This is different from ‘I knew it was wrong’. At an extreme example, Oscar Schindler and Harriet Tubman were not doing anything immoral but certainly didn’t want to be caught.
This is different from ’ it is only wrong if you get caught’ see above
Re Prostitution
I am STRONGLY against prostitution and have previously called it rape on this very message board. As somebody posted above, Only Fans tends to be “bespoke artisanal porn” to compare it to prostitution is ludicrous.
RE Stripping
One of my classmates in ceramics 101 was stripping to pay her way through college. My sister worked as a stripper for a few years. I’d argue that stripping generall exploits men (the customers) not the women who are taking it off onstage.
I strongly disagree. It’s not different, it’s exactly the same argument – it’s all about not getting caught. Schindler and Tubman are terrible examples that are in no way analogous. Both of them were taking an honourable, principled stand against an evil authority. Your analogy only holds if one considers making pornography to be honourable and principled and school officials to be incorrigibly evil. Surely you don’t believe that.
The women wanted to hide their porn activities from school officials because they knew that there would be consequences including probable termination of their jobs, and to hide it from their students because they couldn’t be effective teachers with the resulting stigma. As we see in the four examples posted so far, all the teachers involved in porn were either fired or quit, and in the California case, the firing was upheld by a state tribunal.
Each of these stories was plainly a case of “it’s OK [to do this skeevy thing] as long as nobody finds out”. That’s not just blatant hypocrisy, it has to be the most morally bankrupt argument I’ve ever heard.
It’s not an analogy; it’s a counterexample. (At least, that’s how I understand it.) It’s a counterexample that disproves the claim “If they were trying to hide it, then they must have known it was wrong for them to do it.”
I’m not debating the abstract mens rea aspect of whether they believed that the act of making porn was intrinsically wrong. My argument is that they surely knew the consequences if discovered, because it was predictable that their employer would so strongly disapprove that they’d likely be fired, and even if they weren’t, it would be difficult or impossible for them to continue teaching. Yet they went ahead and did it anyway.
What they did was a straightforward case of professional misconduct, and is wrong on its face without even delving into the moral issues around making porn.
And we are all saying you can say this about any kind of narrow mindedness. Flight attendants getting married was a straightforward case of unprofessionalism by the standards of the sexist bigots of the day. Gay sex twenty years later.
Did flight attendants know it was wrong when they hid their marriages? Did gay people know what they were doing was wrong? Just because you have the political power to impose your bigoted standards on the weaker class, it doesn’t mean that it is right to do so.
It does not seem to me that that is pretty much accepted. They highly likely were not ignorant that consequences were possible, maybe even likely, if their erotic performance job was attached to them.
The question is whether or not that should be the case.
Some seem to argue that such should be the case because the behavior is “wrong” or “immoral” (and they “knew it). We both agree that is a very silly argument.
Some argue that such should be the case because knowledge of their erotic career will be too great a distraction to students.
Some argue that such should be the case because of community moral disapproval whether or not it is “wrong.”
And others that it should not be the case: that it does not interfere meaningfully with their performance as an educator and parental moral policing has and does justified too much harm.
Personally I consider the choice to be an erotic performer to be different than being gay, even one argues that having gay sex is a choice (while who you are attracted to is not).
I would totally agree that the situations are not parallel, even if you compare behaviours (choosing not to be celibate / choosing to create pornography).
However, what is parallel is the disproportionate moral anxiety that arises around behaviours related to sex.
It is pretty easy to not make porn. It is rather less easy to live one’s life in the closet.
Earlier in the thread it was stated that talk about sex is not allowed in schools, except for sex education classes.
I am assuming by the tenor of the discussion that some if not many here disagree with this. Because anyone who doesn’t want this sort of discussion is having feelings of ickiness, and feelings of ickiness are not to be listened to when it comes to sexual material.
A certain level of education is required by law. Kids can be homeschooled or sent to private schools, but those are more expensive options not realistically available to some parents. So some kids more or less have to be there.
So suppose a teacher is efficient and imparting all necessary instruction. They are efficient enough that they have 10 minutes extra in each class period to fill. They choose to fill this time with descriptions of their sexual relationship with their married partner. Nothing is off limits, anything may be described. I suppose pictures and movies can also be brought in, since someone being uncomfortable with them is not something that should be listened to. I am assuming many here will nod in agreement with such a situation.
That is indeed the larger question. To those who are arguing this larger question and feel that it should not be the case, I would pose the following challenge: just what did you expect the school administration to do?
As a practical matter the school and its governing board has to reflect prevailing societal norms, and in particular the perceived values of the parents. Does anyone doubt that if the administration expressed any sort of tacit approval or even tolerance of this, there would be a firestorm of parental protest? And that, depending on how any decision short of strong disciplinary action played out, the principal or superintendent or whoever else was involved might find their own job on the line.
My evidence for the above is (a) that the consequences for secretly creating porn were roughly the same in all four cases we’re discussing here and clearly demonstrated a zero-tolerance policy, and (b) that the teacher herself, in the case cited in the OP, believed (correctly, I think) that she would no longer be able to do her job. The latter is the same reasoning that appears to have been applied in all four cases we’re discussing here, and in the California case of a former porn actress, the firing decision was supported by the school, the school board, and ultimately by a government tribunal which flatly rejected the teacher’s appeal and stated that she had no place in a classroom.
If the teachers did not anticipate this, they were guilty of an astonishing lack of judgment. An abstract academic argument that there’s nothing wrong with porn is similarly naive and doesn’t reflect the real-world options here.
Incidentally, in one of the stories I cited (the one in Arizona) the teacher had come up with the idea of “teacher themed porn”, and according to the article had staged the videos in her own classroom, with the theme “who wants to be my next teacher’s pet?”. You good with that? It’s almost like one terrible lapse in judgment leads to another.
The crucial difference is that Turing was not making a conscious choice. What happened to Turing was tragic and profoundly shameful, especially after all he’d done for his country. The comparison with teachers making porn is just not very relevant.
I agree with all of this. From my understanding (both as a non-gay person and as non-sex-worker), it’s much easier to not make porn than it is to abstain from sex entirely (or, specifically, from gay sex as a gay person). It’s more of a harm for gay people to tell them to avoid sex than it is for sex workers to tell them to avoid sex work.
And that’s important if we’re weighing competing harms. If we’re saying, “Sure, it hurts kids to be taught by someone who has gay sex/makes porn, but it’s important for people to have the opportunity to have gay sex/make porn,” then we need to weigh just how important it is. In such a circumstance, maybe we decide it’s okay for kids to be taught by teachers who have gay sex (despite the harm to children), but not okay for kids to be taught by teachers who make porn (despite the harm to children).
But we’re not weighing competing harms. The sex life of their teachers is not the business of the student or of the student’s parents. There’s no competing harm. As long as parents don’t surf porn sites and then share what they find with children/administration, nobody needs to know. And if someone does find out, the harm to children from learning their teachers have an active sex life is pretty much the same no matter what that active sex life is. (I’ll be interested in strong research to the contrary).
So the analogy is the same, because on the one hand we have people having the sex lives they want with other consenting adults, and on the other hand we have nothing except prurience disguised as prudishness.
Classroom discussion should be relevant to a pedagogical purpose. What purpose would that serve?
This is not about pushing through people’s boundaries to force them to get over their discomfort. It’s about preventing your employer from controlling you in the hours when they are not paying you.
This should be addressed separately, because it’s absolutely not accurate. Feelings of ickiness should 100% be listened to when it comes to sexual material and your own involvement in it. Kids should never be involved in it except in a purely educational context. I don’t have gay sex, because I think it sounds unpleasant; and I have friends who don’t have straight sex, because they think it sounds unpleasant. That’s totally appropriate on both our parts.
Feelings of ickiness should not be transformed into public policy, or into excuses for ruining someone’s career.
Please, please tell me you can see the difference.
While I think there’s very little possibility that I’ll have a productive conversation with you, others might be interested in this. This person deliberately crossed the streams, and used government property as part of her extra job, in a way that nobody involved (except her) consented to. That’s a very different kind of case, and I think it’s appropriate to impose sanctions including firing on someone who does so.
Suzy Favor Hamilton was a collegiate runner who wound up competing in the Olympics for the USA. After that, she became a realtor.
At some point she decided she wanted to sell her services as a paid escort, giving the girlfriend experience. She did not do this publicly, but someone quickly recognized her. She was fired from her realty job.
I think that most people that buy real estate are adults and have sex. The nature of sex is that when you publicize your activity, the messaging of sex is overwhelming and drowns out everything else. A few people may have been put off by what she did, a lot of people laughed at her for it. The realty company got no sales out of it, maybe lost a few, but more importantly didn’t want to be overwhelmed with the perception that they hired sex workers or were offering sex as part of the sale. The realty companies are striving to be as innocuous as possible in that realm and compete in ways not having to do with sex. So she was let go.
I wonder how many teachers there are who are doing OnlyFans or similar sex work on the side and have not been discovered.
If a teacher has a side gig involving porn/sex work, and manages to keep the two jobs completely separate, so that no one involved in one of them knows about the other, I don’t see any reason for firing or outrage.
To be clear, was this realty company a government realty company or a private realty company? Government employers have restrictions on them that private employers do not.
You didn’t tell me you could see the difference, which worries me.