"On the outskirts of the porn industry, any dirt looks even nastier": an excerpt from the book of actress and model Stoya

Tubes versus torrents

4 March 2015

The cost of filming and the need to repay them in order to shoot further, not to mention career prospects, is certainly an important topic. But I'm much more interested in the ethical aspects of piracy.

The porn industry has been in a protracted peak for many years: budgets are being cut, the fees of actors and actresses are not growing very much, but the inflation rate is very even. The people you have worked with for years are replaced by inexperienced newcomers who agree to lower salaries. All this cannot but affect the quality of the films.

The easiest way to blame the online pirates is that people pay less and less for porn, which leads to shrinking production budgets. But it's not that simple.

Long ago, when the Internet was like the Wild West and films were sold on videotapes in offline stores, prices were also wild. More precisely, they were bullied to the limit - because everyone understood that buyers had no choice.

But gradually the Internet became more and more accessible, and studios had to reckon with the new digital market. companies were forced to independently distribute their films on the Web or sell the rights to their back catalogs

All content produced in the past. for a song.

A lot of shady business practices have appeared, including hidden add-ons - additional paid options for which users were signed by default and had to be specifically unsubscribed from (just like Columbia House Sound recording company. who made extensive use of such a system). They could even write off money twice.

In Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, Robert Rosen describes a scam involving the erotic magazine High Society. Users needed to verify their age to access free content, by entering data a credit card - after which they were automatically charged 60 bucks a month.

Of course, these business schemes, from cunning to outright fraudulent, flourished not only in the porn industry. Pyramid schemes have been around since the 1920s and everyone knows how difficult it is to unsubscribe from products like Enzyte and Proactiv. Companies producing dietary supplements and cosmetics for acne, respectively. . But in the backyard of the porn industry, any dirt looks even nastier.

In the mid-2000s, free "tubes" with tons of porn videos appeared, and the audience was simply torn with delight. Money was mercilessly raided from these people, they are accustomed to the fact that by specifying credit card details on the site, they can become victims of scammers. Given all the risks associated with paid porn viewing, it's hard to blame them for choosing stolen and free videos.

A 2011 article in New York magazine stated that a year earlier, a certain Fabian Tillmann had bought Mansef and merged its video sites and other assets to form a new company called Manwin From the combination of two words: man (man) and win (to win). .

Think about it: Manwin. The man. Win. The name oozes straight patriarchy.

Users of these sites were allowed to upload whatever they liked, including copyrighted videos from other companies. This stream of free porn has allowed Manwin to attract a huge amount of traffic.

As you know, for viewing materials on free sites (be it blogs, news aggregators or porn tubes) viewers pay with clicks. It costs nothing to consumers, unless it takes a little energy to wiggle a finger, but the site gets money from it.

Manwin used this traffic to sell ad space to the same companies who stole the video. And they paid a lot of money for banners. After that, Manwin began buying up companies that it helped to devalue, for example, the Digital Playground studio, with which I worked for several years. I believe that the worst capitalists would call Manwin's policy aerobatics.

Between torrents and tubes, in my opinion, there is a huge difference. When it comes to porn, they take a diametrically opposite approach to the endless flow of online content.

Torrents like Pirate Bay are fighting for free flow of information and free speech by posting along with entertainment copyright materials leaks exposing the actions of governments and corporations. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has spoken out openly against laws like SOPA and PIPA Laws that will tighten measures to prevent copyright infringement outside the United States. In 2012, some sites (Wikipedia, Reddit, Google) took part in a protest against these initiatives, by disabling access to their pages for periods from 12 to 24 hours or by placing banners expressing disagreement with laws. .

Most of the tubes, with the exception of WoodRocket and PornTube, are now owned by Manwin (now called MindGeek). This network is very much like a monopolist destroying the market. Many of its divisions use the tactics of "either we will agree, or we will sue you", purposefully harassing people who upload videos and forcing them to pay exorbitant prices for what they see. There's a name for that - patent trolling Patent trolls specialize in filing patent claims. The bottom line is that litigation is so expensive that even in the event of a potential victory, it is more profitable to give money to the troll without a trial. .

Guess which way of piracy of my work is closer to me. I'm now starting to shoot, produce and release porn myself, and I'd love to see Creative Commons A non-profit organization that provides the legal and technical infrastructure for digital content creation. there was a license "Attribution - Non-Commercial Use - ShareAlike A Creative Commons statement that states: “If you modify, transform, or use this work, you may distribute the resulting work only in the same, similar or compatible licenses ". "No Tubes, Only Torrents." But for now, let it be this essay.

It would be great if enough people would pay for Naturalistic Images so that I could shoot something like that in the future. But I don't believe in patent trolling and tightening nuts. Let people make GIFs, screenshots and clips (just remember that the rights to the music belong to Skip Shiri) and share them with the world, just don't sell them and be sure to mention the authors.

And in the name of everything vicious and depraved, stay away from the damn Manwin / MindGeek sites.

Survive auto-tanning A reference to Donald Trump's fake tan, metaphorically "Trump era." , part 1

1 February 2017

For more than ten years now, my work has included communication with the Internet - in the broadest sense. I read everything that they write to me (though I don't reply to everything): every message on Myspace, emails and tweets where they tag me. I believe that a stranger's account of self-diagnosed debilitating dissociation deserves not less attention than complaints from my community - for example, in relation to certain of my statements. I believe that since I am openly expressing my thoughts, it would be fair to hear what people think about it. And damn it, I had to pay for it.

Receiving a message that someone wanted to hurt you is certainly not the same as being in the same room with screaming man at you. But these are sensations from one category. All of these individual comments gradually collect into a whole bunch, especially when they write them to you every day. In addition, they are mixed with important messages that need to be read at work (so that there is something pay rent), or to organize protests, or to keep in touch with friends and loved ones.

And this heap began to bury me under it. It turned out that a disgusting tweet from some random person from the other side of the world who would never have brought his threats in execution, is still able to get into a sore spot and open up wounds from the past, including from serious threats. As a result, as soon as I open my laptop or turn on the phone, I immediately went into aggressive defense or panic surrender mode.

They tried to help me; from the far shelf they took out, shaking off the dust, the good old "dog barks, the caravan goes". Advice to ignore [dash] or not think about [another dash] poured down on me like Halloween candy in a decent suburb of the United States. All I could answer was a desperate one: "I WOULD HAPPY, BUT HOW?"

Do you know the “don't think about the pink elephant” phenomenon?

I tried to imagine how all my insoluble anxiety float away like clouds. I imagined that these are leaves that fall into the stream and are carried away by the current. When I complained to my partner that all this did not help, he replied that he was driving away unnecessary thoughts with the words "These are unnecessary thoughts." And I was like, "WELL CLASS, BUT IN FACT THEY STILL COME BACK."

(At that time, I often used a capsule, feeling myself between the hammer of “Yes, you need to take care of yourself” and the anvil, “So how the hell can I do this?”).

Then he said: "Well, yes, the whole thing is that these thoughts will return, you just need to accept it and again remember that these are unnecessary thoughts." So I stopped worrying that I couldn't get something out of my head once and for all. After that, it became a little easier (and not so emotionally costly) to put off these thoughts until later - when something could be done about it.

In the end, a friend suggested that I read Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Hooded Crow". This is not easy reading, and should be treated with a certain degree of skepticism, but among these thousands of pages, the most useful answer to the question "BUT HOW?" Don't try to cross out the bad, just add the good.

In other words, when the bad is impossible to get rid of, focusing on the good will give you the respite you need.

Each person has different "good" and opportunities too. Here's my list: cats plus a laser pointer, lie down hot water (here 50/50 - either helps or aggravates), have sex, sew some stupid decorative things from scraps as a gift to friends.

It is very important to keep your brain in check and abstract from the source of stress. Because if you do not give yourself a rest - and rush from one embrasure to another - then where will you get the strength to win the whole war?

Jessica Stojadinovich, or Stoya, is an adult film actress and columnist for Esquire, The New York Times, The Guardian, and many others. She has published a collection of essays, Philosophy, Porn and Cats, which discusses the porn industry, feminism, sex, Internet piracy, relationships and, of course, cats.

Buy a book