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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
June 21st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Marc Hochstein, writing somewhat abstractly for American Banker about Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies, turns some nice phrases that go a long way toward explaining why the adult industry struggles to do safe transactions in a world where #pornocalypse-squeamish banks control all our payment systems:
As the world goes digital and physical cash transactions continue to decline – egged on by payments companies aiming to expand market share and by governments seeking to maximize tax revenues – there will likely be a lot more attempts to turn trusted third parties into choke points. The writer Brett Scott warned about this last year:
“Cashless society” is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society.”
…
[I]n a world where all payments are subject to veto by virtue-signaling middlemen, today’s politically correct social norms could become tomorrow’s dangerous control state.
“All payments are subject to veto by virtue-signalling middlemen.” That’s our situation all right!
Thanks to Maggie McNeill for the link.
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December 2nd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I am in the research phase of setting up a Patreon page for ErosBlog, with an eye toward keeping the lights on and building the chance to do more of what I do best. “Research phase” in this context means studying how people I respect are doing it; and thus have I have been reading a lot of compelling Patreon pitches, and coming to the conclusion that we all need to be doing more to highlight patronage-supported projects of our friends, peers, mentors, heroes, and creative people we could not live without. Hence this post, which I hope will be the first of a lengthy if occasional series.
Today I want to highlight the Patreon pages of three women who have been doing excellent work in the adult/erotic space for at least as long as I’ve been blogging. But first, perhaps just a few words about the growing importance of the peer-patronage economic model?
As I see it, we live in a world where the old economic orders are breaking down. Automation, globalization, and information technology have utterly disrupted the reliable wage-and-salary economies upon which most of us depended, while the internet has killed the traditional publishing models that used to keep artists and creatives (a few of them, anyway) in day-old bread and thinning shoe leather. Late-stage capitalism seems increasingly predatory and self-referential; it pays only for what it values, its values are increasingly estranged from the culture that supports it, and precious little sustenance trickles down from the well-caulked boats being buoyed up on its rising tide. The creativity that brings us joy is no longer likely to be well-supported in the market, and relying on the patronage of the wealthy (although a time-honored survival strategy of artists everywhere) has its limits in the tastes of the wealthy. If this were not true, why would #pornocalypse — which at heart is about the squeamish unwillingness of the investing class to have its money associated with sexual culture — even be a thing?
One approach to a solution is crowdfunding. A duke or a titan of industry can support an entire opera company, but the company (predictably enough) will perform mostly the operas the duke enjoys. The internet lets us democratize this patronage model; I’m no duke, but I can (at least in a good month) afford a dollar here or a fiver over there to support something that delights me. The same internet that destroyed the traditional publishing model now lets an artist who draws anally-obsessed anthropomorphic ponies find support in a hundred or a thousand places. No more insufficiently-perverted dukes gate-keeping our pornography!
But finding each other is still a challenge in this newly-democratized peer-patronage model. The internet makes such finding possible, but does not make it easy. So that’s my inspiration for this post: to try and help with that. Here are three tireless women who deserve all the support they can get, and whose creative energy will more than repay us for whatever support we can provide. I’ve “known” all of them for more than a decade without ever meeting any of them, but what I “know” may not always be the face that they choose to present to the world today, so for purposes of this series, I’m just going to amplify their own words as found on their own crowdfunding pages:
Violet Blue at Patreon
I’ve created and run the oldest sex culture blog on the internet (tinynibbles.com). I’ve authored dozens of indie books in a turbulent and censorious market. And I regularly make news by reporting on hacking and privacy, companies behaving badly, and injustices to at-risk populations. I’ve bootstrapped my site and everything that goes with it, I work at industry rates (which aren’t great), I constantly have to chase down people who take months to pay invoices for my writing, and I was homeless as a kid, so I only have me. I want to do so much more.
I want to grow all of this.
If you’ve ever followed me or my work, you’ve seen how hard I fight for people who need a voice in their own conversations — and you’ve seen how badly I get attacked, censored (Libya, Apple, Focus on the Family, Amazon search, Facebook, the list goes on). You’ve also seen my work cause positive change, like drawing attention to PayPal’s financial discrimination against sex workers, getting Tumblr’s NSFW search reinstated properly. And maybe some of my work has touched your life, too.
…
I’m freelance and indie. This means I’m not beholden to interests or advertisers, and no one will ever control what I say. But there are many business tools I cannot use, because the topic of half of what I cover is sex — plus, like many, I’m affected by things like Amazon deciding to deep-six searches for indie books about sex.
Alison Tyler at Patreon
My name is Alison Tyler, and I’m an insomniac. Since I don’t value sleep, I write. All the time. If you see me at a 24-hour diner, I’ll be writing. If I’m stopped in traffic, I’m scribbling with a ballpoint on the back of my hand. That light on in the window at 3 a.m.? That’s me. Hope I didn’t disturb you.
To date, my career has been a whirlwind–a drive in a fast car, on a mountain road with winding hills. Was it being in the right place at the right time, sheer luck, or a refusal to give up? No clue. But I’ve managed to work for Masquerade, Black Lace, Plume, Harlequin, Penthouse, and others.
There’s no safety net here. I’m in my glitter and rhinestones. Let’s run off together and make our own circus.
Pandora Blake at Patreon
I’m Pandora Blake, the award-winning feminist porn producer and performer. I’ve been making kinky films since 2011, when I launched Dreams of Spanking, my website dedicated to ethically-produced BDSM erotica. The site is radical in prioritising gender diversity, explicit behind the scenes enthusiastic consent, and equal pay for equal work.
My erotic films express my own kinky fantasies and are sex-positive, body-positive, and strongly rooted in queer politics. I’m proud to say that my work has won multiple international awards, as well as attracting a wonderful fan base – until the UK porn censor ATVOD stepped in and shut my site down in August 2015 under new anti-porn legislation. After a drawn-out campaign, I’m delighted to have successfully won an appeal against the ruling, and the site is now back online, officially exempt from the new legislation.
Since fighting that battle I’ve had to learn a lot about porn law – and I’ve been increasingly called upon to speak publicly on issues of sex work law reform, censorship and obscenity law, sexual freedom, kink acceptance and ethical porn. I was honoured to be awarded Publicist of the Year at the Sexual Freedom Awards 2015 for my efforts advocating for sex workers’ rights and against porn censorship. Now, I’m taking that work to the next level.
Image Credit (directly above): Movie patrons in an advertisement for the National Cash Register Company’s new ticket-printing register, from the Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1916.
Image Credit (top of post): An opera company seeks royal patronage for French opera by throwing vulgar English theatre under a train, from an 1841 issue of Punch.
July 28th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
There is news today that Patreon has liberalized (a little bit) its stance on what it used to call “NSFW” and now calls “Adult Content”. An article by Lux Alptraum on Motherboard somewhat oversells the news with the misleading headline “Patreon Ends Payments Discrimination Against Adult Content”. Unfortunately the headline doesn’t mean what you’d think it means, because “Adult Content” in this context is a Patreon term of art that (a) Patreon refuses to or is unable to define; and that (b) explicitly excludes “porn” (again not defined). Nonetheless; there is actual good news in the story, and what appears to be real progress on the payments front for adult creators.
Last week [Patreon] sent out an email announcing a couple of changes for its more risque creators. Most notably, creators operating under the “adult content” banner on Patreon can now accept payments through PayPal (or, more accurately, its subsidiary Braintree).
There are a lot of reasons to feel excited about this. For one thing, it straight up makes things easier for Patreon’s Adult Content creators. Until now, Adult Content creators could only accept payments through credit cards, while other types of creators have had PayPal as an additional option for backers. Now, there’s no difference between Adult Content creators and other creators when it comes to payment processing options (though Patreon does distinguish between the two camps in other ways; Adult Content accounts aren’t discoverable through the site’s search function).
According to the Patreon email, the company went aggressively to the mat with the PayPal people, and succussfully argued that these transactions are not any higher-risk than Patreon’s other business:
For creators that have been with us for a while, you may remember that we used to allow this functionality in the past, and we only removed it after PayPal threatened to stop all payments to Patreon. Unfortunately, this is a common issue in the payments industry, both because payments for adult content are subject to a higher rate of chargebacks, and because of an aversion to the content itself among some payment processors.
After many long discussions we were able to convince PayPal, or more specifically their subsidiary Braintree, that Adult Content creators on Patreon are not a serious risk. Our content policy, and the nature of subscription payments, means that Adult Content creators on Patreon are less risky than most creators making adult content. We also have a very diverse mix of content types, so even if our Adult Content creators are higher risk than other types of creators, Patreon as a whole is less risky.
That’s good news. But as I wrote back in May:
I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
At that time, Patreon’s policy was worded like this:
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
Their email from last week says:
We are also continuing to clarify what content is acceptable when flagged as Adult Content and what content is not allowed on Patreon.
However, Patreon’s new clarity has not reached the policy, which is word-for-word identical to the old policy except for the change from “NSFW” to “Adult Content”:
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked as Adult Content. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as Adult Content in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
So where does that leave people with adult projects who want to use Patreon? Pretty much in the same place they were before: don’t call it porn, and hope nobody complains. Or as Lux Alptraum puts it:
So where does this all leave indie smut creators? Only time will tell, but for now a bit of cautious optimism seems in order. Adult themed comics like Erika Moen’s Oh Joy Sex Toy would seem to be completely in the clear; as are art nudes and dirty minded podcasts. But people who want to photo and video document actual people fucking? Well, that might come down to the age old question of “art” versus “porn.”
Back in May I wrote that I was reluctant to use a platform that makes me lie about what I do, which I conceptuallize as “porn, or I’m doing it wrong.”
I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.
And that’s why I’m torn about the news from Patreon. On the one hand, they still prohibit porn while refusing to say what they mean by that. On the other hand, they have promised greater clarity to come, and it’s clear that they actually went to bat with the payment providers in order to improve their platform for adult content creaters. Is it still fair for cynical me (who sees #pornocalypse under every rock) to call Patreon a “porn-squeamish” platform? Or should we credit them for taking this fight to the payment processors, and give them a free pass (until they abuse it) about maintaining a squishy “no porn” policy, especially if that squishy policy may have helped them in winning some very real progress with PayPal/Braintree?
I’ll admit I’m of two minds. I’m so offended by undefined “no porn” policies that I want to piss on the toes of every company that trots one out. But I also find myself tempted to give Patreon the benefit of the doubt just now. It’s possible they’re doing the best they can for adult content creators, in the context of a business/financial environment that is implacably hostile to us.
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May 23rd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
For reasons that will be explained in a post appearing soon, I am looking into crowdfunding (preferably Patreon-style) in order to try and improve the depth and quality of posting here at ErosBlog. However, I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
Trouble is, I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.
Here are the results of my first round of quick research into the porn policies at a few of the most popular platforms that sometimes allow adult projects:
- Patreon: “Patreon is not for pornography.”
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
- Indiegogo: currently prohibits “sexually explicit” projects.
Do not post images or videos that are sexually explicit or post links to sites that contain sexually explicit material.
- Kickstarter: “We prohibit…pornographic material.”
- Offbeatr: Closed 2/8/16. Sounds like #pornocalypse in action:
We’d like to thank all our customers and users for supporting Offbeatr throughout our years but the website will be closing indefinitely due to changes in corporate structure.
So, what have I missed? Is there a single crowdfunding platform out there that is officially open to projects featuring pornography and sexually explicit material?
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March 25th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Here’s another great reason to love the internet: a large digital collection [gone now, here’s the Wayback machine URL proving I didn’t dream it] of On Our Backs, the lesbian magazine from the 1980s and 1990s (I’d call it “seminal” if that word weren’t so manifestly unsuited to carrying the freight I need carried) published by, among others, Susie Bright.
The collection is from Independent Voices (“an open-access collection of an alternative press”) and though it doesn’t claim to be complete, it is very substantial, containing 68 issues of the magazine. (Gaps in the collection are evident from the numbering, but how many of them coincide with publication gaps is something I can’t easily check.)
Enjoy!
2019 Update: I’m sorry to report that Independent Voices has removed public access to the On Our Backs collection, for stated reasons that strike me as reflecting either cowardice or insincerity. It can be humiliating when the #pornocalypse comes for you, and not everybody is willing to admit when it happens.
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November 10th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
I am possessed of a very bad habit. Sometimes I write hectoring letters of advice to complete strangers, in which I tell them how to run (or how not to run) their businesses. Do I actually know how internet strangers should run their businesses? Probably not. Thus, the people who get these letters of mine may conclude that I am a complete crank and net-loon. It’s possible they’re right.
In my defense: I’m getting better! Decades ago, I needed less provocation. Once in the early 1990s, the owner of a small dialup ISP sent me a polite email asking me not to be dialed-in from work and from home simultaneously. (I was in fact running multiple “news robots” against his company’s NNTP server, downloading lots of porn from Usenet.) I apologized, and with the apology sent him many paragraphs of enthusiastic opinion about his business and how it could (from my perspective as a happy power user) be improved. He took my feedback positively, wrote back in good humor, and we maintained a friendly email correspondence for some years, until he sold out to a telecoms giant and went off to Silicon Valley to play startup games with the big boys.
Before the internet, I had a job where I would sometimes write a “micro memo” on a single sheet of paper to summarize and transmit an important press clipping to my bosses, along with a couple of sentences about why it was important to our business. Sometimes I would write these opinionated little micro memos as fax cover sheets and then fax them to random members of my local business community who I thought might need the clippings (and my opinions). They might respond with gratitude, or with confusion; mostly they didn’t respond at all. I justified the effort as “business development” but mostly it was just a cranky hobby. My joke with my friends and colleagues was that I was running a charity business consultancy. Free business advice! (That you never asked for — uh, sorry.)
I told you: I’m getting better. These days, it’s mostly people who write to me first who are at risk of getting an unsolicited session of free business consulting. Usually they are asking for something like marketing help or free exposure, but they make the mistake of pretending they are asking for my advice or feedback because “Please have a look at my stuff and tell me what you think” sounds better than “Please have a look at my stuff and then blog about it for free.”
On the list of recent victims: the perfectly nice folks who run Mikandi, the adult app store for Android devices. Several of you have asked me why I did not blog about the excellent article in Wired magazine last month called The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think It Is. That article featured, among much other excellent stuff, profiles of Mikandi’s Chris O’Connell (chief architect) and its founders, Jesse Adams and Jen McEwen.
Porn and smartphones are a natural mix. I called Steve Jobs an asshole (until I had to transition to metaphorical spitting on his grave) for inventing the smartphone and then for locking it up so tight that porn apps can’t practically be installed on it by a typical user. Android looked better to me when it came along (this was back when Google still took a stand against being evil) but when Google entered its modern “fuck it, evil pays better” phase, they locked porn out of the default Android app store too. Mikandi (“the app store that treats you like an adult”) stands against all that, and runs what everyone says is a fine adult app store for Android. I want to like them for that, indeed I do like them for that, and I’ve been saying positive things about them for awhile.
I am not, however, a Mikandi customer. The reason for this is embarrassing and economic. I get free iPhones from a family member who wound up on the “Oooh, shiny!” Apple early-adopter treadmill, and so they give me free barely-used phones on a regular basis. I’ve never owned an Android device because of my endless supply of free IOS ones. It’s OK. I get plenty of porn on my desktop, I guess I don’t really need it on my phone, too.
But still. In theory I’d rather be an Android user, and if I were one, I’d be a Mikandi customer too.
Back in June I got a nice email (a real letter, not just a form template) from Jennifer McEwen at Mikandi. She identified herself as co-founder and VP of Product Development at Mikandi, she reminded me that we’d chatted on Twitter via their company account (@mikandistore), and she wanted to “share with me” that Mikandi had officially released its feature supporting the sale of adult comics as apps in the Mikandi store. She invited me to take “take the comic reader for spin” and offered to set me up with some free Mikandi Gold (presumably Gold is their app-store currency) to facilitate that.
She didn’t expressly ask me to write about the new Mikandi product line here on ErosBlog, nor did she explicitly ask me to tell her what I thought of her new offering. Nonetheless I assume she wanted at least one of those. My guess is that she wanted something like what Violet Blue gave her over at Tiny Nibbles: an enthusiastic and visually-appealing blog post saying nice things about the Mikandi comics publishing platform and about the hot dirty sex comics you can enjoy there.
Surprise, dear reader: Jennifer McEwan from Mikandi did not get that from me.
Nope, she got the detailed feedback on why I don’t think her business model is a good one for adult comics publishers. Whoopsie…
Y’see, I have issues with the media-packaged-in-an-app business model. I also have issues with simplistic policies about depictions of consent in porn, and it turns out that Mikandi’s policy is cartoonishly simplistic:
“MiKandi does not accept any non-consensual material, actual or implied. Consent is sexy!”
Reader, I shared my issues with Jennifer. I totally did. Here is an edited-down (yes, really!) version of what I wrote to poor Jen:
Hi, Jen. I’m actually quite glad to hear from you! I’ve become rather a big fan of Mikandi based on your fundamental market positioning and blog postings. (Although I am in theory a big fan of the more-open Android platform and its potential to allow adult products and services that Apple bans from the IOS world, the sorry truth is that I am an IOS user. Thus I don’t actually have an Android device in the house, which means I don’t have the familiarity with your platform and business processes that I would like.)
Sadly that means I’m afraid I have to decline your kind offer of some test Gold — an offer which I would otherwise accept with alacrity.
I must confess I find myself less than excited about your new comic book publishing platform, although I expect a great many comic book publishers will find benefit in it. My concerns with it are at least
partly philosophical: I see a distinction between software (like games and such) and media (like comics). Although I’m not happy buying software that has the potential to get DRM-bricked upon failure of the platform (years pass, the platform gets acquired, the servers stop responding, the app phones home, no answer, so sorry, you lose) I’ve mostly resigned myself to it. But when it comes to media, I am extremely old-school about my purchases. Basically if I can’t load it into my Calibre library (as I do with ebooks), convert it to whatever device-specific format I’m using this week, and then side-load it onto my devices, I’m not going to shell out good money for it. I realize this makes me a crusty curmudgeon. Nonetheless I have all good wishes for your venture; I’m just not excited about this specific business model of shoving media into app-wrappers that need to phone home periodically.
I’ve also got concerns about your Terms Of Service regarding non-consent content, as you were discussing on Twitter yesterday with @eroticawriter. I fundamentally understand that your interface with the banking system leaves you very constrained, but a 10-word policy from 2011 is simply way too vague. If you can’t get more certainty out of your CC processor, you’re not ready to release the platform; and if you HAVE gotten more specific terms regarding what the CC processor will tolerate, those terms ought to be revealed to potential developers.
We all know you don’t want (and the banks won’t process for) endless reams of rape manga, but I am imagining some comics producer like my friend Dr. Faustus who publishes his Tales of Gnosis College comics in old-fashioned comic-book-sized segments, where a plot-essential rape scene might theoretically show up for the first time across four panels in the middle of the seventh book. Indeed, Dr. Faustus does have several sex scenes scattered throughout his comic books, some of them featuring bondage, wrestling, complicated inducements, complicated risk environments, and other complex circumstances that might call consent into question. He avoids the squeamish-publisher problem (and many others) by releasing everything under GPL for free, but I feel like a for-profit publisher trying to distribute an ongoing series via your platform would be put in a terrible bind. Either they have to abandon your platform or they have to decide that artistically, they can’t go where the series otherwise needs to go.
Asking publishers to work in that sort of chilling-effect environment, it seems to me, requires offering them more than ten words of guidance about what is and is not allowed. This is especially so in the case of comics. What does consent even mean in the context of brightly-colored line drawings? It would be fairly easy to exclude material where the fact of rape was the deliberately-titillating fetish element; you could exclude material that advertises rape in titles or summaries, contains dialog or visual elements making the lack of consent explicit, and so forth. But you can’t do it in ten words, and it’s not fair to do it at all without also including some sort of guarantee that a publisher will get a warning or a pre-review process or an opportunity to discover where the line is without being summarily ejected from the platform.
I assume Mikandi is good to developers and publishers because that’s the impression I get about your overall approach to business; but so many #pornocalypse-ready platforms have burned so many people with irregular bannings and subsequent refusal to engage or explain! I would advise any would-be publisher of adult comics not to adopt or invest resources into building out on a new platform or marketplace unless the people running the platform make a public and contractual commitment to providing what is called “due process” in the legal realm. No arbitrary bannings, no unexplained bannings, no loss of ongoing access to the platform because of a transgression that is deemed to exist at the platform’s discretion based on policies not fully disclosed or not even fully-defined internally. It may be (and I hope!) that your internal process incorporates all of these publisher protections, but if so, your documentation doesn’t hint at them. We know you’re adult-friendly, but if the underlying reality is that you have to completely dump some long-running publisher without notice or warning because you got an unhappy phone call from a banking executive, all your good intentions are not so useful. If all of the app-wrapped comics that publisher has sold then suddenly stop working (I have no idea if this risk exists, another “reassurance opportunity” not yet seized by your documentation) it becomes a calamity for readers as well as publishers.
I apologize for turning this into another one of my #pornocalypse rants. I know from your twitter responses yesterday that you’re sensitive to at least some of these issues, and that you’re operating under billing constraints that you can’t do anything about. But I’m very passionate about advising adult-industry people not to get invested in platforms that don’t have their backs. I’m pretty sure you WANT to have the backs of the people who publish through you, but it’s unclear from the TOS whether you’ve got the necessary procedures in place, or the necessary freedom negotiated with your billers, to actually offer publishers what they need: clarity, certainty, and security from arbitrary business disruption when the limits of clarity and certainty have been reached or passed.
Finally, consent issues are at the emotional heart of a lot of BDSM fantasy literature, including in adult comic books. Ambiguity about consent is part of that, whether the ambiguity arises from the limited information available to a third-party viewer (if the opening panel is a handcuffed character fucking, we just don’t have facts to answer the consent question) or whether it arises in the notional mind of the character. (Are they undecided? Have they changed their mind since inviting the handcuffing, but not said anything? How do we know? How would we ever know? Since the mind we are interrogating doesn’t exist, what do these questions even mean?) It seems to me that there’s just a huge realm of adult “comics” literature that is just INCOMPATIBLE with your current ten-word policy on consent. It’s not because non-consensual themes are predominant, but simply because there’s no way to evaluate the work against the 10-word policy and reach any kind of sensible, predictable, or reproducible answer.
Oops! Ranting again. I’ll stop now. Please believe me when I say that I love what I can see of what y’all have been doing, and I’m delighted that your platform exists to challenge the prudishness of Apple and Google. Whatever my reservations about the current offering, I want to see Mikandi thrive and grow and prosper.
Thanks again for getting in touch!
She never wrote me back, poor woman. And what’s more, I don’t blame her. In her shoes, I would have have carefully closed the email from the internet crazyman and gingerly deleted it from my inbox.
How not to be an e-commerce business consultant? I am totally your dude for that!
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June 1st, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Here’s an interesting story that I missed in late April on the Mikandi blog:
The latest hit to companies who are actively anti-sex industry is a lawsuit against the payment processor Square. Xbiz reports that attorney William McGrane is taking them to court with the claim that the 27 business categories in Stripe’s “Prohibited Businesses” are being discriminated against and having their civil rights violated under the policy.
According to McGrane, the majority of the types of businesses listed are either too vague to be valid or are legal businesses, making it illegal forSquare to discriminate against them.
While the suit was originally filed on behalf of a bankruptcy law firm that was dropped fromSquare because “bankruptcy and debt collection” is also a prohibited category, anyone who works in a sex-related field who used Square but then was dropped may be eligible to be a part of the lawsuit.
The relevant section here is “Adult content and services,” which Square defines as “Adult entertainment oriented products or services (in any medium, including Internet, telephone or printed material).”
I like this because no matter how the suit comes out, the lawsuit itself establishes a cost for discriminating against adult businesses. If it gets expensive enough, these companies will have to narrow and tighten their policies, rather than engaging in sweeping discrimination against an entire legal business category. #Pornocalypse happens because of commercial pressures. If this suit is successful in establishing that Pornocalypse policies come with a quantum of legal risk, perhaps that will serve as some countervailing commercial pressure in the other direction.
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