On Unavoidable Messy Representation & The Closet

Photo of Lady Justice by Dev Kulshrestha, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

A little while back, a judge in the US was caught and fired for engaging in sexwork. Specifically, he made gay porn – and the booting overlapped with a period where he was critical of anti-trans bigotry by a city councilor. On the other hand, as the case came out on social media, people were quick to fret his advertised sex work engaged in implications he mixed his work with his sexuality. In reaction to that, even people who were generally leftist and might even otherwise be inclined to stand with a sexworker were quick to point out it showed poor judgment, even if he described his framing as kayfabe. 

The choices of Mr. Locke were relatively benign in the spectrum of things, basically sexualizing himself in his role.. Nonetheless, he will have his career ruined as firmly as if he had committed some crime of violence. A few moonbats like myself will mourn in vicarious humiliation and he will get some media footnotes alongside his tabloid dragging, but nobody will effectively petition or protect him in any way that will get him his job back. That chapter of his life is effectively over.

My position on this was pretty clear: I want my judges to be sexworkers, past or present. 

Read more

Corporations Hate Kinky Sex

Credit card providers don't want you to have kinky sex.At the time of writing, Patreon and Twitter are both going through a phase of removing adult content. Patreon changed their ToU, while Twitter has been merrily shadowbanning accounts it deems sensitive, trimming them from the general popular discourse.

Twitter managed to hit historical expert @Whoresofyore during her book promo, while Ferns of Domme Chronicles and a number of other prominent sex bloggers have discovered they have been secretly muzzled. That’s what makes Twitter’s handling of things particularly frustrating- nobody knows how your posts and content pass the threshold of unacceptable. And nobody notifies you. You just need to figure out if you have been silo’d.

This was in the heels of, and overlapping with the Patreon change. Those who make porn remain ever vigilant that the guidelines of a corporation will crush them. It’s old, tired and familiar by now, part of an ongoing trend.

I had been thinking of making the switch to Patreon support, so I could put more effort into content and less into other sources of revenue, both linkbuilding for SEO (which I am iffy about) and the unreliability of getting scraps of freelance story requests. I don’t think that is as likely to be a viable option and that frustrates me. And that’s the challenge here, with trying to make adult oriented, and to be explicit, sexual art. Everyone wants the fucking stuff, but nobody wants to pay for it and admit they want it or give it space in the mainstream.

And when we do try to make stuff easier to pay for, we get yanked around by the credit card providers and financial brokers that underpin the transactions that make this possible. Because they are private corporations, unlike writing to my MP, it is considered to be a privilege to me that a few companies have a monopoly on most of the use of money that I do I and everyone else has no recourse.

The truth is, credit card providers don’t want you to have kinky or unregulated sex, and sites like Patreon are hostage to that. Meanwhile Twitter’s logic seems to be tied with the same efforts to try to scrub out trollish harassing nazis- only they remain more interested in punishing outspoken women than the people who bother them.  And at it’s core it’s a problem with our heavy dependency on for profit business to maintain platforms of public discourse but also the fuzzy moral madness around sex in society at large.

This is part of an ongoing war, both government side, and through the whims of the monopolistic control of private corporations, to decide what kind of sex you are allowed to have and talk about.


Read more