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A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

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Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#291
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A generic argument: prostitution allows woman without any skills to earn plenty of money which might convince women do go this way even if they don't really enjoy it. The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains.

One aspect I find frightening about interpreting prositution as a "real job" is that women could be denied unemployment benifits if they reject a job that would involve them selling their body and their consent. > The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains. I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a pros…

This is a great argument for Universal Basic Income, or some other system that allows people to choose not to work.

It's naive to think that there aren't people being pressured into "selling their body and their consent" to work that is generally considered moral.

> I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used.

GP's argument was poorly stated. It's more genuine to compare sex work to hard labor. There is the risk of physical harm (STDs/injuries), a low barrier to entry (attractive and have a camera/in decent shape and can get to/from work), is considered by many as demoralizing (gross prostitute/dumb factory worker) but also glorified by many (high-class escort/blue collar backbone of our country).

In what ways is it truly different for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for rejecting a hard labor job than it is for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for refusing to be a sex worker (prostitute)?

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#292

The world really needs an alternative to these tweet serials. They're extremely annoying to read.

'Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.'

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#293
post #29

Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financia…

> How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill. By acting "proactively" on anything w…

i think what they were really afraid of was a grass roots boycott. It's very easy for a consumer to cut up a mastercard and just use their visa. It's virtually impossible for a business to say "we accept all cc's except mastercard".

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#294
post #75

The concern that various kinds of legal sex work might be a de-facto haven for human trafficking is at least many decades old, does not solely or even mainly originate from people identifying as Christians, and seems to have a pretty solid factual basis - at the very least, there is a consensus on the broad argument if not the details. The Twitter thread does not even attempt to fairly acknowledge these facts. Very s…

I looked into the history of anti-trafficking movements when I was deciding what I thought of SESTA/FOSTA, and I came to the conclusion that “true” anti-trafficking movements have been hijacked by moral crusaders who realized that attaching “anti-trafficking” to a law was a way to make it palatable to legislators beyond just a smaller group. Human trafficking is not a made-up issue, but these groups do nothing but ha…

It's also worth calling out specific instances like FightTheNewDrug and Operation Underground Railroad who have deep ties to Conservative Christian (Mormon) ideology, and are often called out by sex positive groups.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#295
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If a journalist asking uncomfortable questions about your business endangers your business, then the problem is not the journalist, the problem is your business. If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then usually nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a few months. But in the porn hub story, the uncomfortable truth is that there was a lot of involuntary porn on the platform. The NYT story jus…

There's a difference between asking uncomfortable questions and asking loaded questions that misrepresent reality. The description of the CSAM & revenge porn issue in mainstream media painted the picture that this was a substantial portion of the site's content. In reality few would ever encounter such content, and PornHub did everything feasible to try and remove and report it. No joke, outlets highlighted the fact…

> ...and PornHub did everything feasible to try and remove and report it.

That's demonstrably not true, since PornHub did do more in response to the mainstream media coverage (e.g. finally require some kind of age verification for uploaders and purge unverified content).

The only way they could be contextualized to have done "everything feasible" is within a fundamentally flawed model that they created, but it's precisely that model that needed to be reformed.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a girl goes from Instagram to OnlyFans willingly and is getting paid...why should anyone judge her or care? How is that any different from her making videos about video games or revising books and making money?

You are asking the difference if my 18 year old daughter posts pics of her butthole that will be on the internet for life, versus making videos about video games? I think she is more likely to potentially regret the butthole pics vs the video game videos being out there on the web for life.

And she might say something homophobic in her video game video. Which is more embarrassing?

Have you considered that she might live a full life without regretting the decision?

The fact that someone is likely to have regrets after doing something is no reason to outlaw that thing.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#297
post #94

I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child molestation; which are all non-sequiturs: true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself. Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.

The best argument "against prostitution" is the moral argument against consuming it: you don't and _can't_ know if the person you're paying for is too poor or too wasted to be able to choose to participate, or if they're being threatened with violence into participating by a pimp, for example. Coerced sexual activity with another person is r-pe (as opposed to, say, working at Burger King, which might be coerced by the need to survive but is not r-pe.) Enjoying r-pe is wrong.

If you don't think coerced sexual activity is r-pe, or you don't think that enjoying r-pe is wrong, the argument falls apart, of course, which is why this comment section is the way it is.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that EU and Australia have regulated interchange fees for MasterCard/Visa, costing them gobs of money and value. The US doesn’t need to fine or litigate them if they want to penalize them heavily, they can just pass a “consumer protection bill” (so Walmart and others can pay all credit card payments).

The interchange goes to the card issuer, not to the scheme. Visa and MasterCard fees are the smallest part of the overall fee charged by the payment processor. (That said it might be higher in the US, I don't know).

A lot of the incentive to pay by card evaporates if the vendor pushes the fee to the customer.

The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there’s less fee to collect.

Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#299

The concern that various kinds of legal sex work might be a de-facto haven for human trafficking is at least many decades old, does not solely or even mainly originate from people identifying as Christians, and seems to have a pretty solid factual basis - at the very least, there is a consensus on the broad argument if not the details. The Twitter thread does not even attempt to fairly acknowledge these facts. Very s…

The author lost me when they started the Christian bashing. The author lumped all Christians in with the organization cited in the original NYT article, which is just as prejudice as those for which they're claiming to defend (prostitutes).

I agree that lumping Christians in is a problem, as is ignoring secular influence in anti-sex lobbying groups.

How might you edit the article to remove the "Christian bashing" while also being clear about the influence of Christian conservatism on the topic?

How can we make a clear distinction while also being clear about the anti-sex ideologies that come directly from Christian conservatism?

Is there a specific secular influence that is worth pointing out here that the article missed or glossed over?

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s quite the axe to grind against journalists. Especially since their job is to ask questions. To think they’re a part of this mass conspiracy to take powerful entities down is laughable. My partner, a journalist, has gotten death threats just by being at peaceful protests against certain groups that have wealth and pull in the community - just because members of that org were certain the journalist was the main…

> Especially since their job is to ask questions. That's a stretch. What else will you have us believe? That the New York Times intends to be a politically neutral voice of reason? No, sir. Maybe in the 1950s, maybe before the Internet, in those halcyon days when newspapers had a good slice of the nation's ad money and lots of competitors and earned money by attracting from a broad swath of readers to earn money from…

> The job description of contemporary journalists, and especially journalists at the New York Times, is to build narratives™ and use them to influence the world. That's what you'll learn about pursuing a modern journalism degree, and that's what will get you career success at the Grey Lady — doubly so since the Trump election.

No, you're conflating different things. That's the job of an op-ed columnist, which is what Nicholas Kristof is. And frankly, that isn't new. It's been true since the invention of newspapers. An op-ed columnist the equivalent of a modern-day pamphleteer.

The news section is different, and it's job is to report facts. The news and opinion sections are run as totally different organizations in well-run newspapers, because their objectives are so different.

Also, City Journal is even more ideological and biased than the New York Times.

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