Every morning for two months, hordes of people have misidentified a group of professionals as part of a global pedophile conspiracy. I’m not talking about conspiracy theorists falsely accusing Comet Ping Pong’s pizza delivery guy. I’m discussing the aftermath of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, religious fire-breathers, famous feminists, and tech reporters painting the porn industry as a sex-trafficking racket.
In December, Kristof wrote a horrifying viral story about unverified users uploading child pornography and rape videos onto Pornhub. You probably know what happened next: Pornhub banned unverified users, and Visa and Mastercard suspended payments on Pornhub. Everyone from MAGA senator/insurrectionist Josh Hawley, to liberal, feminist tech journalist Kara Swisher, to edgelord podcasters Dasha and Anna praised big finance for taking on big sex trafficking.
I, too, would like to take on big sex trafficking because sex trafficking disgusts me. I would like to abolish the racket, but I have zero ideas on stopping sex trafficking because I don’t work as a sex trafficker. I’m a consenting adult performer working in the highly regulated, legal porn business. If sex trafficking occurs in legal porn, I have yet to see it—and I’ve worked in the adult business for a decade. I’ve sold my self-made content on every legal clip site you can imagine, and I’ve shot for every major porn studio (which, not to brag, but is a pretty big deal).
But the Times story’s aftermath has harmed legal porn stars and done little to nothing to stop sex trafficking. The world has moved on to other viral stories, but porn stars are still reeling from the consequences of Kristof’s sloppy report.
Let me explain: Pornhub only allowed consumers to buy content created by individuals who could prove their age. Pornhub never allowed someone to buy unverified rape videos. By suspending card payments, Visa and Mastercard harmed porn stars who made legal videos and did little to stop sex traffickers. Many girls I know are now struggling financially, all while dealing with strangers calling them sex-traffickers on Twitter.
These girls and legal porn production companies don’t create the despicable, disgusting rape videos that Kristof describes. Say a criminal abducts someone, then sex-trafficks them in Iowa, and the perpetrator films the rape and uploads it online. That has nothing to do with the field I work in every day. When I go to shoot porn, I am following pages and pages of state and federal laws. California determines how and when I use a condom. The Communications Decency Act forces me to make sure I can prove everyone involved on set is of legal age. If I break a rule on set, a co-worker can call OSHA. On top of all this, the porn industry self-regulates, forcing everyone to get an STI test before shooting. I feel much safer filming porn than I did when I worked a minimum-wage job as a teenager.
Porn is a highly-regulated profession a world away from sex trafficking, but I understand the public’s confusion. Most people consume porn on Pornhub, a distribution platform, so it’s easy to mistake the distributor for the producer. It’s the same thing as when someone sees Netflix “created” Schitt’s Creek when the show first premiered on the CBC. Except, in this case, the public is falsely aligning legal consenting workers with sex traffickers.
The misconception aggravates us in part because porn performers were at odds with Pornhub until very recently. For most of Pornhub’s existence, adult performers viewed the site the same way Metallica viewed Napster: an enterprise that stole our content and let consumers consume it for free. But in the past few years, porn workers have decided to play ball with Pornhub, selling our content and buying ads on the site. Our relationship was improving, but it wasn’t perfect. Long before Kristof started typing about us, porn stars were begging Pornhub to ban unverified users. Many unverified users stole and uploaded our content that we need people to pay for, so we could make a living.
Now we are being punished because of criminals who don’t belong to our industry. This is like saying someone who worked in a Budweiser plant is liable for a grandma cooking moonshine in her bathroom. Bad actors uploaded illegal content onto Pornhub, so now the public believes all pornographers and sex workers are human traffickers.
To a degree, I understand why Kristof is confused. Midway through his story, he identifies Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait as a source. I would be confused, too, if I learned everything about porn from Mickelwait. She also works for an Evangelical Christian organization called Exodus Cry. The group emerged out of Kansas’s radically conservative IHOP Church. As The Daily Beast previously reported, IHOP promoted homophobia in Uganda, where legislators later attempted to pass a law sentencing homosexuals to life in prison. (I never thought I would see the day when landmark lesbian tech reporter Swisher would push propaganda from a group in league with Christian preachers trying to throw gay women and men in prison, but here we are.) When actress Melissa McCarthy donated to Exodus Cry, she sparked a backlash.
Now many people are pushing Exodus Cry’s lies, unaware of Exodus Cry’s background. If Exodus Cry wanted to end sex trafficking, they would target Facebook, where victims’ advocates say more sex trafficking occurs. But for the past decade, Mickelwait has tried to abolish porn altogether.
Her early attempts centered around morality but failed to take off. Everything changed in 2020 when she created a petition calling to outlaw Pornhub to stop sex trafficking. Over 2 million people signed up, believing they were fighting sex trafficking but unaware that Exodus Cry’s tax records list their goal as “abolishing sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry.”
They’re winning in their war on legal porn because they’re smart. Everyone may watch porn, but as I have learned while dating men and women who don’t work in porn, most people also look down on porn as shady. Traffickinghub plays on stereotypes of the porn industry, and it ties porn to something everyone opposes: sex trafficking. Seriously, who favors sex trafficking? Not I!
Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times
Frederick M. Brown/GettyBut when you dig past the surface, you’ll see that the end result of Exodus Cry’s work is mainly to outlaw legal porn, not fight sex trafficking. Their tactics remind me of when President George W. Bush called his horrible education bill No Child Left Behind. Everyone supported Bush’s plan because they didn’t want to sound like they hated kids. In the process, they supported a law that gutted public schools.
Now, religious fanatics and famous feminists, who supposedly care about women, are attacking porn when it’s finally become a woman-controlled industry. A decade ago, most girls relied on (mostly male) agents, directors, and company owners to find them roles in videos for (mostly male-owned) big studios that refused to pay residuals. Today, many of these studios are struggling while girls are raking in millions. We create our videos, sell them through our distribution channels, and call all the shots. If I wanted to, I could make my living without ever interacting with a male. Can Jennifer Lawrence or any other A-lister work without dealing with powerful men? I doubt it.
This female golden age of porn could face extinction because of conservatives and feminists spreading lies. Feminists and religious conservatives have previously collaborated to assault sex-workers’ rights. Eighties left-wing feminist Andrea Dworkin advised Reagan’s Justice Department to ban porn because she believed “Pornography is the celebration of rape.” Upon the release of Oscar-winner Milos Forman’s 1996 Larry Flynt biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt, conservatives and feminists protested the film. Gloria Steinem wrote in the Times, “A pornographer is not a hero… Hustler is depicted as tacky at worst, and maybe even honest for showing full nudity. What’s left out are the magazine’s images of women being beaten, tortured, and raped, women subject to degradations from bestiality to sexual slavery.” The industry fought back against these misrepresentations, and porn flourished.
The media should trust porn stars when we correct their lies about our industry. Nicholas Kristof might hang a Pulitzer on his wall, but I’ve won more AVN Awards than I can count. Listen to the experts next time you consider posting an exposé about porn. Otherwise, you may end up spreading disinformation like your QAnon cousin.
