Hello, and welcome to Series Inquiries Only. This is Episode 310. I'm Thomas. That's Lindsay. How you doing? Fantastic. How are you? Doing great. Excited to be doing sex stuff with you.

Let's do some sex work. I've been making that joke a lot. Let's make some porn conversations about porn happening.

So, listeners to the show will recall that we've done a couple episodes. I guess I did interviews with Eli and Tom.

Talking about the only fans. Sorry, back then it was the porn hub conversation. There's a lot of response to that. If you go back and listen to Eli on that specifically, I think in retrospect, a lot of what he says has been... I don't want to rehash the whole thing, but anyway.

It's very prescient. Yeah, and then also then... Gosh, there's so much behind this. Then recently there's the whole only fans thing, which was somehow they were going to take away the porn part of their site, which is like Google taking away the search part of Google.com. I don't know what else is there. Apparently there's a chef on there who takes one picture of food. It should be one account.

Nobody would know the name only fans if it hadn't been for the adult content creators. I'm not even making a joke. I actually thought it was just that. Is there something other than that? I don't mean it in a bad way. It's a good place. I thought. I was like, alright, people can just...

My impression is that that was designed to be more like Patreon generally. It wasn't designed to be the host adult content, but that's who made it successful.

Anyway, the whole point is I guess only fans could be for something other than porn apparently, but I thought it was just porn.

We were going to talk about that. Maybe I was going to get Eli on to talk about that or whatever. Then they reversed the decision.

I don't know what is happening, but I also asked Lindsay to maybe look into some of the research on sex work and etc. to be more informed about this. I'm so excited to hear about what you found.

Yeah, no, this has led me down many, many rabbit trails. This has been a lot. I didn't know much about this literature at all. Sex work, pornography, there are big academic literatures on these things. I knew nothing about them.

I did realize that I had a lot of assumptions about sex work that I had not inspected. They were probably because of my conservative upbringing.

This has been a really interesting journey for me. The initial question that I set out trying to answer here was about the evidence regarding how restrictive or suppressive policies affect sex workers.

Do punitive laws and other suppressive policies actually do what they're reported to do, which is to help protect people from exploitation, or do they actually do exactly the opposite of that?

Again, this led me into a bunch of nooks and crannies about analyses of sex work from like a sociological perspective and a labor perspective, which is really interesting.

I tried to find something that would give me stats about trafficking, but as you're all about covered.

Did you know 70 million children an hour in my house are trafficked?

That's correct. Did you know that?

Yeah, I did.

If anyone's listened to that, I highly recommend both the show you're wrong about, but also specifically the human trafficking episode is pretty mind blowing.

Again, I know we've already talked about this, but what blows my mind about those kinds of incorrect assumptions that we all come to as a culture or something is that I get it on one level.

It's like in the popular, I don't know, in the zeitgeist in the whatever. It's like, oh, human trafficking, big problem, big problem.

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