4. Pornotopia Bound

When Tumblr Became Straight

On December 17, 2018, the social media site Tumblr banned “adult content” from its platform. For many years, Tumblr had been a safe haven for purveyors of alternative, feminist, and LGBTQIA+ porn, most commonly referred to collectively as “alt-porn.” It also offered sex-positive and body-positive blogs and several curated archives of sexual expression not readily available elsewhere on the web. The changes worked to eradicate this safe space and renew a long-standing effort to cleanse the platform and better monetize it. Tumblr had been purchased by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion dollars with the promise that Yahoo would not “screw it up” by altering the platform.1 Despite this pledge, shortly thereafter Yahoo moved to shadow-ban adult content on the site, with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer describing adult Tumblrs as not being “brand safe.”2 This was despite Tumblr supporting a robust alt-porn community, with its own analysts at the time reporting that less than 1 percent of its adult blogs were spam-based mainstream heteroporn advertisements.3 Despite this, Yahoo exiled its adult blogs to what Violet Blue has referred to as a “non-searchable ghetto,” de-indexing them from both internal and external searches and making an estimated 12.5 million adult Tumblrs unfindable. At the same time, Tumblr rolled out its app for iPhone, which led to even more intense efforts to combat pornography on the platform, banning the hashtags #gay, #lesbian, and #bisexual from the app because it associated these terms with searches for pornography.4 As we’ve seen, this heteronormative overblocking that so sexualizes people’s existences that they can be considered pornographic is nothing new. After severe backlash from its user community, Yahoo announced that it would roll back these policies. By many accounts, Yahoo did not understand Tumblr or its users and ended up leaving the platform to its own devices after the failed attempt to cleanse it.5

This changed when Verizon acquired Yahoo for $4.48 billion in the summer of 2017 and began attempts to better monetize its holdings.6 From the beginning, it was expected that Verizon would again look to crack down on sexual content on the platform. As Katrin Tiidenberg, a professor at Tallinn University in Estonia who studies adult content on Tumblr told Quartz, Tumblr’s new owners understood the intermittent adult content as making it more difficult to sell ad space to potential advertisers.7 This is despite the fact that adult content constitutes over 20 percent of all the content clicked on by Tumblr’s desktop users, demonstrating the deep entanglement of the platform with pornography.8 Within months of its purchase by Verizon, Tumblr rolled out a new “Safe Mode” on the platform so that users could browse content on the site without running into pornography. However, it appears that this did not suffice. In November of 2018, the company got the chance to further ramp up its censorship efforts when Tumblr’s app was removed from the Apple App Store after child pornography was found on the platform.9 As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, Apple maintains a strict anti-pornography and more generally anti-sex moral stance and polices its App Store based on those morals. Apple forces companies like Tumblr that want access to iPhone users to regulate their platforms in accordance with Apple’s biases. As a recently purchased company looking to better monetize its platform, Tumblr had the excuse to ramp up content moderation on its platform and ban all adult content whatsoever, though, oddly, far-right extremist content continued to proliferate unchecked on the platform.10

Tumblr’s new definition of adult content primarily included “photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.”11 The company made exceptions for images of breastfeeding, people giving birth, and “health-related situations” like mastectomy and gender confirmation surgery, as well as for written content, nudity as political speech, and nudity in art. Tumblr acknowledged that its content moderation system was being implemented on the fly and that there would certainly be mistakes as it worked to develop automated features to cut down on the human review labor necessary to maintain its platform.12 Its computer vision-based automated content moderation system led to a comedy of errors in its debut, likely due to the short time frame in which it was implemented. The system flagged user drawings of dragons, images of crocheted candles, of tights, a vase, and of NHL-player Alex Ovechkin sleeping with the Stanley Cup trophy, among others.13 A number of art and anatomy Tumblrs had a large portion of their posts censored on the site.14 Even a post about LGBTQIA+ content getting censored on Tumblr that was posted to the platform got flagged for violating its new adult content policies.15 As we’ve seen, overblocking is a frequent result of any attempt to filter or moderate digital content and one that inordinately impacts LGBTQIA+ communities in its failure to distinguish the context of sexual speech and nudity, as well as its hypersexualization of female-presenting bodies. And similarly, this overblocking can have disastrous consequences, as having too many pieces of flagged content on your Tumblr will de-index it from Google Search and thus hurt your ability to monetize your digital content.16

Tumblr presents a unique case, however, because of its long history of being used as a queer-friendly safe space that incorporated sexuality and pornography into its open LGBTQIA+ discourse. Alexander Cho, a digital media anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, has described Tumblr as a “queer ecosystem” in which LGBTQIA+ users felt free from having to articulate their identities in relation to heterosexual norms and, because Tumblr is such an image-based platform, of course, these communities flirted with edgy and sexual images.17 He further points out that because Tumblr offers pseudonymous accounts and reblogging features, it avoids the “default publicness” of social media like Facebook that makes LGBTQIA+ youth fear being outed. Stephanie Duguay, professor of communication at Concordia University, noted that these communities on Tumblr “share GIFs and videos and content around queer celebrities, queer characters, and fanfiction. Sometimes nudity and adult content is in this. . . . It’s a general part of people’s self-discovery, especially when you’re a young person and you’re determining things about yourself and your sexual identity.”18 Duguay notes that it is important for these youths to see representations of queer identities in the context of relationships, embraces, kisses, and sex so that they can imagine these scenarios as possibilities in their future, a process that heterosexual people are privileged to take advantage of in most popular media. By fragmenting these communities, young people will have a more difficult time finding these materials and experiencing content that represents their identities and everyday lives. In the wake of these changes, a number of LGBTQIA+ Tumblr users have given testimony to the role that the platform played in shaping their sexual identities as they used the site to discover and imagine new possibilities for their futures. Many of them expressed their worries about a future in which LGBTQIA+ youth don’t have access to these communities and this content.19

Internet studies researchers Tim Highfield and Stefanie Duguay have shown that by sharing edgy and explicit looping GIFs, LGBTQIA+ users are able to produce a sense of irreverence and play that builds communities and signals to people that they are in a safe space for sexual expression.20 In interviews with queer women, Duguay has found that this visibility of queer sexuality may also dissuade homophobic harassment and lead to less discrimination on the platform.21 For instance, trans Tumblr users engage in self-representation on the platform through sophisticated hashtagging practices that make their community dialogue visible to one another on the platform, often including sexual expression that challenges cisgender norms.22 A lot of LGBTQIA+ history was also archived and catalogued on the site and has now been rendered invisible. For example, the anonymously authored Tumblr Bijou World curated photos of vintage gay porn, old magazine covers, and newspaper clippings to capture the history of LGBTQIA+ erotica and culture.23 These losses may be irreparable to the community, as a number of artists have noted that not only were their images flagged, but their accounts were permanently banned, leading to them losing entire archives of their work that they had not backed up elsewhere because they trusted the long-standing reputation of Tumblr as a safe space for sexual expression.24 Perhaps most importantly, however, this entails a forfeiture of the space for digital pornography to mainstream heteroporn conglomerates.25

For many years, Tumblr was the perfect solution for people who found “tube sites” like Pornhub or XHampster to be too flooded with misogynistic, mainstream heteroporn and who could not reliably find alt-porn through Google Search. As Ashley Vex, an adult entertainer and curator of a DIY porn Tumblr, noted in her eulogy for Tumblr,

Sex wasn’t this separate, shameful thing. . . . We shared it, discussed it, debated it and curated it. Porn on Tumblr wasn’t treated as disposable, something just to be immediately purged from your browser history, but an aesthetic, artistic component of your page and your life, alongside your complementary colours of sunsets and song lyrics and personal posts. It was out in the open. It allowed you to become a collector of your own desires, displaying them and celebrating them proudly, rather than having them spoon fed by a tube site algorithm. [ . . . ] It allowed for sex in a space that didn’t feel like it was dominated by male desire. [ . . . ] It helped young, queer people find their communities and sexualities represented, to take control and represent them themselves. [ . . . ] It allowed people with disabilities, young parents, people of colour, trans and gender non conforming folk (identities that make up a large majority of the community of sex workers and who are too often ostracised by a traditional, capitalist workplace) to make rent. [ . . . ] If we push our depictions of sexuality into the shadows, we allow them to continue be defined and co-opted by the status quo.26

Vex’s article is worth quoting at length because this sentiment abounds in nearly all of the reporting on the changes to Tumblr. For instance, WIRED conducted interviews with more than thirty sex workers, pornographers, and porn viewers who collectively lamented the loss of the site and the unique safe space that it curated for exploring sexuality. The magazine noted that these interviewees “described the site as notably more empowering and friendly than more traditional venues for explicit content.”27 Liara Roux, a sex worker and online political organizer, told the magazine that “the options for finding adult content online are diminishing, and consolidating with big companies,” making it more difficult for LGBTQIA+ communities to find a space for their online existences.28 With Tumblr cleansed of pornography, tube sites and Google are the foremost remaining options for finding digital pornography, and thus the bulk of this chapter will be dedicated to examining them. The first section looks at the political economy of tube sites and the heteronormative biases they reinforce, with an added focus on the recent moves in the United Kingdom to make all porn sites use the services of MindGeek, which maintains a monopoly on tube sites, to age verify all of their visitors. The second section looks at Google’s move in 2012 to an always-on version of SafeSearch that only allows pornography to appear when users both turn SafeSearch off and use specific pornographic keywords in their search query. It goes on to show how the current political economy of “independent” porn sites is dominated by mainstream heteroporn whose influence sets genre standards that permeate even amateur porn and alt-porn. Lastly, this chapter will examine the financial impact that FOSTA-SESTA has had on sex workers and adult entertainers, and it will demonstrate how it has put pressure predominantly on low-budget and amateur pornographers, which results in an inordinate impact on LGBTQIA+ content.

Tube Sites and the Vicious Circle of Heteronormativity

In 2013, David Cameron centered his election campaign on censoring pornography, which he argued was “corroding childhood” and doing irreparable harm to the minds of an entire generation of British children.29 In 2014, the United Kingdom advanced David Cameron’s anti-pornography crusade by amending the 2003 Communications Act. The new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that online pornography now adhere to the same guidelines laid out for traditional video and DVD pornography by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). The act effectively bans pornography from containing acts of spanking, caning, aggressive whipping, penetration by any object “associated with violence,” physical or verbal abuse even if consensual, urolagnia or “water sports,” role-playing as nonadults, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, strangulation, facesitting, and fisting, noting that these final three are potentially life-threatening.30 The BBFC argues that these restrictions are a “tried and tested” method for protecting children, though adult performers argue that they are more aimed at regulating women’s pleasure with the odd inclusion of things like female ejaculation and facesitting.31

This sweeping set of regulations was just the prelude to the introduction of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which was introduced the next year and meant to require all online distributors of pornography to age verify every visitor to their website. The BBFC was to be in charge of enforcing the new regulations and holding sites accountable for any minors who viewed their content, with consequences including withdrawing advertising services, pressuring payment service providers to deny service to the websites, and requiring ISPs and mobile network operators to block access to these websites writ large.32 Independent adult content producers feared the regulation would turn all erotic film in the United Kingdom into “boring, unrealistic male fantasy.”33 This is largely because many independent pornographers would not have been able to afford to age verify every visitor to their site. As feminist pornographer Pandora Blake, who runs the site Dreams of Spanking, noted in an interview, “There’s no way sites like mine could afford to verify every visitor. We’ll all go under.”34

The United Kingdom’s new age verification requirements were originally set to take effect in April 2018 but were pushed back twice with no clear date of implementation as the United Kingdom attempts to pass the laws through Brussels at the same time as it is managing Brexit.35 As of 2019, Nicky Morgan, the fifth culture secretary, noted that the government no longer intended to enforce this component of the law but stated that its objectives might still be obtained by the new regulator set forth by similar legislation.36 A large reason why the United Kingdom’s porn blocker was repeatedly delayed before being canceled was the practical problem of implementing age verification. The BBFC intended to create a certification scheme for age verification systems that websites could’ve used but was never planning to create a nationwide scheme free of charge. Instead, it intended to leave this to the free market, with each site being responsible for implementing its own age verification scheme and, in most cases, doing so by purchasing schemes from third-party vendors that the BBFC had certified.37 The frontrunner that stood to gain a near monopoly on the age verification market in the United Kingdom was the AgeID system being developed by MindGeek.

While sizable portions of the porn-blocking legislation appear to be defeated for the moment—thanks in part to organizers who demonstrated the collateral damage that it would have in terms of overblocking nonpornographic materials like charities, schools, and social support websites38—this incident helps to demonstrate the international reach, lobbying power, and adaptability when faced with government regulation of the most highly capitalized segments of the mainstream heteroporn industry. If you remember from the introduction, MindGeek owns Pornhub, as well as many of the other most popular tube sites on the web, like RedTube, YouPorn, GayTube, Xtube, ExtremeTube, SpankWire, and Tube8. MindGeek’s platform boasts 115 million daily hits and consumes more bandwidth than Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon.39 The average visitor to these tube sites spends at least ten minutes on them.40 The frequency and duration of the visits have allowed MindGeek to create its own highly profitable advertising network, TrafficJunky, to serve targeted ads to the people consuming its free pornographic content. With its soaring profits, MindGeek has bought up several top pornography studios at discounted rates, including Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos, MyDirtyHobby, Reality Kings, and Twistys.41 MindGeek and its subsidiaries also spend lavishly on advertising in Adult Video News and other industry news outlets, in trade publications, and at events, allowing them to effectively shape the discourse within the pornography industry.42 As Shira Tarrant, professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Cal State Long Beach and author of The Pornography Industry, told the Atlantic, MindGeek’s business model “features vertical integration and horizontal integration, so they’re really monopolizing the industry.”43

In an interview with the Daily Dot, Adult Empire director of business development Colin Allerton noted that “every major studio and star is now partnered with MindGeek or has worked for a studio that MindGeek purchased.”44 In fact, studios and stars are so entangled with MindGeek that they are afraid to speak out about the company’s practices for fear of being blacklisted.45 One of these practices is hosting pirated pornography across their tube sites and requiring owners of that content to file individual Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests for each pirated video on each tube site, an onerous burden and one that many smaller and independent studios don’t have the financial resources to keep up with. As adult film star Siri noted, the tube sites “force copyright holders to jump through hoops to get our content removed.”46 This rampant pirating of content is occurring within an economy in which production, subscriptions to, and sales of pornography are all trending downward. As David Auerbach has explained, “The result has been a vampiric ecosystem: MindGeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek, which makes money off of the tube ads that does not go to anyone involved in the production side.”47

MindGeek, originally known as “Manwin,” has served to reinforce patriarchy and heteronormativity for twenty-first-century pornography. We can see how this plays out if we look to three communities impacted by this shift toward tube sites in the political economy of pornography: professional adult entertainers, amateur adult entertainers, and consumers. In terms of professional adult entertainers, it has reinstated the traditional subjugation of female porn stars in a political economy in which they had been making strides toward equality as more women opened and ran pornography studios and websites. MindGeek has essentially instituted a “freemium” economic model in which adult entertainers make pornographic videos as advertisements for their other lines of business, like camming, stripping, or escorting. Adult entertainers make increasingly diminished returns off their pornographic videos, which requires them to bank on a small minority of consumers of that free content who will pay for additional services.48 This pushes adult entertainers to heighten their performances and engage in more extreme sex acts, since they are essentially advertisements for niche audiences, and may explain the trend toward increasingly exploitative and misogynistic sex acts in mainstream heteroporn. It also has radically increased the number of adult entertainers who engage in escorting to supplement their income. According to Salon, while it would have been taboo within the industry to engage in escorting at the turn of the century, it is now considered normal. One porn star told Salon, “If you look at the escort sites, pretty much every porn star is on there.”49 Thus, the economics of tube sites and its subsequent impoverishment of adult entertainers has led to an escalation of misogyny in pornography and of adult entertainers engaging in escorting, a risky endeavor given state and federal anti-prostitution laws.

The same is also true of amateur adult entertainers, who similarly use their pornographic content on tube sites as advertisements for their camming, personal websites, one-on-one Skype sessions, and similar paid features. Even more so than professionals, amateurs must make use of tube sites to advertise their other content and services if they want to generate enough income to live off of. Tube sites are dominated by mainstream heteroporn, and the titles and metadata for their content reflect this. To generate clicks, amateur models often use similar titles and language to describe their videos, and they use similar tags to apply metadata to their content, all of which produce a normative effect on the actual content that they produce.50 Similarly, a quantitative study by French researchers of tube sites Xnxx and xHamster found that while the sites do host a wide variety of material, just 5 percent of the tags (e.g., “blowjob,” “teens,” “big boobs,” “cumshot,” “anal”) used to categorize pornography cover over 90 percent of the videos on the sites.51 In broad-ranging quantitative studies, computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam have similarly found porn to be increasingly heteronormative.52 As Shira Tarrant explains, the stereotypical, often sexist and racist, keywords that most people use to find pornography end up working as a feedback mechanism that subsequently influences what porn gets made.53 Tarrant describes this as a chicken-and-egg problem, but we might better think of it as a vicious circle of heteronormativity inscribed into the political economy and algorithmic infrastructure of the internet.

Lastly, MindGeek reinforces patriarchy and heteronormativity among its consumers as well. It operates sophisticated recommendation engines that are trained on the heteronormative titles, descriptions, and metadata of mainstream heteroporn. As Tarrant explains,

In addition, MindGeek, for example, uses algorithms to create highly curated personalized sites that are based on the user’s search history. It’s a lot like Amazon, where you look for a couple of books and they say, “You might also be interested in this.” Then you’re being spoon-fed a limited range of pornography based on the keywords you use, based on your geographic location, based on their algorithms and the information that they’re processing about time of day. They’re doing a lot of data collection. Online-porn users don’t necessarily realize that their porn-use patterns are largely molded by a corporation. We talk about the construction of wants and needs in other aspects of the economy, but that applies just as well to pornography.54

Thus, tube sites do not just lock porn producers into making content that corresponds with the view of the genre embedded in their recommendation engines; they also lock users into it as well. This is an opinion shared by Pandora Blake, who argues that MindGeek homogenizes pornography in accordance with the “male gaze” and objectifies all sex, leading to “clickable, sensationalistic” porn. She notes, “It’s a power law distribution—the more something is viewed, the easier it is to find and the more views it gets, and then producers make more porn like it because they know it’s popular. There’s so much diverse, alternative material out there on the open internet, but as MindGeek’s monopoly increases I fear it will become less and less visible.”55 These mainstream tube sites thus deflate their consumers’ sexual imaginations and capacities to experience new pleasures and form new desires at the same time that they harm sex workers’ livelihoods and push them toward more dangerous and unstable sources of revenue.

It is no wonder that professional and amateur adult entertainers alongside many consumers of pornography in the United Kingdom were fearful of handing over a monopoly on age verification to MindGeek. This monopoly would have quickly put most small-scale pornographers out of business and made it even easier for MindGeek’s tube sites and affiliate networks to strengthen their monopoly. According to a Freedom of Information request, MindGeek met with the British government five times between the critical months of September 2016 and January 2017 as the act was being crafted and lobbied for the government to shut down their competitors.56 They expected to sign up twenty to twenty-five million sites in the first month alone after the act went into effect on an initially traffic-based pricing schema, but there would be nothing to prevent them from increasing the rent once they have a monopoly on an age verification market. Further, there were no protections in the act for the massive amounts of user data that MindGeek would have been able to collect as it gained insight into the pornography consumption patterns of an entire nation.57 Lastly, it should be noted that the act let search engines and social networks off the hook, classifying them as ancillary service providers and focusing instead on regulating “pornographic websites.”58 Perhaps it ought to be expected that internet platforms would have the clout to escape regulation, but it demonstrates a bias in the regulation schema toward censoring those sites without the capital to fight back.

While nothing on this scale has been seriously considered to this point in the United States, it is increasingly possible. The end of net neutrality in combination with FOSTA making ISPs potentially financially liable for facilitating vaguely defined sexual services makes it easy to imagine a world in which content filters will be applied at the level of ISPs rather than individual platforms. Violet Blue goes farther and even imagines a future in which classifications of “pornography” are broadened to include any speech that the government doesn’t like and looks to examples like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, which classify the World Health Organization’s website as “pornography” in order to censor it under national law.59 As we’ve seen in chapter 3 and will continue to see in the rest of this chapter, however, even without heteronormative content filtering at the ISP level, the United States’ increasing reliance on internet platforms and payment services creates a technological infrastructure and political economy in which mainstream heteroporn can continue to dominate not only the porn we see but also the porn we can imagine.

Google SafeSearch and the Invisibility of Alt-Porn

As we have already seen, the tube sites that now dominate online pornography consumption operate heteronormatively in a number of ways. Many critics, like Pandora Blake, compare this to an idealized version of the open internet in which all content, no matter how niche or queer, was readily available to users. These ideal versions of the web as a pornotopia largely require us to view Google Search as an unbiased gateway to that pornotopia, else the content might exist, but everyday users would have no means of ever stumbling upon it. Or at least, if this imagined pornotopia can make room for just a little bias on Google’s part, like allowing the most visited porn sites, which are by default heteroporn, to show up first in its search results, it would require a sort of pornoliteracy in which adept users might manipulate the search results to get past the wall of heteroporn and discover the feminist and queer pornography cached all across the web. In reality, both of these axioms for a pornotopia are immensely flawed.

First, while some readers—especially adult readers with a longer history of seeking and finding alt-porn online—will think that this pornoliteracy is widespread and easily obtained, I am not convinced that we should be so hopeful. It requires that internet users be able to make rather sophisticated determinations about search content, such as what content is the result of paid advertising or SEO techniques. In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission conducted a study on how advertising might be better distinguished online to help people make these sorts of determinations and found that in its default state, only 45 percent of the Americans they tested were able to correctly identify advertisements in search results and social media feeds.60 A larger private study found that nearly 60 percent of people were unable to recognize paid ads on Google in 2018.61 Similarly, the Pew Research Center found in 2019 that 59 percent of Americans reported that they understood little to nothing about what companies do with the data they collect.62 Not only does this sort of pornoliteracy require the capacity to navigate around advertisements and search engine optimized heteroporn, but it also requires the impetus to do so in the first place. It requires the capacity to imagine that porn could be other than it is, a capacity severely diminished in our current pornographic ecology. This capacity requires practice to develop, which, as we will see, means that during the normative phase in which adolescents internalize archetypes of pornography and the possibilities for their sexuality represented in that pornography, they are most often stuck with mainstream heteroporn, at least until they develop a more sophisticated online pornoliteracy.

Second, Google has never offered an unbiased gateway to any content online, and certainly not pornography. Instead, it has always privileged mainstream heteroporn, a trend that has become radically amplified since Google’s SafeSearch algorithms were changed in 2012 when SafeSearch became an always-on feature in Google Search. Turning SafeSearch off only opens up the possibility for pornography to appear in search results, but in actuality, Google will still censor pornography from search results in most instances. In actuality, SafeSearch is now only turned off by the use of pornographic keywords.63 What this means is that unless your query signals to Google that you are intending to locate pornography, it will not present you with pornography in your results. By tethering the appearance of pornography—or more broadly nude or fleshy bodies—to this limited set of keywords, Google has essentially guaranteed the continual reification of the current political economy and genre hegemony of mainstream heteroporn. Mainstream heteroporn companies currently possess a dominant position in the link topography of the web, with well-established digital presences and vast systems of interlinking subdomains and companion sites, guaranteeing high positions in any Google Search results. Since 2012, they now have an easily identified and limited set of keywords that they need to perform SEO for and the upfront capital to hire top SEO firms to perpetually maintain their position atop the search rankings. As Safiya Noble has demonstrated, the porn industry is one of the most sophisticated users of SEO, particularly the American mainstream heteroporn industry.64 What this means is that in ensuring that you only get porn when you want it, Google has additionally ensured that you will always get the same kind of porn. And that same kind of porn will be made by the same people in the same political economy and set of power relations that have been the subject of an endless series of critical porn exposés over the past few decades.

Political economic research on mainstream heteroporn has shown that the industry shows a strong capacity for constructing global networks through new dissemination technologies and adaptable business models.65 As Jennifer Johnson has shown empirically, today’s mainstream heteroporn operates something like an online platform.66 Large corporations maintain closed networks of “affiliate websites” that are often independently run. These affiliate websites offer niche content to a limited set of users, but they purchase that content from a larger distributor. They also link to and sometimes share login credentials with other affiliate sites on the network, thus reinforcing that network and circulating porn users within their own online pornography platform. These affiliate programs allow large corporations and local webmasters to work collaboratively to use minimally differentiated content to cover a maximal number of established niche audiences and thus also capture maximal web traffic and economic expenditure. As Johnson explains,

By circulating consumers inside a never-ending series of click manoeuvres and interrelated websites, constantly updated gonzo content and strategic targeting of addictive behaviour, the industry views consumers not as sexual beings with authentic desire but rather as dehumanized “traffic” to be manipulated and maximally exploited.67

Rather than offering a system in which niche content differentiates to match the evolving sexual proclivities of its audience, mainstream heteroporn circumscribes that audience and uses affiliate networks hegemonically to constrain its pornographic tastes to prescribed, revenue-generating niches. Google’s algorithms are perfectly tailored to foster the digital hegemony of mainstream heteroporn, as their ranking metrics are highly sensitive to link topologies and expensive professional web design that meets their quality standards. By further limiting pornographic results to a limited set of pornographic keywords, SafeSearch only makes it that much easier for these affiliate networks to engage in SEO and further reify their hegemony over digital porn consumption.

While it may be true that sophisticated porn consumers figure out ways to escape mainstream heteroporn’s hegemonic networks online, doing so requires the cultivation of what I have called a “pornoliteracy” above. While Kath Albury has described “porn literacies” as an ability to critique misogyny, homophobia, and racism in mainstream pornography that might be a useful addition to sex education, here we need to think of pornoliteracy as something more basic and widespread among porn users.68 At its most basic, pornoliteracy is the capacity to navigate the world of available pornography, matching pornographic representation to one’s own internal desires and imagination. There is a sexual and media literacy implicit in all porn use.69 Porn users are active agents in their consumption processes. They select, reject, interpret, and cocreate the online pornography that they engage with.70 Porn users acquire skills through viewing practice and come to view themselves almost as hobbyists with tastes and preferences, likes, and dislikes.71 More than this though, pornoliteracy includes as well everything from viewing habits to a familiarity with the topography of online pornography—where the good stuff is and how to find more. What is important for our purposes here is that pornoliteracy is almost a style of porn use, and like any style, it takes cultivation.72 As Attwood, Smith, and Barker note of one user, “porn begins as unknown and monolithic—an ‘it’—but becomes ‘kinds’ over time and with the investment of browsing.”73 It is very likely that this monolithic version of porn will be the mainstream heteroporn variety. Mainstream heteroporn’s hegemony over online porn consumption through strategies like affiliate networks ensures that people will find it first and most often. They will only come to escape it by developing their own pornoliteracy. And finally, even once more mature users learn to escape mainstream heteroporn, it has been granted the opportunity to serve a normalizing function. The research indicates that repeated viewing of certain sexual behavior does normalize that behavior and increases the viewers’ positive evaluation of that behavior over time.74 This capacity for normalization is only enhanced by the compulsive or addictive usage patterns that researchers have found in porn users.75 This addiction occurs by design, as the content, web platforms, and affiliate networks are all engineered to stimulate it. As people stay enrapt in mainstream heteroporn, its normative influence grows.

Mainstream heteroporn thus constitutes the default pornography online, and its hegemony is only reified by SafeSearch making it easier for major players in the industry to game Google’s search results for pornographic keywords. Thus, while SafeSearch does not really seem to have ever succeeded in preventing adolescents from accessing pornography online according to most studies, it is successful in heteronormatively channeling adolescent porn use.76 The case of adolescents is again important, as adolescent porn use often precedes first sexual encounters and thus has a potentially socializing role on adolescents.77 It is very difficult to accurately assess the precise stakes of this heteronormative, commodified, and sometimes misogynistic socialization that SafeSearch helps to reinforce. As a number of scholars have pointed out, research on pornography tends to be binarized into an anti-pornography perspective that focuses on negative media effects of pornography and an anti-censorship perspective that rebuffs prudery and celebrates sexuality by embracing pornography perhaps too enthusiastically.78

Many anti-pornography studies are motivated by conservative Christian morals, are often tethered to pro-censorship policy advocacy, and, even when more rigorous, often operationalize an oversimplified “media effects” theory of how people interact with pornographic texts in which texts unilaterally and homogeneously impact their readers or viewers.79 Social science research on the subject is also deeply tethered to class and racial tensions. Pornography scholar Laura Kipnis perhaps puts it best when she reminds us that “researchers aren’t busy wiring Shakespeare viewers up to electrodes measuring their penile tumescence or their galvanic skin responses to the violence or misogyny there.”80 Keeping that in mind, there are some common findings in media effects research on the negative impacts of pornography use that warrant attention, especially now that SafeSearch helps to reify the centrality of mainstream heteroporn online. Many studies suggest that mainstream heteroporn—and particularly pornography depicting violence, pain, or suffering during sexual activity—may be a risk factor for sexually aggressive behavior or sexual violence.81 There also may be connections between mainstream heteroporn use and sexual risk taking, like having unprotected sex.82 More broadly, there are also potential connections between mainstream heteroporn use and subscription to stereotypical beliefs about women, their sexual roles, and the acceptability of objectification.83 Again, while none of these studies allow us to infer causation and many may contain implicit social biases, they are worth engaging so that we can better articulate the stakes of SafeSearch’s censorship.

There have been only a handful of studies to empirically consider the potential positive effects of pornography use alongside its negative effects, even though these positive effects might outweigh the negative effects.84 For example, Nicola Döring has described the positive effects as potentially including “increased pleasure, self acceptance, inclusion of handicapped people, improved communication between sexual partners, in addition to the widening of traditional gender roles and sexual scripts.”85 Within the media effects model of social scientific research, we need more balanced data so that we can effectively assess the overall impact of pornography use. Beyond that, more knowledge on the positive effects of the use of different types of pornography would be particularly useful in advocating for specific changes to content filters like the SafeSearch algorithm that might make more diverse porn more easily accessible.

Conversely, many anti-censorship studies look to celebrate the production and consumption of pornography. In particular, they focus on feminist porn, LGBTQIA+ porn, alt-porn, or Netporn. Looking at these pornographic texts, scholars argue that the internet has made possible new forms of amateur, low-budget, and/or niche pornography that can showcase empowered female agents, alternative body types, amorphous and queer sexualities, and BDSM, fetish, and other “grotesque” forms of sex.86 These new forms of pornography challenge everything from the political economy of mainstream porn production to the heteronormativity of sexuality as presented on the screen. However, a number of scholars have pointed out that we now are left with very little critical research on mainstream heteroporn.87 Pornography scholars tend to agree that mainstream heteroporn is “racist, classist, ableist, and heterosexist” and seem willing to leave it at that.88 As Mark Jancovich has argued, there is a class tension in its decision as well, which assumes that mainstream porn is uninteresting and rote because of its popularity and mass production.89 In short, anti-censorship studies need to be less automatically pro-pornography. To understand the impact that SafeSearch is having by directing users first to mainstream heteroporn, we need more critical scholarship on mainstream heteroporn that can help situate social scientific data on pornography use within broader analyses of its cultural context, as well as alternative interpretations of pornographic texts. As Kipnis has noted, “Pornography [ . . . ] is profoundly and paradoxically social, but even more than that, it’s acutely historical.”90 Beyond this, a number of porn studies scholars have argued that we need to be more critical of more celebrated alternative pornographies also.91

As I have noted above, mainstream heteroporn operates normatively on porn users as they (in the best of cases) develop the requisite pornoliteracy to escape, first, SafeSearch and, second, the mainstream heteroporn affiliate networks. This dynamic is duplicated at the industry level, as the normativity of mainstream heteroporn also influences a large portion of alt-porn, as one might expect from porn genres that define themselves over and against mainstream heteroporn. A number of porn studies scholars have demonstrated how the genre conventions of mainstream heteroporn continue to shape the production of what is often collectively referred to as “alt-porn.”92 Here, we can understand alt-porn as an aggregation of alternative pornographies whose main similarity is their positioning as outside the mainstream. Aside from that similarity, they are incredibly heterogeneous, ranging from niche fetish pornography to LGBTQIA+ pornography to feminist pornography. The influence of mainstream heteroporn on alt-porn is only complicated by the increasing professionalization of amateur porn.93 Cramer and Home have gone so far as to call indie porn “the research and development arm of the porn industry.”94 The hegemony of mainstream heteroporn that SafeSearch helps to maintain has consequences even outside of its affiliate networks, as it constrains the possibilities for alt-porn in many ways. For example, a study of YouPorn.com has shown that amateur videos on the site follow a heteronormative “pornoscript” that focuses on dichotomized sexual and gender differences as the primary source of visual pleasure and almost always from a male subject position.95 Some, but certainly not all, alt-porn falls under the critique that Kipnis made of mainstream heteroporn: that it “creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender,” where that one gender is male.96 This is particularly true of amateur porn posted to these sites because, as Paasonen notes, “amateur porn that is shared online needs to fit into already established subcategories to be recognized as porn.”97 This is particularly problematic because amateur porn signals “realness” or “real life” and thus can further naturalize heteronormativity.98 As Shoshana Magnet argues, alt-porn’s emancipatory potential is limited by its commercialization.99

Alt-porn needs clicks and views to garner revenue. Clicks and views require high ranking by indexes and search algorithms. Achieving a high ranking in search indexes requires conforming to that search engine’s definitions of the genre.100 Their definitions of the genre are the extracted lowest common denominators across all pornography. These definitions also operate with inertia, meaning that each successive index influences the web traffic that the next index extracts its data from. SafeSearch greatly exacerbates this problem of index inertia by greatly restricting web traffic to pornographic websites that are not tailored to a limited set of largely heteronormative pornographic keywords. As Döring notes, there are few social scientific studies of how people select and process pornography at cognitive and emotional levels or how they might develop a unique style or pornoliteracy in doing so.101 Without this type of research, it will be hard to empirically assess the impact of SafeSearch on porn consumption. In addition, we need much more expansive data collection on exactly which keywords can trigger pornographic results in different Google Search algorithms at different times, places, and by different users. Without this data, it is hard to articulate exactly what norms are being perpetuated by SafeSearch’s filtration efforts. At this point though, it is safe to assume that these keywords will reflect the heteronormativity so deeply ingrained in our pornography, in SafeSearch’s schema and ontology, and on the internet writ large, as we’ve seen throughout this book.

As Susanna Paasonen argues, “Pornography is a multifaceted assemblage—a historically evolving media genre. It is a field of labor, technological innovations, monetary exchange, carnal acts and sensations, regulatory practices, verbal definitions, and interpretations.”102 She notes that this evolution has no predictable direction or trajectory, as it continually tries to connect new genre conventions, technologies, body styles, and values in such a way that it will affect users, both materially and symbolically.103 By affording mainstream heteroporn companies the capacity for ongoing digital hegemony, Google has essentially limited the possibility for pornography to evolve by limiting our ability to take random walks through and engage in serendipitous discovery of new materials in our digital pornographic milieu. It has essentially shut down what could have been a freer and more open space for explorations of human sexuality. The alternative, avant-garde, and experimental pornography that is the focus of much of porn studies may find itself continually and increasingly marginalized. If porn is where we go for a safe space not only to be affected—materially, symbolically, and sexually—but also to discover what affects us, this space has been sold for the sake of ad revenues. The outcry over unfiltered porn will always outweigh the outcry over filtered art.

FOSTA-SESTA and the New Political Economy of Sex Work

While we’ve seen the impact that FOSTA has had on nonpornographic content online in chapter 3, I would now like to turn to its impact on sex workers, particularly LGBTQIA+ sex workers. Not only is FOSTA ineffective, but its real purposes are transparent. Essential tools that sex workers used to find clients and thus protect themselves from having to solicit sex in person and to verify clients to screen out those who have abused sex workers in the past have been shuttered, including Backpage, NightShift, CityVibe, the Erotic Review, VerifyHim, HungAngels, YourDominatrix, Pounced, and Yellow Pages.104 In an article that traces her history of soliciting sex in person, using print-based personal ads in newspapers, and dealing with exploitative but safer online personal ad sites like Craigslist and Backpage, Caty Simon notes,

What we’ve been telling the media over and over again is plainly true: many of us will die, some of us have already died because of the damage SESTA’s done, and especially because of the loss of Backpage. And the victims will more often be trans workers, disabled workers, workers of color, and trafficking survivors—those of us who never had many options to begin with. We are without allies.105

This is by design in the ambiguous language of FOSTA, which conflates sex work with sex trafficking and holds companies culpable for acting as intermediaries, even if all they do is host a link to another website where a transaction may take place. As Simon notes, its most immediate victims are often doubly marginalized, as they are not only sex workers but also disproportionately LGBTQIA+, disabled, POC, and trafficking survivors. This has been confirmed repeatedly. Emily McCombs interviewed dozens of sex workers for a Huffington Post article on FOSTA and reported that many of them noted that opportunistic clients and pimps were already trying to take advantage of this window where sex workers didn’t have access to online personals and client screening resources.106 She also interviewed sex worker and adult film star Arabelle Raphael, who pointed out that “it is so far mostly free and low-cost sites that are disappearing, which she says largely affects those who can’t afford more expensive platforms or who can’t ‘class pass’—that is, adopt the markers of a higher socioeconomic class—enough to get work on them.”107 Performer Ginger Banks told Motherboard that FOSTA has made it more difficult for those working in the adult industry to speak out about abuses and misconduct in their industry, such as the wave of revelations in summer 2020 primarily focused on Ryan Madison’s abuses while shooting scenes for Porn Fidelity and Teen Fidelity—both owned by his wife’s company, Kelly Madison Media. People working in the industry are concerned that their revelations will be used by anti-porn activists to further argue for the “abolition” of pornography, and thus they may be disinclined to report abuse to protect their livelihood.108

While Ann Wagner claims that FOSTA has shut down nearly 90 percent of online sex trafficking business and ads, the Washington Post has fact-checked that claim and found it to be inaccurate. Online personals were already back to nearly 75 percent of their pre-FOSTA levels within six months of the bill’s passage.109 As McCombs notes, those with the privilege of disposable income and technoliteracy have been migrating toward encrypted communication technologies and cryptocurrencies.110 A number of services have also cropped up to help sex workers in the wake of FOSTA, like Red Umbrella Hosting, an Iceland-based, sex worker–owned and operated web hosting service and Switter, a sex worker–oriented Twitter-like platform run out of Austria. Switter’s hosting service, Cloudflare, determined it necessary to refuse service to the site after it had amassed 49,000 uses, despite Cloudflare having campaigned against FOSTA and having since described it as “a very bad law.” Switter was able to find alternative hosting; however, Cloudflare did this without notice and without ever replying to emails from Switter or providing any kind of explanation.111 Even nonprofit organizations that aim to help sex workers and sex trafficking victims have been negatively impacted by FOSTA. For example, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation notes that FOSTA caused them to censor information on their site that could assist sex workers.112 Similarly, the Sex Worker Outreach Project had to cancel the “acquisition and development of an electronic tool for sex workers to report violence, harassment and other harmful behavior.”113 To my knowledge, the digital tools that sex workers used to protect themselves have not been fully recovered in the wake of FOSTA.

FOSTA does not stop sex work or trafficking. It pushes it offline, where it is more difficult to track, and leads to more negative material ramifications for sex workers. It also inordinately impacts the already marginalized who may not be able to wait out the law or invest in new technologies and platforms to recover their lost income. They instead face the prospects of financial, mental, and physical tragedy in the interim. For instance, in 2017, researchers studied the impact that Craigslist’s erotic services section had on violence against women in the United States between its opening in 2002 and its closing in 2010. They found a 17.4 percent decrease in the female homicide rate as a causal effect of Craigslist’s erotic services section during the years it was active.114 It is difficult to establish the impact of FOSTA empirically, as such studies are rare in my experience. Further, FOSTA has led to the legitimation of discrimination based on sex, sexuality, and sexual expression, and this legitimacy is being taken advantage of by nearly every internet platform from financial service providers to content hosts to social networks. The passage of FOSTA essentially established a financial incentive for internet companies and service providers to maximize overblocking.

Sex workers’ income has long been under attack by traditional financial entities like JPMorgan Chase, Visa, and MasterCard, which have routinely denied their services not only to sex workers (thus forcing them into the dangerous position of having to conduct cash transactions) but also any small business, artist, or independent contractor whose business happens to center on sex. A number of legal porn actors, including Stoya, Teagan Presley, Dakota Skye, Layton Benton, Tieran Lee, Bonnie Rotten, and Veronica Avluv, have been denied Chase accounts or had their services terminated because they were considered to be in a “high-risk” line of work.115 More shocking yet, Chase refused to process payments for Lovability, a condom company that stresses gender equality and safe sex.116 Chase only relented and agreed to process Lovability’s payments when the refusal made headlines, and it was pointed out that Chase handles mergers and acquisitions for Trojan condoms.117 Chase similarly refused to process payments for New York Toy Collective, a company focused on giving people access to safe, high-quality, and self-affirming sex toys to help foster a sex-positive culture safe for all forms of gender expression.118 These practices are heteronormative not only in their explicitly anti-sex disposition but also more subtly in that they produce a political economy in which smaller-scale and niche-oriented sexual commerce is strangled and only large-scale industrialized corporations like Trojan can survive, which by their very scale tend to be heteronormative in orientation because of their imagined majority audience.

In December 2020, both Visa and Mastercard pulled their services from Pornhub, partially in response to a New York Times opinion column by Nicholas Kristof that argued the companies were indirectly supporting child sexual abuse images and exploitation by providing financial services to Pornhub.119 Not only is this argument specious—far more nonconsensual abusive imagery is shared on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter than on Pornhub—it also aligned with the messaging of anti-pornography crusaders, particularly the anti-Pornhub Traffickinghub campaign backed by Exodus Cry and NCOSE, which Kristof mentions explicitly. As Samantha Cole notes for Motherboard, this is yet another expansion of the demonetization of sexual speech on the internet—from more niche pornography like blood play and water sports to pornography writ large—that harms sex workers’ ability to access financial services.120

In response to being denied more traditional financial services, many sex workers and sex-oriented businesses have turned to Silicon Valley for financial management, using services like PayPal, Square, WePay, Patreon, and even Amazon wish lists to facilitate the transfer of money and goods as payment to sex workers. All of these services have begun targeting sex workers for denial of service in the wake of FOSTA. Nowhere have these practices been more prevalent than at PayPal, which routinely denies service, seizes accounts, and freezes funds indefinitely for account holders associated with online sexual content, including art and sex education.121 Violet Blue has catalogued some of these practices, which include

• banning dominatrix January Seraph for life,

• freezing the account and seizing the funds of Dee Dennis Tess Danesi for publishing the New York City Sex Blogger Calendar,

• banning blogger and adult industry writer Cara Sutra for selling a corset,

• banning former escort Vicky Gallas for processing payments for her memoirs,

• freezing the account of the Seattle Erotic Art Festival for processing fine art submission fees, and

• freezing the account porn performer and producer Maggie Mayhem made to raise charity funds for relief work in Haiti because she linked to it from her sex blog.122

According to Kate D’Adamo of Sex Workers Outreach Project NYC and Sex Workers Action New York, “Paypal has for several years made the decision that if they assume someone is involved in the sex trade, they will shut down that account and, in every case that I’ve heard, keep the money.”123 The war on sexual expression has been going on inside PayPal for at least a decade, but the passage of FOSTA has emboldened PayPal and helped spread its disposition to other online financial service providers.

WePay famously deleted a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for porn performer Eden Alexander’s medical bills when she was dying of an infection that caused multiple organ failures because the campaign was linked to sites that sold pornography.124 Square refused to work with Searah Deysach, the owner of a Chicago-based indie, education-focused, woman-owned sex toy store.125 After giving a TED Talk titled “Make Love Not Porn,” Cindy Gallup launched a crowdsourced porn site based on her ideas from the talk. According to the site, “MakeLoveNotPorn is Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference. We’re the world’s first user-generated, human-curated social sex video-sharing platform, celebrating #realworldsex as a counterpoint to porn, with the aim of socializing sex—making it easier for everyone to talk about, in order to promote good sexual values and good sexual behavior.”126 PayPal, Amazon, Google Checkout, and Chase all refused their services to Gallup’s site.127 Companies like these are regularly denying financial services based on loosely defined conceptions of sex work and pornography. These are essential financial services for small businesses and self-employed content producers, and thus for the majority of LGBTQIA+, feminist, pro-sex, disabled, working-class, POC, and non-native English-speaking sex workers, adult entertainers, and erotic artists.

In the wake of these denials of service, a number have turned to maintaining Amazon wish lists in lieu of currency and have faced similar discrimination from Amazon, which has begun deleting their wish lists without warning. When contacted about their policies on deleting wish lists, Amazon told the Daily Dot that they would delete any wish list that contained “evidence” that it was being used for “bartering.” Amazon made these determinations in any instance where a wish list was directly connected to an adult site as an option for “gifting,” regardless of whether this gifting was transactional. Amazon further noted that wish lists would be deleted if they were set to “public” and contained “certain” adult items. When prompted for more information, Amazon revealed that a wish list that contains phallic-shaped vibrators would be deleted but one that contained a compact vibrating personal massager would not, based on the former’s “more suggestive shape.”128 This is in spite of the fact that sex toys are available for purchase on Amazon and in great abundance. These determinations yet again mobilize an ambiguous set of criteria that can be leveraged on an ad hoc basis to systematically deny services, and thus revenue, to already marginalized sex workers and adult content creators.

Perhaps the best exemplar of these ambiguous and ad hoc policies wreaking havoc on the financial livelihoods and everyday lives of small business and self-employed sex workers and adult content creators is Patreon. Patreon is an online platform that helps content creators gain and manage revenue from their online content and has become central to many small and niche content creators’ livelihoods. On its home page, Patreon promises to allow content creators “to have a direct relationship with [their] biggest fans, get recurring revenue from [their] work, and create on [their] own terms.”129 The site boasts two million patrons, one hundred thousand monthly active content creators, and an estimated $300 million in creator earnings for 2018.130 In 2016, PayPal put pressure on Patreon to stop facilitating adult entertainment and sex work platform-wide, which Patreon resisted, agreeing only to remove PayPal donation links from sexual content. At the same time, Patreon actively courted adult entertainers and sex workers and reportedly promised them via private email that their accounts were safe on the site.131 In September of 2017, the company accepted a new round of investment capital and shortly thereafter made changes to its terms of service.132 These new terms of service banned the use of the platform to generate revenue from any and all pornographic material, though the definition of what exactly constitutes pornography for Patreon is left purposefully ambiguous.133

Users were immediately skeptical about these changes, but they were told the following by Patreon: “The TL;DR is that if what you were doing before was okay, then probably what you’re continuing to do is okay. And if what you’re doing is in too much of a gray area, then we’ll be reaching out.”134 However, just a half year later, FOSTA was passed and Patreon began suspending and reporting many users for “implied nudity.” These suspensions were most notably doled out to a number of cam models and adult entertainers who used the site to sell adult content, charge for private webcam sessions, or maintain adults-only websites.135 A number of artists have also had their content censored. Take, for example, Kate Victoria, a photographer whose account was suspended without warning for “public nudity” despite containing no images that exposed genitalia. According to Victoria, the only image that did contain nudity was censored by text.136 In contrast, Engadget interviewed a Patreon representative and presented them with potentially adult pages to see which they might censor. The representative was shown the Patreon page of an adult performer who created “sexy content for her fans.” She offered “personalized sexy pictures,” “access to a secret Instagram account,” and even “10 minute live webcam session[s], through Skype, once per month” to higher-tiered patrons. The representative noted that this content would not violate the new terms of service.137

Patreon has for years provided a frustratingly vague definition of what constitutes pornography and whether or not pornography violates their terms of service.138 As Liara Roux notes in her open letter to Patreon, the company’s definition is similar to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s—“I know it when I see it”—in its ambiguity and ad hoc nature. She writes, “This is an outdated, legally unclear, and importantly, extremely problematic view of adult media.”139 The problems that arise here are multifaceted. First, as we have seen, vague definitions and case-by-case determinations inevitably lead to biased content moderation, often skewing toward the heteronormative. Second, the frequent changes of policy combined with conflicting messaging leaves sex workers, adult entertainers, and erotic artists unable to make stable financial plans or formulate long-term business strategies. These are already extremely precarious sources of income and the lack of stability Patreon is introducing is a catalyst for life crises like homelessness or physical and mental health complications. Lastly, as Roux also notes, this new policy inordinately affects queer, trans, disabled, POC, and people whose first language is not English.140 In particular, porn versus art distinctions are mobilizations of class warfare, as only those adult content producers with the discursive fluency and educational background to successfully situate their content as artistic stand a chance to escape censorship. Lower socioeconomic status correlates strongly with content creators who are queer, trans, disabled, POC, and who do not speak English as their first language. This class status only gets reinforced by cutting primarily these content creators off from sources of revenue.

Prior to the post-FOSTA ramp-up in suspensions, Patreon CEO Jack Conte published an email sent to adult content creators in response to Roux’s open letter. In his response, Conte both notes that it breaks his heart that content creators are afraid for their pages and doubles down on the argument that Patreon “never allowed pornography or sexual services.”141 After reading it over, Roux noted that Conte only exemplified more clearly that Patreon is more committed to its own image in the eyes of investors and banking partners than to maintaining the well-being and safety of its legal content creators.142 By banning sex workers and adult entertainers, Patreon forces the production of erotica, pornography, and sexual expression into the mainstream market so heavily dominated by mainstream heteroporn. Content producers are forced to implement their own web services, seek the few financial services left available to them, and market individual pieces of their content through platforms already dominated by mainstream heteroporn. This essentially shuts down the economy of patronage in which alt-porn and queer content can be produced and disseminated for free, with creators being supported by those in the community who have the means to donate funds to their cause.

It is hard to isolate a discrete cause or responsible party for this system-wide denial of financial services to small businesses and self-employed people whose work focuses on sex toys, sex work, adult content creation, and erotic art. Every financial service provider involved tends to invoke “high-risk” profiles and argue that the next person higher up in the chain prevents them from servicing these “high-risk” customers. WePay, Square, Patreon, and PayPal not only blame each other, but they also blame credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard and banks like JPMorgan Chase particularly. Visa and Mastercard have both denied all responsibility, claiming they had nothing to do with the decisions made by companies like PayPal to refuse service. This is all despite the fact that both a federal appeals court and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have declared that it is against federal financial regulations to refuse business or close accounts based on a “high-risk” assessment determined solely on the customer’s work being related to human sexuality.143

Some of the pressure is coming from the US Department of Justice under what it calls “Operation Choke Point,” which requires banks to identify any customers engaging in what the government defines as “risky” activity and “choke off” those customers’ access to financial services. According to Frank Keating, CEO of the American Bankers Association, “Justice is pressuring banks to shut down accounts without pressing charges against a merchant or even establishing that the merchant broke the law.”144 If banks refuse, they are penalized by the government, regardless of whether the bank committed any wrongdoing or whether the customer was engaged in illegal activity. While Operation Choke Point primarily targets payday lenders, evidence has been surfacing since 2014 that it has also targeted those in adult industries and may be connected to the glut of adult film stars whose Chase accounts were closed around the same time.145 In short, the only thing that is clear is that there is a system-wide felt sense of urgency to not only avoid any transactional relationship with but also to punish any person whose work is connected to sex, sexuality, or sexual expression. As I—and others—have demonstrated repeatedly, this inordinately impacts financially disadvantaged and marginalized groups, who for that very reason do not have strong enough advocacy to alter this trend of systemic discrimination. It is this cultural context that helped incubate a law like FOSTA, which has in turn only amplified this felt sense of urgency among financial service providers.

The result of this legislation is to make financial services less available to smaller market and independent sex workers and adult content creators. As we have seen repeatedly, this inordinately impacts LGBTQIA+ content creators, making that content less available to those who might benefit from it and forcing its creators to enter marketplaces already dominated by mainstream heteroporn. Additionally, this new internet-wide impetus to police sexual expression more heavily offers opportunities for alt-right misogynist trolls to wage campaigns of harassment and oppression on sex workers and adult entertainers. As we will see below, these opportunities were quickly recognized and taken advantage of, as the alt-right mobilized on 8chan and Reddit to develop new strategies and tactics for waging their anti-sex war on porn.

The #ThotAudit and Alt-Right Exploitation of FOSTA-SESTA

The impact of FOSTA was immediately felt across the internet as sex workers and adult entertainers found themselves under systematic attack, being banned from online platforms, having their content removed, being denied financial services, having their accounts and funds frozen or seized, and being doxed by digital misogynists and thus receiving a glut of hate mail and death threats. This was in addition to facing real-world consequences like losing their jobs. The long-standing efforts of anti-porn grassroots activists to use standard governmental and financial channels to disrupt the political economy of adult entertainment and sex work have been coupled with a campaign by alt-right internet trolls to punish “e-whores.” It is worth noting that this very term belies the penetration of NCOSE’s “intersectional” articulation of sexual exploitation. The lines between prostitution and digitally mediated dissemination are blurred such that cam models are considered prostitutes. This campaign is nowhere more visible than in the response to David Wu’s November 2018 Facebook post calling for a campaign to report self-admitted sex workers to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in an attempt to get them audited. At the time, Wu’s Facebook page contained a depiction of him as Jason Voorhees, the murderer from the Friday the 13th movie franchise, dismembering a sex worker.146 Wu’s call quickly spread to Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and Twitter and went viral after subsequently being dubbed “thot audit.”

The word “thot” is an acronym that means “that ho over there” and was most often used in Black communities. It has been prevalent in hip-hop lyrics for many years, for instance.147 The word has obvious misogynistic overtones. It near universally refers to women and analyzes them purely as sexual objects. Thots are women who are easy to sexually possess and thus can be dismissed as worthless. Just like the term “slut,” thot is wielded with obvious class antagonism as well.148 Thot status is primarily an aesthetic designation based not on any real information about a woman’s sexual history but on her consumption habits (i.e., style, tastes). As Amanda Hess writes, “If women are products, then thots are cheap goods. More than that, they’re knockoffs: low-quality merchandise that attempts to masquerade as luxury items.”149 As with most alt-right memes, thot also contains a racial component, as it is a term from Black communities primarily used to designate Black women as cheap imposters of high-class, hard-to-sleep-with, white women.

As I have mentioned, the original strategy behind the campaign was to report “thots” to the IRS in hopes of getting them audited. Roosh V championed this effort early on, arguing that anyone who managed to get a thot audited would be awarded 30 percent of any taxes recouped by the IRS after the audit. Roosh wrote, “There is actual financial incentive to defeating thottery.”150 In his YouTube video on the “thot audit,” Roosh gave voice to what he described as the “righteous anger” of online male communities, like gamers on Twitch, who were enraged by the “boobie streamers” taking over their digital communities—women who have nothing to offer to society but their bodies—and the “paypigs” that support them.151 Increasingly prone to blending religious rhetoric with his outbursts, Roosh argued, “God is gonna judge these hoes” with his “cleansing fire.”152 In the same video, Roosh echoes complaints that video games are incorporating homosexual and transgender propaganda, thus showing queer materials to young people, demonstrating concretely the intersection between the biologization of gender roles and the reification of heteronormativity. He argues that sexualizing people at younger ages turns them into homosexuals, that sex education is meant to turn people gay, and notes that he would be on the verge of murderous violence if people were trying to “homosexualize” his children. Roosh argues, “Giving the women the right to vote, the right to choose their careers, everything, was such a mistake. It goes against the natural order. Women were never designed to have choice in anything, except what color clothes her baby gets to wear.”153 Roosh borders on viewing the situation as a conspiracy to “disconnect the sexes,” lower the population, and turn all men into homosexuals and all women into sluts. His response is right out of the alt-right playbook, as he reiterates throughout the 150-minute video that he is not telling men to do anything, but he won’t blame them if they report sex workers to the IRS. The entire video is an effective endorsement and catalyst of this sort of behavior despite these lines intentionally placed to offer plausible deniability of inciting it.

Men’s rights activists like Roosh’s followers and members of the incel community—incited by tweets from the official Twitter account for incels.is—quickly organized to begin reporting sex workers to the IRS. The trolls found out that using the IRS’s whistleblower program is extremely tedious. You have to submit, in paper via physical mail, a person’s physical address, full legal name, date of birth, taxpayer identification number, and specific information about the alleged fraud being committed.154 The organizers of these “Right Wing Tax Squads” worked largely via 8chan and the r/ThotAudit subreddit, which had nearly two thousand followers before it was banned on November 27, 2018.155 One Reddit user responded to the problems with IRS reporting by posting, “Find the thots paypal email, send them money, and then report them for selling goods against paypals services. . . . It’s against Paypal’s rules to solicit digital sexual content. All of their funds will be locked pretty quickly.”156 The dissatisfied trolls quickly turned from reporting sex workers to the IRS to abusing the content moderation policies of online platforms to damage the livelihoods of sex workers, a tactic that has been used by foreign governments and partisan groups to, for example, silence the Syrian resistance movement and the Catalonian independence movement.157 On one thread of the subreddit users described a way to expedite the reporting process, “including spamming webforms with multiple reports, including links to illustrate the breach of the company’s terms of service, and threatening to report the breach to the media if the company did not immediately ban the sex worker.”158

To further streamline this process, these digital misogynists organized via 8chan the construction of what they termed the “ThotBot,” a web crawler that would automatically crawl the web to capture the screen names, full names, locations, links to wish lists, individuals’ payment processors, and bios of online sex workers, which it would then compile into a spreadsheet to make reporting them for violations of terms of use easier. By December, ThotBot had already captured the information of more than 166,000 sex workers.159 An 8chan poster wrote, “Find every piece of law breaking action that the left does. It’s fucking easy since they broadcast it all on social media for the public to find. Get their dox, use it to report their illegal activities to the authorities, rinse and repeat.”160 The creator of the ThotBot told WIRED via direct message that the intention behind the crawler was the “total excommunication or extermination of whores in society” and noted that they ought to face the death penalty.161

Where the first leg of the ThotAudit campaign of reporting sex workers to the IRS was an abject failure, this second leg has led to serious consequences for sex workers and adult entertainers online. Take, for example, Lily Adams, who makes and sells pornographic photos and videos online. In the wake of the thot audit, Adams took to Twitter describing the campaign as a witch hunt. Within a minute, her account was flagged and added to a review list. On the same morning that her account was reviewed by thot auditors, Adams’s PayPal account was frozen indefinitely with $256 left in it. By the end of the day, she was banned by every cash app she was using.162 Porn performer Ela Darling was doxed, and her family received calls from internet trolls at their workplaces to harass them about her vocation.163 Stories like these are increasingly becoming the norm among online sex workers and adult entertainers. They find themselves in a renewed state of precarity that is culturally invisible because so many of us have bought into the Pandora’s box of porn myth, assuming that sexual speech and content flows freely across the internet. Instead, the internet has been canalized to facilitate the flow of heteronormative content at the expense of queer communities. And this new heteronormative infrastructure is being viciously exploited by digital misogynists to renew their violent crusade against queer and female bodies.