Is Porn Becoming a Monopoly?
As the consumer internet becomes ‘sterilized and gentrified,’ alt-porn producers say they’re being marginalized
In June 2018, Patreon told Vex Ashley that it was effectively shutting down her page. Ashley’s independent pornography project, Four Chambers, had been on the funding site for a number of years, and the income it provided was her livelihood — and paid for the labor of her performers.
The shutdown was part of a wider flurry of suspensions toward adult creators on the platform. Patreon explained at the time that it had ramped up a “proactive review of content” due to pressures from “payment partners.” While Four Chambers had existed happily for four years on the site, Ashley was informed she couldn’t continue to use funds for work that involved nudity or sexually explicit material.
“This is an issue bigger than Patreon,” she wrote in a blog post. “It’s a worldwide, online and in-person crackdown on freedom of expression, on women, on marginalised people, on sex and sex work, on non-conventional forms of labor that counter the status quo: the domination of corporations and the patriarchy. On dissent.”
Six months later, Tumblr announced it would be permanently banning sexual content on its platform—a move at least partly motivated by the…
