Tag Archives: consequences

OnlyFans Backtracks on Its Plans to Ban Porn

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When I first found out that OnlyFans decided to allow pornographical material to continue, yet subscribers are still deciding to jump ship, my first thought was: It’s amazing what happens after everyone decides to jump ship after you make a stupid, horrible decision. This is a lot like that one time I told my billionaire, bikini supermodel astrophysicist girlfriend we should probably see other people. Didn’t go the way I planned.

The point is: OnlyFans has a spotted history as it is, and then once it revealed it was pursuing the dollar in hopes of becoming more mainstream, and then losing practically all of its subscriber base, they retracted, they did pretty much what ever critic of the site has believed was going to happen as a natural stage of evolution. At some point, they were going to stab themselves in the foot and then wonder why it hurts so much to keep on walking.

What’s interesting is that OnlyFans didn’t start out as a site geared around promoting sex workers. It was designed as one of those sites that hoped to attract celebrities who would use it to communicate with their fans. And then a guy who ran a cam girl site bought a controlling interest and then pimped it out to the cam girls who used his site. In a very short amount of time, it became known as a sex-friendly site, and then the pandemic hit. The rest is, well, history.

The site would probably continue to grow (and still might) on the backs of sex workers, but as often happens in this kind of situation, the owners ran afoul of payment processers who refuse to have anything to do with this industry. And thus, the situation that emerges today (after the backlash of starting to realize that its bread and butter was starting to jump ship and those that they wanted to attract still consider the site to be one that is cloaked in porn.

But this isn’t the first time this has happened in the Internet era. Pornhub went through this problem before (and survived) as did, and might even again, Patreon. Similarly, years back, during the early days of the Internet, I was a web designer for an adult bookstore, and the Internet service company they used had been sex positive, as was the manufacturer of the bookstore’s shopping cart. Well, one weekend in the middle of the night, the bookstore owner received an angry communication from the company that made the shopping cart, calling her all sorts of derogatory names and indicating that his company could no longer continue doing business with a purveyor of filth, immediately cutting off all access to the shopping cart. Shortly after that, the web site provider also contacted her and said something similar, stating that their company refused to do business with a porn business. Keep in mind, both of these companies had been profiting from an association with her company for over four years before these announcements and there had never been any concerns in the past. As a matter of fact, they had actually gone through lengths to get her business in the first place.

So, almost overnight, I had to find her a new Internet web site provider and then ran into a wall of companies that couldn’t promise not to take the same action one day concerning hosting her shopping cart. So, I sat down for two weekends and crafted a shopping cart for her from scratch, coding it in PHP.

The point is: She took care of her business regardless of the resistance she encountered because she was both patient and had perseverance. On a slightly amusing front, the two companies (the Internet web site provider and the company that made the shopping cart) both went out of business a few years later due to lack of clientele.

So, that’s kind of where OnlyFans is right now. I’ve been reading very interesting asides from those in the sex worker community who have vowed to move their content to other sites, while a few others seem willing to stick it out. This action by OnlyFans may prove to be a make or break incident, but either way, it should serve as an excellent wake up call for other companies in the future that dare to buck trends. The market corrects, but it doesn’t always correct in a favorable fashion.

What a No-Fly Zone Really Means

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I really shouldn’t have to write this post, but it bothers me that so many people don’t understand what it really means when they advocated for a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s like we’re playing some kind of video game where America (or the west) is so powerful that we have all of the cheat codes enacted, and there’s no way anything bad can happen. Well, we just declared war without actually declaring war again, so in case anyone thinks this is something less than that, you’re wrong. We’re now at war with Libya for as long as it takes to scare a dictator into surrendering, backing down or something equally improbable. In reality, we’re demanding he step down, which then means he either escape to another country that might take him, hope his own people won’t kill him or put him on trial, or that some other equally undesirable event doesn’t befall him. In other words, we’re asking someone to take a path of worse consequences than the one he’s actually in right now. We did the same thing to Saddam Hussein, who held out until we had to put troops on the ground, decimate his country, kill LOTS of his own people, and then finally capture him hiding out in a cellar somewhere, hoping he might not be caught.

Right now, the French have attacked with aircraft. It’s possible one plane has already been shot down. Details are hard to come by this early in the war. But they have engaged the Libyans on the ground.

Which means people are already starting to die. So, no amount of posturing, pretending or ignorance gets us away from the fact that our entrance into this war means people will now die. Yes, people were dying before, but we’re going to be killing people ourselves now. We don’t get to paint over that with new paint and then put up a new car fragrance ornament to hide the smell. We’re killing people now. And we may lose some of our own. This is war.

I’m not against a war. I just want people to know and understand that they’re in one now. Sure, we’ll all go back to the mall on the weekend and buy videogames, dresses and other crap, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that we have aircraft in the air right now bombing people we don’t know anything about, and probably never will, especially since they will be dead soon. Hopefully, it won’t be as bad as some previous wars, and hopefully the survivors won’t grow up to hate anyone from the west, planning our deaths decades from now while we’re celebrating  a holiday or just going about our usual business.

This is war. It sucks. Don’t let anyone try to pretend it’s anything more pleasant.

But they will. Because that’s what spin doctors do with these sorts of subjects. Just hope that we don’t end up having to send soldiers over there to “finish what we started”  because someone in power who will never see combat can’t see any other way around the “dilemma”. War sucks, and it rarely turns out the way you plan, intended, or desired.

Now, back to American Idol and whatever we were doing before I so rudely interrupted with reality.