French equality watchdog finds 90% of online pornography abuses women
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Even after "reviewing millions of videos on the biggest international porn sites" how can they get the 90% figure?
Only looking at the biggest sites is going to get you a biased sample. Not all porn is on big sites. That's not to say there isn't a problem.
And did they talk to sex workers/performers?
Governments and anti-sex orgs have a habit of talking about and legislating sex work without actually listening to those who do it. In March, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation published a report[1] labeling all porn exploitation without speaking to any sex workers.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pa9y/porn-sex-workers-expl...
More precisely you get one company. After countless iterations of mergers and buyouts its almost exclusively "ethical capital partners". Producer and sites.
Regarding your point of ignoring sex workers, this tends to become quite despicable quickly. There are some crusaders out there that are doing their best to criminalize sexwork entirely as an end in itself. At the cost of the sex workers. It was quite visible with years of sabotage of the liberal German prostitution laws. They turned working from your own home into a bureaucratic impossibility to then argue with economically exploitative situations of bigger brothels against prostitution entirely. Which gets you back to women working from hotels illegally, which gets you back to human trafficking.
https://www.donacarmen.de/ has been reporting about this for 25 years now. How these women are treated out of political calculus is plain disgusting. Which likely explains why none of these people talk to them and just about them. Once you weaponize safeguards meant to protect sexworkers against them there isnt much ambiguity about your intentions left.
This is a pretty dry article: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/5/1243/6208896
Which describes it's methodology quite clearly.
Their conclusion is that: "In total, we found 12 per cent (n = 15,839) of the total analysable sample (n = 131,738) of titles described sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence."
Their data set comprises of content shown to first time site visitors.
12% is still disturbingly high.
guess what, porn titles are clickbait
class dismissed
This is covered on page 20 of the study (the beginning of section 1). It's 90% of the 50 most viewed videos.
I'm sure there is a lot of abuse and torture in online porn though.
But just as a counterpoint, most movies contain all kinds of criminal acts and the average person isn't going out committing criminal acts, just because they watched Dexter.
They define it as non-simulated harm. So the difference with Dexter is that in that case the actors pretend to have been injured, but in pornography the women are actually being injured. I guess most people's definition of "acting" would inlude something liek "pretend" or "make-believe."
> From the article: A significant amount of content amounted to torture. The report warned that any kind of so-called contract was void in legal terms, because a person could not consent to torture and sexual exploitation and trafficking.
It comes down to their legal definition of consent. One can not legally consent to being murdered for example. If a movie was made where someone was murdered then that would be illegal regardless of the contract in play. In France one can not consent to being tortured or abused, and most of the popular videos they looked at showed actresses being subject to actual torture or abuse.
But my point stands that they are probably using a very narrow definition to produce this extreme result like using a very narrow definition of consent or very wide definition of abuse such as mostly using verbal abuse to constitute abuse, which is hardly abuse if you are an paid actor and it isn't real.
Yes, it's my belief that they're actually being whipped and that that is the major difference. Do you believe otherwise? Pro wrestlers generally go to great lengths not to injure each other. In pornography the audience will copmlain that the violence is fake if the whips aren't real.
> But they don't actually murder people to make movies. When you watch Rambo are people actually being shot?
No, I don't, that's why I'm not coming here to share research about the abuse being routinely inflicted on actors during the filming of Hollywood films.
> they are probably using a very narrow definition to produce this extreme result
The study is linked in the article and I've told you the definition they're using. I'm not sure why you have to continue with conjecture as to what they're "probably" saying.
I referenced the documentary "Kink" from 2013 above about the BDSM studio with the same name. They have a part about how you smack somebody that it sounds good but isnt painful. Its a skill to learn.
The whole perspective is counterproductive though. Pain can also be really pleasant if done right. Anyone who ever scratched an itch should understand that.
This is likely a good illustration why simplifications are utterly counterproductive. You cant go for some simple checklist of what to ban. While BDSM stuff looks rough the actual dangers in sex work are too rough and unprepared sex leading to something ripping. That can be really hard to identity on video and horrific for that person.
Which makes this so counterproductive. Signaling towards easy to visualize stuff means you have the exact opposite effect of the claimed intention. You dont go after known bad actors but people with spotless records that make sure to take care of the people they work with. Kink might waterboard you safely if you are into this sort of stuff but there wont be any surprise genuine attacks and pressuring by psychos with big dicks that sends you to the doctor like you will find it in some mainstream porn.
https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-popularity
The authors of the french study will likely be shocked and appalled to find out that men werent the target audience for 50 shades of grey.
Prudes better stick to reading only the first 4th from the left. She isnt kidding with taboo, human sexuality can get pretty fucked up.
Then again, no kink shaming. You do you. Play safe :)
while informative, i wish this type of study (and analysis) were repeated to address concerns of representation [0].
[0] https://aella.substack.com/p/who-took-my-big-kink-survey
Just thought i mention it since gender preferences shouldnt be news to anyone who heard of tumblr. Kinky and degrading stuff is just not an exclusively male, or even male dominated domain. Maybe treating women like they have no agency on this is pretty sexist.
Again, none of this takes away from the concerns for sex workers safety. Once money enters the picture, consent considerations have to change and safeguards must apply. Which sites like Kink do a great job with to give a positive counterexample. Go check out the 2013 documentary by the same name¹. Here its worth mentioning that they are especially hard hit by signaling pressuring their payment processors. Its a great example for how this kind of unguided actionism by ideologues always harms the people who least deserve it. Yes they do torture porn, but they do it like it should be done.
> A significant amount of content amounted to torture. The report warned that any kind of so-called contract was void in legal terms, because a person could not consent to torture and sexual exploitation and trafficking.
The women in these videos are actully subject to what is depicted. It's not acting. Can you see how that's different to a Hollywood movie depicting a murder?
The planning, execution, willingness, extend and the necessity thereof are important - context is important.
Watching the work is mostly useful in this setting for identifying if the content is outright illegal (individuals present who should never have been) or if physical harm endured within it reach visibly unacceptable levels (as we for now do not expect CGI here), both which would likely (would it be weird to say hopefully?) be traumatizing for a viewer to experience. To draw the conclusions they wish to draw, I believe they need to study the work environment, not the works - and that this applies to any industry, irrespective of its output.
Am I reading this right? Are you saying that it's regular acting to be subjected to such a high level of verbal abuse at work that you might take your own life?
> scripted violence to a certain degree including where mistakes lead to significant or even fatal actor injury is considered regular
It feels like a movie script that leads to fatal actor injury would surely be illegal also in the US? Or do you mean accidental injury/death? That's different that the injry or death being an inherent part of the script and intentional thing that is inflicted upon the actress. Otherwise, can you point me towards a single example of a Hollywood movie where an actress was intentionally killed and this was seen as regular/normal by the public?
> scripted sexual acts themselves are commonly considered regular acting in more "artsy" movies.
Yes, that's fine and the study even talks about such cases in a positive light. People can absolutely consent to sex acts! Sex is fun. But under French law people can not consent to be harmed, which is what was seen to be happening in the case in 90% of popular videos. Again, that's actual harm, not simiulated harm.
> What is depicted in these works is also acting.
Yes, to some degree it is. But can you see the difference in acting out being stabbed with the use of an unloaded gun and some fake blood, and being degraded by a queue of 50 men who want to slap you, cum on you and call you a worthless Moroccan who deserves to be treated like this? One of those things is very simulated, the other not so much. Maybe if all the slaps and the ejaculate were faked? Then it could be comparable.
Ah, no - that the work depicts the individual taking abuse for extended periods until they take their life, the actor themselves is alive and well. This is as contrast to the verbal aspect of abuse in these works.
> It feels like a movie script that leads to fatal actor injury would surely be illegal also in the US? Or do you mean accidental injury/death?
The actor taking on intentional and planned mild injury, with very real and non-zero risk of fatality. I did not imply intentional death, maybe poor wording on my end.
> But under French law people can not consent to be harmed,
How does that law apply to violent sports where the goal is injury - preferably temporary - until the other party becomes unable to continue, such as boxing, MMA or even classical martial arts sparring? How does such law deal with martial arts movies where multiple actors take on implicitly harmful acts, that at the very least causes bruising and pain? Old Jackie Chan works might not be what comes to mind in the context of this discussion, but being beaten for a semi-realistic effect by a fellow martial artist is planned and consented harm.
Is consenting to be repeatedly kicked and punched with a certain degree of intensity (higher in older works and with younger actors) in action movies different than consenting to be slapped in the discussed type of work? If a slap is unacceptable, why is being knocked and kicked unconscious in violent sports acceptable?
> But can you see the difference in acting out ...
I immediately think of Nymphomania as appearing far more degrading for the actors than at least content of the discussed type that I am familiar with, and yet that movie is considered by many as a "work of art".
(I never liked that movie myself, but that is not particularly relevant here.)
> Maybe if all the slaps and the ejaculate were faked?
The latter usually is in most works, but for the former I believe it is a matter of intensity and consent. Is the slap only as strong as needed and as agreed to act out the role - like with a kick or punch in early martial arts works - or is it full force with the intent of injury? Are we in full on slap competition or boxing match territory, and if so where is the distinction?
The way I see it, the terms are what matters, and in particular how and why the individual agreed to them. While I won't find myself in those works, there are definitely exists terms where I'd willingly agree to a possibly significant degree of verbal and physical abuse on video. I do not know how one would evaluate what terms are acceptable though - few would worry about me if I was paid 1M USD in such video, but if I accepted 10 USD or felt threatened one might be concerned if my position in life was abused.
Ah, ok, in this case the definition of violence is that it's not simulated, so these cases are not directly comparable. The pornography they're looking at depicts actresses who do actually take violence against themselves. The blood that is shown is their own blood.
> How does that law apply to violent sports where the goal is injury
This is a better comparison, and one that's still being hotly debated in france. Violent sports like MMA for example were entirely illegal until a few years ago (2019) and are still under much public scrutiny. The debates are still ongoing.
> I do not know how one would evaluate what terms are acceptable though
It's a very difficult question between wanting to allow freedom but also wanting to protect. This dillema is not unique to the pornography industry. Other studies have shown that women in the European Union almost invariably face real-world sexual violence throughout their lives. This is again incomporable to something like Rambo which depicts issues very far removed from most people's lived realities.
I would say from my personal perspectives two things on this question:
1. The violence in pornography could be simulated. More care could be taken to protect the actresses. We could just as easuly be arguing that actors in action movies should be taking actual violence against themselves because boxers consent to the same. But they don't need to? Boxers do need to because it's an actual battle of physical skill
2. As noted above, there is a huge issue with gender based violence against women throughout the world. Almost every woman in France will experience sexual violence throughout their lives. This puts a huge strain on society and makes the issue more pressing than questions like the effects of shooting up aliens in video games which is a very theoritical reality, or even shooting up soldiers which is something that thankfully will only come up in the lives of a small number of people.
I think we agree on all counts at this point, but I do hope and believe this style of actual slashing, beating and bleeding would be significantly less than 90% of all material mentioned by the watchdog as abusive, and rather something quite a bit lesser than a majority. This does not make it any better of course, but exaggerating undermines the message.
My personal concern is primarily with those forced or otherwise coerced into an act, as would be the case for those you mention that end unwillingly exposed to it sometime throughout their lives.
I find trying to draw a line between when a slap is legal and when it is not to be flawed - it is only okay if the video title ends in "championship" and is solely an intense act of violence with face-deforming slaps? - and quite incompatible with my pedantic mind. One could argue it should all be outlawed, but as someone who practiced martials arts in a previous life I would lean to the liberal side of allowing consensual violence within some defined framework regardless of final video title.
This is the first time I hear about that and follow our French news on a daily basis.
Being more serious though, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. The porn industry is well known for being extremely shady if not an outright bad actor. The entire sex "work" industry is hugely problematic.
That's not what it says, though I admit French isn't my first language. It's saying that "Moroccan" was one of the main terms used to search for violent videos. That means, they identified certain videos as abusive and then looked at which terms users used to find them, and Moroccan was one of the top results. Violent videos are defined as depicating non-simulated harm.
The part that amazes me, though, is that they don't seem to believe that the person being called "whore" or "salope" or whatever can have consented to such "violence." On the one hand, if we believe the offense being committed isn't against the performer herself but against women in general, it makes some sense. On the other hand---wtf?
This is consistent with French law, where one can not legally consent to this kind of abuse.
Only puritanical bureaucrats could turn sex into safe, bubble-wrapped boredom.
true, but the point is (supposedly) that the actresses are coerced into and harmed by it.
this is clearly not unrealistic, but the proportion of the problem remains elusive as you'd have to ask a lot of them very detailed and thought out questions to get any significant result.
They are talking about any kind of non-simulated violence against a woman which includes common things like slapping or choking.
Is it just me or is this mixing wildly different things? Sexist stereotypes and objectification (note how vague that is) in the same category as (presumably non-consensual?) assault and torture?
I wonder, does this count as the French equality watchdog abusing its employees? We have generally not seen mildly on the mental trauma of such content review when tech companies do it.
Content ethics aside, I imagine the these individuals can no longer watch pr0n and might even have a traumatic relationship to it, possibly extending into their real life sexual engagements as well.
Often perfectly visible? Did this 90% number perhaps come from people who were looking at the material with a specific agenda in mind?
Does anyone know if there are any other quality British newspapers left? At least some of it seems to be due to government interference.
They also call "Teens" category child porn, racial categories racist and allege illegal sex practices. Not sure how deep you want to dive into the shades of bullshit. Its a smear piece, the study as well as the article. I am hard pressed finding anything that could function as a reasonable base for discussion. And given the amount of nonsense i am not optimistic that this would be time well spend.
They look at verbal, physical and sexual abuse, which are the three typres of abuse recognised in French law. Should they do this differently? If you don't mind me saying so, this argument feels tautological. You're not telling me why it's an issue, simply that they do it.
> titles (which are close to randomly generated to make identifying the scenes difficult for pirates)
Do you have a source for this? I've seen a lot of porn in my time and the title almost invariably matched the content.
> They also call "Teens" category child porn
Which page to they do this on? I can't find it.
> racial categories racist
They give examples of the titles which they class as racist, including:
* War Porn: Russian Solder have No Mercy For Ukrainian Girl
* Russian Soldiers Rape Ukranian Bi-atch
* 21 Year Old Refugee Fuck Hotel Owner For Asylum
* Palestinian teen gets fucked by Israeli guy
If that last video is not produced with a racial element in mind then why is it titled that way? Is that the randomer generator?
> allege illegal sex practices
What is the issue with making such allegations? If someone believes that illegal sexual violence is taking place then I would only ever encourage them to speak up about it.
Not on these sites today my pirate friend. Pick any of the channels of commercial sites and look for actual titles. You will find short excerpts from the full videos for sale on the sites with no ability to cross reference the two. Thats working as intended. You wont ever find the actual title of a clip on a free site. They are all placeholders.
>* Russian Soldiers Rape Ukranian Bi-atch
There is simply no way that you will find any video containing the word "rape". Those got purged a long time ago. Like most other terms mentioning violence.
>If that last video is not produced with a racial element in mind then why is it titled that way? Is that the randomer generator?
The nationalities are exactly that, nationalities. Turns out people from India like to watch porn with Indian people. I even heard rumors that some people even find people attractive who look different then the ones they grew up with. Kinky stuff, i know.
>What is the issue with making such allegations? If someone believes that illegal sexual violence is taking place then I would only ever encourage them to speak up about it.
>> They also call "Teens" category child porn
>Which page to they do this on? I can't find it.
page 20 >(« teen », la catégorie pédopornographique étant une des plus populaires),
If you think you are able to find actual illegal stuff (let alone a child porn category) on any of these sites, go call the police now and file a report. All of these sites now have production studios for every clip on file, which means people who will go to jail over this. Including the site operators if they actually supplied people with a childporn category.
The fact that you arent should say everything about the credibility of the report. This is by all means an important topic, too important in fact to base any discussion on this utter nonsense.
The rest of the report could be spot on and you still couldnt do anything with it given these ludicrous and false claims.
edit: Didnt realize you switched back from racist to racial. Cheap shot.
It had 30,000 views on PornHub when it was removed in 2019. We can discuss the fact that policies have changed, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that the methodologies were "bullshit" based on them looking at the videos that were online at the time they conducted their research.
> The nationalities are exactly that, nationalities.
This ignores the widely understood power dynamics between nations especially those nations that are in such serious conflicts as the ones mentioned. Honestly your response here feels like I'm talking to the Men in Black and you want me to just wipe my understanding of the real world.
> (« teen », la catégorie pédopornographique étant une des plus populaires
I took this to mean that the subcategories where the actors pretended to be under 18 were the most popular.
> If you think you are able to find actual illegal stuff
Where did illegal come from here? The law isn't my moral barometer and I didn't bring it up. The fact that these depictions are so popular and normalised is already notable enough for me to want to discuss it with my peers. I don't know if it needs to be banned and I'm not suggesting that any of what is up there is currently illegal, but I believe that this study shows us some very real truths about ourselves and our consumption.
But if that's where you want to go, I would note that this is a report coming from a French governmental department. It is my understanding laws in France mean that actresses cannot consent to be harmed in the way that is common is the videos they studies, and would be illegal to produce within that jurisdiction.
Where I grew up, in the UK, even simulated depictions of underage sex acts are illegal, so much of the teen category would have been a no go there as well.
The laws will of course vary from country to country, but again that's not why I shared this article.
Silly me took the clearly defined term literal.
>Honestly your response here feels like I'm talking to the Men in Black and you want me to just wipe my understanding of the real world.
Claiming racial categories to be racist is nonsense. You quoting long since removed videos with bad sounding placeholder titles doesnt show that.
>Where did illegal come from here?
From the report, its what we are discussing here.
>when it was removed in 2019.
I am glad we that we could come to an agreement that the study is referencing something that doesnt exist anymore. Might explain why the article is flagged.
I really hope you can see how ludicrous it is to make these kind of claims. There are some serious concerns with the structure of the porn industry and exploitation of sex workers, especially with the videos produced for freesites, derailing with these hyperboles is extremely counterproductive. Without credibility there is no basis for communication. There is no room for overstating for effect.
edit: Even if you could take the report serious (no), arguing with the state of pre 2019 and presenting it as current is disingenuous and shows a clear lack of credibility.
Could we speak without this kind of rhetoric? My command of French is not perfect and I'm telling you my understanding and asking you questions politely. If I misunderstand something then I apologise but you can point it out without being rude.
Having looked at it further I can see that they indeed meant that there was a great deal of underage content available on these sites at the time.
> Claiming racial categories to be racist is nonsense.
The racist element is in the use of race to depict power dynamics in a violent way.
> I am glad we that we could come to an agreement that the study is referencing something that doesnt exist anymore. Might explain why the article is flagged.
It doesn't explain it to me. We often discuss articles from the past on here. I still find it worthy of discussion that this was the case very recently, and I would also note that the move to remove this content only came as the result of legal pressures against the distributors.
> I really hope you can see how ludicrous it is to make these kind of claims.
Are you saying that what the study claims was not true at the time of their research?
Good point. Its just really bad to present slander as scientific or journalistic. Even for a pre purge state of pornhub, the claim that there was a child porn category is just really really wrong.
But that post was quite helpful, i think we got the point responsible for the different perspectives.
>We often discuss articles from the past on here.
The article, as well as the study dont present it as a picture of the past but one of the present state. The guardian article is from yesterday and the study had been going on for 18 months. Presenting stuff they found from 2019, with quite questionable methodology at that, as current breaches journalistic, scientific and ethical standards.
>Are you saying that what the study claims was not true at the time of their research?
Unfortunately the study itself doesnt seem to have a date, but from the article, yes absolutely.
edit: URL of the PDF of the report contains the same date as the guardian article.
I'm not able to check exact numbers now, but I remember glancing at total videos once on xtube or a similar site. The number of gay videos seemed to be 10-20% of the number of straight videos.
So we can reasonably assume that a reasonable portion of pornography features men only. Even if it's just 5%, it calls the 90% number from the article into question.
Interesting about the percentage of videos on the unnamed site. But I would wonder: What is the percentage breakdown by views?
Also, do note that section 2 of the study is entirely dedicated to gay pornography and goes to lengths in discussion the framing of misogynistic norms that are being represented in gay pornography.
I guess the only answer would be do a proper count on a group of major sites. I wasn't able to find any stats and am surprised no one has researched this.
I'm sure there's a lot of crossover, I simply meant to point out that (taking the top estimates of all our sources) roughly 10% of men are gay, 20% of gay men watch porn and 50% of straight men watch porn. That is thus 2% of all men in the gay porn category and 25% of all men in the straight porn category. With the market for straight porn being more than 10 times bigger it would surprise me if gay porn made up 10% of the total.
> There definitely are harmful misogynistic norms in gay pornography, too.
The more you look out for it, sadly the more such norms are perpetuated almost everywhere. It's increasingly becoming an elephant in every room. Thanks for recognising it!
> I wasn't able to find any stats and am surprised no one has researched this.
Same, let's hope more will be done.
That must have been a strange job to do.
And that's not even getting into "proper" BDSM, which is subject to monthly "think of the women!" outrage; always by people who've no interest in hearing from the actual women involved
I'm quite certain the people performing this "study" had already made up their minds before loading the first video
It sounds like you've also made up your mind before reading it. How about taking a look and making some counter arguments to their findings so that people who disagree can argue on that basis rather than the basis of your speculation?
Are we clutching pearls? 90% of the popular porn videos show taboo fantasies centered around--at the very least--spanking women. Is that not interesting? We don't need to clutch our pearls to make note of that and to discuss what it means. Pornography is very taboo as you've alluded to, but HN is for me a place where we can discuss anything that we find intellectually stimulating.
I find it very interesting for sure that depictions human sexuality is apparently almost always in some small way also depicting violence against women. I find it disappointing that so many here want to write off the simple mention of that fact as "moral panic" and discuss it no further.
> Even for the "genuine" cases
What do you mean be genuine cases?
Do you have any points to make that could be argued against or do you just want to scaremonger? I could equally well say "There's a large pro-porn contingent on HN" and then leave it at that, but instead I've shared an article and some reasearch that I'm happy to discuss.
Well, the fact that the title is "90% of online pornography" but from the actual study, it talks about 90% of the top 50 watched videos, so we've gone from "90% of pornography" to "45 videos".
> I could equally well say "There's a large pro-porn contingent on HN" and then leave it at that
Well, there is.
Yes, the 45 most watched videos. They also analyse the metadata of millions of related videos. The headline is of course not the whole study. This is very common with studies. Any time you see "X% of children exhibit Y behaviour" or even "Mice respond A to stimulus B" it's implied that they have a limited sample size due to the nature of what is practical.
Altneratively: What do you think might be a better headline? I would welcome a debate on the basis of that one.
Personally I don't see the significant material difference between 90% of the 50 most popular videos depicting violence against women and 90% of all porn videos depicting the same. I'm happy to hear why you might disagree though.
> Well, there is.
Yes, that's a tautology.
i don't think you've established a rationale for the discussion you are hoping for.
Which represents what percentage of pornography watching? Or rather: what fraction of a percent of pornography watching?
> Personally I don't see the significant material difference between 90% of the 50 most popular videos depicting violence against women and 90% of all porn videos depicting the same. I'm happy to hear why you might disagree though.
Well, "90% of pornography" is millions of videos. So at the very least, the material difference between them is again, literally millions of videos.
> Altneratively: What do you think might be a better headline? I would welcome a debate on the basis of that one.
It's a 200 page report written in French. I have no idea.