PERVERTS, IT’S TIME FOR UNITY
The points below are by no means new; there is already a movement of kinksters and sex workers of all kinds calling attention to the walls closing in on our sexual freedoms. But, because of its important reach beyond the realm of sexuality into the realm of human rights, it warrants saying again. And again. Until people start caring and act, and in more convincing/effective ways than petitions and vagina-clothed marches.
The paragraphs below were posted on kink forums the readers of which displayed skepticism that things are indeed this bad. I therefore resort to the larger public of my social media to spread the message that everybody with an interest in sexuality is going to see their pleasures controlled, exposed, vetted and outcast if we don’t act.
Individual sex workers, performers, content producers, dommes, escorts, and sexy workers of any kind are under threat from many directions. On the other hand, normal people consuming porn and sexy services are under threat also. The two crowds often overlap. That means we all have something in common that should unite us. The end product still looks luscious and the offer abounds… for a while. It’s the inertia of a very solid decade or two of internet freedom. But slowly behind the scenes our rights both as producers and consumers are critically at the edge of the precipice, about to be snatched for good by intrusive legislation, discriminatory card companies and unchecked monopolies that favor the corporations over female (or male) talent. The end result is sexist, but only as a byproduct of the underlying economy.
On the larger industry question: tube sites like PornHub, RedTube, xVideos etc. completely undermine the adult business. They even develop software to present their pirated uploads of a performer higher on the google search page of a performer’s name, than the performer’s own links. They discourage a performer’s DMCA takedown of pirated content by publishing their real name on the site — which for women in the adult business is highly risky. They should be sabotaged, but no one cares. Even large studios struggle: kink dot com, the legendary porn factory in San Francisco, is no longer producing porn and is selling the Armory. The lesson is piracy kills business. Music and movie industries hit back and killed torrent sites. But no one cares about the porn industries, they have lesser lobbies and the moral brigades against them. I personally wouldn’t engage to defend THEM; the big adult companies already ARE unfair competition to individual sexy services providers and small content producers, like me and many dommes I know. Or camgirls, strippers, etc. etc.
What is surging is individual niche porn producers, mostly females, who use new platforms to sell their content. Or sell it themselves. A good and ethical site is iWantclips. But as female producers we still get discriminated and harassed: you can pay your tax and be registered as a business, it won’t protect you from financial processors like Visa, PayPal and others shutting down your account and confiscating your funds if even a mention of the word sex is somewhere on the web associated with your name. PayPal accounts of 80-yr old female romance novel writers were shut. The same discrimination doesn’t apply to big porn producers, some of which make some really nasty porn or defend rapists like James Deen who go unprosecuted. MindGeek has some skeletons in its closet, but it’s a huge corporation and therefore untouchable.
When a man buys femdom from the big companies, he is eventually paying men. When he watches on PornHub for free, he is supporting a corporation ran by men. When he is buying from dommes’ own studios, THEN he is living up to his stated love of femdommes and supporting them. If you’re not paying me directly but buying my content elsewhere, then you’re supporting my competitors. You are of course free to do so, but that also makes you adversarial under capitalism. You cannot call yourself a lover of women, and dominatrices, but rather a parasite. Your economic choices sabotage the livelihood of the artists that bring sexual entertainment to life: the women.
Any man who has submissive desires and wants to support femdom as a thing should support individual performers, as we already have to operate and navigate through dozens of oppressive and discriminatory laws and rules from the state, the credit card companies, the new DEB, social stigma, etc etc etc. If you don’t support performers and dommes, then your actions eventually contribute to a dwindling of the femdom culture and overall, these oppressive anti kink, anti sex work laws will leap into other areas of our lives as well, making it harder not just to wank, but to do … about anything fun.
Surely this is a dream time for dommes?
..Was a point raised in forum conversations. I’m glad it was brought up.
All areas of sexual pleasure thrived enormously because of the internet. Of course culture at large did, but the boom in these areas: 1. consensual kink; 2. porn; 3. sex work of all kinds (and there are MANY kinds) took off massively with the advent of internet. I think femdom was one of the areas that profited from it. It was truly a golden age. Not just for the pro domme but for the normal kinky woman who wanted to explore. And of course, the man.
But it’s.. over. Or at least evanescent. The attack on kinky porn in the UK started in 2014 with the ATVOD regulations. Violent maledom wasn’t affected, only the small, homegrown femdom studios. We learnt then that males drowning a woman in sperm is fine (bukkake), but watching a female orgasm on dedicated porn sites (as few as they are, female orgasms are not all the rage) is deeply immoral and therefore banned. Ethical porn producer Pandora Blake saw her site shut and then reinstated after a long legal battle. ATVOD is now dead but replaced by other more sinister government organizations.
Now the Digital Economy Bill is threatening to ban access to ALL porn unless every porn site visitor proves their age with ID. You better save your favorite porn and sex worker contact data because you’ll find visits to those sites will be impossible in the near future (well, as soon as they find the tech infrastructure to implement drastic control of ALL porn). Of course there are VPNs, but for how long?
Just a while back spankingtube.com deleted my spanking and caning photo album saying they don’t allow extreme pictures on their site. FetLife deleted whole groups, conversations, kinks, photos, etc. overnight a few weeks ago when under pressure from CC companies in the US to ban all that is “immoral”. The pressure is coming from the new republican administration, they said. They rule out depictions of what we the kinksters view as exciting forms of consensual play. Even Coinbase, the company that runs on bitcoin, desisted their services to Fetlife on account of them being a kinky, therefore immoral, company. Brief reminder financial companies DO NOT ban service to the great corporations like Google and Apple that avoid tax. Brief reminder that these bans deprive us of income avenues while our income is still taken in tax.
The walls are closing in, ladies and gentlemen. And it’s only getting worse. Porn is getting harder to access; sexual freedoms limited; internet closely monitored; finances used as coercion matrix to impose a new “respectability”. Where the only accepted sexual orientation is conformity. And “let’s think about the kids”. A moralistic argument that doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
Of course for the time being we still have the inertia of a marvelous recent online sexual revolution. It will still run for a while. We, as providers, work hard to make sure the product is still as impeccable and joyful. But we encounter obstacles: finance processors ban our services for being correlated with sex work or adult in any capacity; I recently saw my Circle account banned for unspecified reasons, even though I used that account to receive payment for therapeutic, counseling chat to my kinky friends across the world. Pirate sites steal our content; the law is enshrining intrusive internet controls; they’re discussing a Swedish sex work model to be implemented in this country, which would criminalize the client of any kind of sex work (and domination IS sex work, I don’t care what you say). The platforms that do allow our internet business are getting greedier and greedier, knowing we have no alternative. Clips4Sale takes 40%. Clipsfatale and IWantClips cut 30%. I prefer the last two. At least CF is female ran. It’s a model forcing us out of business autonomy into dependency to a third party, similar to pimping. I.e., that which the law states it wants to avoid (!).
It’s not looking good for the future though. This isn’t just sex/kink/porn either, by the way. Renowned lawyer Myles Jackman is famous for saying online pornography is “the canary in the coalmine of free speech”. A detailed analysis of the incipient democratic threats behind porn censorship is provided over at Porn Panic.
SOLUTIONS
I recommend reading to the end of this article for a suggested solution. It doesn’t deal with the same issues I call attention to; but it’s all part of the same trend. While of course finding small ways to speak up and educate the public at every turn. Share and retweet this and spread the word. Talk to me.Talk to other people mentioned in this article. It’s up to us, the pervs, to save our harmless perversions.
