From GirlsDoPorn to Onlyfans: Milestones in Internet History.

you're here to do your very first adult
film how do you feel pretty nervous but ready so what made you want to come to a porn video just to try something new i'm 18. about a week ago i turned 18 a week i'm 21. how old are you 18. how long you've been 18 like a week and a half a week and a half they're gonna control you they'll make you feel like you're famous man you're famous dude you're big you're the next big thing man you're gonna be johnny depp guess what they're raping you son they are raping you you don't know what's actually happening because guys like me are looking [Music] all i want to do is like start and only fans and frolic naked in a field i've seen some of your guys's videos oh my god and i was like girlfriendporn.com was the top of your list yep when you went to shoot your first adult video i'm graduating high school next week uh do you have a boyfriend yes you do did you know you're here no have you ever cheated on a boyfriend before no no no first time yeah and you were telling me a little interesting fact that you actually got you lost a bit to do this we weren't going to say what the bet is but you lost the bet with a friend to do this video yeah it's true you say it like it's a bad thing uh it's a porn thing i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you before reality television there was television before there was only fans there was this other website girls do porn they're different in important ways but they're similar in that a distinctive part of the product a distinctive part of what the audience is paying for is realness is this strange sense that we call in english the girl next door fact the what what does that mean who who lives next door to why do we say that in english the girl next door not that this is somebody you actually know it's somebody that you could know it's somebody that you have some kind of social relationship to that is not quite the same as the relationship of the audience to a movie star or the viewing public to a news broadcaster there was a transition from television to reality television and this somehow made the characters in the screen seem tangible and relatable and real what made you want to do this um it's an experience to have yeah how many guys have you been with um i think five do you work out or anything um i surf you surf yeah and what do you do are you working or studying um yeah i just work retail right now swing you enjoy that it's a job it's a job what is it exactly that people are now paying for on only fans it's not to admire a movie star from afar it's to have some kind of simulated social relationship however phony some kind of packaged telecommunications mediated intimacy with these people these performers that members of the audience feel they know one of the assumptions about models porn stars and personalities promoting themselves on only fans is that they have made the decision to go public to take their name and the details of their private life and put it on the internet and become a public figure in in many cases that's not true in many cases actually they're trying to conceal their face conceal their name trying to maintain a private life but the assumption is that if you're on only fans you've made this choice and you're promoting yourself and the assumption about the women who appeared on girls do porn is that they were trying to maintain their anonymity and that is not always true however one of the most salacious and shocking aspects of the court case that brought the website girls to porn to its end was the revelation that the owners of the company themselves the filmmakers themselves were doxing the models which is to say they were promising these women that they would treat their names phone numbers email addresses as private and confidential and on the contrary sometimes on the same day that a video was posted to their website precisely this private information that the filmmakers had received in writing a contract with these women was posted on the internet fans were encouraged to share personal information on websites that were owned by the same team of filmmakers the plaintiffs need not show that defendants personally leaked the names or participated in the harassment of the models of the porn stars if you like although there is evidence that they did the porn wikileaks forum specifically dedicated to identifying the women who appear on girls do porn at one point contained a prominent banner that read quote real names and personal family info right from the owner of girlsdewborn.com he exposes real names and personal family info of the closet [ __ ] he films close quote this banner published on a site owned by the defendants provides the most straightforward and plausible explanation of how this happened it's worthwhile to pause and reflect why is this shocking it's shocking because these women imagined that they could appear in a pornographic film without anyone ever knowing their name without anyone ever knowing their educational history where they went to school without anyone knowing the jobs they'd had in the past and perhaps the career they aspired to have in the future therefore we treat the revelation of those facts as shocking it's only shocking because we presume those things can be concealed this is the year 2020. every single social media influencer myself included cannot conceal any of that information this is the year 2020 each and every young woman who chooses to market her body and her personality on a website like only fans today is presumed to become a kind of social media influencer who will share anecdotes from her personal life and it will be possible for anyone and everyone in her audience to know her real name where she grew up where she went to school perhaps jobs she had in the past perhaps about ex-boyfriends she had in the past you may complain about her on the internet and yes to know about her career aspirations in the future i'm not disputing whether or not this is shocking but i'm inviting you to take a moment and reflect on why and to look at the road ahead because i of all people i know the burden of being a social media influencer of having all of the disadvantages of fame with none of the advantages i've never done this before why not it never really crossed my mind yeah so what made you want to do today um gotta pay the bills yeah yeah is that the only reason you're doing this um i think everyone has a little bit of inner freak i guess the public passion we're dealing with here is an appetite for reality not fantasy the mania for disclosure turns up this type of contradiction the woman claims she's poor that she's participating in pornography just in order to pay the bills and then what does the audience leap on this audience of hated trolls that leap on the fact that she received a scholarship worth close to 100 000 us dollars that she is in fact a graduate of some kind of tremendously elite academy this tells you a little bit about the resentment against particular persons in the equation but it tells you a great deal about what's going on in the united states of america in the 21st century some of you may now be asking how could it be that even a few of these women imagined that they would maintain their anonymity that they would maintain their privacy after appearing in a pornographic film of this kind evidently there were hundreds of models who worked with this company some of them went on to become famous porn stars and promoted their own careers but 22 women were part of this lawsuit the company in question had more than 500 women make pornographic films of them perhaps the real number is closer to 700 i don't know what was the plausible reason given to them how could they have possibly believed that this film would not end up on the internet well the answer is there was absolutely no plausible reason whatsoever and in fact that was all that the lawyers could argue on behalf of the filmmakers was to point out again and again it's completely ridiculous to claim that the video would only be seen in australia england and quote a few other really remote countries it's completely ridiculous to imagine that a film on dvd would never end up on the internet how could anyone be alive in the year 2019 and imagine that films that are on dvds are never shared on the internet that's ridiculous how could anyone believe as in the second quotation here that only men on fishing boats were going to be able to watch it that there is no plausible way they could have imagined that this would not end up as a public widely seen film on the internet but that is irrelevant to american law as you can see on screen here under american law if someone is incredibly foolish that only increases the burden of honesty on the businessman to truly explain to them what it is that this contract means that they're signing the more foolish the customer is the more easily defrauded the customer is the greater the burden on the business person to be fair and open and honest to avoid misleading them in the 22 case studies documented in these court documents there is not a single word indicating that the women found this empowering on the contrary these women try to reach out to us and let us know how utterly devastating this was for their personal lives for their emotional lives for their intellectual lives for the education that in many cases they dropped out of because they were so distraught and this is where there's a peculiar moral tension they also step forward to complain that this destroyed their relationships with their boyfriends in this woman's case it was a fiancee are you working or studying i am i study international business and i work as a receptionist at an i.t office do you have a boyfriend no i don't when was last time you had a boyfriend the last time i had a boyfriend oh god like a real official boyfriend is probably like two years ago okay that's a while so you kind of hesitated you're kind of saying someone or not right now i'm like i'm kind of sort of seeing somebody okay but like it's not like serious or anything yet so you didn't tell him you're coming no i'm just curious what do you think you'd say if you knew you were doing this um he might be a little mad maybe i don't know he's not gonna find out in other cases women stayed together with their boyfriends but they complained in court to the judge that um well they're complaining that they can't have their cake and eat it too if you believe morally that women ought to have the right to prostitute themselves ask yourself the further question do you believe that a woman has the right to lie to her own boyfriend to her own husband to her own father mother church pastor do you believe that she has the right to engage in prostitution in secret and live a double life and don't you think the moral implications of that are significantly different for everyone significantly different from engaging in prostitution or in being a porn star honestly and openly these women not all of them but many many of the cases of the 22 in these court documents these women are complaining that they had to face the consequences of disappointing their own boyfriends let's talk about the very first time you ever had sex like how old were you who you did it was where you guys did it oh lord i was 15 and it was with some guy that my friend knew and i thought i really liked him but i mean it was great i don't know that much cool um how many guys have you been with and one of at least eight guys i'm in school i'm majoring in biology it's my sophomore year and um i work at a restaurant do you guys ever hit on you lots lots i work at a restaurant basically like hooters so oh have you picked out a major yet like i mean not major but do you know what you want to do i want to be a veterinarian okay cool so animal lover yeah i love animals awesome um are you in a relationship right now i am okay currently does uh does he know where you are no he has no idea he snuck away in a came to do a porn how do you think he would react if you found out oh he leave me really yeah okay well did you tell anybody that you're coming out here um i did tell people i was coming out here but not not to do what you're about to do right how do you think your friends and family would react family would kill me friends would probably kill me as well received an email from a young woman who describes herself as having been involved in sex work to some extent and who describes herself as being incapable of getting a real job a respectable job or the particular type of professional job she'd like to get because there are sexually suggestive photographs of her available on the internet and those photographs in all likelihood would sooner or later be connected to her name her role in this profession and then lead to her being uh fired i'm not filling in all the details partly because i don't know them partly because it's not relevant to this video but just note i believe she's using the word sex work with its current 2020 definition really just to mean the taking of these photographs to my knowledge she wasn't involved in sex work to any other extent or in any other sense of the term she asked me a question that many of you may be asking yourselves if not in watching this video today then perhaps i'm watching the earlier videos in this series i've had exploring the implications of websites like only fans the increasing extent to which the internet makes it possible for everyone to commercialize their own sexuality to make some money out of their body out of their appearance she asked wouldn't it be for the best if our society simply moved towards total acceptance of sex work to get rid of the stigma to get rid of the prejudice it is certainly a very easy thing in principle to call for all mankind to respect sex workers and yet it's interesting how all of the implications seem so very different when we say face to face person to person that i'm asking you to respect me then i'm asking you to trust me that i'm asking you to hire me i sent her a copy of my resume my cv and i said to her look you've watched the youtube channel for a long time you're probably generally familiar with my life and the things i've done and the jobs i've had and the jobs i've lost put it that way um when i lived in thailand i never slept with a single prostitute what if there's a parallel universe where i did if you compare that other world to this one which man do you respect more do you respect me for the things that i did in this life would you regard me differently would you feel differently but would you have a different sense of trust or mistrust for the person i am if in that other world i had lived by those very different rules and let's be clear when you're looking at my resume i never found the cure for cancer i never accomplished something self-evidently great or grand or amazing with my life but whatever i did accomplish whatever struggles i had including struggles to earn money and feed myself and educate myself and become this personality you've gotten to know over youtube right i played by my own rules my own moral compass my own moral code and for me that absolutely excluded sleeping with prostitutes in town that's part of the man i was it's still today part of the man i am for better or for worse right i can see that there are advantages on the other side so i'm asking you honestly if you're gonna say like in general the world would be a better place if we all accepted prostitution with no stigma can you even extend that kind of respect to me to this one person here and now when i lived in china i had the very real option to become a prostitute myself i'm not joking i had options so let's look again at my resume so again at my cv you have some sense of what i did with my life trying to fashion myself into some kind of scholar what if i had spent those years in china prostituting myself what if there's a parallel world where you can compare this life that i led with all its strange mixed mediocre results right i never found the cure for cancer it's not like you're saying oh well in this other world this guy became a prostitute instead of finding the cure for cancer no in this other world i became that man who played by those rules instead of this world where i became this one and if you compare those two men how do you feel about them how do you feel about the choices they made and the consequences of their actions i think even in my case you wouldn't respect me if i had slept with prostitutes as a client you wouldn't respect me the same way if i had become a prostitute myself so how is it really that we can talk about extending this kind of respect to a lawyer you may hire a politician you may elect if they have in their personal history made those same choices those same decisions that you would revile in me and you would revile in others the idea that prostitution should be wholly legalized wholly accepted is not some hypothetical science fiction fantasy it's something that has already been tried in the real world a minor political leader you might have heard of napoleon bonaparte he tried it it wasn't just his policy in france it went on to be an unbelievably influential policy all around the world even in places like cambodia the french empire globally tried this grand experiment of the total legalization and total professionalization of prostitution you can read that history and you can judge its outcomes there is no doubt that napoleon was thinking about the greater good for the french army he was thinking about military men and their ability to sleep with prostitutes whether they were in the harbor of marseille in france or they were getting off the boat at the other end in cambodia all right napoleon's priorities were not women's equality were not women's liberation on the contrary those ideas were being very much debated and contested in france during and after the french revolution he slammed the door on all of them he didn't want any of that but he wanted the professionalization the mainstreaming of prostitutes within our society all right so there are two or three different questions to be asked right and one of them is what is best for the prostitutes themselves and one of them is what is best for society i'm quite willing to be a hypocrite but on issues like this i have to recognize that my values are radically incompatible with the society i'm living in i gave you guys the hypothetical question before of would you be willing to hire this woman as your lawyer if you know she has a background that in the past she was a prostitute i personally i really am i am willing to hire someone as my lawyer and even though i know they used to even though maybe i can go on the internet and look up photographs of them or they're more of anything i personally feel that i could make that judgment that i think this person is intelligent maybe they're an even better lawyer because they had that background or they got the experience of being arrested or whatever it is i actually feel comfortable with that right but i'm challenging you in the audience could you would you and how is that going to work for society as a whole as you scale it up i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you