The entire area of what is known as “sex work” is an area where societies get into all sorts of conflicts and debates.
This is not new. Sex is still seen as a taboo subject by many people in many societies. The reality that taboos tend to contribute little more than ignorance and bad decisions is often overlooked. But since sex is an essential activity, simply for the continuation of the species, it cannot really be ignored, despite what some people would like to have happen.
There is a reason why prostitution has been known as “the oldest profession” for centuries. But, today, in the multimedia age, the term “sex work” appears to have become (in many people’s minds) an area of far greater current extent. The rise of magazines, video, sex self-help publications, sex toys and devices, and online platforms for people to sell titillation and arousal for a fee has blurred the boundaries of “sex work” over the past few decades to the point that, like beauty, the definition of “sex worker” is now almost entirely in the eye of the beholder. Just like the famous quote about how to define obscenity (“I’ll know it when I see it”).
Whenever groups of people in society come across a belief or practice that is outside the mainstream and which pushes boundaries, censoriousness becomes a feature of reactions. The idea that prostitution will disappear if it is made illegal and if law enforcement “cracks down” on it has been an article of faith among religious and censorious electorates for hundreds of years. The fact that prostitution still exists should be enough proof that the idea of legislating and enforcing it out of existence is utterly, discreditably stupid. The situation is analogous to the War On Drugs, which is also an expensive failure.
However, no politician or authority figure ever paid an electoral penalty for moral grandstanding (unless their sniveling hypocrisy becomes too much to tolerate), and “protect the children” has an emotional resonance that makes it THE go-to trope for any elected representative looking to increase their popularity with their electorate. So until politicians actually get ridiculed and pay an electoral penalty for proposing ridiculous, unworkable and useless legislation, the current tendency of “OMG is that happening, there oughta be a law against it” will continue.
Although a minority of people operating in the erotic and sexual space are doing it for fun and for free (examples like Literotica are here to stay), many people operating in the space are doing it, to varying degrees, to make money. I suspect (although I have no evidence to support or deny this hypothesis) that the Covid-19 pandemic may have increased the numbers of people trying to make money in the space. Anecdotally, I know of at least 2 women who turned to being escorts after they lost reasonably well-paid permanent jobs in the last 3 years. Needs must, as the old saying goes.
The industries are, of course, pyramids of the classical kind, with a few people at the very top making a lot of money (albeit sometimes for short periods of time), and a lot of people down the bottom making hardly any money at all.
Laws against prostitution, misguided and ineffective though they are, are at least formally codified attempts by societies to signal disapproval of the activity. What is now becoming more dangerous are attempts by quasi-monopolies operating in the IT space to engage in their own form of censorious behavior.
We have a sex and erotica industry that is now dominated by a few large platforms (Pornhub and its offshoots, Amazon, Facebook to name but two) that largely control and influence publishing and sales of many different objects and types of services. They are the 750 pound gorillas in the room, quasi-monopolies that for the time being, seem to be beyond the reach of most governments and trading blocs.
We also have a handful of payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal) that are quasi-monopolies the payment processing space. They act as faucets for money to the publishing platforms. If they turn off a faucet, the amount of money reaching a publishing platform can plunge and almost dry up.
Major payment processing organizations are now making arbitrary decisions about which business entities they will engage with, and which business entities are unacceptable.
It is important to understand that these decisions are being made by non-government entities, which means that they do not have to take into account any intangible factors such as the “public interest”, or other legal factors that might come into play in the USA such as the First Amendment. They can be as arbitrary and capricious as they like.
The result of this freedom is that there is currently a tendency of payment processors to cut off payment processing for entities who they regard as engaging in reprehensible activities, or to threaten to cut off payment processing unless the business entity makes a decision that they demand. Visa threatened to terminate payment processing services to Pornhub and its subsidiary sites a week or so ago, after concerns began to be raised that unverified videos on the platform showed illegal activities. It is not clear to me whether the concerns were even backed up with evidence, but Visa threatened to pull its services, as a result of which Pornhub removed all unverified videos.
Now, this may not seem like that big of a deal to many. However, there are people making money off those unverified videos, so the decision removed a revenue stream from a lot of people.
Amazon also engages in capricious and arbitrary decisions with respect to erotic writing, sometimes removing books and ebooks from its platform. In online publishing, Amazon is the 3500 pound elephant in the room.
Like all social media platforms, Amazon claims to have standards. (ASIDE – It would be refreshing if a platform actually led with “we have no standards”, but that would be a bridge too far for the lawyers.)
When books or publications violate Amazon’s standards, they remove them. However, it is clear from reading stories about some authors’ problems with published erotic books that the process is dysfunctional and defective. Amazon is telling authors that a given book violated its standards, but in many cases they will not explain how or why the book violated standards.
This is not fair or reasonable. It leaves authors in the dark about the details of what is acceptable, meaning that they are unable to do one of two things (a) decide if Amazon is an appropriate platform for publishing their books (b) if it is an appropriate platform, they can ensure that they follow the rules, because the rules are clearly defined and consistently enforced.
I now read that Instagram is threatening to remove accounts that look like they are promoting sex-themed businesses. And PasteBin is threatening to remove NSFW content (which, in practice, could mean almost anything, since there is no generally accepted definition of “NSFW”, not surprisingly, since that probably varies from employer to employer).
This is not a recent development. Well over 18 months ago, Tumblr decided to stop carrying adult content on the platform. This was kind of awkward, since most of Tumblr’s traffic at the time comprised people viewing adult content. Unsurprisingly, banning and removing adult content blew a massive hole in the bottom of Tumblr’s business model. Not long afterwards, Verizon offloaded Tumblr, and the general consensus is that the buyer paid very little for the assets.
On one level, I have no problem with corporations making these kinds of decisions. They might determine, for example, that they will make more money from pandering to evangelical Christians than they will from processing payments for Pornhub. In which case, they are free to refuse to process for Pornhub. Their business, their decision. It will probably reduce their overall marketplace significantly, of course, which is not a normal business practice. Corporations always like a larger target marketplace. But if they want to do that, it’s their call. If it nukes their business model, like it did with Tumblr, that is on them.
The problem with these kinds of decisions for paid contributors, authors and other participants is that since they are arbitrary and capricious by definition, they are often inconsistent and wide-ranging. When an established author such as Gigi Engle is in danger of having her Instagram account removed, and is advertising for other work because her income has been decimated this year, you know there is an issue even for people who would be regarded as more serious or substantial.
This long arm of censoriousness could keep extending. Dr. Jennifer Gunter wrote the excellent Vagina Bible a couple of years back (translated into dozens of languages), but that book deals (albeit tangentially) with sexual matters, so I could imagine a censorious group of people becoming fired up about the book and trying to get it banned, or pressuring payment processors to not process payments for its sales.
We are in danger of moving into a new book censorship era, not via book burnings (except for the odd item of ostentatious public posturing) but by ebooks not being published or carried on major platforms.
If major IT platforms implement seriously inconsistent and arbitrary rules in an attempt to avoid being ultimately regulated by government, they may well be disappointed by the results. Governments will probably try to regulate them anyway, and then we will be faced with the distinct possibility that, while there may be laws protecting free speech, those laws have limited real-world meaning if major IT platforms refuse to carry artifacts containing speech that they (or, worse still, the government) determine to be dangerous.
In the meantime, the landscape for artists, writers, performers and other people involved in any activity that somebody might claim is “sex-themed” will continue to become steadily more hostile, dangerous and, ultimately, uneconomic. Ultimately new, viewpoint-agnostic businesses may appear to fill the niche, but in the short term things will get worse.