I’ve been a backer on Patreon for a few years, for several RPG writers and sci-fi illustrators. One pledges a monthly payment to the creator, in return for receiving some manner of exclusive content or perks from the creator (early access to material, etc., custom illustrations, etc.)
No, TERFs and Christians tend to be unusual allies. Both oppose porn and oppose trans athletes in girl’s sports, for instance.
Patreon is an online service that lets people donate money (usually in monthly payments) to people and organizations they wish to support. This message board is an example of the kind of organization that would have a Patreon account. People who enjoy having the SDMB around would be able to pay something like a dollar a month and the SDMB would receive the money (minus Patreon’s 5% cut) to stay in business.
You often receive some minor benefit for your support. For example, I support Rich Burlew via Patreon. As a benefit, I get to see his new webcomic strips a day before he posts them online.
But, unless I missed something in one of the links, neither has anything to do with this particular ban, do they?
Right. I see a lot of good content on YouTube, and one way the content gets this good is if the provider is being paid…and it is often via direct payment through the likes of Patreon. You’ll hear YouTubers mentioning their Patreon page both in the video voiceover and in the description, which can contain links.
Here’s a twitter thread that gpes into some detail. It can be a little difficult to navigate without an account, but it’s doable.
I am conflicted with regards to sex workers. I have some views:
A. Sex is a perfectly normal human activity. If consenting adults want to exchange money for it, so be it. Sex is not dirty or sinful. Much like marijuana, legalize it and regulate it.
B. Despite A, sex work is often, or almost always coercive. Physical violence or economic coercion. Human trafficking is a real concern.
C. I think the credit card companies, which some think are the villain here, are actually doing the right thing. Regulate. Verify you aren’t putting any underage people in danger.
D. OnlyFans seems to be a way to balance A and B. Nice safe environment where a person can of their own free will choose to be a sex worker.
E. People can still be coerced into having a OnlyFans account.
True enough, as far as it goes – and yet, oddly enough, the CC companies are NOT going after the really big fish, like Facebook. It’s hard to find good sources, but what little I can find is fairly clear that Facebook has far more of a problem with sex trafficking, child porn, etc., than any of the sexually-oriented websites. About the only sexually-oriented website that might have had more of a problem was Backpage – and a lot of law enforcement actually liked having Backpage around, because it sort of naturally collected a lot of the bad actors into one convenient location.
Yes, they are. I have a couple of friends who work in that industry. Onlyfans took a very large percentage of their income, but they did, at least, pay what they said they would pay. Changing platforms is difficult.
They know Onlyfans will die due to this change, but it’s not going to benefit the legit sex work providers either.
I don’t think TERFs had anything to do with it. There are wide-ranging attitudes towards porn within radical feminism. I’m sure you could find TERFs who hate all porn, but there are also TRAs who hate all porn, because people who are Trans Rights Activists also have a wide range of views.
Nor was I. Every single tweet that contained “OnlyFans,” before I got sick of seeing retweeted content about it and muted the words, was about porn/sex work.
I just assumed it was a typo. The term I’ve heard is SWERF (sex worker ERF).
Firstly Facebook is free to the public so their business model doesn’t rely on CC companies.
Secondly, a lot of people talk a lot of shit about Facebook. Don’t get me wrong it’s a terrible service that I use only because some of my international friends are on it and it’s a way to keep up with their news. But it has become the whipping boy for everything by reason of its ubiquity, and there are people out there who are prepared to blame it for everything wrong with the world.
Based on my experience of reporting concerning Facebook, I would be very skeptical of the allegation it has a notably bad (or notably culpable) problem with sex trafficking etc. As an example, there was a common media story where I am a year or so ago, the tone of which was that Facebook was “pedophile central”, based something like 70 or 80% of all reports to police about underage porn coming from Facebook. Most of the reports didn’t bother to mention (or buried in the final para that no one reads) the fact that
- the figures were absolute not relative meaning a large site like Facebook stood out simply because of its overwhelming size, even if it was very “clean” relatively speaking; and
- Facebook was the only internet entity that had systems in place to notify and scrub such things!.
In other words, their own good efforts were being used to damn them.
The CC companies gotta do what they gotta do to protect themselves from the effect of relevant legislation. So I don’t seem them as a “villain”.
But the problem with such legislation is that it is not possible for porn sites to “verify they aren’t putting any underage people in danger”. It’s an impossible test. And probably designed that way.
Imagine if every publicly available service was culpable unless it could verify it wasn’t being used for criminal activity. Phone companies. Roads. Public transport. Photocopying companies. The sex industry is subject to punitive standards because a large part of the population would like to see it shut down anyway, and the other part are embarrassed to defend it.
Well here’s an interesting wrinkle
That isn’t what TERF means. TERF is a problem specifically inimical against trans people. Please don’t use it outside of its proper meaning. Trans woman and sex worker are not synonymous, despite stereotypes. Not all trans women are sex workers. Me, for instance. I’ve never done sex work.
Indeed… from the article:
So they may have found banks that will allow OF to stay on “Tier 5” of the Visa/MC tier list (as pointed out in the Twitter thread that @Darren_Garrison linked to)
TERFs are a special type of radical feminist, though. They tend to be stuck on older ideas of feminism, and then have expanded those ideas to the point where they hurt others. So I would expect there to be more overlap between SWERFs and TERFs that there are trans activists and anti-porn activists.
This also aligns with my experience. On Reddit, the TERFs have a subreddit called /r/GenderCritical. And it is posters who post there who I have seen try to argue that all pornography is coercive. The way Reddit is set up, if your idea isn’t popular with at least half of the people involved, it will wind up downvoted (with a negative score). But these comments were heavily upvoted (thus a high positive score). Sure, not all of them agreed, but that does suggest the overlap I mentioned.
I also find it really weird that we keep referring to this as “sex work,” BTW. To me, that term implies something more than videoing yourself in sexual situations or having sex on camera. That’s just porn. It’s not as if OnlyFans was being used to facilitate prostitution, AFAIK.
About two years ago YouTube made some changes in the way they calculate the providers’ payouts and most of the prolific ones took a big hit. There were a log of complaints at the time and then all of the Patreon mentions started coming up.
Yeah, I almost posted something similar yesterday, but got distracted with some IRL stuff and didn’t get back to it. TERF doesn’t inherently mean anti-porn, but the overlap in that Venn diagram is pretty damn close to a circle.
I think sex work is a larger categorization that can include prostitution, porn, bdsm services, etc.
Sure, porn is a type of sex work. It just seems odd to me to use that word when we’re only talking about porn and not the others.
Perhaps the goal is to point out that they’re all in the same class, and thus the other stuff shouldn’t be illegal, either.