Look, Patreon cracking down on smutty fan-artists sucks, you’ll get no disagreement from me there, but folks are talking like this is the start of a slippery slope – and no, it isn’t. It’s the end of a slippery slope.
There’s a specific trajectory that platforms like Patreon tend to follow:
1. The platform starts out relying on sex workers for the majority of their business, typically presenting themselves as a safe venue for this type of transaction. Indeed, at first this may legitimately be the case!
2. Once they’ve become established and gained a reputation as a trustworthy service provider, the platform begins stealing money from those same sex workers, usually by freezing their accounts due to minor terms-of-service infractions and claiming any saved balance as “administrative fees”. Sex workers are specifically targeted because the quasi-legal nature of their work leaves them with few options for disputing the platform’s actions.
3. Owing to a combination of institutional inertia and the perception that there are no good alternatives, this misconduct is initially tolerated, allowing the platform to become increasingly brazen and steal increasingly large amounts of money, until a critical point is reached and sex workers begin abandoning the platform en masse.
4. When this tipping point is reached, the platform initiates widespread crackdowns to chase away the stragglers. This forms part of a broader effort to re-write history and claim the platform was never a haven for sex work in the first place, thereby rendering it more palatable to mainstream advertisers and other potential business partners.
5. Once all the sex workers are gone, the platform moves on to sex work adjacent targets and repeats the process. This cycle typically happens several times before they get to targeting smutty fan-artists, but they’ll get there eventually.
Again, I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, but there are a couple of things you need to recognise about the nature of the problem:
a. By the time they get around to going after Sonic the Hedgehog porn, you’re not looking at the thin end of the wedge – you’re looking at the culmination of a process that’s been ongoing for many years; and
b. What you’re seeing isn’t an exercise in misguided puritanism: it’s a business model. When crackdowns on smutty fanart occur, it’s tempting to view it through the lens of fandom drama, but it’s important to recognise that all the fandom drama is really doing is furnishing the platform with a thin veneer of justification for something they were planning on doing anyway. Reforming fandom culture isn’t going to stop it, or even meaningfully slow it down.
(And yes, Paypal itself went through this very process, probably one of the first platforms to do so. Bear that in mind the next time somebody tries to tell you that sure, Elon Musk may be an asshole, but at least he helped found Paypal! During Musk’s tenure, stealing money from sex workers formed a large part of Paypal’s core business model.)
