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This month, Wall Street Journal contributor Abigail Shrier tweeted, “‘You’re not entitled your book contract,’ can quickly become… ‘Visa doesn’t let you use its cards.’” Shrier was referring to publisher Simon & Schuster canceling Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s book deal, prompting conservative howls about their banishment from private businesses. But one group of Americans already deals with Visa, Mastercard, and other financial institutions denying them access—and it’s not conservatives, it’s porn stars.
For at least three decades, banks, credit-card companies, and fintech conglomerates have repeatedly blocked adult performers and directors from accessing their services. Chase and other banks have closed the checking accounts of legal porn businesses. PayPal has barred porn stars from receiving payments from customers. Consumers may believe these rules don’t impact their lives, but credit card giants dictate every piece of porn you watch, and you don’t even know it.
When pornographers sell their work online, they must follow credit card companies’ arbitrary rules, which ban multiple types of legal pornography. Take fisting videos. Federal law allows pornographers to sell fisting videos, but financial giants will only process the payments if the thumb stays out of the asshole. Dozens of similar rules exist.
Theoretically, the First Amendment allows me and other porn stars to film any type of legal porn, but if Visa and Mastercard refuse to process payments for our videos, how can we sell our content in the digital marketplace? Let’s be real: When was the last time anyone, besides a truck driver, paid for porn with cash at a brick-and-mortar retail outlet? It was a long, long time ago.
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Credit card companies’ power over porn has only increased. Today, consumers buy porn from production studios’ websites or subscription platforms like OnlyFans. Most companies process customers’ credit card payments via processors like CCBill and Probill, which cater to adult companies. Still, all consumers give CCBill and Probill their Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card information. Nielsen found that 80.2 percent of credit cards were Visa or Mastercard in 2019. According to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, these companies operate as a duopoly. Everyone from Tucker Carlson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called out the credit card companies’ hold over American consumers.
Nobody knows this better than adult performers and directors. According to two adult content creators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, the credit card companies ban everything from already-illegal content, such as footage of rape, to legal videos featuring fake blood. Marvel Cinematic Universe films can feature loads of staged gore, but the mere glimpse of red corn syrup in a porno can prompt a payment-service provider to stop processing payments.
Financial companies’ decrees often waiver into kink-shaming and homophobia. An adult performer, who goes by Filthy Femdom, says that her pay processor flags any content featuring people dressed as animals, a.k.a. Furries. Financial companies also list “twink” on their list of “concerned words” that raise a red flag. Twink refers to a tall, skinny, young gay male, typically ages 18 to 25. They’re the gay world’s equivalent of a lean, blonde girl with big tits, yet credit card companies treat twinks as if they’re illicit. Twinks are consenting adult men. Credit card companies should treat them as such.
Chase's New York headquarters in New York City.
Legendary porn director John Paul the Pope, a.k.a. JP, has seen his fair share of financial titans’ censorship. JP rose to porn royalty as a director at San Francisco-based Kink.com, where he built his reputation creating landmark bondage films. His craft brought him into direct conflict with multiple censors. In fact, until the mid-aughts, financial institutions refused to process payment for bondage films that featured heterosexual sex.
Credit card companies’ orders would rob female performers of their consent and sexual agency. When a girl would say, “I want it rough,” JP would have to say, “I can’t.” In the mid-2000s, JP recalls a girl asking him to choke her on camera. He agreed; she walked away injury-free. He tried to sell the video, but he says, “[A credit card company] popped up and said, ‘You BDSM guys especially, no more choking.’”
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Bondage, of course, is a nuanced sexual practice—practitioners require training to avoid injuries—but credit card companies have gone so far as to ban footage of natural forms of day-to-day existence. Take piss play. JP says, “We had a site, Pissing.com, and [credit card companies] were like, ‘No.’ They shut it down. There’s nothing wrong with pissing. Pissing is part of your body.”
PayPal can enforce even worse rules than credit card providers. A few years ago, performer Carmen Valentina says a fan tipped on PayPal as a gift. “He sent $20 just because,” she says. “I didn’t ask for it nor wanted it. He wrote in the notes, ‘Thanks for helping me masturbate.’ They didn’t shut down his account, but they shut down my account.” She’s not alone. PayPal closed my account, and I fought with them for months to receive the thousands of dollars they held hostage. My call on sex worker Twitter for people’s PayPal nightmares received multiple responses.
“[They shut down my PayPal] because my account was linked to activity they didn’t support, a.k.a. sex work,” says Saya Song.
“PayPal froze my account with close to $4,000 in it because they said the charges were suspicious, and it ‘could’ be adult related,” says an employee of DDBD Studios. “I also had a few banks deny my account because they said my business was a sexually-oriented business.”
In 2016, dozens of porn stars reported Chase bank shuttering their accounts. Porn star Alix Lynx learned this the hard way. During one of California’s notorious fires, she fled Los Angeles with her brother. She stopped to buy gas. She inserted her card into the machine, then received a message on the screen: “Card declined.” “What the fuck,” Lynx recalls thinking. She drove to what she called “a random-ass gas station,” inserted her card, and received the same message. Out of gas and escaping a natural disaster, she opened her phone and saw an email that said Chase had closed her account because of the nature of her transactions. In desperate need of money for gas, she drove to the nearest Chase and emptied her account. She walked out with bags of cash.
“Fuck Chase,” Lynx says. “I concluded they shut down my account because of my job. It was discrimination.” (J.P. Morgan Chase declined to comment for this story; Probill, CCBill, Visa, and Mastercard did not respond to requests for comment.)
Lynx has found banking sanctuary at another household name, but some performers have found that their porn history follows them like a bad credit score. Numerous adult performers told me banks rejected their bank account and loan applications because of their past jobs. “[When you were in school], they used to threaten [you with] a permanent record,” Paul says. “It’s like that now.” Even worse, if a credit card company declines to process an adult performer or studios’ sales, they could be out of work forever.
Pornographers have always battled censorship, but the market was different. In May 1985, Reagan chose Attorney General Edwin Meese to investigate the porn industry. As Screw magazine founder Al Goldstein details in his memoir, the commission came at the worst time for porn. Feminists had bought into “the offer of the mainstream right-wing” and were collaborating with Republicans, like Father Bruce Ritter, to create censorship that Goldstein called an “American nightmare.”
The nightmare went differently than it would have today. Ashley West, a consultant on HBO’s The Deuce, has detailed how the Meese Commission sparked porn boycotts. After Meese published his findings, 7-Eleven stopped selling Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, and more. In response, Hugh Hefner launched a competition to find the sexiest 7-Eleven employee. The bunny could respond with a tongue-in-cheek stunt because they could still sell their mags in other stores. Thousands of adult stores flourished around the country. These proprietors allowed Playboy to enter a second golden age in the ‘90s.
Today’s pornographers can’t rely on the adult stores around the corner. We rely on two credit card companies.
History, of course, is long. As Goldstein details in his memoir, all of his enemies met a hypocritical, shameful end. Meese resigned over corruption charges. Authorities accused Father Bruce Ritter of embezzling charity funds to pay for prostitutes and molesting homeless children. If you censor the adult industry and participate in censorship, you will get your karma.
And if you don’t defend porn stars when credit card companies come after us, you could be next. Just ask all the de-platformed people who didn’t care when Instagram hung us adult performers out to dry.
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