down. Let us kill them. You know where it is. It is basically there. That same thing happened here where I see tons of comments that are like how do I identify the people that are going to motherless .com? How do we find them? How do we inflict violence on them? What do we do? A lot of comments to that effect. How can this website even be allowed to continue? It is a rape academy. These people should be be arrested, that kind of thing. Here's one example, a popular comment on Reddit about this. If countries really wanted to, they could use the information from just that one site to jail thousands of men who raped their spouses. But we can't seem to even investigate, never mind indict people from the Epstein files. So I doubt they will pursue this too far. At the very least, they need to hold the website owners accountable so other owners will be disinclined to allow that shit on their servers. And just giving some examples, this is one that actually I kind of I meant to read before sort of applies. I think some people don't understand how significant 62 million is. The entire U .S. population is 340 million. 125 million are adult men. 62 million is nearly half of all adult males in the United States. Absolutely fucking disgusting. So lots of talk about how, wow, who are these people? You know, let's find them. Let's take down the website. Let's arrest, you know, that kind of thing. It really reminded me of the Tebow thing. And again, Again, with this being referred to as a rape academy and with seeing that number thrown around, I don't blame people for being alarmed. I was certainly alarmed when I saw it, but I can actually go to the website. So when I went to motherless .com, maybe I'll leave a little cliffhanger before the ad break. I was shocked at what I found, but maybe not in the way you would think. I got to take the usual break. Be right back.

0:27:59 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:27:59 Thomas: All right. So I went on this thing and I was expecting there'd be some really gross, horrific stuff on there. I wasn't really excited to see that at all. I was just going to broadly take note of the categories and video titles, but I don't have a good stomach for anything weird or gross or violent, so I was kind of begrudgingly doing this. But when you look at this site, it definitely has an aesthetic of being a bit more hardcore, like unfiltered, anything goes kind of thing, which I think is certainly an area for concern earn and could conceivably allow abusive material on, they also take great pains to say this is for user submitted stuff and it has to be legal. It doesn't allow anything illegal. Now, how much does that matter? I guess it matters how much it's enforced and moderated, but how different is that from the other tube sites? And I think what I was most surprised about here is how much this this is kind of just Pornhub. It's like PornHub, but edgier. And now this is later. So they've obviously responded to this. And I think they were taken down briefly after this article. Now the website, the main page has a statement. We're happy to be back and truly appreciate everyone who has been waiting. We have strengthened our moderation systems and processes to more effectively detect, prevent, and promptly enforce against illegal content. Content every report is now publicly tracked with its complete resolution history so the community can see exactly how it was handled we rely on the motherless community to keep the platform safe if you see any violating content please use the report button thank you and then you can view the audit log okay so my first thought is like okay wow getting taken down and like threatened with police action is probably good I'm glad that that happened these controls should already be in place and so don't get anything twisted I'm not endorsing any particular porn site especially not this one already motherless. And the logo is like, feels gross and misogynist. I'm not endorsing this site at all, but I do think it is important to know what is going on, especially what is claimed when people are saying 62 million men. And we'll go through the iterations of that claim, but the 62 million man thing and why it's not even close to correct on any level. And I think it's important. Now, if the argument is that there needs to be more regulation on the the internet. One million percent agree. I think that it's hard to find ways that we all agree on because they often become hijacked by the insane Christian right. And I don't know, but we can at least, I think, agree in principle. I would want very strong controls against any non -consensual content, any illegal content, anything like that. I want websites to be very worried about that and scared even. I Would want operators of websites to Be scared that that stuff would be there. Anything, obviously anything underage, anything like that, I would want them to be terrified about that and would be policing it as tightly as they could. And that's what I would want. But when I read that article, I was strongly under the impression that this was going to be, and literally I kind of was a little afraid of going to this website because I thought this was going to Be like, all right, here's horrific stuff. I was, I have to say surprised at how much it's not that. And here's one of the main things that motivated If people are talking about, again, we'll go in order, 62 million men. Well, that's no part of it. It's not men. That was just kind of assumed, I think, based on the article and based on the fact that like the one person they go on to talk about was a man that they kind of tried to track down. We can get to that later maybe, but it's just, they said it was 62 million visitors in February. Now, if that were the only correction, I would not even get anywhere near bothering to do this, but it's it's obviously not. So the CNN article talked about the categories and it said, well, there's 20 ,000 videos of so -called sleep content. So I went to the at first I didn't know they had gotten rid of it. So I was going to see if that number was right. Now you can't even find it. And that was weeks ago. But I did want to go to the categories just for like context. Text. I assumed the other categories would be like other equally horrible stuff. Now each category page tells you how many videos I can assume that that's where they got that 20 ,000 thing. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll compare. Let me give you the top several categories. Now this is a, I'm trying to be perfectly accurate. This is a little complicated by the fact that I think videos can be in more than one category. So that's an interesting numbers thing we can talk about. I, it does make a difference here, but not, I don't think it's going to be that significant. I can go into that later. It's pedantic, but setting that aside, if we just go category by category and look at how many videos there are and look how many, like, you know, how popular they are. The number one category is trans amateur. And I mean, if you want, you can click on it and look there's, it's not like trans, you Know, sex assault, rape under it. Nope. It'S just trans amateur videos. That's it's the number one in terms of videos has 837 ,000. The second is gay amateur. That has 572 ,000 the third is trans teen. Now, obviously that's the teen category is going to raise people's alarm bells. I get it. It's just kind of a fact of porn sites that that's a category. And I know we can, we can and should be uncomfortable with that. It doesn't mean underage. We could suspect that some amount of underage content has snuck in. We can suspect that I think there should be systems to prevent that. I strongly, strongly believe. And I think this is where people will probably disagree with me. I really think that we ought to be able to do some sort of identifying thing on the internet at a device level. And if you're uploading porn, I think you ought to be able that it's consensual and prove your age. I think that would get rid of almost all of this problem. A lot of people have huge privacy concerns over that. I get it, but that's where I stand. Like that is actually what I think. If we don't have that, there's going to be some amount of illicit content that sneaks through because there's no way to age verify with a hundred percent accuracy by site. I don't see it as an indictment of a website in the way that people are talking about, as in, this is like a den of illegal, awful stuff. If there's a category called teen. We got to grade this on its own terms. And now if you're someone who wants to get rid of Pornhub and you think that PornHub is the same as whatever this is, then I, I disagree. Well, I kind of do think PornHub is maybe the same As whatever this Is. If you think PernHub is the same, as what they're describing in this article, which is like, it's just a rape Academy. It's awful. It's, it just a den of this kind of awfulness. I think I disagree with you there. I think that would mean you, you would need to just ban all online porn. That's not something I'm going to agree with. Now, I will say, I do think I'm probably further on the side of, again, I think there just needs to be a way to verify people's consent and age in porn. And I am all for that. I don't know technologically what it is. I always get emails saying any attempt at that is going to be horrible and violate privacy and people will get all, you know, okay. I'm just saying that's what I think. I don'T know how it could be done. We could debate that. That would solve all of it. So that's where I'm coming from. Now, if we don't have that, like I started to say, if we don' t have that and we want to not ban all porn, then what are you left with? I think you're kind of left with what we're seeing here, which is, hey, pinky swear that this isn't illegal and also report anything you think might be illegal. We'll follow up and they probably just take it down right away just in case because there's so much. It's not like they're going to run out of porn. And that's kind of like what you can do. You You know, like I don't, again, hey, tell me if I'm wrong. There may be other creative, more ambitious ways that this can be policed. You know I'm all ears and I don' t run a porn site so whatever. I don''t even use this kind of porn. I have no dog in this fight other than I don ''t think it's good if we pair with the Christians to ban all porn. I don'T think that's good. That's bad. So I donʻt want to do that. But this is what really motivated me. When I saw that the top three categories and then the so the next one after that, when I just said is straight masturbation as in straight people like the cat, the broad category is straight, gay, trans, like that's the first category. And then the subcategory is like what kind of thing it is. So straight masturbación. The next one is gay cumshot. After that, trans blowjob. After that straight solo. After that gay teen, then trans webcam. Camp what struck me was overwhelmingly the most popular categories are gay and trans and so honestly that's kind of what gave me that extra motivation to talk about this is like now we have a case where people are talking about we need to round up all the all the visitors to this website because they're doing a rape academy and they're and they'RE drugging their wives or whatever and it turns out that like if you run the numbers like almost half of all the content content is LGBT, is gay or trans porn. And not like subversive or rapey or under, it's just normal gay, you know, I'm sure someone with the fifties would have a heart attack if I said this, but just normal gay or transporn is like half of this website. And I worry about that. I worry if we're stirring up a fervor and saying, I can't, why don't we execute all these people are on this website on the spot. And a lot of it is like, again, the top two categories are trans amateur, then gay amateur, and then trans teen. Like that's wrong. I'm sorry. It's wrong to be stirring up fear and use this 62 million figure. And the thing you're talking about is visitors to a porn website, the vast majority of whom are not doing anything wrong. The vast majority are not doing anything wrong. And probably a majority, or at least like a plurality of are probably queer people seeking queer porn. Cause maybe it's not always easy to get the kind of queer porn you want on the most popular or normalized porn websites. Maybe that's what it, I, I, I'm deeply uncomfortable. Once I saw that I'm deeply comfortable with how much this is being demonized. Now, look, I want people to get this very straight. This is not a full -throated endorsement of whatever this fucking website is. I'm sure there's bad stuff on it. I've seen stuff suggesting maybe it used to be worse, you know, like maybe it Used to be more 4chan -y and it's, you know if that's true, then I don't obviously endorse whatever that is. And maybe it's true that like a lot of websites, maybe it started off really horrible. And then over the course of time was exposed a bit and now is more like above board. I don't think it would be fair to take me as endorsing whatever that is. I'm not, you know, so if this has like a bad history, I don'T know about, I've seen some people claim that maybe that's right. Seems, I mean, it seems plausible if that's true. You know, I'm NOT endorsing this fucking website. I'M NOT endorsing any of that, but I am just looking at the evidence and following up and going through the categories, 95 % of all videos and visits on this is just pretty much in the realm of someone wants to watch porn that gets them horny. That's not, that's not illegal. And here's the thing. If I am wrong about that for any reason, I don't know what that would be. If I'm wrong about that, there's no possible way to know that from this fucking CNN article is all I'm saying. So if it turns out there's some deeper hidden reason why what I'm seeing is incorrect and I'm always open to that. It won't be because the CNN article was correct. I just want to make that very clear because I think that that sometimes happens in these debunks where it's like, hey, well, that that article making this claim, that's wrong. And then maybe there's some other way someone can find to prove that debunk wrong. It's like OK, but that had nothing to do with the article. You know what I mean? Like I find that to be a frustrating tactic because two wrongs don't make a right or or whatever. The CNN article is just wrong on its own terms when it talks about this. And technically it didn't lie because it did say one porn site, motherless .com, is home to more than 20 ,000 videos of so -called sleep content uploaded by users with hundreds of thousands of views. Now, I can't verify the views because they're not around anymore. I'll trust that if you had 20, 000 videos, then hundreds of 1000s of views is not hard to get to. I think it's at least pretty relevant context at at the very least, if you're going to defend the CNN article, okay. But when you say home to more than 20 ,000 of so -called sleep content, and when you're gonna say the website, the whole website, the whole thing had 62 million visits. When you go through and add up all the videos, and yes, I did this while I was watching hockey games, because it took a stupidly long time, but I was like, all right, I'll just click through and check each category. By the time it's all said and done, I, like I said, I couldn't see the sleep category. I just took them at their word that it was 20 ,000. That is 0.14% of the website, 0.4%. Now, like I said, I'm allowing for, and I don't, I haven't seen anyone talk about this, but it occurred to me that since videos can be in more than one category, which you would have to worry about is if different categories had a different amount of that, because if they were all the the tagged in five categories, then it all cancels out obviously. But like, you know, okay. It might be true that sleep videos would have fewer additional categories because they're maybe, but not necessarily because you could still tag it under like amateur, straight or gay or trans, you can still tag It under whatever was happening. So, you know, there might be some, I've just, again, I'm trying to make absolutely sure I'm not missing anything. So I haven't seen anyone say this. It just occurred to me that I guess that that means this isn't a straight one for one, but it's probably pretty close. Like I can't imagine it being off by that much. Like it would have to be that like the sleep videos are only in that category and everything else is in like a million categories. And so therefore the other categories are being overcounted, but even so it's just not going to add up to much, you know? And that's to say nothing of the fact that, okay, here we go. This might be controversial. We don't know how much of that sleep content was even illegal or unethical. I guess I got to take a break. I'm doing these cliffhanger breaks. Woo. Yeah. More on that after this quick break. Sorry, this is so obnoxious, but got to do the ad breaks.

0:43:02 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:43:02 Thomas: So here's the thing. It's always uncomfortable because I don't know what's going on broadly in people's heads. I think there are going to be people who are saying, wow, any porn video that features a sleeping person is like bad or problematic. That's, I mean, assuming everyone's consenting, which I am assuming anything non -consensual should not have any place here. And I hope that goes without saying no non - consensual, no genuinely non -consensual stuff should be on up. That should be heavily policed. I hope everyone knows that I believe that. I Hope that we would all believe that, but in my opinion, there's a massive difference between what's okay to fantasize about and have like erotic content about and used to masturbate or something versus real life behavior. I mean, the number one category on like most porn websites is like step sibling stuff or whatever, you know, or it'd be like incesty stuff. I get that that's a hugely popular category, and yet I don't believe that that means everyone is trying to or having sex with their relatives. Like, I don't think that's happening. I think that that'S a taboo. I think people get turned on by taboos. I think that especially in this day and age of the internet where there's so much exposure to stuff, I think there is a drive. And this is bad, but I think there is a drive for more and more subversive taboo stuff because people get a little desensitized. And I think that is bad. But I think that is fundamentally different depending on who it is. I think that's different than meaning everyone looking at a certain category of porn means they're going to do that in real life. People are into rape fantasies. People are into consensual non -consent. And I think it is okay to make fictional depictions of stuff like that. I think with some of this sleep stuff, now the article goes on to actually, well, let me continue on the article a little bit. The legality of some material posted is in serious doubt. It talks about eye check videos and that's where I guess they, though, so men, it says in these videos, men film themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show they are sleeping or sedated with some eye-check videos surpassing 50 ,000 views. Okay, so what I want to do is try to put some reality on how, like, if the thing we are worried about, the thing this article is worried about and is talking about and is making you think that is happening for all these 62 million visitors is people who genuinely are going to or at risk of or have already or want to put their partners owners unconscious and do stuff to them and or possibly film that for content that's the thing and and obviously non -consensually fucking horrible those people should be arrested that's rape simple as that once again hope that goes without saying so that's that's a population of people that is the target of this and that we should be concerned about I'm not disagreeing with any of those that of that like those people yeah like anyone who does that that sexual assault that's rape, that's awful. They should face criminal penalties for that. No disagreement there. The thing that's happening here is the conflation of several levels of this. Several levels. First, we conflate it with, it gets, the whole website gets 62 million views in a month of February. So 80 million after that or whatever. The whole thing. So right away, and people said men, right? You know, we know that's not true. 62 million visitors. And that's another thing I actually wanted to do this episode is because there's several levels of debunk. Because the first level you might've seen is, oh, it's not 62 million men, it's 62 million visits in a month. And I think what's troubling about that and what makes me want to do This is that's the first of like 10 debunks and a lot of people stopped there. So a lot Of people already were like, well, it' s views, not men. Well, that' s still really bad. You know, 62 million, I might've said 62 ,000 different places. You Know what I mean? 62 million. You know, OK, it's not individuals, but it is visitors. That's still really bad. But that, in a way, almost makes this more effective misinformation because it gives you that first plausible debunk. But that's not we're not even close to the truth. If the thing we're trying to get at is people who are going to do, as I described, are going to do or might do or Might teach others to do any any of that, this kind of nonconsensual rape essentially or sexual assault under sedation of their, of their intimate partners. We're all agreed those people are fucking evil. And I hope we're all agreed those people are evil and should be arrested and face consequences. But if we're, if we'RE trying to get at that, that first debunk sort of like eases people into being more comfortable, like, Oh, okay. It's not 62 million, but it is 62 million visits. No, that's of the entire fucking website. I've already covered half of which nearly half, something like 46% of videos are queer content. And again, not illegal, not rape, not just straight, like one was like masturbating, like definitionally, unless that's revenge porn that someone didn't want up there, which is again, always a possibility and one that I hope everyone and any sensible person would disagree with, but is always a probability with a porn website, unless we had really tight regulation, which we probably should have. Setting that aside, you know, one of the biggest categories was like gay masturbation. How, I'm sorry, you don't, you can't include that when it's one of the biggest categories. I don't want you getting anywhere near all visitors to that website being people who should be the legitimate targets of violence or arrest because they're like rapists. That makes me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. To go back to it, the real number is 0.14%. You know, it's on par with the category right below it. Funny porn, like comedy porn, gay handjob porn around that. Gothic. Let's see. It's just above cartoon heels. You know, like by the time we're getting down to this stuff, we're in the 96th percentile. So like all other videos, I don't know if I said that right, but like we're down to like, by the time we get down to This category, this sleep category, we've covered 96% of all of the videos on the website. And we're getting down to the, like the tiny, tiny things. I mean, there's 178 categories and the sleep category would have been again, just taking it the 20,000 would have been the 120th out of 178. And like the ones below it again, it's like masks, like mask porn, toys, Thai as in T-H-A-I lactating. It means it's niche stuff. I I mean, it exists, but it's, these are, this represents a tiny, tiny, tiny, teeny portion of what's on this website. Okay. But I guess going back in order, if you're saying 62 million people, not people visits, then here's the thing. That's actually, I mean not for nothing, the percentage of visits. And I looked this up there, the estimates vary wildly. The amount of reported visits that are actual human beings from what I'm seeing, especially now in the age of AI too, it's something like, I've seen estimates as low as 15% and as high, get this, as high as like 50%. So like from what I'm seeing, and I don't have a definitive answer for you on that, but I think we're all familiar with bots and with AI and how much like the search engines, the scrapers, and all that, the amount of traffic that's actual legitimate human beings is something like in the area of 15 to maybe if we're super optimistic, half of that amount. I mean, not for nothing. That's like pretty significant. Some people think it's as low as like 15%, because the amount of, especially with AI, the amount of times that computers, that bots, that AI can visit a thing just globally is so much more. It vastly outnumbers humans. And so people don't know, but let's say it's half. So now already you're now, instead of that 62 million, let's say 31, just for fun, just for fun. I want to go down to what these actual numbers would mean. That's one thing that I think is worth doing. If we're going to be, again, if we're going to be really concerned about this just for back of the envelope type stuff, let's say those visitors are hitting proportionately the categories. And there's some plausibility to that because this is a user uploaded thing too. So that means like, it's not as though this is like Netflix and it's like, you know, how many videos they make isn't necessarily how many people are going to be watching them. This is like user submitted. So you can assume there's a pretty decent correlation between how much is going to be submitted and how many people are using it or looking at it or whatever. And so, you know, if we're down to, let's say half for fun, we'll take the highest estimate that I really saw. Let's say it's half of that is real people. Well, now you're down to 43,000 people in a month, 43 ,00, sorry, 43 thousand visits. Well no, it would be people cause we're cutting it out. Now you're down to 43 thousand by people in a month. But that's in a month. So how many people, how many unique people is that? And then from there you got to realize those are just people watching videos in a category called sleep. To get back to what I started talking about, does that mean they're all like rapists or something? Or is it possible that some people have a bit of a fetish about that? And like a lot of fetishes are going to watch a video that depicts their fetish. And that doesn't necessarily mean that's something they're going to do in real life. I think if we go down the road of saying all of people's fetishes or turn ons or whatever are things they're actively at risk of doing, I think that's a dangerous road. I think that leads towards a lot of censorship, a lot of prudish bullshit, you know, because, like, people like to have fantasies about stuff. People like to watch porn about their fantasies. That does not mean they're about to get a girl stuck in a dryer or whatever the fuck, you know, like I think we got to be careful with that. Oh, man, I'm out of time. I think there's a lot more I got to talk about. So I'm going to do a part two of this as usual. I think I'll release it right away for patrons. I might release this right away for everybody because these were already a little late. But there's so much more to talk about with this. Thanks for listening and thanks for supporting. And most of all, thanks, folks, for listening with an open mind. And I hope trusting me as I'm trusting you that this isn't a case of wanting to debunk rape statistics or sexual violence statistics for the sake of doing that. That's not something I'm interested in doing for the sake of doing it at all. I hope I haven't even fully built out my case. But like I said, the main thing was like a lot of this website's visitors are people who are consuming trans and gay porn, like a lot of it. And even more of it is people just consuming like ordinary stuff. And so I worry about whipping up homicidal anger towards the users of a porn website. So that's, that's one of my main concerns. There's a lot more to talk about though. So thanks for listening. I'm going to jump off and jump right back on a part two. I'll see you then.