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A straight fetish producer posted this over at XBiz. Apparently it was posted publicly on FetLife (though I haven’t managed to find it there). It has pretty big implications for everyone in adult who’s “out of the mainstream” (and possibly for mainstream sites as well).
They mentione new rules they would follow:
Nothing non-consensual (abduction, rape, etc.)
Nothing that impairs consent (drugs, alcohol, etc.)
No permanent or lasting damage (snuff, lacerations, deep cutting, etc.)
No hate speech (Nazi roleplay, race play, etc.)
Nothing that falls under obscenity (incest, etc. )Doesnt that kind of imply that it’s been allowed up until now? If so, its no surprise they lost their accounts. That together with a “A highly publicized rape case in Australia involving a member of the community;” …
Think about their audience… If you’re into consensual Nazi scat rape scenes with deep cutting, where else are you going to discuss your fantasies? FetLife is sorta it.
Back when I was in GMSMA the refrain was “Safe, Sane, Consensual”. You can do pretty much all the things on their restricted list in a safe, sane and consensual manner. So IMHO, it’s disturbing that even discussion of those things is now forbidden. When people can’t talk about their dark fantasies, bad things happen. They need to be able to talk it out.
I know this has made me think again about the discussions on my forum site. Years ago I sorta set the rules that fantasy discussion, fictional stories, etc. were generally OK (with a few exceptions like stories involving kids – but even that has the exception that people can share what happened to them as kids provided it’s done factually and not eroticized.) but when it got to advocating non-consensual acts on a real person, then that wasn’t OK.
Then there’s the whole public/private thing. I require members to keep the most extreme conversation in members’ only sections of the site, just because I want the site to keep a somewhat low profile. That said everything on FetLife is members’ only – so that policy didn’t protect them.
Ultimately we’re talking about the topics that are legal to discuss, but which Visa/MC don’t like. Personally if someone goes after my forum site I’ll just take sponsor banner ads off the site and replace them with banner ads for my other sites. So the sponsors would then be two steps away from the content that Visa/MC may not like. Free speech is important to me.
I don’t necessarily disagree about being able to talk about consensual fetishes however it’s not strange that VISA/MasterCard would put a stop to it, on the contrary why would they continue to do business with something extreme? We all have probably become more and more careful with what we publish, unfortunately the future seems to go towards more censorship rather than becoming more free.
Rape, Scat, acts of violence involving sexual gratification, pissing on someone, pissing in someone’s mouth have pretty much been taboo for years, nothing new there with Visa/MC. It seems more about enforcing those regulations and setting an example again. Much like Rentboys was and putting the fear of God into people. Is that coffee I’m smelling?
Even high risk processing has limits, and we need to know what they are. I believe in free speech / freedom of expression as much as anyone here, but we still need to play by the rules and stay within the limits of accepted content if we want to use Visa/MC.
