A religious pressure group, which has long classified all sexual performance as exploitation, has made a fresh bid to stop credit card companies accepting payments for adult services.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) has sent an email to CEOs of financial institutions, demanding that they stop aiding the adult industry, claiming that there’s ‘no such thing as consensual porn’.
Other bon mots from the email, released yesterday and shown to XBIZ, include “all porn is human trafficking,” and “porn addiction is a medical condition”. Neither of which is true, at least as a blanket generalization.
To add some clout to its claims, NCOSE, which is not above bending the facts – in the same way that the sea is not above the sky – claims to be representing global pressure groups, all united in their bid to bring down the porn industry. The group has been trying to do as much since its inception in the 1960s.
By its argument, processing credit card payments for porn makes those processors guilty by association of “child sexual abuse, sex trafficking videos, rape, and more” and “content eroticizing sexual violence, incest and racism.”
To put it in perspective, mind you, this is the group that once called the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar “hardcore pornography”, so let’s all just calm down a bit, shall we?
Honestly, now?
The big problem here, beyond the regular problems with parts of religion’s ongoing issues with porn, is that NCOSE has completely failed to capture the public mood. There’s nothing new in what this email says – we’ve heard it all before. What’s different is that we’re in the middle of one of the greatest crises ever to face the planet.
Not only is a porn ban not at the top of anyone’s list right now, but the performers who usually make their money from the industry are, in many cases, facing financial destitution as a result of widespread shutdowns of studios. Plus, be in no doubt that things aren’t going back to normal anytime soon.
No porn performer could manage penetration and ‘social distancing’ simultaneously. New workflows and processes will have to emerge before shooting continues.
We get it, though. NCOSE doesn’t like porn. But its campaigns are an affront to freewill, based on misguided generalizations about pornography, and some rather on-display neuroses. The groups claim to be Christians, and we don’t think it’s particularly helpful – or indeed Christian – to be attempting to further destroy the careers of thousands of talented people, both behind and in front of the camera.
Targeting credit card processors seems like a misguided, if potentially effective, move anyway. Credit card companies are facilitating a transaction for a legal service. Involving them, is very much like shooting the messenger. It’s not like adult sites have it easy. They’re already shadow blocked by much of ‘Big Tech’, and funding sources like Patreon aren’t generally open to adult performers.
If we were more cynical, we’d question if the timing of this letter is designed to kick the industry while it’s already down, but the reality is that this is just another step on a long, misguided and fruitless campaign.
Batman has The Joker, Tweety-Pie has Sylvester… maybe the adult industry needs a nemesis. But right now, we really need to be focused on having an Adult industry to protest against.
Attempting to make life harder for performers under the guise of protecting performers is a special kind of logic that we just can’t get behind. Sorry, NCOSE – but we know you’ll keep trying anyway.
That’s what a nemesis does.
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