Editor’s Note: Connor Young (@ynotconnor) is CEO and co-owner of YNOT. He’s the founder of the YNOT Cam Awards, co-creator of YNOT Cammunity and an all-around adult industry veteran with decades of web development experience. He has served on the Board of Directors for the Free Speech Coalition and as an expert witness for the ACLU in its successful challenge of the COPA legislation.

To the extent that feminism is about equality, I’ve always been a feminist. One sex should not have inherent power in society over another. Even as a child I found this inherently obvious.

If you journey down the rhetorical rabbit hole of feminist thought there are some branches that I find more compelling than others, but the basic premise of equality is a no-brainer.

It was in college though when I had one of those “lightbulb over the head” moments on the importance of the feminist movement. The epiphany came not in a women’s studies class, and not from reading any essays or poems or novels written specifically on the topic of feminism – although I did explore all those things. Instead, my little enlightenment was gifted by the writer Daniel Defoe, a long-dead gentleman most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe.

It was his other famous novel though that had that big impact on my development. Moll Flanders tells the story of a woman in 17^th-century England whose grand plan to marry into wealth and comfort proves difficult to realize. The story is at times funny, at other times heartbreaking. Its cynical and critical look at British society really spoke to me and my naturally rebellious spirit. The novel is perhaps the first written in English to really tackle the topic of economic opportunity for women, and to explore what happens to people when they live in times where opportunities just don’t widely exist for their group.

It’s quite remarkable really that a novel written in 1722 (and written by a man no less) manages to tell such a compelling and enlightened story about a woman who turns to sex work to survive. Think about that for a moment: one of the first English language novels in history offers a sympathetic narrative about a sex worker.

Readers find themselves invested quickly in the character of Moll and impressed by her courage and ingenuity. Moll, a bit of a natural grifter, understands that her ability to attract the attention of men is her biggest asset – and she’s willing to exploit that power to find solutions in a difficult and dangerous world.

Defoe took no small risk here when you consider he wrote this novel just a few decades removed from the Salem Witch Trials in America, and at a time when religion and politics were also strongly mixed in England. I wish I could shake his hand and buy him a beer. I’ve always felt a kindred connection to famous artists from history who challenged the repressive cultural norms of their times.

If you think sex work is risky now, imagine being a sex worker in 17^th-century England. Birth control was non-existent. Antibiotics weren’t a known thing yet, neither were vaccines, and diseases were rampant. The punishment for sex-related “crimes” could be quite severe.

And yet, she persisted. When the only real chance for women to achieve comfort and security lies in marriage, and the right match just doesn’t present itself for any number of possible reasons, you can see how one might accept risk in exchange for survival and a shot at the good life.

This is why the presence of opportunity in any society is so important to the welfare of its people. Without opportunity, whole populations of people become desperate and vulnerable to exploitation. With it, individuals can find that elusive form of comfort that comes only from financial security. Abundant opportunity means individuals can generally pursue the kind of activities that bring them happiness. Art and culture thrive.

It was not my original intention to work in the adult entertainment business. I simply stumbled into it out of college precisely because of the opportunities it offered for financial stability and personal independence. I’ve always been thankful for the opportunities I have found in adult and that it has provided me with a home and extended family for several decades now.

I’m also thankful and proud that our industry has provided opportunities to countless women and men who work as talent, many of whom left behind difficult situations to find their own homes in adult.

Opportunities for independent living are shrinking in the United States these days. I read a memorable quip recently that said the problem with capitalism isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it works too well. Large companies no longer kept in-check by the government they now control have been busy sucking all the economic oxygen out of the room. The pace of their devastation has only quickened with advances in automation, big data and AI. If there’s a way to make money known to man, the titans of Wall Street want to exploit it.

Do you want to sell widgets for a living? Good luck competing with Amazon. You can sell your widgets on Amazon, of course, but have fun competing with the Chinese vendors who have an abundance of low-cost labor at their disposal. Maybe you want to sell software? If it has any viability, Microsoft is probably selling it already. If not, and if they see you making money at it, they will soon. If you can think of a service that people need, chances are a giant corporation (or two) is already gobbling up all the potential customers.

Except when it comes to adult entertainment. The inability for average Americans to be “grown up” about sex and sexuality means the world-eating companies that control the planet can’t be seen selling porn. They can dabble on the edges: Hollywood movies film mild porn scenes occasionally (and insist it’s something else), and companies like Amazon profit from novelty sales and also the IT services that adult companies use to run their websites. Banks of course profit indirectly from porn since they take their cut from essentially all commerce. Still, Apple can’t sell you hardcore video clips and Wal-Mart can’t offer live adult webcam shows.

Yet the demand for adult entertainment remains, as always, very strong.

That means for those people not wearing outdated and frankly ancient views on sexuality, the adult industry might be the only place where unencumbered opportunity exists.

Try getting that while working at Starbucks.

If financial security brings power and independence, lack of financial security leads to desperation and exploitation. The mainstream’s flawed narrative about adult is that the industry ‘exploits women,’ and while I can’t say that never happens, that’s an accusation that’s increasingly more relevant to mainstream companies and businesses these days, not to adult.

Just a few weeks back, Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow went on Jada Pinkett Smith’s talk show and the pair of actors criticized porn. Smith argued that porn has messed us all up in the head, while Paltrow – who has used her sexuality her entire career to get ahead – argued that porn is bad (mmkay) because it makes women think they need to be sexually attractive.

As if women had never coveted that power before porn existed.

It’s also especially rich to be lectured about morality from two people who represent an industry that celebrated the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, Luc Besson, Roman Polanski… look I don’t have enough room here to list them all, but if you’ve been paying attention, you get the idea.

While adult has been building platforms like cam networks and user-generated content stores that turn power directly over to the women and men who use them, mainstream lobbyists are busy fighting against minimum wage hikes and better health care. They’ve been working tirelessly to raid social security, degrade public education, bust unions, saddle students with a lifetime of debt, drive up prices on housing, and end a woman’s right to an abortion. All these things keep poorer Americans desperate and easily exploited, willing to work jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want at wages that don’t even cover the necessities.

This is the machine that drives our nation’s true obscenity, and the executives at the top of these companies are laughing all the way to the bank – while riding on the backs of desperate workers to get there.

Some of us don’t want to carry their considerable weight.

The adult entertainment industry is an exception to the normal rules. It offers a different path for those who don’t want to live by all those restrictions that come from mainstream work, and who don’t want to play a rigged game. Adult gives its talent a means to produce an income on their own terms, and to express themselves just as they see fit. It’s a unicorn industry.

Look, I don’t know for sure that Moll Flanders would have given adult camming a try had she been born in our modern times, but I’m pretty sure she would be entertaining a packed room on Chaturbate right now.