Because commitment to progress ends at the penis. Always. And for many, slavery is too super-hot to fight.
Warning: Mild descriptions of sexual abuse and some nasty Google search screenshots. Viewer discretion is advised. NSFW.
The sheer ludicrousness of giving ‘slave reparations’ to people who’ve never been slaves by people who’ve never owned them is only one reason why I don’t support this dumbass idea.
The other is because if slavery is that bad, and it is, the focus should be on ending modern slavery today, rather than yammering on about an institution abolished over a century and a half ago.
It won’t be a welcome topic at your local Black Lives Matter rap.
Africa, after all, and as always, is the epicenter of modern-day slavery, a continent that has been buying, trading, selling, and owning human beings for millennia and is not going to stop just because it’s politically incorrect.
Bringing slavery home to wherever you live, a helluva lot of people aid, abet, and support slavery today, including many ‘progressives’ and far-left antiracists, maybe even you. The supporters pretend not to know it, and they brush it off or deny it if you bring it up.
Because frankly, slavery today is too super-hot to fix.
Who supports slavery?
I can’t know how many antiracists, or people angling for reparations handouts, support human slavery via the sex and porn industry. And I don’t want to specially single them out either, because support for human slavery is so widespread, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like or how you vote. The need for human slavery is so great because there is so much demand for sexual content.
Some estimates hold that 21 to 45 million people are trapped in slavery today, which gives you some idea of how fuzzy we are on the extent of it. The illicit spa industry is a multi-billion-dollar business and according to the United Nations, around four million children and adults were sex-trafficked in 2016, 99% of them women and girls. Asia and the Pacific region were the biggest suppliers, and it was estimated 1 in 7 runaway American girls ended up sex trafficked. The profits from this trade? Globally, around $99 billion.
I became interested in the commonplace support for human slavery quite by accident, when I mentioned to a man I’d been dating that I hadn’t known how prevalent human trafficking, i.e., slavery, was in pornography.
He pushed back so strongly I was a little surprised. I told him I’d just finished a book about dating apps and their impact on romance, sex and relationships, and that it briefly touched upon how much pornography depends on human trafficking. Some ‘sex workers’ are paid, few are paid well, and even ‘legitimate’ legal porn actresses are sometimes trafficked. Montreal-based online porn king Mindgeek had faced allegations for years that their sites contained child porn and other sex-trafficked content.
Mindgeek, which revolutionized porn in the 2000s with Pornhub and YouPorn and pioneered self-created ‘amateur porn’, was acquired a few weeks ago by private equity company Ethical Capital Partners. Pornhub has made, at best, half-assed attempts to remove content identified as sex-trafficked, or clearly illegal porn. Pornhub has been accused for years of refusing to remove illegal content, especially if it made too much money, like the 14-year-old girl raped for a porn video.
A consumer can lie to himself that a porn subject is a young-looking 18-year-old. That she’s ‘acting’ at being raped, rather than that she may very well be underage, and really being raped.
(But still, it’s kind of hot, isn’t it?)
Pornhub has required zero identification and verification, and all you needed to get a ‘verified’ free blue check mark like Twitter’s was to provide an email address.
Sex trafficking today literally can’t keep up with the demand for porn producers. Anyone who watches porn, or solicits prostitutes, or visits spas offering ‘happy endings’, almost certainly abets and supports human trafficking, i.e., slavery.
It’s not just men - about 30% of Pornhub’s accounts belong to women. Their top categories of interest, according to Pornhub’s annual Year in Review for 2022 was ‘lesbian’ followed by ‘Japanese’, ‘threesome’, and ‘ebony’ (please note, antiracists, that black porn stars are often paid considerably less than their white counterparts). Women were also more likely than men to search for and view trans male transgender porn, along with hardcore and gangbang.
Not all victims of sex trafficking work in porn. Prostitution, or ‘sex work’ as it’s called by those looking to make it sound more respectable and voluntary - also feeds the beast, and some are pressed into service for non-sexual forced labor, domestic servitude, child marriage, field work, construction, or for organ removal.
But sexual exploitation is a huge driver, and the anti-slavery-mad United States is the top porn consuming country according to Pornhub. The increased demand for violent porn, not to mention the real illegal deal - child pornography and violent sexual assault (where there’s a lot of overlap) requires sexual enslavement, as no one under the age of 18 can legally consent to appearing in even self-created porn, and few women will fully agree to real rape or any other violence unless their ‘choice’ is vicious physical abuse or a desperate need to pay the bills. ‘Consent’ isn’t ‘she’ll suffer far worse if she doesn’t agree’.
Pornhub’s shiny new management
Ethical Capital Partners’s website says they seek investment and advisory opportunities for industries that “require principled ethical leadership. ECP invests in opportunities that focus on technology, have legal and regulatory complexity and that put a value on transparency and accountability.”
If there’s one thing Pornhub could use a massive hypodomermic hit of, it’s transparency and accountability.
In their news release of the acquisition, the “ethics-first” acquirer claims, “ECP believes the internet should be safe for all - with child protection, intimate image security and digital self-determination at the core of our values, and that MindGeek must play a leading role in the fight against illegal content across the internet.” Pornhub removed almost all of its videos - all by unverified users - in late 2020 when they lost Visa and Mastercard payment processing services. Said services have since been restored.
It remains to be seen how much real transparency and accountability ECP will bring to Mindgeek’s phenomenally popular collection of porn sites.
ECP itself is a brand-new establishment and Mindgeek is their first acquisition. If they have any other clients I can’t find any.
Slave reparations for women
It’s unclear how much the ‘new and improved’ Pornhub after its 2020 ‘cleanse’ has kept illegal material off the website. Pornhub and its sister YouPorn are merely the leaders, apart from numerous other non-Mindgeek companies producing and providing porn all throughout the world.
In the olden days, as is still for many today, porn was exchanged surreptitiously, via the U.S. mail and the now-defunct Internet’s Usenet forums. Today there are clandestine ‘darknets’, for trafficking in the very worst of human malevolence by people who absolutely, positively, know they’re breaking the law.
Today, we pretend that’s only for filthy criminals while ignoring our own support of an industry that itself relies on human slavery to function.
After all, we’re good people.
Antiracist anti-slavery advocates should note that black men, as of a few years ago, were a growing audience for porn.
We can’t know what the political persuasions of porn consumers are, but with so much modern attention focused on the evils of the pre-20th century transatlantic slave trade, it’s hard to think that at least some civil rights protesters pulling down statues of historical slave owners by day aren’t then going home at night to wank vigorously over human slaves themselves.
We’d rather not think about it because, well, porn is so hot, isn’t it?
Women may support 30% of it (why, girlfriends, why?) but that makes male lust responsible for keeping human slavers in gold chains, Bugattis and penthouse apartments. Guaranteed some of these male consumers are ‘feminists’, or at least are respectful of women’s rights by day. The porn consumer I’d been seeing was one of them. He was perfectly respectful of me and what I would or wouldn’t do, yet he viewed a lot of porn - I don’t know how much but he expressed a willingness to try a lot of things I’m quite certain he’d never have found attractive had it not been for porn.
The new-ish male obsession with anal sex was inspired by you-know-what. The embrace of oral sex as a now-normalized sexual practice began with Linda Lovelace and Deepthroat (Lovelace was herself forced into making the movie by her abusive then-husband).
Porn and sex trafficking go way, waaaaay back.
It’s something to think about when antiracism exaggerates the position of the United States’s slave trade in American history. It’s a big black mark on our historical record, for certain. It’s nothing to be proud of, and the United States was one of the last countries to abolish slavery.
But it doesn’t solely define our nation, and attempting to go after the Founding Fathers’s statues because they were slave owners is intellectual dishonesty when they were the first people in nearly 2,000 years to bring democracy back to the world (imperfectly implemented in ancient Greece, as well as in colonial America). It’s hypocrisy at its very worst if one consumes pornography or solicits prostitutes, not knowing who’s doing it voluntarily and who’s forced, or ‘agrees’ to it as Linda Lovelace did because sucking a stranger’s dick was better than beatings by her husband.
If white Americans are expected to pay ‘slave reparations’ a century and a half after the last slave was horsewhipped on a plantation, then it’s time for men to pay ‘reparations’ to women for their part in supporting and abetting the modern-day slave trade. In fact, maybe every human born with a penis should pay ‘slave reparations’ to women for 12,000 years of ‘patriarchy’, most of which was defined by men owning women in one capacity or another and governing their very lives. Mostly for the pussy.
Sex and the single antiracist
I speak tongue in cheek. I don’t expect men will ever agree to this, nor should they, any more than I expect white people to agree to slave reparations (although a San Francisco panel appears to be trying to make a go of it - we’ll see how far this idea of giving $5 million apiece to every person who ‘identifies’ as black gets with the voters.)
After my ex-guy pushed back on slavery in porn, I read an article on how feminism always encounters resistance from so-called progressive men the moment it threatens male sexual pleasure. It’s how you can identify who watches a lot of porn without asking directly. Just start talking about human trafficking and porn to see who gets pissy.
“Google ‘YouPorn Pornhub sex trafficking,’ I told him. “The first page of search results offers several reliable sources.”
I’m quite certain he never did. I’m certain he didn’t want to know. I didn’t push it at the time because it wasn’t my particular interest, nor did I want to make him feel like a pervert.
I’d bet a lot of progressives fighting a dead slave trade today wouldn’t Google it either if you pointed out to them how much human slavery supports the sex trade.
Because for many of them, violent, degrading pornographic acts visited mostly on women and young girls are just hot. Better to talk about young black bodies swaying from trees, or the hideously scarred back of a 19th-century slave, rather than scrutinize the faces of the women and girls violently mistreated in porn videos. Better to tell one’s self that they’re getting paid, and that they’re actresses, not real victims provided by a global slave trade.
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to wank it dry, as I believe Lord Alfred Tennyson once wrote. The little perv.
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