Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> _help_ the sex industry thrive

There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract."

The advice I give to anyone going to work on their first porn shoot: Bring a friend. Someone older, with a car, who will be on the set with you at all times.

View on HN

Yes, conventional porn is a dark place. In my study of the problem, this fact underscores the importance of the Snapchat/Onlyfans revolution rather than taking away from it.

Prohibition creates problems. It doesn't solve them. Prohibiting anyone from using conventional payment infrastructure simply pushes them into the arms of the (sometimes abusive) people who have the resources to work around the system. In this scenario, an individual can't work around the system. The nameless/faceless owners of the large porn groups can.

This situation creates an inherent power imbalance that incentivizes coercion.

In the Snapchat/Onlyfans model, coercion is eliminated by virtue of allowing people to express themselves, when they want and as they want in the privacy of their homes. They are the directors, gaffers, editors etc. and no one else can tell them what they can or can't do.

A decentralized system is better at taking power away from those objectively awful people than any regulation or personal tips or oversight could.

> It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive.

Some of it maybe. But not the toy selling business being discussed.

I’m fine with regulating the adult industry for safety and what not, I just think that credit card agencies are possibly one of the last parties I would pick to be the regulator, second only to religious institutions.

I would contest that if the industry wasn't demonized it wouldn't have a dark side.

Hollywood isn't daemonized, but I used to give basically the same advice. Industries that run on attractive young people, people looking at very short careers, tend towards evil. Ask any successful recording artist about their first record contracts. Taylor Swift is writing songs about that dark place.

Fair enough, I can see that. I think a good portion of the evil in those industries comes from sexism, but that's really tangential to the topic and I appreciate your point.

EDIT: I would like to expand my previous comment though. Whenever prostitution is legalized we see massive improvements in the lives of sex workers. It seems clear to me that further reducing the demonization of sex, sex workers, etc would lead to a better work place in those industries for similar reasons. There may be a baseline of evil, for the reasons you point out. I don't think that should stop us from working to at least reach that baseline, rather than just leaving the people and businesses that inhabit that crucial landscape to rot.

porn already works within a well-defined legal framework. There are model releases, people getting paid etc. So if a reputable porn company interacts with their models and their consumers, everything is well. However, there are still non-legal reasons that make it a special case - see the ancestor post about a bank wanting to dictate what a merchant can offer to their credit card customers, or the post about models being treated badly (not getting paid or having to do things that they didn't sign up for). In that case, there still seems to be a difference to non-porn modeling and acting in terms of standards and of recourse available. part of this is that there are more people paying for badly made porn than for badly made action movies

> I think a good portion of the evil in those industries comes from sexism

What do we mean by "sexism" here? You don't think it's enough that men would like to have sex with attractive women? Or is that fact itself sexism?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com