MONTREAL — Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, profiled on Sunday the new MindGeek advisory board set up by Ottawa-based private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), after its recent purchase of Pornhub, Brazzers and other leading adult brands.
For the article, political reporter Mark Gollom of CBC News spoke with board members Leah West and Val Webber, both academics.
West, an assistant professor of international affairs at Carleton University, is a Canadian military vet and an expert on national security law and counterterrorism. She told CBC News that she has been working at the intersection of technology, human rights and law for some time, and that people who know her well will not find it odd that she is advising a tech company in the adult sector.
“I’ve been a strong advocate against sexual violence against women in the last couple of years,” she explained.
West told the CBC that she does not believe that all porn is demeaning, or is undermining women or feminism. She decided to get involved in an advisory capacity, Gollom writes, “because of the potential to have impact at a site with 2.5 billion visits a month.”
“My goal is to make the industry as safe as possible for all participants,” she noted. “And if you want to do that, you do it with the biggest player in the industry.”
West stressed, however, that “righting past wrongs” and dispelling myths are tasks for MindGeek’s new owners, not for the newly appointed advisory board.
Val Webber is a postdoctoral researcher in pornography and sexual and public health at Dalhousie University, and has experience as an adult performer. They told the CBC, “I would like to see us relax a little bit around the content of pornography as playful and fun entertainment and that it not be judged so much more harshly than other kinds of entertainment.”
Webber added that they are interested in ensuring that Pornhub does not end up “needlessly censoring different expressions of sexuality.”
Other members of MindGeek’s new advisory board include female empowerment leader Kortney Olson, financial auditor Shayna Miller, lawyer Jessyca Greenwood and University of Toronto Faculty of Information academic Maggie MacDonald.
Solomon Friedman, one of the founders of Ethical Capital Partners, told CBC News that the board members were selected based on their expertise in the areas of sex work, health and safety, and online adult platforms.
“We realized that we needed to engage as advisors people who are rooted in those communities and can give us advice about what has worked, what has not worked,” Friedman said.