OnlyFans to ban sexually explicit videos

“The fact men are so eager to support the normalisation and sanitisation of the commercial sexual exploitation of women and young girls should set alarm bells ringing. It’s no skin off our nose if a woman believes herself to be “empowered” by the industry, and in fact, that just does the leg work for us. It is Barthes’s Death of the Author come to life: her empowerment lives and dies with her. She is viewed as the same dehumanised object that can be purchased on a whim whether she believes herself to be or not.”

This cannot be said enough.

I wish women and girls could see this but how can they when they NEVER get space to even BREATHE away from men's exploitation and abuse and leering and sick gaze and stinking breath and body odour...how can they?

Yes.

I wonder what changed the banks mind? had any bad stories come out, like the Millie Dowler case or something like that?

So it was to get round rules the payment providers had set up?

@dyslek I would imagine it was investors of the payment providers. There are only certain providers that work with adult and gambling sites due to high fraud/charge back risk. The same one we'd used for years but all of a sudden they wanted rid of all explicit content asap.

I used to work for an adult dating site and we had the same thing with payment providers. We had to categorise every image and video on the site as explicit or safe so that they could be hidden if necessary and make an algorithm that filtered our certain keywords, mostly fetish related. I had to write a list of safe suitable words that could replace them. It was a strange job.

@TomFarr1

From your other article on The Critic

thecritic.co.uk/crouching-exploitation-hidden-misogyny/

“The fact men are so eager to support the normalisation and sanitisation of the commercial sexual exploitation of women and young girls should set alarm bells ringing. It’s no skin off our nose if a woman believes herself to be “empowered” by the industry, and in fact, that just does the leg work for us. It is Barthes’s Death of the Author come to life: her empowerment lives and dies with her. She is viewed as the same dehumanised object that can be purchased on a whim whether she believes herself to be or not.”

We need a whole new thread on this! How men are happy to throw ticker tape parades for porn and to convince women to participate in their own degradation.

Scared of being held accountable for the kidiporn?

@TomFarr1

Thanks! It was an excellent piece. I’m not seeing much criticism about only fans … just those singing it’s praises, so it’s refreshing to read a piece that puts it in accurate perspective.

That's very depressing and not at all beyond the realms of possibility.

Yes, exactly.

Damn. That sounds depressingly plausible @Ereshkigalangcleg. Kind of like when Heinz pretended it was going to discontinue salad cream, only… more so.

Have you seen the news that they have reversed their decision to ban sexually explicit content. I was talking to a friend about it last night and he's texted me this insightful comment he read in a tech forum, which I think is bang on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28306368

Doubt it. This IMO is probably the best PR maneuver ever conceived. I doubt they ever planned to do it.
The BBC was just about to release a long-researched exposé about all the moderation issues they have and how child porn and abuse were going unchecked on their platform. This was a supposed to be a huge deal that could destroy them if the media at large rallied around that story like they did with Pornhub. By making this announcement before it came out they stole the narrative and switched the focus away from that problem and towards the issue of what are all the sex workers going to do when they suddenly lose their income and also just how crazy the announcement was in of itself.
They did it with perfect timing and drummed up such a fuss with such a wild and seemingly out of nowhere change that when that article actually dropped, it was merely background noise and not the primary focus of media coverage. The media likes to hyper-focus on issues for a short period of time (with a few exceptions, trump/covid/amazon being a few) and then quickly move on regardless of whether the issue/story has finished or resolved itself in anyway. Which is what will likely happen here, OnlyFans will likely make it through this mostly unscathed and with a ton of publicity.

@TomFarr1 interested in your thoughts?

I think you're spot on there @TomFarr1

Interesting to compare your piece with this in the graun. Spoiler alert: the change at onlyfans is bad for women and has been brought about by right wing evangelical lobbying [eyes roll all the way out of head]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/21/onlyfans-sexually-explicit-content-gilead

Nepata

Thanks for that post.

I don't want to sound like I'm trivialising.

That list though. Is the same as the list for patriarchal religious extremists.

The consequences are different in many ways but. The basis is the same

That thing about how extreme left and extreme right meet. That's where we are heading with women's rights. Really fast.

Saw on news and on telly

This is a response to the journalists etc finding, and mods taking about

CSA not being addressed
Incest
Underage children
Prostitution (against their t and c)
Beastiality
Women who were obviously imprisoned, raped. Being moved around
Hopeless reaction to infractions with those making them money getting lighter consequences
More?

Saw one woman interviewed said it was terrible as there's a stigma around 'sex work' and it's just prudish nastiness. Failed to address any of the above. Just looking to her cash (and I mean fair enough most people look after number 1 but I felt she was out of her depth and really not a good person for.. BBC maybe newsnight not sure).

BBC piece woe is me with (drumroll) a bloke selling pics and bids. They always dig a bloke out. Doesn't elicit the same response as a young woman etc...

Oh and it's always great and fun and awesome.

Right... So the whole child sex abuse stuff? That negates it?

The whole omg it's just horrible prudes thing is so old hat.

Women are bored as fuck of people saying omg you're so boring vanilla and you probably are ugly blah blah. When concerns are raised about sexual exploitation....

• sex work is work like exactly any work and can be an empowering career choice but only for vulva peoiple
• surrogacy is very much necessary so that 'fertility equality' can be reached, and an important way a woman can both make a money and be kind
• women actually really love being beaten and choked in sex
• sentences for rape are beginning to look rarer than hen's teeth,

• the group which is affected by all of those is being made invisible by erasure of all names it could have

I recall reading a New York Times (I think) article about OnlyFans a couple of years ago. It made me feel odd until I realised that it carefully avoided making a single reference to the sex of those performing on the site or the sex of those paying to watch the performance. Everything was entirely sex-neutral! Even the example mentioned was about a straight man stripping for a gay audience.

This is the way our ability to SEE what it means to be female is weakened. Not the only example I have come across, of course. There was another one in a recent Guardian story about the difficulties that sex workers faced due to the current plague which pointed out that they could at least earn money on OnlyFans. That everyone interviewed was female had to be carefully erased.

'Sex work' is NOT 'work'

It is the exploitation and objectification of women.

The patriarchy has tricked women into thinking this is a viable occupation.

Ffs, makes me want to cry.

BBC Newsbeat is sad about this.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-58282653

Great article, thanks Tom.

Thanks for taking the time to read them!