The Ethics of OnlyFans: Easy Money, Hard Choices.

well what do you do do you work or go to
school i do i work um in retail and i um i'm gonna be getting my psychology degree in the fall i'm gonna be going back for that how old are you i'm 18. oh my goodness newly 18. newly 18. how new about a week ago i turned 18 a week i cannot believe it aren't we lucky so how did you find us through pornhub i've seen some of your guys's videos what are we here to shoot today my very first adult video your very first porn video yes this is maybe the most puzzling part of the equation and it may not be the most salacious it may not be the most entertaining it may not be immediately obvious to you why this is worth thinking about seriously do you really imagine that sex work is good for the sex worker one simplistic position is to argue that it's good for anyone and everyone who wants to do it the diametric opposite is to say it's not good for anyone should be completely banned it's not good for him at all most of us certainly the vast majority of people who are willing to click on this video and ponder the problem philosophically fall into category number three the belief or the assumption that it's good for some people but not others that's actually the most difficult position to sustain that's the most difficult position to justify and it entails the most troubling implications because you are consciously or unconsciously dividing humanity into two classes of people those for whom this is acceptable and those for whom this is not [Music] i feel very unhappy and unfulfilled sometimes even though i am making good amount of money because i know this is not something i want to do [Music] this is kind of gross but guys you've been around they probably want to see you naked and not all of them but most of them will pay that extra money without telling you and they're gonna see i can't even imagine how many guys that i went to high school with is up to my only fans but you know that is that's just how it is and i can live with that but can you this only fans thing people don't want to see pornography they want to see your pornography this is a very mentally stressing industry because as much as we want to say our body our choice society are still going to judge us upon it that's why a lot of girls don't want to show their face because they don't want society people around them to judge them it's really hard to talk about it because i'm making a really good amount of money for someone my age and not even doing that much like i don't feel like i've sold my soul yet do you believe army recruitment is good for the young soldier who is recruited wouldn't it be simple to live your life with a belief that sure joining the army is good for anyone and everyone there's nothing wrong with teams of army recruiters signing up 18 year olds doing army recruitment in high schools young people making this decision that's going to change their life forever on the basis of propaganda on the basis of what may be intentionally misleading recruitment information provided by the recruiters and on the basis probably of fantasies or dreams they have of what being in the army is like that they may have had since childhood or that they may have gotten from watching movies and tv shows right it wouldn't your life be simple if you could believe in position one or position two here this is good for anyone and everyone army recruiter joined the army it's good for all teenagers to sign up or maybe you're some kind of principled anti-military pacifist who thinks this isn't good for anybody this should be completely abolished they should be completely illegal but position three is the one that's really difficult to justify yourself and it has the most troubling implications it's good for some people and not others if we really believed that sex work were an unalloyed good then we would have no trouble at all with the sex industry recruiting students in high schools setting up a desk just like this army recruiter here and saying sign up now to star in pornographic films sign up now to be a stripper or even a prostitute there's an article here from an anti-pornography website complaining about sex industry groups sitting up precisely this kind of stand at schools trying to recruit girls who've just turned 18 to become strippers porn stars so and so forth and i thought it was interesting that even though this website is anti-pornography and anti-sex work they chose quite a moderate ethical parallel here they compared this to the credit card industry setting up booths in high schools and offering teenagers credit cards when teenagers couldn't possibly cope with couldn't possibly imagine the long-term implications of running a credit card debt at what age can you really understand the long-term implications of signing up to join the military at what age can you really understand the long-term implications of signing up to become a porn star even if that is the currently socially acceptable form instagram modeling only fans modeling the various shades of gray that the internet has afforded to sex working as an industry and i want to just briefly press forward to a much more shocking much more serious and much more politically important question do you think cocaine and heroin should be legalized i debated this at great length with a libertarian who took the positions quite quite popular here on the internet for people to argue in terms of just our abstract reasoning on the chalkboard that society would better place if you allowed anyone and everyone to use cocaine and heroin if they chose to but i pressed on point three here what do you really believe you believe there are two classes of humanity one class of humanity that's so contemptible that it doesn't matter if they use cocaine and heroin and one class of humanity that absolutely must remain sober do you believe that a police officer should be allowed to use cocaine first thing in the morning before he goes out on the job do you believe that an airplane pilot should be allowed to shoot up heroin before after or during work do you believe that a schoolteacher should be able to do these drugs on the weekend do you believe that a parent who is raising children should be allowed to do these drugs in their own home in front of their kids you know at the dinner table or actually you don't believe any of these things when you say that cocaine and heroin should be legalized what you really mean implicitly what you really believe what you're refusing to examine is the assumption that there are some people for whom this is okay and for those people for that separate class of humanity and society this doesn't have negative consequences that we should worry about and implicitly when we take the position that sex work is good for the sex worker that only fans isn't a problem really implicitly position three entails that there are some people for whom this is okay and we don't want to admit to ourselves that we're dividing humanity into two classes that for you it doesn't matter oh but for a young woman who wants to become a police officer but for a young woman who wants to become a surgeon a politician a psychiatrist for a young woman maybe even who just wants to later be a parent and raise a family that actually you are creating a subclass of humanity in your mind and it's not that you believe those people won't suffer the negative consequences of sex work it's not that you believe the soldier who signs up at 18 won't suffer the consequence of joining the army or that the drug addict won't suffer the consequences of drug addiction it's that you think there's one class of humanity for whom those negative consequences don't matter i do i work in retail and i am going to be getting my psychology degree in the fall i'm gonna be going back for that what i'm trying to say again again is no each of us in our way has the responsibilities of a police officer of a pilot and of a parent we all share in being the same class of human beings with the same responsibilities and the same potentials above all politically sometimes in ethics politics and philosophy we have to deal with a completely irrelevant consideration that enough people believe to be relevant that it becomes important it becomes important in talking about the future of our culture and frankly the future of legislation that may govern this part of our culture the irrelevant but important factor i want to talk about now is privacy there's this catchphrase in the year 2020 that we're living in a post-privacy society but the reality is before the internet existed there was the phone book and the reality of the phone book is that anyone who knows your name can find out your address and your telephone number that never was treated as private or concealed information it never was treated as a crime for someone to share your name your phone number or your address that has not been up to this point part of our cultural and legal tradition and that may change it may be that these things start to be treated as secret or that there are new laws that make it a crime to come on the internet and say hey i know who that is i know her name because that's all it takes right no matter how hard you may work to conceal your name on the internet all it takes is one of your cousins one of your neighbors maybe the bank teller to say oh yeah i recognize that girl i recognize that guy here's his name now that you have his name you can find out his phone number you can find out his address that's the way it's always been we don't live in this respect in a post-privacy society we live in a society that's actually more interested in more sensitive to these fundamental questions of privacy than ever before because of the internet and if you look back at the lives of women who appeared in pornography in the 1970s or 1980s you're quite wrong to think they lived in a world where they could take for granted that nobody knew their name that nobody knew their address or that their friends and family members were unaware that they were appearing in pornography they were able to conceal this part of their lives all right the internet has made these sorts of things faster it's made these sorts of things cheaper and with the advent of facial recognition software yes we have the final step whereby basically nobody no matter how hard they may try can conceal their name can conceal their address or can conceal the connection between the different profiles they have on the internet if for example you have a professional name and then you have a name you use for your modeling career on the side those are going to be connected by having your face in common however most fundamentally we have to recognize that in even raising these questions of privacy we're raising something profoundly irrelevant to the ethical question at hand what we are asking in effect is what if you could have your cake and eat it too what if you could star in pornography and make that money and have that fame while remaining completely anonymous while concealing it from your friends and family your co-workers while still having a career as a psychologist or a lawyer or a school teacher or a parent what if you could have all of the advantages of appearing in pornography without the disadvantages and that is a fundamentally immoral and irrelevant question if we were talking about murder we're not going to talk about the ethics of getting away with it and it's very obvious that in the 21st century there is absolutely no way on the internet you can get away at least not with being a successful porn star or a successful nude model if we're talking about whether it's right or wrong to take revenge by killing someone we have to recognize how irrelevant the question is of yeah but what if you could conceal it what if nobody found out what if you could get away with it stereotypically these questions are asked about women not men and they're posed in a way that presumes that women don't have some other career to sacrifice whether that be a potential career in the future or an actual ongoing career here and now these stereotypes are challenged by examples like professor nicholas goddard who in his 60s with a phd with a distinguished career as a university professor started participating as a performer in pornography and inevitably he dealt with the consequences that his co-workers his friends his relatives and of course his students at the university did indeed discover that he had this double life why do i say that privacy is a separate and irrelevant issue it's because i see that it becomes a dangerous distraction in talking about the ethics and even the pragmatic decisions we all have to make as individual people when we talk about pornography there's a really important court precedent from about one year ago involving a company called girlsdewporn.com what i see in the mainstream press reporting on it is that the journalists sympathize with the perspective of the young women who brought the complaint in that they felt that they should be able to appear in pornography they should be able to earn the money get the fame and acclaim without the notoriety that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that somehow privacy should make it possible to [Music] be a psychology major who goes on to become a psychologist while simultaneously and secretly being a porn star the young woman who started the complaint that ultimately went to court she's listed as jane doe number one she was the ringleader reaching out to and organizing the other young women 22 of them were dissatisfied with their experience with this company she was a law school student she was planning on becoming a lawyer and what do you know it's actually impossible to be a porn star to have all the advantages of being a porn star or a nude model without having the disadvantages also now this is not the only important ethical issue raised in this court case on the contrary i'd be happy to do another youtube video talking about many other aspects of this court case there are a lot a lot of profound things to reflect on there but this is a dangerous distraction from all of those profound and important questions because the question you're asking is well yeah but what if you could get away with it what if you could have all the advantages without the disadvantages well what if we could kill osama bin laden without starting a war that would kill thousands or tens of thousands of innocent people what if we could conquer syria without having to go billions of dollars into debt what if we could have war without the negative consequences wouldn't it be great then what if the cia could acquire secret information without wiretapping anyone without torturing anyone the whole realm of ethical and political debate must concern and include those negative consequences there's absolutely no point in dealing with this hypothetically as if you could have the advantages without the disadvantages and privacy has become precisely that kind of dangerous distraction from these issues the video up to this point has only entertained the question of whether or not sex work is good i think there is a very different discourse we have to engage in when we shift to the question of whether or not it is normal in the year 2020 the president united states is donald trump his current wife is a retired model do you think you could go to google right now and find nude images of donald trump's wife how about his ex-wives how many of his former wives have nude images of themselves on the internet this has become normal good or bad we have to as with the absence of privacy face up to the profound normalcy that this has taken on in our lives and at all levels of our society the problem is precisely that people in the top level of our society are able to indulge in these things without dealing with the consequences a poor and powerless person who is struggling to become a psychiatrist or a medical doctor or a lawyer or even just to get a job on a construction site or as a mechanic they may really be unable to deal with the consequences of having quite benign rumors about their sex lives on the internet or a minor uh sex scandal involving an ex-boyfriend and some unflattering posts on facebook or youtube complaining about something sorted in their personal past a poor and powerless person may be quite ill prepared to deal with the consequences of the fact that maybe in the year 2020 they briefly opened and only fans and tried to find out how much money they could or couldn't make out of marketing nude images themselves and we know that it's precisely people like donald trump donald trump and his wives who are able to do these things with impunity i'm interested profoundly in equality under the law both ways it may sound very strange to ask the question of can we or should we all live like donald trump but legally morally and ethically i think those are precisely the questions we have to move towards asking we can't have a society in which there is impunity for some but not others either this is a right to be exercised by all or by none at all