VISA dropping Pornhub is bad for women

It's really bad for everyone

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Like any cool girl, this weekend I watched an episode of PBS’s Frontline from 2002 doin a moral panic about the porn industry moving online.

What struck me is how little has changed in the last twenty years. In fact every sex-based American moral panic follows the same stupid playbook:

1. Women find a way to make money

2. Government cracks down

3. Media fuels a moral panic

4. Government cracks down more

5. Women get fucked over and white men continue to profit

From the white-slavery panic over women moving to cities in the early 1900s to the 1980’s porn wars to the early aughts obscenity trials it’s always the same playbook. Moral scolds use made-up or embellished stories, false statistics, and mind-bending logic to justify state violence against women. The end result is also always the same. Sex work and porn continue unabated but women and independent smaller producers get arrested, jailed, and driven out while white men running large, corporate incumbents are further entrenched.

Here’s an example of false statistics and mind-bending logic from 2002. In the Frontline episode, the guy who prosecuted Larry Flynt for obscenity says if the Clinton administration hadn't gone easy on pornographers in the 90s porn would have never taken over the internet.

"If there had been continued federal prosecutions you wouldn't see the internet presence of the porn syndicates as big as it is today."

Whereas in 2002 we had Frontline in 2020 we have Nicolas Kristof warning of the perils of PornHub and the New York Post outing women on OnlyFans. Kristof singles out Pornhub despite the fact that for every one case victims rights lawyer Carrie A. Goldberg has involving a rape tape on Pornhub, she has 50 involving rape and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) being disseminated on Instagram and Facebook. Data from the Internet Watch Foundation confirms that there’s way more CSAM on mainstream social media platforms than there is on Pornhub.

“The majority of the most ghastly content is not published publicly on porn sites,” Goldberg wrote. “It’s hoarded and secretly exchanged with as little trace as possible.”

Still, Pornhub did limit uploads to ID-verified users, something sex workers and porn performers had been asking for for years. They also expanded their moderation efforts and implemented other reforms.

Yet AFTER Pornhub cleaned up its act, VISA and MasterCard confirmed they were dropping Mindgeek, the company that owns Pornhub and all its websites.

“Call me a prude,” Kristof wrote, “but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.”

This isn’t the first time credit card companies have censored porn. In 2002 VISA and American Express slapped “high risk” sites with additional fees. Did this destroy internet porn? Did it usher in an era of fair, competitive, ethical porn? Or did it simply fuck over small, independent porn producers and performers?

We already know that forcing payment processors to play cops just entrenches incumbents while encouraging offshoring and black markets.

The big problem with using government to achieve your ends is there's no penalty for them or for you for being wrong. Who cares that the Bush-era Obscenity Task Force and payment processor fees financially ruined small, competitive, ethical American porn producers and helped entrench Pornhub? No one is going to see any accountability for the harms they caused.

And seemingly no one has learned anything (other than sex workers and porn producers/performers who have a vested interest in getting these things right).

Pornhub creators are just the new Danni Ashe, et al. The DOJ is out to fuck swers & convince middle America we’re being saved. Meanwhile white guys continue to profit as their competitors get shut out and shut down.

And no, techbros, payment processors dropping Mindgeek will not usher in crypto-utopia. The DOJ ignored HSBC’s billions in money laundering for years but threw Charlie Shrem in prison for not properly reporting a small BTC sale. The DOJ will crush every competitive market, leaving only the behemoths. We must reign them in.

Gustavo Turner:

Kristof’s call for state censorship and defunding of Pornhub is identical to the current crusade being conducted by a well-funded, religiously inspired organization variously called Exodus Cry and Trafficking Hub, a California-based offshoot of controversial Midwestern ministry International House of Prayer.

In fact, Kristof mentions the organization’s main mouthpiece in his tirade. “An organization called Traffickinghub [sic] led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down,” he writes.

Mickelwait, a single-minded zealot whose life mission is to get someone — anyone — to “shut down” Pornhub, looms large in the background of Kristof’s editorial, as does NCOSE (formerly known as Morality in Media), another well-funded, religiously inspired group which has been waging its own War on Porn since the 1960s.

NCOSE was responsible for the useless, wasteful copycat legislation passed in several Red State legislatures since 2016 attempting to define “porn as a public health crisis.” These performative bills attempted to divert resources from actual public health matters to “porn addiction” groups for training and other services. Since the actual COVID-19 public health crisis began, these efforts have become dormant, with funding by donors interested in the War on Porn being now repurposed for organizations like Exodus Cry and anti-Pornhub crusaders like Mickelwait.

Almost every piece of tendentious misinformation about Pornhub in Kristof’s piece, plus his attempt to influence mainstream financial services to stop doing business with the company, are straight from Mickelwait’s playbook, although Kristof does not disclose Exodus Cry’s very obvious influence on both his analysis and his proposed remedies.

By writing this deliberately manipulative piece, Kristof has essentially turned the New York Times into the Exodus Cry house organ, delivering its message to millions of readers, including influential politicians, judges and opinion-shapers.

Polaris sends cops to arrest sex workers and colludes with ICE to deport them. Exodus Cry is an Evangelical, anti-porn, anti-sex-worker anti-gay, anti-abortion, and antisemitic organization that seeks to “abolish” aka criminalize sex work. Trafficking Hub is an Exodus Cry program which baselessly blames porn for human trafficking and seeks to criminalize commercial porn.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is an arm of the DOJ. All of them want to ban porn, keep sex work criminalized, and arrest sex workers.

Kristof and friends want to further erode Section 230 protections and give Congress more power to censor the internet and shut down disfavored websites which history shows will not benefit anyone but black market pornographers and huge incumbents.

Please don’t get it twisted. The DOJ is pressuring credit card companies to drop Mindgeek and other porn sites (OnlyFans is likely in the crosshairs). Moral scolds like Exodus Cry are laundering false statistics and mind-bending logic through tools like Kristof to justify state violence against women.

As Melissa Gira-Grant writes, these groups have successfully built bi-partisan coalitions and passed anti-trafficking laws and policies that largely ignore labor abuses and instead target the sex industry. 

Allowing these groups to run the legislative agenda rather than the porn performers and sex workers we’re purporting to protect will only result in more black market porn, small pornographers and sex workers losing their legal income and turning to more dangerous work, and industry consolidation.

But maybe that’s the point. After all, a new study found that stock-owning Congresscritters vote to benefit their portfolios and that their votes can’t be explained away by other factors, such as ideology or constituent interests.