Trump is right to deny pandemic payouts to porn

President Trump's $2 trillion stimulus package rankles with those whose industries were left out of the plan. Notable among them is the porn industry, according to Vice. The article charges Trump with being the first US president to have slept with a porn star (Stormy Daniels), while refusing to help the industry from which she earns her living.

And while it is valid to criticize Trump for his escapades with an adult film star, it is nothing but a non-sequitur to use that example as a reason why the federal government should use federal aid money to support the porn industry during a global pandemic. Trump's dalliances should have nothing to do with which industries receive funding.

The porn industry is barred from the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) application on two accounts. The first is that a given business that receives funds cannot “present live performances of a prurient sexual nature or derive directly or indirectly more than de minimis gross revenue through the sale of products or services, or the presentation of any depictions or displays, of a prurient sexual nature.” But the industry is also barred under the qualification that the applicant could not have been “engaged in any illegal activity (as defined by Federal guidelines).”

Pornhub is an iron arm of the porn industry that has seeped into the mainstream, with Twitter users jokingly tweeting things like “finished pornhub now what.”

Conan O’Brien tweeted, “Oh so NOW my accountant says I can buy stock in PornHub.”

It’s obvious that these tweets are meant to be lighthearted. And that’s fine, but it proves how prevalent and okay our culture has become with adult websites that garner thousands of views and profit off the sexual exploitation of women and children. This is the same industry that Vice apparently thinks should receive federal funding.

Rose Kalemba, according to BBC, was stabbed and raped over a period of 12 hours when she was 14 years old by two men, with a third filming various parts of the assault. The most despicable part of Kalemba’s story is that a few months later, she “was browsing MySpace when she found people from her school sharing a link. She was tagged. Clicking on it, Rose was directed to the pornography-sharing site, Pornhub. She felt a wave of nausea as she saw several videos of the attack on her.”

“The titles of the videos were ‘teen crying and getting slapped around,’ ‘teen getting destroyed,’ ‘passed out teen.’ One had over 400,000 views.”

And these stories are not uncommon. A Twitter user called Avri Sapir shared a personal story not much different to Kalemba’s. Translated, it reads: "I was abused and used for child porn since I was a baby until I was 15 years old. A few weeks ago, videos were uploaded to Pornhub where I was a little girl in diapers being raped. The video was for hours and days. One exceeded 600 visits, and they were monetized with ads."

There has even been a petition on Change.org, calling “for adult website Pornhub to be closed down after it hosted videos featuring sex trafficking victims and child sexual exploitation has attracted more than 400,000 signatures.”

The petition cites a specific case of a mother of a 15-year-old girl who discovered that videos of her daughter being raped and sexually assaulted were uploaded to Pornhub. The girl’s trafficker, Christopher Johnson, who is seen in the films raping the teenager, was arrested in Florida when police managed to match his appearance in some of the videos and linked it with 7-11 CCTV footage.

The National Review published an article in mid 2018 that said that the most commonly identified form of human trafficking worldwide is sexual exploitation, which constitutes 79 percent of it. Because there is no identifiable way to know if someone on camera is consensually there or on camera under duress, it is very likely that, among the 28.5 billion views of porn in a single year, many viewers have watched women and underage persons being raped and sexually assaulted. And this information cannot be discarded when considering prostitution and stripping.

But Vice has decided to avoid these examples in their analysis of the businesses not being extended governmental aid. They have instead appealed to arbitrary examples, explaining that “the paperwork also bans applicants who get more than a minimal amount of “revenue through the sale of products or services, or the presentation of any depictions or displays, of a prurient sexual nature,” meaning that retailers selling anything more than a few sex toys or porn magazines could find themselves rejected.”

To play down an industry constantly engaged in illegal behavior as merely selling a few sex toys and porn magazines is either a byproduct of absolute ignorance or willful apathy toward trafficked women and children.

The demand for porn is not going away any time soon, and perhaps never will. In fact, with everyone locked inside their houses for the foreseeable future, the 40 million Americans who watch porn may see a substantial rise in their ranks. But an industry that’s prospering through the exploitation and manipulation of women and children should not be granted federal aid, to say the least. If there is a single industry that should be allowed to fail, it is the porn industry.