MONTREAL — Canada’s public broadcaster CBC News 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 the parent company of Pornhub, Brazzers and other leading adult brands.
For the article, penned by political reporter Mark Gollom, CBC News spoke to board members and academics Prof. Leah West and Val Webber.
West, a Canadian military vet and expert on national security law and counter-terrorism at Carleton university, told CBC that she has “been working in the tech and human rights and law space for a while,” and explained that people who know her well will not find her advising a tech company in the adult sector odd, “because I’ve been a strong advocate against sexual violence against women in the last couple of years.”
West stressed that “righting past wrongs, learning from the past, all of that and even I would say dispelling some myths” is the job of MindGeek’s new owners and not of the newly appointed advisory board.
West 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.”
West explained to CBC that she does not believe that all porn is demeaning, or is undermining women or feminism. “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.”
Val Webber — a post-doctoral researcher in pornography and sexual and public health at Dalhousie University with adult performer experience — told CBC they “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 they are interested in ensuring that “we aren’t 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’s 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 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.