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| Irony rules. In a first for me I wrote Your rather than your. It's an accurate reflection of how I feel in the fight of beautiful BDSM vs bad, bad bankers. (Image: Tumblr/unknown, edited) |
My previous post on Fetlife was a bit harsh, I agree. Still, Fetlife has little to offer because of its static nature. Just like the moon waxes and wanes, so do our desires, but you cannot run an adult community solely on people who post just that fact over and over again. On top of it, there are major privacy concerns handing out your phone number to an adult entertainment company.
Basic Fetlife is free, but bills still have to be paid. Therein lies one major problem. You can say what you like about former President Obama, but the moniker No Drama Obama was spot on. Unfortunately no drama is not always a good thing. There was exactly zero drama when it came to bankers being held responsible for the credit crisis that started in 2008. The exact number of them going to jail is zero. Drama or no drama, history will repeat itself. Soon, I guess.
Payment processors, aka banks, are mostly US-based. Not only that, they also claim the moral highground. Payments to dictators, the US State Department approves of, are smooth and convenient. But, oh boy, if you like to add a little extra spice to your vanilla sex, there's no way to pay for it. And that is a problem for companies such as Fetlife. They have to keep their servers humming. Right now I'm wondering who their hosting provider is and if they are subjected to the same limitations that Fetlife is. Probably not. Especially not if it's Amazon Web Services, their clout keeps the cloud humming indefinitely. And Amazon also sells sex toys, discretely of course. Bet you didn't know.
Banks live by two sets of rules. The first one is that of moral superiority to any other business of living creature. The other one, more down to earth is that of profit. Banks cling to the belief their reputation is perfect despite all that has happened. At the same time they loudly express their fear of being under attack from the world's sleaze and dirt. Once again, it's their definition, not ours. I'll bet bankers are among the top paying clients of your average pro-domme. When they express their kink, it's their own private business, or so they claim. When the rest of us tries to do the same, they flatly refuse our right to express ourselfs as individuals. Either because it's 'immoral' or because it's illegal. Never mind that most of the time it ain't illegal, it just makes them feel good to say no.
At the same time, Silicon Valley companies are fighting censorship - part-time only - afraid it will have a negative impact on their bottomline. After all, non-compliance to the impossible is a huge business risk. Meanwhile financial institutions love self-censorship, something that always surprises me.
For businesses there are grey areas, where the risk outweights the potential rewards. When it comes to adult entertainment, sex workers and anything that has to do with one of the most basic of human emotions [good or bad], banks pretend to be better than the rest of us. Unfortunately for them, the people who work there are just as human as we are. Meanwhile, they either directly or indirectly decide what is morally acceptable when it comes to other people's sexual freedom.
Half a century ago, when porn was still officially a bad thing, the US Supreme Court struggled with it's definition.
In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote "I know it when I see it" when attempting to derive a threshold test for pornography and obscenity in the Jacobellis v. Ohio case.
Basically that answer is useless. First of all it assumes that you are free to speak your mind. If the majority of people object, in most settings it's hard to disagree. Any fair judgement also requires for everybody on this planet to share the same idea about what exactly porn is. What the US Supreme Court said, is that they basically found it impossible to determine when something is porn. Clearly, banks are much smarter than the Supreme Court. They can exactly tell the difference between smut and art. Perhaps that's also the reason no banker went to prison for their role in the greatest economic depression since the 1920s. So, being smart not only pays the bills, but also keeps you out of jail - if you are a banker that is. As for everybody else? Who cares if you are a banker who claims the moral highground - well-paid of course?
In the end it comes down to the fact that banks act as gateways. Everybody who is commercially involved in kink has to deal with them at one time or another. Fetlife needs contributions to stay afloat. Most pro-dommes reasonably require a deposit for first-time clients. If you buy movies online, think about the restrictions Clips4Sale faces when it comes to finding a payment processor.
Simply put: big banks are a threat to democracy. A baker who refuses to sell wedding cakes to gay couples runs the risk of bankruptcy. No chance of a government bail-out. Meanwhile, ten years on, Bloomberg, a business publication, reports how the financial crisis has cost every American $70,000. In other words: a quarter of a million for a family of four. As in Harvard for the kids baby! Or perhaps a really, really nice house. Now multiply that by 80 million families. Still, those banks deny us the freedom to live our lives, the way we want. How's that for immoral?
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