(Content warning: This is an anxiety driven vent post. I talk a bit about politics and payment processing. Not for the faint of heart).
Hey Yiffit and other instance peeps, currently going through a rough spot mental health wise and could use some sympathetic thoughts. Or maybe even a bap on the snout with a newspaper because I’m worrying over nothing.
For context, due to events I shan’t go into, I’ve been feeling quite bad anxiety. And my anxiety takes the form of latching onto things and just not letting go… Also, due to my neurotype and upbringing, I have difficulty breaking “rules”, even if everyone else is doing it. I also live so much online and need to touch grass, I know.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, this has unfortunately latched onto my enjoyment of adult content. And that is a rich fertile land of things to be worried and angry about.
I live in what I’d describe as a country with an “Americanised European” culture, which I’d assume would be cool with most forms of sexual expression. But not really; BDSM is technically illegal (by way of a law that was only really used decades ago to prosecute gay people) and they banned depictions of the female orgasm until 2019. You also need to provide strict proof of age to look at porn on mobile internet.
They also passed a law recently requiring websites hosting adult content to perform strict age verification. People I trust say that this law likely won’t actually result in anything, but it’s a worry and these laws have been cropping up in many places…
Google requires a credit card to use adult stuff, Reddit is threatening to do it, and I don’t see Discord lasting long once news breaks about the “teenage dating servers” stuff. I can see this sort of thing being normalised, and sites that don’t do it getting shut down one way or another…
I also made the regrettable decision of looking up payment processors which… I don’t recommend doing. There’s so much bullshit there and they have control over so much stuff, especially niche fetish and bdsm stuff.
And commissioners and porn sites seem to both use Paypal and/or Strype in such a flagrant disregard for their terms of use that either they have a special agreement or there’s an unspoken rule that they allow this sort of thing unless you draw attention to yourself in a negative way.
I really hate that and think it’s fucked up. If you allow nsfw stuff, put it in your terms of service.
I sometimes get these “positive intrusive thoughts” of hopes and optimism. I have a habit of pushing them away, but… Well, I want to be optimistic and think that attitudes are warming up to this stuff.
Maybe subscribing to onlyfans and having an ad twitter/masto/bsky is becoming normalised. Maybe all of this stuff is just fascist people fighting hard to get control of the narrative they are losing. Maybe it’s a classic case of the lawmakers being very out of touch with culture.
It seems to me that most major lgbt-friendly fediverse instances are also nsfw-friendly, which is nice. And Subscribestar seems to be promising.
Anyway, sorry for my rambling thoughts. Just wanted to get stuff off my chest. Sorry if it reads rambly.
Without knowing the events surrounding your anxiety, I can’t really help you there.
I have a very privacy focused view online and would likely use VPNs or other methods to circumvent technical limitations. As for the payment processors, yea they have a history of being hostile to adult topics I think onlyfans was big enough to have negotiating power. Fetlife had to stop accepting credit cards (they might accept them again now) due to processor requirements that would have required them to remove many fetishes. At least with distributed platforms (mastodon, lemmy, matrix…) you don’t have to ever worry about identifying yourself, except maybe to the local admin.
I don’t know what the current general view towards sex is, but then again I watch mostly sex positive spaces where most people do have an AD or just post everything on main. Like everything sexual expression comes in waves. In the mid 1900 hollywood was fundamental in their enforcement of “decency”. It has been a fight for hundreds of years and no signs of it stopping.
Edit: Forgot to mention patreon, they just kicked another kink off their platform.
The more I read about this payment stuff, the more upsetting it is, ugh. I know it’s partly due to liability concerns rather than necessarily puritan stuff, but still.
It really sucks that most adult stuff skirts under the gaze of all powerful companies that control people’s livelihoods.
Maybe in future someone will see the gap in the market for a kink friendly payment processor or bank and make one. But that seems like wishful thinking.
I don’t know how much is puritan vs how much is liability. you always have to think about the brand image and although sex sells, we don’t want our brand associated with it. Crypto was supposed to solve some of the payment stuff, but its just confusing, full of scams, and full or investors turning it into a commodity rather than a currency. There is still cash, and bank transfers, but that only goes so far. I’d be happy to see a more open credit network, but I don’t really think there is a big enough market for someone to try and fill that niche.