Clip
You’re listening to a frequency podcast network production in association with City News.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what Only Fans is, and you know what it’s primarily for. Which is why when the company company said about a year ago that it would ban adult material, the news was greeted with shock and then skepticism. And sure enough, Only Fans backed down and a whole bunch of jokes were made. But the reason that Only Fans would even consider such a move banning the content that makes up the vast majority of their revenue was mostly ignored. This saga was perhaps the most publicly visible evidence that even as the public at large becomes more accepting of this kind of sex work behind closed doors and by that I mean banks and boardrooms, not bedrooms, nothing changes right now. A case before Ontario’s Superior Court, which will almost certainly end up in front of Canada’s Supreme Court, argues that laws against sex work in Canada are unconstitutional. This decision could obviously have huge ramifications for people who make their living or even just make a second income by selling adult content online. It would be a complete and very public legal victory. But even if it happens, it might not change what happens in the shadows. So why not? Why, even as adult content becomes ever more mainstream and available, do financial institutions still refuse to work with the people who provide it? What happens when someone is tagged as a sex worker, even if it’s just for selling a tasteful photo online? Why are we still talking about scarlet letters in the year 2022? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The big Story. Maggie McDonald is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Her research focuses on pornography platforms. Hello, Maggie.
Maggie MacDonald
Hi.
Jordan
Can you start by taking us back? And this is where I think everybody will kind of remember this discussion. Take us back about a year ago to the brief period in which Only Fans was planning to ban porn. What happened there?
Maggie MacDonald
Oh, truly, it became a running joke that week on the Internet. Indeed, in August of 2021, Only Fans, the pornography most well known for being a pornography app and platform, announced that on October 1, a policy change would be instituted that would ban adult content and restrict adult content from the platform. So obviously, this was very baffling to the general public, given it is a platform that has made a household name for itself over the past few years, trading in pornography by providing a space to connect users who are seeking out news and loads with content creators. It was especially jarring given during the pandemic, the obvious increase in precarious work, the mass layoffs that were being experienced everywhere. There had also been a surge in people turning to platforms like Only, found as a way to make casual income to make ends meet. So this was a betrayal. It was not only lucrative in a way that it was a funny punchline that Twitter had a field day with. It was quite nonsensical. And so there was an uproar, I will say, from the creator community, namely sex and pornography content creators who felt that they were being betrayed by a platform that they had made infamous. And what’s remarkable about this Only Fans, incident is that only a week later, on August 25, only Fans publicly announced that they were reversing their decision that there would be no policy change implemented and that they had secured the ability to maintain their creator community as it stood. So it kind of just became like a funny joke for many people. I loved reading one tweet that said banning porn. Those were only plans, right? It’s so simple, so funny. But what we witnessed in that layout on the stage of Twitter largely was so interesting because it was the first time I have personally seen sex workers successfully speak back against a platform that is attempting to remove them. And they won. It was a victory. And they won through grassroots organizing, which in this case played out on social media from Only Fans point of view.
Jordan
Why would it ban its most lucrative revenue stream by far?
Maggie MacDonald
Yeah, this is an interesting doublee-dged story that this story represents to. I love this because there was a very public layout that was very salacious and funny and visible on social media. That was the sex workers speaking back to the problem, the problem itself, the implementation of this ban was the opposite. It is a vague, shadowy money question and it is often not discussed in serious arenas. So the Only fans dusted up brought attention to the fact that there is a routine financial discrimination taking place against sex work. Despite being legal industries that these porn workers are moving in, especially they’re facing routine financial discrimination. They are not able to access similar financial services. In the case of Only Fans, the platform itself was having a difficult time securing any form of venture capital, despite being hugely successful. If you were to see any similar, let’s say, food delivery platform or home entertainment media platform reach the disability and accessibility fans, it would be ludicrous to think that they wouldn’t have accrued any venture capital by now. There is a double standard that is applied to pornography industry workers that they suffer from in a larger, more institutional way. In cases like this, only science problem also targets them as individuals. They have a harder time accessing many financial services and they are discriminated against in many subtle, almost invisible ways.
Jordan
Can you give us some examples of that? You wrote in The Walrus that sex workers wear a financial scarlet letter. What does that look like in their day to day lives? How does it impact them?
Maggie MacDonald
Well, I mean, I’ve spoken to sex workers in my research who have had difficulty securing things like business loans when they are well beyond their years of doing active sex work. I also should say that in my research it’s almost always pornography workers. I think that the moneyed waters happen a little bit more when we are talking about full service in person sex work and this is specifically applying to pornography which is around the sex work. So often conversations around sex work get blown out as though it’s all the same. And creation of pornography and distribution of pornography is a legal regulated industry in Canada the fact that banks, financial firms, payment processors, credit card companies are being deputized to basically chokehold out an entire legal industry from being able to successfully thrive and regulate itself is a problem. And it’s not only a problem because it currently is creating financial security and difficulty and it’s discriminatory conditions for many many people, tens of thousands of people in Canada. It’s also a problem because it sets a precedent. It sets a precedent that vague private companies can make moralizing decisions that impact Canadian citizens’ ability to engage in financial infrastructure even when they are doing legal work.
Jordan
When you say the banks are being deputized, who’s deputizing them and why would they care? As long as the commission from credit card purchases come in as long as the loan payments are being made the bank is making money so why are they doing this and who’s behind it?
Maggie MacDonald
There is so much reputational management at stake here because you know these huge financial firms, the banks, the credit card companies, the payment processors, a great deal of what they do is PR and it is brand management and there is a very vocal vitriolic vehemently anti pornography lobby in the United States especially. I mean it exists everywhere but that’s sort of where the crux of this movement is. And you see these groups campaigns like trafficking Hub fight the new drug exodus cry. There are a large swath of evangelical conservative religious lobby groups based in the United States. They do have actually quite a lot of power to influence politicians, influence lawmakers, influence policymakers, get into boardrooms, get into meetings because they have this populist appeal. There is decades of baggage behind this conversation that range back from the anti porn like Second Way feminist sex wars that we saw starting in the 1970s.
Jordan
Right?
Maggie MacDonald
This is a story with a long history and after decades of campaigning that pornography is all violence against women, that all pornography is rape, that pornography is thoroughly degrading. There has emerged out of all that rhetoric a very thriving rescue industry which is less concerned with the well being of the people engaged in this industry and more concerned with the moral stance that this industry should be abolished which unfortunately puts policies in place that often harm people engaged in the sex industry significantly more than it would if they were just left well enough alone. And because there is such a, again, like long cultural history of considering sex work and pornography work degraded, disgusting, lowly, filthy how could they do that? That’s so morally compromised. There is a long history of that being the default thinking around pornography work and that’s prudish snobbery and it’s out of touch with the reality of what the industry looks like today. And people espousing these views are not talking to sex workers. In fact, they are doing everything in their power to preclude them from entering these conversations, from entering policy consultation arenas, from entering, you know, being able to advocate for themselves in legal settings. It is very important to this whole mechanism of anti-pornography evangelical lobby groups that porn continues to be seen as a scourge. But the problem is that doesn’t add up, right? That doesn’t add up with the numbers that we see. We know that porn is being consumed rampantly. We know that pornography is massively popular. We know that it takes up a huge percentage of the bandwidth of internet usage. We know it’s ubiquitous. So to continue to pretend that it’s something that’s struggling at the margins and that the only people doing it or doing it out of their own debasement of the self is absurd and yet it’s still constantly being reiterated in boardrooms, in courts, in legal practices. So when it comes to this financial discrimination, what we see is that despite us as a nation agreeing that pornography is legal and it’s highly regulated in Canada, we have some of the tightest record keeping obligations there are for producing pornography. If you are a person who produces pornography, you will still be targeted.
Jordan
This is going to sound like a dumb rhetorical question, but it’s not. If selling porn is not illegal, making porn is not illegal. Consuming porn and paying for it is not illegal, how is it legal for banks or other companies to discriminate? And how would you even prove that if you were going to challenge this kind of discrimination?
Maggie MacDonald
So that’s just it. It’s not legal. It is not legal to financially discriminate against an entire class of legal workers. But there are very few, unlike these evangelical conservative lobby groups, there are very few populist fiery policymakers politicians, legal aid work groups that are prepared to stand up for the rights of pornographers. And that’s because of decades of successful smear campaigns against pornography in general. A more specific example of the way that this discrimination takes place is under the guise of something called chargebacks. And what a chargeback is, is when a customer sees a charge on their credit card service and disputes the charge and have it reversed. And you know, any individual process of doing that isn’t that expensive. But when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions in giant blocks for a company like Visa or Mastercard, they claim that certain industries, because chargebacks happen at a higher rate, are too risky. The problem is chargebacks are not unique to pornography. Chargebacks also occur in industries like anything remotely related to casinos or gambling. They are very common with online shopping chargebacks through services like Etsy or Amazon. They’re common in travel booking flights. Chargebacks happen all the time and you don’t see high rates of chargebacks being used as an excuse to throttle services for airlines or casinos or other sectors of the economy. It is uniquely targeting sex work. So it’s like a bit of a smokescreen where there’s some plausible deniability that everything is being done fairly and accountably. And that’s not actually the case when you take a larger view at the context that the chargeback excuse is being led in.
Jordan
I know so far we’ve talked about pornography and sex work kind of as a monolith, but is all of that porn and online sex work created equal when it comes to this kind of discrimination? Or is there kind of a hierarchy of what kind of performers are most likely to experience this kind of discrimination? Because, again, I imagine that the straight, white, blonde women who are mega stars in the adult industry don’t get it nearly as bad as some of the only fans, creators who are not that.
Maggie MacDonald
Jordan, I’m so glad you asked this question. There’s actually a term that gets casually thrown around as a shorthand for exactly what you’re describing, and that’s the hierarchy. There are a wide variety of ways that people can engage in sex work. I think there’s a flattening out that happens where when you think sex worker, you might think like, I don’t know, a Brian Dupont movie, a woman in a red dress in gritty New York who’s down on her luck, who’s doing full service sex work for cash. That is not what sex work looks like as a practice today. It’s a very outdated way of thinking about sex work. So many people engaging in sex work are doing it casually. This is part of the democratization of media in general that the internet has given us and the platforms have provided. They’ll take some casual, tasteful nudes and not consider that sex work despite the fact that they’re selling what is clearly like a libidinous image for money. Whereas full service, in person sex work is often considered on the lowest rung, I will say, of the hierarchy. There’s often a narrative that gets put on them. They did it because they were desperate and needed money or being tempt or on drugs. And that’s just not the reality that you will hear if you were to talk to sex workers. Many sex workers work in sex work because it is in some ways more dignified than being a sandwich artist at Subway or having some boss sexually harass you or like a middle manager make your life miserable and you aren’t ultimately making any more money. The idea that sex work is a uniquely degrading form of work. It’s crusty, it’s stale. People need to get over that it is not uniquely degrading. However, there’s this kind of, again, cultural hangover that if you’re doing in person sex work, you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy. Whereas, say, like a sorority girl who is selling past semi nude photos on, only fans might even deny that she’s doing sex work at all. What recourse does a sex worker have if they are hit with financial discrimination? If their credit cards canceled, they can’t get a plane ticket, et cetera, et cetera.
Jordan
Is there a legal process they can avail themselves of?
Maggie MacDonald
Largely, no. There is virtually none, which is one of the reasons why this is such a pernicious problem that we need to be paying attention to. I’m sure that every one of your listeners at some point felt the frustration of having an airline cancel on you last minute and you have to pay a much higher fee. And there is no form of recourse. We’ve all experienced that in some horrible, bureaucratic, administrative way. Sex workers experience it all the time and have no recourse. They have their Airbnb accounts canceled because there’s a history of suspicious transactions that they have from a different platform. They’re not granted business loans because despite having steady streams of income coming in, it’s coming in through the gig economy, and it’s coming in through not a t four. And so they will be denied access to improve their own circumstances. I spoke at one point to a pornography producer who for a decade now has been running a thriving pornography production business in Winnipeg. And when she started out, despite having a little bit of startup capital, a solid business plan, everything in order, every one of the big five Canadian banks she went to denied her any form of business loan because they considered her like a reputational risk.
Jordan
But this should not be a question that is left up to private companies, right?
Maggie MacDonald
This should not be a question that is left up to payment processors or companies like Airbnb or Visa and Mastercard to determine what kind of work is valid and what kind of work is not valid. Many white supremacists have credit cards like we’re talking about morally policing people’s behaviors online. Sex work is a silly one to fixate on.
Jordan
So what needs to happen next and is there any momentum for it? I understand the Supreme Court is making a decision right now about decriminalizing all sex working candidates. I’m not going to ask you to get into the details of that, but what do governments need to do, if anything, to stop this in its tracks?
Maggie MacDonald
I mean, I’m glad you asked that. This is a really great week to be looking back at the only fans incident, because effectively, sex workers have had enough pornography workers and sex workers have enough. They see that they’re being ostracized. They see that they’re being discriminated against. They see that they do not have recourse. And there are enough of them that they can make quite a fuss about that. So this week, what we have seen is a challenge, a petition to the Ontario Supreme Court that will almost certainly progress the Canadian Supreme Court by the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform. And that’s a coalition of 25 different sex worker organizations who do advocacy work and direct action work and frontline work and represent the interests of the sex workers doing legal work in Canada. And they are challenging the Ontario Supreme Court, claiming that the current state of our laws are unconstitutional and discriminatory towards sex workers. And the current challenge is to an anti prostitution law passed in 2014. And that’s the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. So currently Canada operates under what we casually call a Nordic model, meaning that sex work itself is not illegal. But many of the trappings that functionally are a part of doing sex work are illegal. So in this case, it would be the obvious one is that it’s not illegal to sell sex, it is illegal to buy sex, it is illegal for sex workers to live together because that could be constituting a brothel. It is illegal for many of the elements of the transaction are made as illegal as they would be. A sex work was outright illegal, right? Not only sex worker organizations, but groups like Amnesty International, groups like the ACLU, like the World Health Organization, have all agreed and made public statements about the Mordik model being no more safe than outright illegal sex work. And so this organization, the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform, is challenging our current Nordic model under this PCEPA legislation. Because basically under PCPA, it’s illegal to advertise any sexual services. It’s illegal to communicate in a public place, to talk about sexual services, it’s illegal to receive a, quote unquote material benefit from the purchase of sexual services. It’s illegal on the buyer’s side. And they are pointing out that that makes their work functionally illegal. And so they are pushing for full decriminalization of both the buying and the selling of sex. The reason for this is that it’s not just financial discrimination that sex workers face. They clearly face huge amounts of social stigma, slack from colleagues, from family members, their safety is constantly at risk. Like the level of violence that sex workers experience is disproportionately high. And what this legislation they are challenging has done is it’s made their life harder in very particular ways. It makes it almost impossible to screen clients. Clients are not going to submit screenings because if clients have a record of the experience, then they could be charged. It’s illegal. It makes it almost impossible for sex workers to organize, it makes it very difficult for them to form unions, it makes it very difficult for them to live together. Obviously the focus of this only fans incident financial discrimination. It makes it very difficult for them to find recourse or push back against discriminatory practices by private companies. And so this challenge is pushing for the full decriminalization of sex work in Canada which would be safer for all involved. Last question then, as we wait for this Supreme Court decision which will inevitably go up to a higher level. In your piece for the Walrus, you wrote something that struck me and I want you to explain it as a last thing. You said that sex work is a case study on the future of work itself.
Jordan
How so?
Maggie MacDonald
Because of the absolute pile of stigma and discrimination, they have become very reflexive as a group at moving quickly to adopt new technologies, at moving quickly to adopt new organizational strategies, new techniques. Sex workers are very entrepreneurial. They are very much the kinds of workers who do 17 jobs at once every day. And they are savvy. They are very aware of the ways that platforms are discriminating against them, cycling through them, pushing them out of public spaces, censoring them. The thing is, all of these conditions are not actually unique to sex work anymore. I open the century telling you I’m a pornography platform scholar and platforms have become absolutely ubiquitous in our lives. Platforms are the infrastructures of our current moment. You can’t functionally move through our economy or our modern culture without engaging in platforms constantly. And so reliance on these services that are so common that they become invisible to us makes them infrastructural things like your utilities.
Jordan
Right?
Maggie MacDonald
So the reason I say that sex work is an indicator of the future of work is that platforms are now heavily implicated in the economy. Platforms are following a model where they are increasingly chopping up traditional careers, lifelong jobs with stability into precarious task oriented gig work. And they’re unstable, they are temporary, they are ephemeral. There is not a shop for you can’t organize with your colleagues because everyone is a shopped out contractor under platform to work. And as platforms like only fans, like larger platforms like Facebook, Uber, Amazon, as they continue to dominate the economy, we are actually seeing that this is how all jobs are beginning to move now. They are all beginning to be more disposable. It is difficult for workers to organize across all sectors. They are having what are technically sort of pseudo legal employment practices. Employers are getting away with as much as they can possibly get away with. They won’t pay someone 40 hours a week with full benefits when they know that they could pay someone 36 hours a week. Just have them right under the legal line that they need to provide. The tactics that are being applied to sex workers now could come for all of us and we’ve seen it time and time again. You’ve seen it. When it comes to the advancement of technology, sex workers often on the bleeding edge of what is new. The reason you have pop up and banner ads today that all has its origins in sex work, blue Ray and Red Shark. BluRay largely won out because the massive power of the pornography industry that invested in Bluray helped that process along. And so it’s not just on the technological side, it’s also on the sort of labor side. So Sex Work is showing us what will happen if we continue to look the other way when these private companies are given disproportionate amounts of power and not put in check for exploitative business practices.
Jordan
Maggie, thank you so much for this. It’s fascinating and obviously should be alarming for us all.
Maggie MacDonald
Thank you.
Jordan
Maggie McDonald, PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. That was the big story. And now I want to share a little bit of listener feedback. We got one of our more popular episodes recently was one called what Do We Lose When Our Malls Disappear? Personally, I thought it was excellent, as I do all our episodes, but we got a note from a listener that had one issue with this episode, and I want to read it because it’s really interesting. So this is a listener named John. He says, My issue with this episode is that it bundles the extremely important question of losing community with consumerism. I believe there is no way of getting around the notion that at the end of the day, physical stores are still stores and their end goal is to make us purchase things that we probably don’t need to the detriment of the planet, the environment and us all. I wish there was at least an acknowledgment that you wanted to compartmentalize these two aspects of physical stores. Laser focusing on the community aspect. This is a really good point, and so I wanted to read it out to you guys. And I also just wanted to say there’s a bigger point here about the ways that we spend money to take our mind off how horrible things can be. So, yes, community is certainly an aspect of it. Another aspect of it, and you can debate whether this is good for our mental health or not, is that when things are crap, it’s sometimes fun to buy something new. And, like, honestly, I’m going to bet 80%, 90% of you right here are nodding along. I have made some stupid ass purchases after recording particularly depressing episodes of this show, including a smartphone case that doubled as a fake Game Boy and could play some knockoff games from China. I still have it. I’m never going to attach it to my phone. It was dumb, but I felt better for 10 seconds. Anyway, you can find the big story at the Bigstorypodcast CA. You can listen to all sorts of episodes there. You can also give us feedback either on Twitter at The bigstory FPN or via email, like John did hello at Thebigstorypodcast CA. And of course, you can call and leave us a voicemail and we will start to play some on there as soon as we get some good ones. Make sure you speak clearly. Make sure you keep your voicemail short. I’m not running a minute and a half of you talking. I’m the only person that gets to do that here. You can find the big story wherever you get your podcast. And when you do, rate and review. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawling. We’ll talk tomorrow.
Back to top of page