Don’t Fire People for Making Pornography in Their Free Time
Eight years ago, a middle-aged husband and wife in Wisconsin published their first book, Monogamy With Benefits, under pseudonyms. “We couldn’t be more entrenched in the local establishment,” they wrote, noting their jobs as executives at respected organizations and their nonprofit work and appearances on the local news. “So we’re not exactly the kind of couple you’d expect to be engaged in adventurous sex with others. But we have a highly erotic collection of video files on our home computers that proves otherwise.”
Just imagine what would happen, they speculated, if they were to post their videos of “the full carnal process” online. “We think our sex is beautiful and have no qualms at all about other people watching us make love,” they wrote. “But our establishment colleagues likely would be shocked … and we’re fairly certain we’d be shunned in our community. Our careers likely would be ruined.”
Nevertheless, in the years that followed, this couple uploaded videos to Pornhub, joined the adult-content-creator site OnlyFans, and published another book, Married With Benefits—Our Real-Life Adult Industry Adventures. Then, last month, that long-predicted career ruin finally came, after an unknown tipster outed the husband as University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow. After nearly 17 years on the job, Gow was promptly removed as chancellor. University of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman stated, “His actions were abhorrent.” Gow’s ability to return to the faculty as a tenured professor is now in doubt.
[Helen Lewis: Nobody should care about a woman’s ‘body count’ ]
Gow soon appeared on CNN to assert that he did nothing wrong and that his free-speech rights were being violated. He may yet file a lawsuit against the university. As a legal matter, Gow is correct to believe that firing him as a faculty member is suspect, which the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains here. The First Amendment is unlikely to save his job as chancellor––see the attorney Ken White for that analysis. But First Amendment law can tell us only so much. How should Gow’s superiors have responded to this exhibitionist sexagenarian’s pornography?
They should simply ignore it. (Indeed, I myself have chosen not to watch.) Sure, I can understand why various UW officials might feel frustrated with Gow or a need to feign disapproval. Public support for higher education is cratering. Factions hoping to defund state universities are eager for any pretext to portray these schools as decadent enclaves with contempt for the values of most Americans. One needn’t believe that porn is immoral or disgusting to know that millions judge it so: A 2023 Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans, a clear majority, believe that pornography is morally wrong, while just 39 percent believe that it is morally acceptable. If Gow was paid partly to bolster UW-La Crosse’s public standing, an argument can be made that he failed at his job.
Then again, Gallup also found that 85 percent of Americans believe that having an extramarital affair is immoral. And few people would expect the chancellor of a public university to lose his job for that transgression.
Pornhub is watched by more people than Netflix. OnlyFans, a site that is best known and substantially used for adult content, reports more than 3 million creators worldwide. Almost inevitably, in the coming years more and more people in public roles will be outed for making porn. Broadly, our digital culture gives Americans opportunities to judge and to be judged. Educators will be caught on cellphone cameras or CCTV drinking at bars, participating in street protests, being rude to waiters, entering strip clubs, leaving abortion clinics, failing to pick up after dogs, running red lights, and imperfectly disciplining their children.
[Russell Berman: Political accountability isn’t dead yet]
Surely society would suffer if all such cases and more were potential HR issues. Instead of our value-diverse, negatively polarized nation of more than 333,000,000 souls constantly contesting which off-the-clock behaviors are bad enough to justify termination, wouldn’t it be simpler to agree that, at least if no laws are broken, one is judged at work only for what one does at work? Among the benefits: fewer fraught arguments, fewer firings, and fewer lawsuits.
Moralists may argue that taboos play an important role in communicating a society’s values, and so firing people for creating porn (or engaging in other morally controversial activities) is acceptable or even desirable. Still, moralists can find value in the siloed approach that I am proposing. After all, if termination is understood as a signal that an act is immoral, many will see ongoing employment as a sign that all known behaviors of still-employed people are thus considered moral. But if what people do outside work is irrelevant to employment decisions, that downside for moralists goes away.
Karen Walsh, the president of the UW Board of Regents, said she was “alarmed” and “disgusted” by Gow’s actions, which were, she stated, “wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor.” But Gow’s actions were neither consistent nor inconsistent with being chancellor. Strictly, his actions were outside the scope of that role. Or they could be considered so, if most Americans simply chose to see the situation that way.