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Dominatrix Accuses Airbnb Of Banning Her

Arianna Travaglini’s account was deactivated—and she says it’s because of her job

Source: Vocativ.com.

USA – For two weeks, Arianna Travaglini says she tried to book an Airbnb rental for an upcoming trip to Baltimore for the LGBT Pride celebrations, but hosts weren’t responding to her messages. When she clicked the “Instant Book” button, she kept getting error messages. So Travaglini, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, contacted Airbnb’s customer service team. On Wednesday, she says she received an email notifying her that her account had been disabled. The message read, “Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account.”

But Travaglini thinks she knows why she’d been banned: She does sex work under the persona Andre Shakti, and the two names can be easily linked with a quick online search. “I think I was banned because they found out … that I do sex work,” she told Vocativ. “All it is is profiling.”

Travaglini has used Airbnb for over two years, under her legal name, and says she’s only ever gotten positive reviews from her hosts. “I have always used the website for leisure, vacation-related travel—never worked out of the location, never advertised that my other persona was going to be at the location,” she said. Travaglini also emphasizes that the sex work she does is strictly legal—she performs in pornography and works as a dominatrix, beating up and wrestling guys, as she puts it.

But again, never at an Airbnb rental. “I didn’t even have to work in an Airbnb, to see clients in an Airbnb, for me to be denied service, even after two and half years of stellar reviews,” she said.

Airbnb did not respond to a request for comment by press time—and there are, of course, other reason she could have been banned. But, Travaglini’s allegations aren’t the first such accusations against the platform.

In March, Julie Simone, a dominatrix, said her account was suddenly shuttered and she received an email from Airbnb reading, “After a routine review, and given information uncovered pursuant to online public records, we have determined that it is in the best interest of Airbnb, and for the users on our site, to deactivate your account permanently.” When asked about the incident, the company told Fusion, “As a general matter we constantly review our platform to ensure that the use of listings are in line with what our hosts and guests both expect.”

These cases follow several news stories about Airbnbs being used for sex work. A San Francisco radio station quoted a local sex worker calling Airbnb a “boon” to business and “a simple way for women who don’t have an enormous amount of money to transition into indoor work.” In Stockholm, there were similar reports. There have also been alarmist headlines like, “Pimps and hookers ditching hotels in favor of Airbnb rentals.” In at least one documented case, the porn industry has used an Airbnb rental for a shoot.

Amid all this coverage, Travaglini has heard rumors about sex workers being banned from Airbnb, but she thought of it as an “urban legend.” Then it happened to her. When she posted to Facebook last night about being booted, she wrote, “Wow. It actually happened. Airbnb disabled my account.” She added, “This is blatant discrimination, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. Completely unacceptable.”

Airbnb’s Terms of Service states that the company can deactivate users’ accounts for receiving poor ratings or if the company “believes in good faith that such action is reasonably necessary to protect the safety or property of Members.” It also explicitly says, “We may, in our discretion and without liability to you, with or without cause, with or without prior notice and at any time, decide to limit, suspend, deactivate or cancel your Airbnb Account.”

This can be done, Airbnb’s terms say, without “explanation to you.” In other words, the company could have deactivated Travaglini for any number of reasons, and it doesn’t have to tell her why. She might never know for certain the reason the decision was made, so Travaglini is left with her best guess.

It wouldn’t be the first time a tech company has denied her service because of her job. In 2014, she crowdfunded money to travel to the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto, but Fundly.com and its payment processor WePay blocked her from receiving the funds she raised, thanks to prohibition of adult content.

This latest incident has once against burst what she describes as her progressive Northern California bubble. “It feels shitty,” said Travaglini, who identifies as queer. “It’s a nice little shitty reminder, especially coming so soon after the Orlando Pulse shooting, that there are multiple parts of my identity that can still be actively discriminated against without repercussion in supposedly the freest country in the word.”

See large photo: www.vocativ.com.

Pornhub launches explicit audio for the visually impaired

The adult video-sharing site now has a ‘described video’ category, in which professional voice actors explain what’s happening in the scene

Source: Theguardian.com.

USA – For the around 285 million people worldwide who are visually impaired, pornography can seem like an acoustic blur of heavy breathing, squelches, slaps and Maria Sharapova-esque grunts.

To help them find some sexual inspiration, the video-sharing site Pornhub has launched a “described video” category, in which professional voice actors explain what’s going on in the scene. The section has launched with a collection of 50 of the site’s most popular videos, and there’s something for everyone: straight, gay, female friendly, bi and transexual.

Pornhub launched in 2007, and claims 60 million daily views to its professional and amateur adult content.

The new narrated videos include descriptions of the settings, models, what they are wearing and the positions they are getting into, combined with the original audio of the video. Many of the explicitly titled clips have already attracted more than 20,000 views.

The accessibility initiative is being championed by the adult entertainment company’s philanthropic division (yes, really), Pornhub Cares, which has previously launched a clothing line to fight against domestic violence and a breast cancer awareness campaign called “Save the Boobs”, where it donated 1 cent for every 30 videos viewed within its “big tit” and “small tit” categories.

“It’s our goal to service all of our users’ needs, which begins with making content accessible to every individual,” said Pornhub vice-president Corey Price. “We selected some of the videos that were better suited for narration and could be best described in detail. We wanted to describe all that we could to provide the user with the best possible experience while not taking away from the video’s original audio.”

Price added that Pornhub wants to encourage its users to create and upload more audio descriptive clips with the differently abled in mind.

“People who are blind have every right to access porn as they do classical Shakespeare or any other kind of video,” says Joel Snyder, director of the audio description project at the American Council of the Blind.

Snyder welcomes Pornhub’s efforts to make its content more accessible, but suggests the move isn’t entirely altruistic. “There are more than 21 million people in this country who are either blind or have trouble seeing even with eye correction. The community is large and has buying power, so this smacks of something that just economically makes good sense.”

Pornhub isn’t the first organization to make porn accessible for the visually impaired. Back in 2006, a website called Pornfortheblind.org recruited volunteers to record graphic descriptions of popular adult videos, which were uploaded as MP3 files. The site became a cult hit, attracting as many as 150,000 visitors per month.

Offline, an artist called Lisa Murphy has created a book of tactile photographs of nudes, embossed on white plastic pages along with a braille description.

See larger photo and video: www.theguardian.com.

China: Bank employees publicly spanked for poor performance

Source: Edition.cnn.com.

CHINA – BEIJING – Eight employees of a rural bank in China have been publicly spanked for poor performance.

A cellphone video of a man with a wooden stick spanking each employee four times on a stage has been widely shared on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, since Sunday.

One of the hits threw a woman off balance. Some members of the audience, seated at dinner tables, can be seen turning their heads away in embarrassment.

Initial Chinese media reports suggested it was the employees’ boss wielding the stick but, according to a statement by local authorities in Changzhi, Shanxi province, the spanking was at the hands of a corporate coach during a team-building exercise organized by the bank.

It also claimed the coach shaved a man’s head half bald as punishment.

Apology

The statement said the Changzhi Zhangze Rural Commercial Bank hired a corporate coaching firm from Shanghai to train its employees last Saturday on professional development.

At the event, a total of 216 bank staff were divided into 27 teams and, the bottom-ranked team — including four men and four women — were spanked by the corporate coach and told to reflect on their poor performance, according to the statement.

Jiang Feng, the coach with the Shanghai Hongfeng Leadership School, apologized for the stunt in a video post. “This incident also offered a great lesson to myself, that it reminds me I should improve my teaching methods,” he said.

The Shanghai-based company and Jiang didn’t immediately respond to a CNN request for comment, nor did the bank.

Beijing News, a state-run newspaper, reported that Jiang’s two-day corporate boot camp cost the company 100,000 yuan ($15,300).

Executives dismissed

Shanxi Provincial Rural Credit Cooperatives Union, the bank’s supervisory body, has removed two executives from their posts, the statement said.

The video unleashed a storm of criticism online after it was posted by attendees and picked up by Chinese state media.

Some Internet users said they had witnessed similar corporate events. Weibo user Guoxiaomiao described a session at her company where employees were forced to do planks, eat raw eggs and have their heads shaved.

“I wasn’t physically punished, but I feel fear and humiliation whenever I think of that session,” she said. “The bosses would just justify it all in the name of performance boosting.”

See more photo’s and video’s on: edition.cnn.com.