PPEcel
cope and seethe
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At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.
He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.
Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.
Opinion | The Children of Pornhub (Published 2020)
Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?
www.nytimes.com
Nick Kristof is a great columnist, so I naturally had to read his latest epic piece. Though I have mixed feelings about his policy prescriptions, the writing doesn't disappoint. I highly recommend.
Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.
Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.
As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.
At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, “I’m not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body,” she told me.
Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.
So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn’t sure how to get there. “It’s kind of hard to go to school when you’re living in a car with dogs,” she said.
Fleites' story is just one part of this article. Other femoids interviewed by Kristof says:
“They made money off my pain and suffering,” an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. “I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall,” she added, weeping as she spoke. “They were laughing.”
Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.
“They’re making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body,” a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.
“It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.”
“Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?” Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. “You really need a better system. … I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website.”
“It’s never going to end,” Nicole said. “They’re getting so much money from our trauma.”
Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.
But Kristof's aim is clearly to get the corporate world and the public sector to crack down on Mindgeek:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?
And call me a prude, 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.
But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.
Apparently, Kristof's pressure campaign is working, because Visa and Mastercard have begun to investigate Pornhub's ties to their companies. Trudeau released a brief statement saying the Canadian government is "concerned". And in burgerland, Republican Senator Josh Hawley tweeted:
View: https://twitter.com/hawleymo/status/1334866293711761411
And just this morning, while I was cooming, I saw an ad on Pornhub. Instead of the usual degenerate clickbait, it was a link to a bland corporate statement where Mindgeek accepted some of Kristof's suggestions.
Discussion points
What I found most fascinating, however, was the following comment and its replies on the NYTimes website. Daniel, from Washington D.C., writes:
Pornography?
I watch it and I can tell you exactly why.
Life as you grow up in society punishingly makes you all too aware of your level, where you should stand, what you should be satisfied with, what you should settle for, indeed what you should love.
I watch porn just like I look at pictures of high quality cars or landscapes or films with beautiful women, just like I search out great books, paintings,--anything of quality. Life has left me poor, with a low quality car, with no property to speak of, with no prospects, and when it comes to women I'm supposed to settle for what society says I deserve.
When I watch porn I see a number of quite beautiful women, women out of my league, and I would rather watch them than be with and pretend to love someone I do not. I don't settle: I don't like crummy cars, trashy landscapes, crummy political ideology, bad food, and any number of other low quality things people say I should be grateful for having.
Society is a nightmare of competition with the best things in life out of reach for millions of us, and millions of us have only images of a better life. True many of the left out are angry, violent, trashing everything from nice cars to landscapes to women when we come across them, but many of us are only making do with what we can, our lot in life.
I don't see myself with Ann Hathaway or Scarlett Johansson or Rachel McAdams anytime soon, but there are a number of nice girls on porn sites so I hold on to ideal as I can.
Fascinating comment. Thank you, Daniel. The replies, though are predictable. Audrey from Arlington, VA, responds:
I find the notion that beautiful women can be put into the same category as cars, books, and paintings extraordinarily degrading.
And Daniel Kinske from West Hollywood says:
@Daniel12 Gross, gross, and gross. Not very imaginative. I'm a gay male in Los Angeles and I never saw myself with Rachel McAdams either until I stood behind her at a Bristol Farms in Hollywood, of course she is just another human-being to me, not some object too slobber over. It is so tiring having less rights than a straight male, when straight men cause such a high preponderance of rapes and assaults and just being gross towards the opposite sex. No wonder there are so many Incels.
1) Are incels really to blame for the dissemination of these private images when they were, in all likelihood, sent to Chad recipients? After all, why would a femoid send images to a classmate she was not attracted to? I can tell you that the rejects and outcasts of high school are not the ones at fault. Does no one think that these Chads should face legal repercussions?
2) Should Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa really be the arbiters of social justice?
3) Is it victim-blaming to remind a foid that if she didn't take nudes of herself, that she wouldn't end up on Pornhub? Because I don't think so. That just sounds like common sense to me.
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