WASHINGTON, D.C.—As adult fans are well aware, there's nothing much in the news these days—which must be why the National Coalition On Sexual Exploitation (which has now added an international division, dubbed the International Centre On Sexual Exploitation) has decided to waste its time and its donors' money—or as Dawn "Terrifying Porn Flight" Hawkins put it in an email, "We have a MASSIVE opportunity right now"—by trying to convince credit card companies not to accept charges from adult companies and websites.
"We are writing to you from our respective countries (Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Denmark, England, India, Ireland, Liberia, Scotland, Sweden, Uganda, United States of America) as experts and organizations dedicated to combating sexual exploitation and abuse, to request that your company stop processing payments for the pornography industry given its extensive promotion of nonconsensual content—including child sexual abuse, sex trafficking videos, rape, and more—and of content eroticizing sexual violence, incest, and racism."
At this point, those who actually watch porn are saying, "Whaaaaa???" That's because they know that legitimate adult companies like Evil Angel, Wicked Pictures, Mile High Media, etc., etc., and adult websites like Adult Time, Brazzers, Team Skeet, etc., etc., etc., not only don't promote "nonconsensual content," they do their damnedest to keep such material out of their DVDs and off of their websites. And in particular, they all want nothing to do with videos of child sexual abuse (aka child pornography, a major federal offense), sex trafficking (ditto), rape, sexual violence and whatever else ICOSE has in mind, plus the fauxcest products released by adult companies are (and no one should have to say this) fantasies, not involving any actual familial relations, while the alleged racism apparently refers to material featuring "big black cocks" (BBCs).
Pornhub is, of course, one of the prime targets of ICOSE's wrath, with the letter first stating that, "It is first vital to recognize that the pornography industry does not judge or verify consent in any videos on their site, let alone live webcam videos. Some sites, such as Pornhub, which is one of the largest and most mainstream pornography sites, do not require age verification for any person to upload pornographic videos—let alone any metric to measure consent." [Emphasis in original.] Exactly how a website is supposed to "judge or verify consent" in a video/clip where the participants appear to be young adults enjoying themselves is never revealed, and since ICOSE supporters don't like any porn of any sort, they feel justified in making such unsupportable claims as long as it gets as much adult material removed as possible.
Indeed; part of ICOSE's letter states, "We also assert that pornography itself is a form of sexual exploitation, causing physical and mental trauma. A 2011 study found, 'Female adult film performers have significantly worse mental health and higher rates of depression than other California women of similar ages.' Another study reported that pornography performers experience physical trauma on the film set, often leave the industry with financial insecurity and mental health problems, and also experience health risks that aren’t limited to sexually transmitted infections." Trouble is, both studies were headed by anti-porn zealot Corita R. Grudzen, M.D., and while there's no room here to dissect her "studies," a look at another study she co-authored should provide a taste.
Part of ICOSE's support for its claim is that Pornhub apparently told Australian news site 10Daily, after "the [British] Internet Watch Foundation ... investigated and confirmed over 100 cases of children being sexually abused on Pornhub," that the "discovery of 100 cases of children in their videos, amounts to significantly less than one percent of [Pornhub's] content." Somehow, however, ICOSE managed to leave out the modifier "significantly," and considering that in October of 2019, Pornhub VP Corey Price told Popular Mechanics that the company hosts 11 petabytes of content, which the magazine worked that out to mean 3,666,666,666 minutes, or about 6,976 years' worth of porn, "significantly less than one percent" of that content (.0001%? .00001%? .000000000001%?) would be damned difficult to find—and Pornhub definitely looks for the stuff because it doesn't want the ration of shit it would face if web surfers could find such illegal material and talk about it.
But leaving out the "significantly" allowed ICOSE to claim in its letter that that meant "Pornhub is admitting to hosting a minimum of 68,300 videos of children being sexually abused—these are real-life children and teens raped over and over again on this website. And again, it is virtually guaranteed that Pornhub has more than this number." In a word, horseshit.
The same paucity would be true of sex trafficking videos, which would be even harder to detect, especially if the participants looked as though they were enjoying themselves having sex. Ditto for so-called "revenge porn," which again would be a vanishingly small part of Pornhub's "offerings" and which is removed as soon as the company is notified of it—as would be non-consensual clips, child porn and videos with trafficked women (or men). But that hardly matters to ICOSE, which charged Pornhub with having plenty of those, actual evidence be damned.
The ICOSE letter then goes on to reference the letter sent to Attorney General William Barr late last year by four House Republicans, asking him to start prosecuting porn again—but somehow, INCOSE couldn't help but infer that Democrat Jackie Speier was a signatory to that letter, which she wasn't, although she did come out against nonconsensual porn.
And of course, ICOSE couldn't help but mention that "in America, all commercial distribution of obscenity is illegal under a federal law that has been upheld twice by the Supreme Court," thereby letting the card companies infer that porn and obscenity are essentially the same—which they clearly aren't. [Emphasis in original.]
What follows in the letter is a litany of supposed porn industry abuses including, besides the above-referenced child porn and sex trafficking videos, an accusation that agent Derek Hay was engaging in sex trafficking, a claim by "an ex-producer for Hustler" about "the ubiquitous use of drugs on mainstream pornography sets;" and a claim by UK's The Sunday Times and anti-porn group NotYourPorn that "Pornhub is flooded with secretly filmed 'creepshots' of UK schoolgirls, hosting clips of men performing sex acts in front of teenagers on buses and indecent images of children as young as three," as well as other possibly bogus charges.
The letter is signed first by long-time anti-porners Haley McNamara (she spoke at last year's NCOSE-sponsored anti-porn conference in D.C.) and the inevitable Patrick A. Trueman, former Justice Department attorney and founder of Morality in Media (which became NCOSE), plus 12 other anti-porn activists from countries around the world.
Hopefully, the executives at MasterCard, Discover, American Express "and more" (what? No Visa?) to whom the letter was addressed are savvy enough to know when they're being played by pro-censorship activists and ignore its hype, misinformation and lies.
The full letter can be found here.
Pictured: ICOSE's hype graphic attached to its email to supporters
