Remember the “clumsy spout” mentioned in Part 1? It was about Milan.
Here is more of the explanation that Bouzy offered regarding it.
So just to clarify, I was not trying to insult or demean someone who has been the victim of sexual harassment on the work at the workplace. Actually, it was the complete opposite of what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say was someone who has been the victim of sexual harassment at the workplace, and was basically forced to look at porn should be mindful and also be sympathetic to the women that are on Spoutible that don’t want to be forced to look at sexually explicit content. And that someone who’s had gone through this do a 180, trying to push a certain “agenda,” it’s concerning to me, but I did not word it the way that I should have worded it and then obviously, it was taken out of context. But that’s literally what I meant…
…I would never make fun of or mock someone for going through sexual harassment or sexual assault and I think people who have followed me long enough know that. But I am concerned that someone who has experienced that would try to then force folks to look at that.
Now, even if the issue was about Milan wanting porn and sexually explicit content to be allowed on Spoutible, posting information about Milan’s sexual harassment experience then claiming she has an agenda makes no sense whatsoever. However, as previously stated, Milan’s issue is about how including sexually suggestive content in the policy makes it unclear as to what is and isn’t allowed. So, Bouzy’s reasons for posting that spout were based on a false premise. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time an influential man has used a woman’s sexual history to discredit her, and it seems very apparent that Bouzy’s spout was an attempt to do this to Milan. It is also apparent that Bouzy received a lot of backlash from Spoutible users regarding this, which is probably why he later deleted it.
Milan later mentioned on Twitter that another writer was issued a suspension on Spoutible but didn’t have any information as to what caused the violation in question. Her name is Jackie Barbosa
The spout Barbosa attached can be seen here.
The spout contains the following link:
https://spoutible.com/Jack...
As you can see, the link Bouzy provided is for Barbosa’s home page on Spoutible. The page displayed states:
This account was permanently suspended from using Spoutible.
Reason: Harassment and bullying.
However, this doesn’t explicitly state what Barbosa posted that violated the TOS regarding “Harassment and bullying.” If Barbosa received an identical message privately once she was suspended, asking for further clarification would be justified. After all, both Twitter and Facebook send an email notification whenever a ban has been issued. The email would refer to the content in question and state the nature of the policy violation. Did Spoutible do this? If not, why not? If so, why is Barbosa asking for more clarification and why did Bouzy provide the above message as if that answered Barbosa questions when it clearly didn’t?
Unfortunately, I was unable to view Barbosa’s spouts because of her suspension, so I am unable to verify the full extent of her contribution to the whole debate. However, some of her responses are still visible. I was able to trace some responses to Milan’s spouts on the issue:
Remember the mystery sex worker I mentioned in Part 1? I eventually found out that it was Jenny DeMilo from Part 2. This is the account she provided me.
I said I’d been there 5 mins and felt discriminated against, he quote spouted me telling me I wasn’t discriminated against. I quote spouted him back saying something to the effect of “Thanks for trying to tell me how I feel.” Or something to that effect and snarky. I was then piled on by his minions. I think some of those and my responses are still visible but I’m not sure. I said I felt discriminated against cuz I had joined, filled out my profile, did a key word search for sex work, looking for my people and read a vile bunch of hate directed at sex workers and their concerns and not knowing if they could even openly exist on the site. The interaction happened then I posted a link to my essay about sex work I wrote for the daily beast and signed off. It spilled over to Twitter, where I joined the spaces and asked to speak, tweeted about it. Bouzy again quote tweeted me calling me a liar, which put hate into my timeline for 2 days and it degenerated from there. My account was suspended on Spoutible for two weeks and when I came back up everything I posted to my timeline was gone. I haven’t gone back to look since early March don’t even know if I still have an account. Hope this helps flesh out some of the timeline. My name on spoutible is/was “jennydemilo” should be easy to find if it’s still there.
https://spoutible.com/JennyDeMilo/
I had a look at DeMilo’s profile as instructed and I can confirm that although the account is there, it appears to be incomplete. The “1 spout” on the profile is missing when you click the spouts tab and there are only three entries under the “replies” tab, one of which is to Bouzy.
I can confirm that when she posted about her interaction on Twitter, she received over 200 replies, most of which accused her of lying.
Here is the account of what happened when DeMilo joined the Space:
DeMilo
Hi everybody, how are you doing? First I’d like to caution you, Christopher. When I heard you say that a lot of sex work was not voluntary, it is a really dangerous place to go. There are a lot of sex workers out here, myself included, who are voluntary sex workers. Sex work and sex trafficking are two completely different things. So, I would caution you just to be careful when you’re speaking about sex workers to speak about them accurately.
At this point, co presenter Michelle Bobb-Paris interrupted DeMilo to claim that Bouzy made no such statement. The discussion became rather heated between Bobb-Paris, DeMilo and Bouzy before the latter stepped in and said the following.
Bouzy
When this space is over, you are more than happy to go back and listen to it. And if I did say that you can DM me and say, “Hey, this is the proof that you said it.” But as Michelle (Bobb-Paris) had stated, I was clear that there are some folks who are voluntarily doing the work that they’re doing and there are folks, a lot of folks who are not and that is an accurate statement. There are a lot of individuals who are “doing sex work” and are presented as if they are doing quote “sex work” and it’s not voluntary. We have no way to know what is voluntary and what’s not and this is a problem that a lot of platforms are going through. If someone uploads an image, and says, “This is what I’m doing,” we have no idea if this person is voluntarily doing this and this is their job, or if this is someone who’s being forced, which would in that case be sex trafficking. They’re being presented as sex workers, and we have no idea on how to police that and no platform does. So, for us it’s just not happening at all. But please continue.DeMilo
Hi. Okay. So, let’s move on because we’re clearly going to have to agree to disagree on that one. What sex worker organisations did you speak with when creating your adult content policy so that sex workers could be not marginalised or not discriminated against on your platform would be something I’d really like to know and if you didn’t speak with any sex worker organisations, why not? The policies as I have read them are very vague. They’re open to a lot of interpretation. There’s a section in there where the policies talk about things you cannot say, things that are sexually suggestive. Sexually suggestive can be anything to anybody. You could have a picture of somebody’s foot, and somebody might think that was sexually suggestive. There can be all kinds of things. I know that the site doesn’t want explicit adult content, videos, and photographs. But why not spell it out in your policies, so that there is no (mis)interpretation, so that everybody understands what the policies are, and can adhere to them, and not have to wonder if maybe somebody will think this picture of me kissing my girlfriend would get me banned from the site? Because when a sex worker, or pretty much any business comes to a social media platform, we’d like to build a following, that’s a lot of investment of time and effort…Bouzy
So first off, no, we did not consult with organisations on sex workers. In terms of the policy, I would suggest you read every other social media platform policy regarding sexually explicit content, and you’re going to find similar language, there’s just no way to be able to spell out everything, it’s impossible to do. In terms of building a following, which I will agree with you, it is frustrating, if you build a following, and then a platform changes its policy, now you’re kicked off. We are trying to avoid that. I specifically said in the beginning of this Space, that two people whether it’s same sex or just heterosexual kissing and intimate moments is not considered sexually explicit material or content. I don’t think most people here would ever consider that. If I see a photo of two men or two women, you know, kissing whatever. For me, that’s absolutely nothing. There are people who have romantic photos and with their same sex partners on Spoutible right now. They’re not getting banned; they’re not getting suspended. If you’re a sex worker, and you are talking about your work, or if you are uploading photos that maybe like you said, maybe a photo of your foot, or leg, or you in some racy outfit, as long as you are not performing sexually explicit stuff, more than likely, you’re not going to have that content removed.But what we’re not trying to do is have folks create a huge following like you said on a whim decide to suspend folks, but you’re never going to get a platform including Spoutible to lay out everything bullet point by bullet point. It’s just impossible to do all of these and this is the reason why a lot of folks were frustrated because they were like, “Wait a second. You’re on Twitter. Twitter has a similar policy, if you’re on this platform, they have a similar policy, why are you going after Spoutible, for a policy that most other platforms have?”
Yeah, you’re absolutely right that Twitter was really open to, the sex worker community and the reason why they had to change is because a lot of these other organisations started pushing back saying exactly what I was saying before, that there are people who are being presented as sex workers who are not sex workers, they’re actually sex traffic individuals that are being forced, and because of that, you need to do X, Y, and Z, it’s where it got into a lot of trouble over that. And then on top of that, as I stated earlier, you have the whole child pornography aspect of it as well. It’s a slippery slope, especially for a startup and I think you folks got to understand that we are a start-up, we don’t have the funds of a Twitter or Google. We’re a small team of individuals trying to provide a platform for a whole bunch of folks. There are certain areas we can’t get into, for legal reasons for funding reasons and all that other stuff. So, also be cognizant of that as well.
Notice how he never addressed the definition of what was “sexually suggestive”? He also:
- Failed to address why he didn’t consult any sex work organisations when devising the policy.
- Explained that content with same sex couples or LGBTQ+ themes does not count as sexually explicit even though DeMilo never said it did. In fact, she was specifically asking about sexually suggestive content, which (as stated before) is different.
- Explained very thoroughly why allowing sexually explicit content on the platform would be problematic, even though DeMilo specifically asked about sexually suggestive content, which (again, as stated before) is different.
- Claimed that other platforms have similar adult content policies to Spoutible even though they’re much more detailed (as explained in Part 2).
If you advertise a platform as a haven for marginalised communities, it pays to do your research on what exactly that means. Bouzy’s admission to not consulting sex workers while devising the sexual content policy is a major oversight on his part. Especially since the policy in question would directly affect their ability to use that platform. Furthermore, it creates the distinct impression that he hadn’t studied as deeply as he should’ve. If he had, he would’ve been aware that race is not the only way a person can be marginalised and how sex work can be both a cause and a result of marginalisation.
It’s worth pointing out that Bouzy did say this near the beginning of the Space:
When you look at sex workers, we all just assume this is what this person wants to do. There are a lot of sex workers who are not doing it willingly, who are having their images put on platforms without their consent, being forced to do it. We can’t and we are not even thinking about trying to moderate that stuff.
I suspect DeMilo highlighted the difference between sex work and sex trafficking because of the above statement Bouzy made.
While it’s possible that Bouzy was referring to revenge porn i.e. explicit content posted without the knowledge or consent of the person(s) featured, his statement that “There are a lot of sex workers who are not doing it willingly” could very easily be taken as a reference to sex trafficking. However, the real question is that if Bouzy wasn’t talking about trafficking, then why was only DeMilo corrected when Emily of Muse Massage Spa clearly came to the same conclusion earlier in the meeting?
My name is Emily. I’m a sex worker and owner of a sex work business in Canada. So, I’m one of the people that have been writing in with these kinds of questions. I’m wondering what determines explicit content and I would like to make two important notes that were mentioned earlier. Let’s not confuse sex trafficking with consenting adult sex work, whether that’s child pornography or adult forced trafficking. They’re very, very different and I think it’s important to note that sex workers are among the most marginalised communities as they also include people of colour, LGBTQ, neurodivergent, etc…
Knowing that DeMilo was the mystery sex worker from Part 1 brings the treatment of her during the Space in perspective. If raising concerns about the vague adult content policy led to the fallout with Romancelandia (as it may have done) it would be easy to see her experience as an attempt to silence or discredit her, just like how Bouzy tried to do with Milan.
Observing Bouzy’s behaviour around sex and women has led me to the following conclusions about him.
- He seems to have serious hangups about sex. He admitted in the Space to feeling uncomfortable when defining “sexually explicit content”. The stress I heard in his voice seemed to confirm this, even though he was discussing sex in the most clinical of terms. It’s one thing to be uncomfortable talking about your own sex life to people, it’s a whole other thing to be disproportionately uncomfortable about basic sexual terminology. To me, this just screams sexual repression which, in my opinion, is the root of the problem here. For someone who didn’t want sexually explicit content on his platform, he spent a hell of a lot of time talking about it, even when someone asked for clarification on sexually suggestive content which is different. Why else would he be so desperate to keep it off his platform while continuing to fixate on it?
- His conflation of sexually suggestive and sexually explicit content indicates that he wants Spoutible to be as sex free as possible. Probably due to conclusion 1.
- He seems to have a strange hang up about white women. His framing of lone Black man vs angry white woman mob strongly indicates this, as does his treatment of Jenny DeMilo. Another giveaway is his attitude towards Courtney Milan once he found out her racial background wasn’t entirely European. He became much more accommodating.
- He has mis marketed Spoutible. I’m still undecided as to whether this is a deliberate move on Bouzy’s part or due to his failure to recognise marginalisation other than his own. He spoke extensively about the racism he has faced on Twitter during the Space but said next to nothing about sexism that women face, or the discrimination experienced by the LGBTQ+ community on that same platform. Although Bouzy claimed that Spoutible is safe for marginalised communities, he hasn’t specified how or why.
- He has a fragile ego. Bouzy seems incapable of handling criticism, no matter how constructive. His failure to handle both Milan’s and DeMilo’s concerns in a professional manner strongly indicate this. Especially given that almost all criticism has been met with accusations of racism. It’s also concerning that many people who agreed with Milan and voiced their own concerns about the TOS have since been permanently suspended from the platform.
In the fourth and final part, I will go into detail about how Spoutible has many hallmarks of a cult. From the reverence to a charismatic leader to the fervent recruitment process.