The Surprising Origins of the OnlyFans Sexual Content Ban
The site’s failed attempt at censorship has much deeper, more nefarious origins than you might think.
The site’s failed attempt at censorship has much deeper, more nefarious origins than you might think.
This comedic news essay was originally read live at The Paper Machete, Chicago’s live magazine.
On August 19th, sexual content distribution app OnlyFans announced it would be instituting a ban on sexual content beginning in October. The announcement was vague, just as the sexual content bans announced by Tumblr and Instagram in prior years were: according to OnlyFans, artistic nudes and photography would still be permitted, but explicit depictions of sex acts would be banned.
In practice, such bans typically bring their hammer down on the people whose bodies are more likely to be viewed as inherently sexual: hence Tumblr’s famous crackdown on “female presenting nipples,” and Instagram’s tendency to keep up shots of skinny white gays’ entire asses while taking down relatively chaste bikini pics from anyone fatter or darker skinned. Shout out to baby__angel69 who still posts gorgeous photos of their hairy ass cleavage while splayed next to a waterfall to Instagram almost every day. Shine on you beautiful otter-y diamond!
The OnlyFans sexual content ban, like the ones on Tumblr and Instagram, were met with a hail out of outrage and protests from creators and users alike. But unlike the latter two sites, OF always existed solely as a platform for models and porn stars to sell sexually explicit content. The app was a crucial income source for many sex workers during a pandemic that made stripping and full-service work difficult.
Unlike say, PornHub, which historically featured a lot of repacked clips from porn studios that brought no payment to its stars, OnlyFans allowed creators to make money directly off the sale of their own photos and clips. Of course, the platform did take a healthy 20% cut of all subscriptions and tips. Still, it proved a consistent enough revenue source that civilians like Bella Thorne and DJ Khaled flocked to it. (I regret to inform you there is no luscious ass cleavage on DJ Khaled’s OnlyFans, by the way, just clips of him sipping lattes.)
And herein lies the problem. After pulling in over $2.4 billion dollars in user transactions in the last year and drawing the attention of numerous celebrities and influencers, OnlyFans determined it wanted to pivot to offerings that were a little more chaste. If you’ve been on the site this year — and I know some of you must have contributed to that $2.4 billion dollar figure — you may have seen advertisements for things like cooking and makeup videos. Since OF follows a subscription model, where you follow and financially support specific creators you have developed a quasi-social attachment to, the site thought it could become the next Patreon, a place to patronize the arts.
But OnlyFans isn’t where you throw a few bucks at your favorite communist catgirl Youtuber or scrappy local theater that is still financially recovering from ousting its sexually predatory founder a few years ago. It’s where you DM photos of your penis to Mistress Euphadoria Huntress Raven-Way (along with a payment of $10) to have her call it shriveled and weak and talk about how much she’d like to drown you in her breast milk. (I’m friend with Mistress Euphadoria on Twitter by the way. She loves my self-help book.)
Many people think that OnlyFan’s sexual content ban was motivated only by a desire for more widespread cultural relevance, and that the sites owners, having milked the prostate of the world for all it was worth, had decided to expand to more normie endeavors. But the actual reason for the ban was a little more complex. It was payment processors — specifically Mastercard — that forced the issue.
Earlier this year, Mastercard announced it would be instituting new restrictions on which kinds of transactions they would allow. Beginning in October, all sexual content that is paid for with a Mastercard will have to be manually reviewed by a human being, not only validating the identities and ages of all performers, but watching all live-streams and videos in real time, determining that all of it is above board and legal. Remaining compliant with this policy would require that OnlyFans hire a veritable fleet of content reviewers, essentially one pair of watchful eyes for every single stream happening on their site at any given time. This would be financially unsustainable, and so the platform decided to just abandon selling sexual videos and access to streams at all.
This isn’t the first time Mastercard (and other processors like Paypal and Visa) have completely transformed the digital jack-off landscape. The first time these companies really flexed their censorship muscles was reportedly in the early 2000s, when they instituted a blanket ban on any erotic content that features mentions or depictions of hypnosis.
The reason? Reportedly (and according to many creators in the scene that I’ve spoken to) in the early 2000’s a user of the porn site Clips4Sale issued thousands of dollars in payments to a hypnosis-themed digital domintatrix, then disputed the charges, claiming he couldn’t have consented to the sales because he was literally under her power. Which I gotta say, was a really clever way for this guy to both enact his psychosexual fantasies in the real world while saving a buck. It was a hell of a gambit , one that required he really tell on himself publicly — maybe he also had a humiliation kink.
Anyway, it worked — Mastercard and Visa weren’t willing to litigate whether someone could actually be hypnotized into giving away thousands of dollars, so they just reversed the charges and put a lifelong ban on erotic hypnosis content in place. That ban on erotic hypnosis has been with us ever since — and it touches every single site where you might use a Visa or Mastercard.
If you go onto porn sites like Spankbang, AVN Stars, Pornhub, or yes, OnlyFans, you will consistently find that the hypnosis tag is blocked. Users routinely have their accounts deleted for posting videos of themselves pleasuring themselves while staring at a stopwatch, for example, or for whispering seductively in the mic commanding viewers to become pretty panty wearing sissies who are completely under their power. You can even get banned on Patreon, of all places, for selling sexually themed hypnotic audio or even fictional stories.
Now you may be wondering, why do I know all this ancient, pre-Web-2.0 history. Well, because I, a published author and a scholar, have been writing smut about the brain control worms from the Animorphs books since like 2006. And let me tell you, it has been really difficult to get paid for my art, with Visa and Mastercard always coming for me, my colleagues, and my readers.
Interestingly, an enforced ban on hypnosis and mind control themed content on porn sites almost always presages a more sweeping crackdown on other creators. Pornhub began deleting hypnosis-themed content a few years ago, claiming that videos where, for example, a woman dresses up as Nurse Joy from Pokemon and hooks up with hypnotic pocket monster Mewtwo are a depiction of, quote “dubious” consent. (Again this is an actual video that exists, and I am aware of it for freak reasons.)
Then in December of 2020, under mounting pressure from Visa and Mastercard, Pornhub scrubbed their site of all videos not posted by big-name creators who had gone through their formal verification process, in response to claims from Evangelical anti-sex-work groups that the site was plagued with videos of assaults and underage performers.
And here is where sexual content bans get a lot less funny. While it is true that all porn sites fail to take adequate steps to combat things like revenge porn and child trafficking, the move to scrub PornHub and OnlyFans of sexual content is led by a conservative Christian group that does not have sex workers’ best interests at heart. And the consequence of these crackdowns is that life as a sex worker only becomes more difficult and perilous.
Mastercard decided to restrict sexual content transactions due to the lobbying of Exodus Cry, an anti-sex work organization that began as a satellite of Kansas City Megachurch the International House of Prayer, or IHOPKC for short. But whereas the real IHOP is revered as a safe late-night haven for drunk sex workers and gays, the KC IHOP is infamous for having influencing lawmakers in Uganda into rendering gay sex punishable by death in the early 2000’s.
Having successfully ablated gay rights overseas, Exodus Cry has turned its attention back to the United States, where it has been working tireless the past couple years to equate consensual, creator-driven sexual content creation with child tracking and rape. Their influence also contributed to the passing of FOSTA and SESTA, two anti-sex work laws passed in 2018 that led to the porn bans on… you guessed it, Tumblr and Instagram. Except for the ass shots of my beloved baby_angel69.
A week after its announcement, and after significant user outcry, OnlyFans declared that it secured alternate payment processing options and would be reversing its porn ban. This is great news for the sex workers who are reliant upon the site for a consistent source of income they can produce from the safety of their homes. Because when bans like these happen, sex workers still have to make money — sending them onto the dark web or into the streets.
But this ban was part of a much larger, multi-pronged approach, led by Christian Conservatives, and targeting credit card companies, social media sites, banks, and mobile payment apps like Venmo and Cashapp. This threat to sex worker’s livelihoods is not going away. Anyone who has ever created sexual content to pay the bills– from porn stars to smut writers to cam boys to women like Euphadora who insult men for money — not only their livelihood, but their ability to occupy public life online is constantly under attack.
When I posted online about the event where I first read this essay, I had to worry that my Instagram would be taken down. Any usage of the word “sex” “sex work” “onlyfans” or “porn” can get your account banned permanently if youre not careful. The internet is rapidly become an anodyne shopping mall, a place where family-friendly services are dispensed by massive corporations who hold the power to destroy our social footprint just as easily as can drain our balls and our wallets.
The solution, then, is not just to fight for only fans to keep selling porn videos, but to rebel against all criminalization of sex work — as well as the oversized influence credit card companies and social media sites wield over our lives.