May 17, 2021

How to make porn suck less

How to make porn suck less

How do we make porn suck less? Pay for it. Well, that and a lot of other important things you’ll hear about once you press play.

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Thinking Is Cool

My name is Kinsey Grant and I want better porn. Well, more specifically, I want a more ethical, more enjoyable, and safer adult entertainment industry, one that works for everyone.

 

Because everyone likes to get off. How you get there, though, is up to you. You might be into seeking out adult content that’s made ethically, with both porn star and porn consumer in mind...or you might be into supporting mega-monopolies that systemically undercut creators and engender unsafe environments for all. Different strokes, right?

 

For me, it’s ethical and fair creation and consumption of adult entertainment that really revs my engine. This episode, we’re exploring how “ethical and fair” become the norm.

 

Who you’ll hear from this episode:

  • Cindy Gallop, the Michael Bay of Business (she likes to blow shit up) and founder and CEO of Make Love Not Porn
  • Dr. Heather Berg, a feminist studies scholar writing about labor, sexuality, and social struggle. Also a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the book Porn Work
  • Allie Knox, a porn performer and OnlyFans creator 
  • Josh Kaplan...who’s my cofounder which is plenty big as far as claims to fame go.

 

Hit play. Listen. Learn. Think. And go have a conversation with someone.

 

Season 1 of Thinking Is Cool is brought to you by HMBradley, our exclusive launch sponsor. Deposit accounts are provided by Hatch Bank, Member FDIC. Credit cards are issued by Hatch Bank under a license with MasterCard. This a paid endorsement.

 

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Transcript

Pull quote: “Sex work should be as natural a career choice as doctor, lawyer, accountant—you should be able to choose to, you know, make a career in sex work.”

 

*Roll intro music*

 

What is good everyone!! It’s me, your host and new best friend Kinsey Grant, and it is the honor and privilege of a lifetime to welcome you to the very first episode of Thinking Is Cool. You being here means the world to me, and I’m so jazzed to kick this season off with you.

 

It’s honestly surreal that this show is finally happening. And it wouldn’t be possible without Thinking Is Cool’s launch partner, HMBradley. I’ll tell you more about ‘em in a little bit.

 

I could sit here and wax poetic about why I started this show, why I’m so convinced you’re gonna love it, what to expect...or I could just show you instead of telling you. Let’s do that. But with one small caveat...not every episode is going to be about sex. Just the first one. For now. There are no rules here.

 

One thing before we get started: subscribing and rating and reviewing are great, but that’s not even a little bit what I care about right now. What I care about is this—you listening to this episode, thinking about this topic, and starting a conversation with someone after the credits roll. That’s really my biggest goal with this—for you to have better conversations. With your roommate, with your date, with your parents, with a stranger, with anyone. That’s all.

 

So...for the first time, allow me to say this: Nothing is off limits. Everything is on the table. Take it anywhere...and remember, thinking is cool. And so are you.

 

*Fade out music*

 

My name is Kinsey Grant and I want better porn. Well, more specifically, I want a more ethical, more enjoyable, and safer adult entertainment industry, one that works for everyone.

 

Because, look, we gotta be honest with ourselves. Everyone likes to get off. How you get there, though, is up to you. You might be into seeking out adult content that’s made ethically, with both porn star and porn consumer in mind...or you might be into supporting mega-monopolies that systemically undercut creators and engender unsafe environments for all. Different strokes, right?

 

For me, it’s ethical and fair creation and consumption of adult entertainment that really revs my engine. You might be wondering why I’m telling you this in episode 1 of my new podcast. Couple answers:

 

  1. Yes, this is going to be a deeply personal show.
  2. It’s hard to think of an industry that fully encapsulates the pros and cons of modernization and digitization quite as effectively as porn. You’ve got everything—technology, monopolies, shifting creator paradigms, and so...much...traffic. Did you know 130 million people visit Pornhub every day?

 

And yet…my ex-boyfriend gave up porn when we started dating because his guilt was so tremendous. We still can’t comfortably talk about porn. Even worse, the porn industry’s leaders can’t comfortably talk about porn stars. Throughout my research for this episode, I’ve come to more deeply understand an industry on the brink.

 

In adult entertainment, there are two versions of the future, and both look totally possible. In the first, porn continues alienating the one thing it needs more than any of us 130 million voyeurs: its creatives...porn stars. In the second, the industry and those looking to disrupt it come to fully recognize the potential of empowered creators and performers, to all of our benefit.

 

It’s a parable for the modern economy: In porn, during digital boom times like right now, greed begets more greed at the top, which in turn burns the working class...and eventually, the consumer, too. But does it have to be that way?

 

I’ll explain more in just a moment, but know this: The adult entertainment industry can teach us countless lessons—lessons in botched creator empowerment, grotesque failure to protect users, and the power vacuum left for ethical platforms to fill when the corrupt die out. But these lessons could be applied anywhere in our modern economy. Put a little more bluntly: Mark Zuckerberg...I hope you’re listening.

 

This is a porn story, but it’s also more than just a porn story. I’m going to show you how and why. 

 

My first call when it comes to porn, sex, or amazing accents has always been and will always be Cindy Gallop. I’ll tell you more about her in a sec, but for now, hear her when she says this:

 

Cindy: “I believe very strongly that everybody should be able to capture the financial value of what they create. And I feel that especially strongly, Kinsey, because my background is theater and advertising, two industries where ideas and creativity are massively undervalued, even by the creators themselves. Right. So when you create something that gives other people pleasure and again, I mean this in the broadest context, because obviously everything I'm saying can be applied to journalism and to what you do. I believe that when you create something that gives other people pleasure, you should absolutely see a financial return on it. And the more people you give more pleasure to, the greater that financial return should be.”

 

So with that, let’s dive into what we’re thinking about today: making porn suck less. Because it feels so icky for a reason—it’s an industry mired in controversy at any given moment, whether that controversy is consent or compensation or representation or...you get it.

 

But we might have hope thanks to a crop of disruptors intent on answering for those controversies. There are new apps and platforms and media companies righting the wrongs of the guys who made the term porn stache a thing. From erotic audio platforms to artificial intelligence porn, there’s a lot to be excited about.

 

Today, though, I want to think about creators. Because from what I can tell, the advent of both creator-focused technology like OnlyFans and a newfound and widespread appreciation for the work of content creators might arm us with the tools to design an adult entertainment industry that feels fair, ethical, and enjoyable for everyone. Because we all get off...but isn’t it time we build the business models to do it right?

 

We’re going to find out. To do that, let’s start with the basics: Welcome to the modern worlds of porn and sex work.

 

This might not surprise you, but I’ve never worked in porn. So for a little context as to what it’s really like to be a sex worker or porn professional, I called up Dr. Heather Berg, a professor at Washington University St. Louis and author of the book Porn Work:

 

Heather: “I think for folks who aren't in sex work industry, the closest reference is to imagine a highly stigmatized form of gig work and then you will have some sense of what it's like to work in the industry. So think think Uber. But with the additional burdens of both social stigma and and criminalization or in the porn context, freedom from direct criminalization, but exposure to all sorts of laws that make it hard to work safely and on your own terms. But but with many of the constraints of other forms of big work in terms of being left outside traditional labor legislation and again, health regulations, protections from discrimination and things like that.”

 

Uber but worse. Cool cool cool. That’s what it’s like in the sex and porn work worlds. 

 

Which, by the way, are different worlds. In the most traditional sense, sex work is the exchange of sexual acts or favors for money. Porn is “the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.” Yes, that was from Merriam-Webster.

 

It’s a fittingly old-school definition for something that has existed in one way or another for no less than 40,000 years by some estimates. Back then, pornography was mostly the proliferation of erotic figurines that would in modern times best be described as two people chest-bumping maybe? Mmm. Glad we’ve evolved to...schoolgirls?

 

Today, porn is a different beast. With the advent of the internet, adult entertainment changed for—literally—ever. Unless you’re still hieroglyphically getting off in which case, have you considered moving to Brooklyn?

 

Let’s run through a couple ways the internet changed porn:

  • First, consumption has skyrocketed. The data is a little hard to come by, but estimates suggest porn accounts for some 20% of all mobile searches and 4% of all websites. I don’t have to tell you how many people have canceled their print Hustler subscriptions right?
  • Second, the invention of the internet meant anyone could become a porn star. All you needed was a camera and an internet connection.
  • Third, the internet enabled tube sites, which rapidly staged what can only be described as a crusade in porn. Here’s what Wired wrote of it a few years back: “an army of "Tube sites"—essentially Youtube knockoffs with names like Youporn and Pornhub—began offering a smorgasbord of online porn for free, much of it pirated, making it far more difficult for pornographers and distributors to make money.”

 

That cavalcade of tube sites was the beginning of a monopoly story that would make Jeff Bezos blush. And it’s a huge part of why we’re having this conversation about building a better porn industry today. To do that, let’s start by identifying what’s broken.

 

*Roll transition music*

 

If you’ve ever consumed internet porn, which I know you have, you’ve probably gone to Pornhub dot com. In my very scientific research that consisted of asking my friends where they go for internet porn, Pornhub was the winner by a longshot. 

 

But have you ever thought, while scrolling through pages of BEEEP and BEEEEP and BEEEEEEP...who owns this site?

 

It’s a company called MindGeek.

 

  • MindGeek is the Fort Knox of porn. No one really knows much about it. For most people, they didn’t even know the founder’s name until last year when a Financial Times investigation blew the top off this closely guarded company.
  • It was estimated in 2016 that MindGeek owned 8 out of the 10 largest tube sites, including Pornhub.
  • In late 2020, there were more US web searches for Pornhub than there were for coronavirus or Trump, according to the FT. Every day, some 15 terabytes worth of videos are uploaded to MindGeek’s sites. That’s about as much as half of the content on Netflix.

 

I’m spewing numbers to describe a scale I probably don’t need to describe to you. You know how vast and popular Pornhub is. But I wonder how often you think of how big its shortcomings are. I see two major problems, and that is why I can’t stop thinking about building something better. 

 

Problem 1: Compensation. 

 

Do you know how little adult content creators make? I hopped on the phone to talk about it with Cindy Gallop, world renowned marketing expert and founder of the adult content site Make Love Not Porn. She calls herself the Michael Bay of marketing...she likes to blow shit up. Here’s what she said:

 

Cindy: “In porn, whether you are a relative newbie or one of the world's most famous porn stars, you only ever get paid by the fee and the pay scale for a scene ranges from, you know, at the low end for newbie, et cetera, you know, two or three hundred dollars all the way to maxing out again, even if you're one of the world's most famous porn stars, it maxes out at one thousand two thousand dollars, and for that scene that will then go on to be viewed—and I use this term advisedly, numerically, trillions of times—across PornHub, North America, whatever, and the porn stars in it will never see a cent from any of those views on their residuals in porn. If they were, it would be a completely different industry.”

 

A completely different industry doesn’t sound so bad. $1,000 for a scene that could be viewed millions of times. Do you know what millions of views earns you on more traditional platforms? A lot more than $1,000.

 

Problem 2: Content. 

 

Tube sites like MindGeek’s have become expert aggregators of stolen content—videos and photos that might be impossible for their original creators to take back. According to most experts, few in the porn industry have the time, money, or resources to go after a company as powerful as MindGeek.

 

That should give us pause. The reason we call Mark Zuckerberg a lizard robot isn’t because he’s actually a lizard robot. It’s because we’ve come to resent the fact that no one can compete with Facebook, the company we...willingly or not...live and die by.

 

And yet, there has been but one recent example of a real reckoning for the similarly monopolistic MindGeek.

 

Here it is: A few months back, PornHub had to scrub the majority of its videos—like, millions of videos—because they weren’t uploaded by verified accounts. And even then, their hand was at least a little bit forced by Visa and Mastercard, which launched an investigation into unlawful material on Pornhub days before Pornhub purged its library.

 

Now, I have a degree in journalism, which means I’m a Google search savant. But it also means that I know there is no Google search result that comes close to the power of talking to a person. Bearing that in mind, I called up a new friend to ask her about her experience in porn.

 

Here’s some of that call with the prolific and talented porn star Allie Knox, who has been full-time in porn since 2015. She’s describing the ways that working for tube sites like Pornhub erase the creator’s control over what they’re making.

 

Allie: “You go in and you get your rate, you don't get anything else. They can use that content for whatever they want. And it's unfortunate because then maybe they're using it for something that you're not into. Maybe you don't like to shoot incest porn and they're going to put it in an incest compilation like it's that kind of stuff. You have no control over it. You literally sign all of your rights away. You get your rate and that's the end of it. So companies are just using it over and over. They're using it for a long time. Right. And good for them. Like, OK, great. I'm not mad at them for this being their business model. It just sucks.”

 

Now, I know that I’ve been dunking on Pornhub and sites like it a lot this episode, but there are benefits to working for these so-called pro sites. I’ll let Allie explain:

 

Allie: “There's lots of things that shooting for those companies offered me. I learned how to do everything. I learned how to do lighting. I learned how to do booking. I learned how to do my makeup. I literally learned—they gave me the formula of how to do this. And then I went home and did it. That type of education was so worthwhile to me. I mean, I can think of one instance where I worked with one photographer who literally taught me how to pose my entire body and my career has been built on me being able to take photos because I know how to hold my angles from that one time. Like all those things are just so useful. Also, they marketed the hell out of me. I got so many followers right away because of these companies that had so many followers there. It was cross promotion, like there was just so much marketing benefits that I couldn't have gotten unless it came from a professional firm, like a professional production company. Those things were very great. In addition, I was able to meet a lot of really great people. I was able to have photographers that I used to shoot for and they would give me their rate. I'm now hiring them to shoot my OnlyFans content.”

 

As for me, I’ll say this in Pornhub’s defense: This content scrub from last year feels like a step in the right direction. Rooting out content that was pirated, filmed without consent, stolen, or illegal is unequivocally a good thing. But Pornhub has been around since 2007...how come it took this long to take Pornhub to task?

 

We drone on and on about the dangers of misinformation and the importance of content moderation on social media platforms, but we’ve utterly failed to apply the same logic to adult entertainment platforms.

 

As consumers, we bear some responsibility in this failure to protect porn creators and their work. For years, we’ve accepted the fact that our favorite performers were paid next to nothing. Or just not thought about it? Why is that? Maybe because it’s easier not to think about it? 

 

Why are we willing to very publicly go to battle for our favorite YouTuber or newsletter writer, but not for someone like Allie Knox? Tube sites are broken, and we’re complicit in the fallout...unless we do something about it.

 

Think on that while we take a quick break. I’ll be back in a sec with a potential solution to the Pornhub problem. 

 

*Roll ad*

 

I’m hot. You’re hot. Financial responsibility is hot. Let’s talk about it.

 

We’re about to embark on the Best period Summer period Ever period. For me, that’s because I’m launching Thinking Is Cool and I’m vaccinated and I’m single. But it’s also because I’m getting smart with my money.

 

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I’m going to spend the rest of the summer telling you more about my new core money platform here on the show, in my newsletter, and on social media. But for now, trust me—you want to check out HMBradley, and you want to do it soon. If you sign up for an HMBradley account with my link in the show notes, you’ll earn up to 3% annual percentage yield on balances of up to $100,000 right now. That’s up to $30250 a month in your account without lifting a finger.

 

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Now, back to the action.

 

Before you heard from HMBradley, which, btw huge shoutout for clearing this partnership despite my insistence that episode 1 be about porn...I told you we were going to consider a potential solution to the Pornhub problem. Let’s go.

 

Earlier, I called MindGeek the Fort Knox of porn. But not even Fort Knox is impenetrable. Lol penetration joke. 

 

A confluence of factors have put a few hurdles in Pornhub and MindGeek’s paths to domination. Some of those factors: 1) that content purge we explored earlier 2) a pandemic that shut down traditional porn production and 3) the entry of a flashy new competitor that absolutely did the most in capitalizing on creator economy buzzwords like subscription and direct relationship and Cardi B. Pair all that with the word sex, and you’ve got a new startup darling.

 

That darling is, of course, OnlyFans. Which calls itself a “content subscription service”...which is exactly what a platform for selling nudes would call itself.

 

To put it bluntly, OnlyFans had a gangbusters 2020, and with that came the hope for a creator-driven retribution against a swarm of sites that had once made bank on stolen content. If Pornhub and tube sites like it were the problem, could OnlyFans be the solution? We’re about to find out.

 

*Roll transition music*

 

My off the bat take: This—OnlyFans—is the creator economy’s user-generated answer to our Pornhub problem. I mean, think about it...how many internet stars do you know who started OnlyFans before or during the pandemic? Cardi B. Bella Thorne. Blac Chyna. Daisy Keech. That girl you went to high school with.

 

Back to Allie Knox, who’s been creating on OnlyFans for a while now:

 

Allie: “So I realized that if I did my own content, I could produce my own things. I could work with who I wanted. I can control my image. I could do only things that I was comfortable doing. I never have to feel pressure in a sexual situation. And it was it's the fucking answer.”

 

The fucking answer...couldn’t have said it better myself. 

 

To me, Allie illustrates the shifting nature of adult entertainment. For a very long time, the only option for internet porn stars was really just tube sites...tube sites that, as we now know, kind of suck.

 

But for stars with big followings like Allie, the experience on OnlyFans is vastly different from what it might be like for you or me to join. Some performers are making good money. But some most certainly are not. Here’s Cindy Gallop again:

 

Cindy: “With OnlyFans, it's a 24/7 job. OK, if you want to make money with OnlyFans, you've got to be refreshing that content, constantly posting. You know, it's a 24/7 job.”

 

We often hear stories like those of Bella Thorne, the actress who famously made $1 million almost immediately upon joining OnlyFans. Or of the 300+ creators who earned 7 figures on the platform in 2020. But according to a GQ piece from this winter, half of OnlyFans’s over 1 million creators net under $100 per month. If you earn just $750 a month, you’re in the top 10%. Not exactly a feasible way to make a living.

 

Sure, owning the relationship you have with your fans is a huge advantage...but you might make less on OnlyFans than you would doing a scene a week for a tube site. It’s a reality made all the more dismal when you consider how much money OnlyFans is making.

  • Revenue grew 553% to ~$390 million last year. 
  • It has more than 120 millions users.

 

And given my conversation with Allie, there’s another important risk worth noting when we consider OnlyFans as the Pornhub solution...being independent is really...really...hard.

 

Allie: “Here's the next phase. Only fan creators are going to get real burnt out because you know what sucks? Working all the time, working all the time, doing it all for yourself. It sucks. It's tough, it would be so great just to go shoot a fucking scene and have somebody deliver it to me, that would be cool. And you can I mean, you can hire people to do for your own production company and everything like that. Like this is a constant grind. This morning I got up at five thirty. As I made breakfast, I was taking photos. Well, because that's what the demand is like, wow, I'm beat, that's that I'm beat, you know, the last time I do, you know, the last time I didn't check my social media was the day I started in 2014.”

 

That sounds like a nightmare. But is it really all that different from other parts of the creator economy? Tossing it back to Heather Berg, our professor and porn work expert:

 

Heather: “I think it's not actually that exceptional, so in freelance journalism, people get paid a pittance all of the time to write pieces that might get circulated a great deal. I mean, so I think I think that that what's different about porn in this context is that because of sex, people think that the exploitation is unthinkable in a different way. And it absolutely is. And it's ethically and politically like something that we should absolutely work to to undo. But at the same time, in addition to the really urgent concerns with addressing sex workers labor rights claims, I think there's something useful. And also turning the lens backwards and looking at all this sort of civilian or straight jobs in which these conditions are pretty standard as well.”

 

Contrasting takes always leave me wanting more. To meet that need, I reached out to OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely to try to get him on this episode, but my messages went unanswered. It’s not the first time I’ve DM’d him to no avail.

 

Still, I wanted to deeply understand what makes OnlyFans tick...what contributed to its meteoric rise aside from the obvious pandemic...what it’s really like. And if it could, despite the hurdles we just discussed, be the harbinger of a better porn industry I so desperately want.

 

So I did the logical thing: mic’d myself up and started subscribing.

 

Kinsey: “All right, let's get to like the down and dirty. I have the corporate card. I am ready to buy some adult content. That's so much to ask. Why is it so hard to find porn on OnlyFans?”

 

Eventually, I found some. Or at least came close.

 

Kinsey: “I Kinsey Grant am going to add payment for OnlyFans using my Brex corporate card, not an ad. This is going to be interesting. I wonder if it's going to flag this. Oh, this is fun.”

 

Narrator voice: Brex did in fact flag the charge. Kinsey lost access to her corporate card for over a week. She went into a tailspin lamenting the fact that adult content is still labeled suspicious because one time her credit card was stolen to buy over $2,000 of goods from Best Buy and no one flagged anything. But a $4.99 OnlyFans charge was enough to put her in Brex jail.

 

Eventually, I did get out of Brex jail. I subscribed to a few suggested creators on OnlyFans, and I walked away with some big ideas:

  1. A vast majority of the content I came across wasn’t pornographic in nature. It was people engaging with audiences. Maybe they were wearing a little less than the average influencer, but they were living their lives and sharing it with fans. That’s cool.
  2. The lack of ads is a welcome change from my experience surveying other porn sites for this episode. Subscription-based businesses actually don’t suck. Aside from the one you just heard on this show, ads are what suck. Now rolling the tape from my experience on Pornhub...

 

Kinsey: “The ads are just insane. It is astounding that the process to see these, like, fake characters and like comically large penises take these pills to grow three inches overnight. That is not what I want when I am coming to something like a porn website, like I don't want to see that and I want to be inundated with ads like that. I want a more natural experience.”

 

Such service journalism, right?

 

But a better revenue model isn’t enough to deem OnlyFans the porn world’s savior, or any world’s savior for that matter. The more I sat and thought about it, the more I realized that OnlyFans might be broken too, just like Pornhub.

 

Creators are still struggling to break through. OnlyFans takes 20% of their revenue, regardless of whether they do in fact make it big. And the reddest of flags, according to the sources I spoke with for this episode: OnlyFans hasn’t created a safe enough environment for sex workers...the very people who rendered it capable of making waves in the startup world today.

 

So what might be the saving grace porn needs in order to suck less? Direct to consumer porn.

 

*Roll transition music*

 

I know what you might be thinking...direct to consumer porn? Isn’t that just a 2am “u up” text?

 

Yes and no but that’s beside the point. Here’s what I mean: We as porn consumers shouldn’t rely on a profit-driven platform to create an ethical porn industry. What’s the saying about those who refuse to learn from history? Well...history shows us that platforms themselves are rarely motivated to sidestep money in the name of doing good by creators and consumers.

 

Cindy Gallop said it best.

 

Cindy: “The young white male founders of giant tech that dominate all our lives today. They are not the primary targets online and offline for harassment, abuse, racism, sexual assault, violence, revenge porn. Therefore, they did not and they do not proactively disarm for the prevention of any of those things on the platforms. Those of us who are at risk every day, you know, women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, the disabled, sex workers, we design safe spaces and safe experiences and the rest of the Internet should be learning from us.”

 

My question at the outset of this episode was this: How do we make porn suck less? Put more eloquently, how can we ethically consume porn?

 

I think the answer lies with us. The responsibility does in some ways, too. And I’m not saying the platforms and their leaders and the regulators charged with keeping them in line are getting off scot-free here...they have a lot to answer for. 

 

But the first step in getting them to answer for their atrocities against creators like Allie and her peers? That first step can be incumbent upon us.

 

Allie: “A way to take a stand on the unethical companies are not buy content from those people. Don't go to PornHub, PornHub sucks. Fuck PornHub. It has made so much money. And they suck, they suck, they do shitty things, fuck Pornhub. Don't go there, don't go there, you don't know that the scene that you're watching is consensual.”

 

Allie: “What's the solution? Pay for your porn. Seek out the people that are doing the things that you're into and maybe most importantly, become an ally, stop perpetuating these fucking stigmas against people.”

 

If you want to support a creator on their own terms, Allie told me, the best way to do so is by going straight to them. Ask a performer if they’re willing to create custom content, and pay for that custom content. You’ll probably love it more than the garbage on Pornhub anyway.

 

I’m proposing this solution assuming that ethical porn consumption is even possible. Which, in fairness, some people don’t believe. Here’s what Heather Berg told me about ethics:

 

Heather: “It’s trite to say, but I think there's no ethical consumption under capitalism is true.”

 

Editor’s note: Dad, I know you hated hearing that more than hearing your daughter say the word porn this many times in the span of a podcast episode. Thanks for listening anyway. Back to Heather.

 

Heather: “I think that there's something, whether we're talking about porn or fair trade, coffee or whatever, there's something problematic. And then it's more really about the consumer making themselves feel good than the realities of the work to to feel like any kind of consumption we do is totally ethically clean. That said, there are certainly, as in any other industry, there are ways to consume that are more ethical and more worker friendly than others. And I think that the best ways to to consume with the highest ethical standards possible include paying performers as directly as possible for their work and thinking about either paying for content produced by companies that have a reputation for before being really respectful of performers, working conditions, health practices and consent. But really more to the point, thinking about ways to and there are many to pay performers directly for content they produce themselves.”

 

Enter: DTC porn. Pay performers directly. That’s how we make porn suck less. Learn their names. Understand their lives. Appreciate them for what they’re doing—going out of their way to make content for you and a living for themselves. 

 

We need to consider adult entertainment performers as creators. For too long, they’ve been typecast as second-class citizens in the creator economy. But the truth of the matter is this—they could do Thinking Is Cool but I couldn’t do what they do.

 

Back to Cindy for a sec: 

 

Cindy: “I've said for years that one of the platoons agendas in socializing and normalizing sex is that if we achieve our social mission at scale one day, sex work should be as natural a career choice. As doctor, lawyer, accountant, you should be able to choose to, you know, make a career in sex work.”

 

Some of you shared that sentiment with me in the inbox. Several of you let me know that you think OnlyFans and creator-driven content is great...but it or any other disruptor is not capable of supplanting sites like Pornhub just yet. To make that possible, we need to erase the stigma around porn, because no one will be honest and open about paying for it until porn is as normal a credit card charge as your morning coffee.

 

It sounds good, especially from where I sit behind a mic. But I’m a realist. I know my suggesting we “reduce stigma” is idealism in its purest form, so I brought in someone you might know very well already to help me off my high horse. Get ready to know him a lot more...intimately. Here’s my Thinking Is Cool cofounder and friend, Josh Kaplan.

 

*Roll Josh interview → do you pay for porn? When did you start paying for porn? Do you feel guilty that you didn’t? Will you moving forward? Do you think there’s such a thing as ethical consumption under capitalism? Do your friends? We are a generation hellbent on leaving the world better than we found it, so why aren’t we applying that logic to sex workers and their rights? Is our perception of sex work really changing? Bring up idea that porn used to be a divorceable offense from emails, now it’s expected in a relationship. BRING UP JOE*

 

*Roll music*

 

This is my first episode, but I think I know a little bit about a lot of you. I know that you know that I know that you know what it’s like to look at porn online. And I know a bunch of you have probably Googled the people I interviewed for this episode, you little weirdos. And I know that you all have a friend like Josh, one who’s willing and even eager to have a conversation with you about making porn suck less.

 

Step 1: Pay for your porn.

 

Step 2: Go find that friend. Go talk about how you might realistically get off more ethically in the future. Go think. Because it’s cool, and you are too.

 

See you next time.