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This problem has existed forever. As long as I can remember. The main company that seems to be able to process credit cards for porn is CCBill. They seem to hav

This problem has existed forever. As long as I can remember. The main company that seems to be able to process credit cards for porn is CCBill. They seem to have no real competition other than small fringe services. As soon as those services get big enough it raises flags and they get shut down. How and why CCBill are able to do it while others aren’t I don’t know. You can sell snake oil on Shopify all day long but sell a JPG with that shows female nipples and it raises flags. Does anyone know WHY this actually is? I know it’s related to Title 18, Section 2257 somehow, but I don’t understand exactly how, nor why CCBill seems to operate without issue. Can somone with inside knowledge explain? Porn has come such a long way in the last 10 years. Maybe I’m just more progressive than I realize, but I see stuff like X-Art as actual art and I wish there was something like iTunes for porn. If someone can explain to be what the legal roadblock is for porn billing and how one might be able to get around it, I’d be the first investor and founder. Seriously. There is so much great pornography out there now I feel like you could actually change the way people think about it and maybe even clean up the industry. It doesn’t have to be a dirty thing you bury under 10 cryptic folders.

corobo 8y ago
I’m not sure how competitive they are but stripe recommends PaymentCloud[1] when they boot you because you’re high risk [1] https://paymentcloudinc.com https://paymentcloudinc.com
pvarangot 8y ago
I always thought this as payment processors optimizing their bussiness model till it's overfitted to "non-porn". I never worked in porn but I did work with payment and clearance systems from carrier companies a long time ago, think billing customers for SMS messages to specific numbers and then getting clearance for the carrier for the money. The risk of fraud or any kind of weird issue is stupidly higher for porn. Either simple "customer doesn't have the money" fraud or "the police knocks on your door because you got money from X customer" fraud. So maybe you need more people or better systems to deal with it while still being profitable. CCBill charges are huge when compared to other credit card processors. It's easy to reduce costs and complexity until the easiest solution to keep or improve current margins is don't do porn.
- smelendez 8y ago
  Yeah, it may well be chargebacks, not legal or moral concerns. I live in New Orleans, which has an unusual concentration of strip clubs. I've heard people who work in them complain that to use a credit card, they require you to let them photograph your ID, make an impression or photo of your card, and have you sign a carbon copied form. This gives some customers cold enough feet that they head out, but the reason is that people will run up a serious tab with lap dances, champagne and whatever else and then strenuously deny they ever set foot in such an establishment. I'm sure porn has the same problem. It's pretty gross as far as I'm concerned. There's no legitimate moral distinction between falsely saying you never signed up for (random porn service) and Netflix, or saying you never got a lap dance and saying you never went to the ballet, and people acting differently causes legal businesses with avid customers real harm.
  - dvtv75 8y ago
    A (former) friend of mine used to work for a very popular porn site. He said that some absurd number of sign-ups were canceled through chargeback, and he figured it was kids signing up to a porn site and then the parents getting the bill at the end of the month. Apparently, he could tell, because genuine users would browse for a bit, download some stuff, but the ones who were more likely to do a chargeback would log in, download much of the site's content in a few days.
    - Waterluvian 8y ago
      I wonder if it might be because of how much free porn there is. "Paying for porn is stupid. But I just have to have everything of this specific person or fetish, so I'll pay, scrape, then chargeback." I'm skeptical that it's a lot of kids because I feel like finding free porn is pretty darn easy if you try. Why would they ever bother with all the friction that goes with charging their parents CC? (Just checked, the top three Googles for "free porn" are sites with a lifetime of free porn)
      - dvtv75 8y ago
peterwwillis 8y ago
> Maybe I’m just more progressive than I realize, but I see stuff like X-Art as actual art You can go to a museum and see highly lauded art with nipples in it. But put a picture of that painting online and you're a pornographer.
closeparen 8y ago
Porn buyers preserve their relationships with spouses who notice the charges by denying knowledge of them. Porn transactions are thus exceptionally likely to be treated as fraud, whether or not they actually are. That’s the folk tale, anyway.
hibikir 8y ago
I have not tried to do what you describe, but this is my best take: The problem isn't really the law most of the time: It's how companies are hooked up to the financial system. The Stripes and Paypals of the world aren't really connected to all the credit card networks directly: There's layers underneath, and one of them is banks that act as intermediaries. These kind of companies start with one bank (say, Wells Fargo), and might expand to more as they want to expand to other parts of the world. Eventually, they might have dozens of banking partners that are part of the transaction processing. Even though this online processors are carrying most of the fraud risk, they still have to adhere to what their baking partners will accept, and pretty much every bank out there will tell them things that they can't sponsor past what is legal, and that almost always includes pornography, drug paraphernalia, medicines and sex toys. The bank will come knocking to their door, and they'll have to say no. This is not just down to banks disliking the businesses for image reasons, but also has to do with risk: The number of stolen credit cards used in those sites, and the amount of disputes on the charges for other reasons is pretty high compared to other lines of business. Therefore, what you need is to form all your banking relationships with entities that have no problem with you processing cards for porn sites. So you have to find banks that will deal with this companies at all, and then convince them that your fraud protection is good enough, and your pockets deep enough, to take the risk.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  The large payment providers have a banking license you can’t really grow without it that’s your hook into the credit card industry. PayPal, Stripe and the rest are their own https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquiring_bank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquiring_bank which means they can process the payment themselves.
dogma1138 8y ago
CCBill has a “relationship” with First Data which is a very large payment processor and an acquiring bank. They are also willing to eat the fines that come with supporting merchants with more than 1% chargeback. The reason why there aren’t many more of them isn’t morality it’s just very hard to maintain profits in this environment. Patreon will have to pay fines if they have high chargeback rates and those fines are intentionally huge so for them it’s a none-brainer they need to reduce chargeback rates and their adult content creators are likely one of the biggest offenders and even if they are not they are an easy sacrifice to the PCI gods.
marcus_holmes 8y ago
I used to work for a payment processor. Our upstream bank would not allow us to handle any adult content at all. The justification used is that adult content is too risky because of chargeback rates. Apparently the chargeback rates on adult content is really high. Anecdotally, it makes sense. You buy the nude pics, your husband sees the charge on your card, "I was hacked" boom, chargeback. You buy the nude pics, do the nasty alone in your room, have some regrets once the pressure to do the nasty is gone, try to get a refund, get refused, boom chargeback. I'm not sure that quite holds up in our post-Pornhub world, where everyone is openly admitting to using porn these days. But banks are conservative (in all the ways) and slow to change.
- turnitoff 8y ago
  That's not the real reason (source: used to work in adult). High chargebacks in high-risk industries are related to three things: 1) The goods are digital and delivered immediately. This means that if I just got a hold of a 100 stolen CC numbers and want to test whether or not they're legit before moving on to physical goods, I'm going to test them out at one such service - which shoots up the CB/refund rate. 2) This also creates a secondary market for illicitly opened accounts / access, which is easy money (and anything else you can imagine down the lane on piracy etc.) 3) Because the margins are so low due to high marketing costs + competition, many sites (especially in the past) would sign the user up to endless recurring billing schemes which are nigh impossible (or costly) to cancel, also driving up the chargeback rate.
  - brettz 8y ago
    Yes this is true. Also most porn subscriptions have "cross-sales" meaning you get signed up to another subscription when you join the first. This leads to higher chargebacks. I run product for Pornhub Premium, we have a clean, no cross-sale offer and it's very easy to cancel, our chargeback ratio is near 0.
    - kthejoker2 8y ago
      AMA? Would be interesting to hear more.
Lazare 8y ago
I believe the logic is: 1) Porn (crypto, gambling, etc.) transactions are significantly riskier than other transactions. 2) CC processing involves a long chain of intermediaries. 3) At every step of the chain there's strong pressure upstream for better rates, and strong pressure downstream to ensure the blended payment stream is safer. So, eventually, someone in the chain gets told "sure, we can give you better rates, but only if you can improve the risk profile of your payment stream". And then they crunch the numbers, and decide it's worth it, knowing they'll lose some volume but hoping they can make it up with better margins. And then the people who churn find one of the remaining partners who hasn't adopted strict policies, and this repeats until all the "dodgy" payments are going through a high-fee chain that can't possibly afford to change their policies, and everyone else is going through a low-fee chain. If you check CCBill, their "Blue" package that allows adult content runs 10.8% to 14.5%, with a $1,000 yearly "high risk registration fee". And even their normal plan (which doesn't allow adult content) seems to be 5.9% + $0.55 per transaction? Braintree is 2.9% + $0.30; Stripe is the same. You can see why, eg, Stripe would be happy to leave CCBill to have a virtual monopily on adult transactions: There's not that many of them, they're so risky you'll need to charge absurdly high rates just to cover your costs, and just touching them at all will potentially taint your other transactions in the eyes of your upstream partners, driving up your rates. Conversely, you can see why CCBill will never kick the adult payments off their platform; it's the only thing they have to offer. Disruptive startups work best when they can start with a niche and then grow from there, but the logic of the financial system makes that very difficult.
- girvo 8y ago
  > adult transactions: There's not that many of them I genuinely wonder how true this is. Does anyone know of any stats/data that have been released about it?
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    Even for people who but lots of it, what percentage of their monthly transaction count will it be?
  - Paul-ish 8y ago
shawn 8y ago
iTunes for porn You're the only other person I've seen use this phrase. If you're serious about working on this, contact me.
- digianarchist 8y ago
  There’s never going to be iTunes for porn because micro payments are an unsolved problem. Solve that and you’ll make more mone.
  - shawn 8y ago
    https://spankchain.com/ https://spankchain.com/ seems to solve it.
lizardskull 8y ago
I am about to go put myself at risk right now with a casual partner. I believe in a another simulation where porn did not exist I’d be snuggled up and listening to some snores of my beautiful wife and newborn. But it exists and grows.
stickfigure 8y ago
I was the CTO of kink.com in the mid-2000s. My biggest challenge of that time was reliable billing. That said, it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be. When you have a long history of low chargebacks you can make some deals, and even then there were a few options. We always had a few processors integrated at any one time because 1) any processor could pull the plug on us with minimal notice and 2) these organizations tended to be technologically inept and their platforms were not reliable. Some payments we processed through our own merchant account. We tried to get more merchant accounts and were unsuccessful. It's difficult because (IIRC) banks only allow a certain percentage of their total volume to be "high risk" and porn is in that bucket no matter how low your chargeback rate is and how long you've been established. It's something you could probably arbitrage profitably if you were a bank, but by the time you get to be a big enough bank you are bound into the stodgy culture of banking ("ewww porn"). That ship has sailed however; there's not much money in porn anymore. The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before, and you can get it free... uploaded to tube sites by the very producers themselves, hoping to get exposure.
- cantrevealname 8y ago
  > The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before. Then why is so much porn still being made if there's so little money in it today?
  - thefounder 8y ago
    Because it's easier to produce?
  - sametmax 8y ago
    There is money. But for current players, not disrupters. Ads and paid niche content manes the bulk of it. Source: work with porn people.
    - pdimitar 8y ago
bambamboom 8y ago
What does progressive have to do with "seeing X-art as art"? Who made that definition?
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  It isn't about seeing x-rated stuff as art, but rather about the ability to be open about sex. Traditional-minded people are rarely as open about it in my experience. I'm female. I watch porn. So does my spouse. There is no secret there. If either of us were going to a strip club for whatever reason or visited a prostitute somewhere legal, we can simply tell each other about it knowing the other won't be angry. We can openly discuss folks we are attracted to. We understand that finding others attractive is normal human behavior, and would rather not lie about it. On the other hand, I've known plenty of women that get angry about men watching porn. I have known plenty of men that won't admit to their wife - this person they claim to trust - that they watch porn or have visited a strip club. There are others that actively protest against porn for whatever reason. In general, you find more "porn is morally wrong!" arguements in conservative environments.
  - jjuhl 8y ago
    Most sane stance I've seen yet.
    - sizzle 8y ago
      "visited a prostitute" That's pretty fringe...
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        That in particular is, and hasn't been something that happened. But you know, if either of us want something the other isn't so willing to do, we both understand. Not such a big deal for us - though I do understand where it would be a line for other folks. And that's OK, the main point is to be open about this sort of thing and be able to discuss it without fear of the other being angry. Yes, this has been discussed in my household, more in the theoretical sense because we both have some hesitations about the other person not wanting to be involved or worse, forced by a third, unknown party... even where it is legal. My own main reasoning for wanting such a thing is because I'm bisexual, and there are lots more men available for me than women. Folks have urges and get stuff stuck in their head, after all. Being able to share these thoughts is pretty great. The rest of it is pretty normal stuff (watching porn, being physically attracted to others), though it is stuff folks tend to not discuss openly.
nasredin 8y ago
The 2257 is the law requiring proof of age paperwork be kept for adult performers IIRC. It's the "custodian of record" you MAY see at the beginning of a FakeTaxi or Hospital.
fastball 8y ago
Seems like a pretty good use case for cryptocurrency.
otakucode 8y ago
Adult content usually sees large volumes of chargebacks. This is because when people are aroused, their inhibitions markedly decline. Because modern people do not see themselves as fundamentally sexual beings, when the arousal has passed they feel regret, shame, or that the person who made the charge "wasn't them" or similar, so they feel no moral reluctance to refuse to pay for the content they enjoyed. It's not really something that can be fixed, the human element of it anyway. What can and should be fixed are payment processors. They are very lightly regulated taxing bodies whose policies are not decided by elected representatives, yet control the majority of our economy. If payment processors wanted to actively override the decisions of the Federal Reserve and set national monetary policy they could do it tomorrow. It's really pretty absurd how a handful of companies who do nothing but shuffle numbers from one place to another not only charge steep fees for the service, but also manage to charge a percentage of the transaction - as if transferring a bigger number down a wire cost more! In the past there was some sense in that there were liabilities involved, but most all of that has been eliminated and only the fees remain.

corobo 8y ago

I’m not sure how competitive they are but stripe recommends PaymentCloud[1] when they boot you because you’re high risk [1] https://paymentcloudinc.com https://paymentcloudinc.com

pvarangot 8y ago

I always thought this as payment processors optimizing their bussiness model till it's overfitted to "non-porn". I never worked in porn but I did work with payment and clearance systems from carrier companies a long time ago, think billing customers for SMS messages to specific numbers and then getting clearance for the carrier for the money. The risk of fraud or any kind of weird issue is stupidly higher for porn. Either simple "customer doesn't have the money" fraud or "the police knocks on your door because you got money from X customer" fraud. So maybe you need more people or better systems to deal with it while still being profitable. CCBill charges are huge when compared to other credit card processors. It's easy to reduce costs and complexity until the easiest solution to keep or improve current margins is don't do porn.

smelendez 8y ago
Yeah, it may well be chargebacks, not legal or moral concerns. I live in New Orleans, which has an unusual concentration of strip clubs. I've heard people who work in them complain that to use a credit card, they require you to let them photograph your ID, make an impression or photo of your card, and have you sign a carbon copied form. This gives some customers cold enough feet that they head out, but the reason is that people will run up a serious tab with lap dances, champagne and whatever else and then strenuously deny they ever set foot in such an establishment. I'm sure porn has the same problem. It's pretty gross as far as I'm concerned. There's no legitimate moral distinction between falsely saying you never signed up for (random porn service) and Netflix, or saying you never got a lap dance and saying you never went to the ballet, and people acting differently causes legal businesses with avid customers real harm.
- dvtv75 8y ago
  A (former) friend of mine used to work for a very popular porn site. He said that some absurd number of sign-ups were canceled through chargeback, and he figured it was kids signing up to a porn site and then the parents getting the bill at the end of the month. Apparently, he could tell, because genuine users would browse for a bit, download some stuff, but the ones who were more likely to do a chargeback would log in, download much of the site's content in a few days.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I wonder if it might be because of how much free porn there is. "Paying for porn is stupid. But I just have to have everything of this specific person or fetish, so I'll pay, scrape, then chargeback." I'm skeptical that it's a lot of kids because I feel like finding free porn is pretty darn easy if you try. Why would they ever bother with all the friction that goes with charging their parents CC? (Just checked, the top three Googles for "free porn" are sites with a lifetime of free porn)
    - dvtv75 8y ago

peterwwillis 8y ago

> Maybe I’m just more progressive than I realize, but I see stuff like X-Art as actual art You can go to a museum and see highly lauded art with nipples in it. But put a picture of that painting online and you're a pornographer.

closeparen 8y ago

Porn buyers preserve their relationships with spouses who notice the charges by denying knowledge of them. Porn transactions are thus exceptionally likely to be treated as fraud, whether or not they actually are. That’s the folk tale, anyway.

hibikir 8y ago

I have not tried to do what you describe, but this is my best take: The problem isn't really the law most of the time: It's how companies are hooked up to the financial system. The Stripes and Paypals of the world aren't really connected to all the credit card networks directly: There's layers underneath, and one of them is banks that act as intermediaries. These kind of companies start with one bank (say, Wells Fargo), and might expand to more as they want to expand to other parts of the world. Eventually, they might have dozens of banking partners that are part of the transaction processing. Even though this online processors are carrying most of the fraud risk, they still have to adhere to what their baking partners will accept, and pretty much every bank out there will tell them things that they can't sponsor past what is legal, and that almost always includes pornography, drug paraphernalia, medicines and sex toys. The bank will come knocking to their door, and they'll have to say no. This is not just down to banks disliking the businesses for image reasons, but also has to do with risk: The number of stolen credit cards used in those sites, and the amount of disputes on the charges for other reasons is pretty high compared to other lines of business. Therefore, what you need is to form all your banking relationships with entities that have no problem with you processing cards for porn sites. So you have to find banks that will deal with this companies at all, and then convince them that your fraud protection is good enough, and your pockets deep enough, to take the risk.

dogma1138 8y ago
The large payment providers have a banking license you can’t really grow without it that’s your hook into the credit card industry. PayPal, Stripe and the rest are their own https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquiring_bank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquiring_bank which means they can process the payment themselves.

dogma1138 8y ago

CCBill has a “relationship” with First Data which is a very large payment processor and an acquiring bank. They are also willing to eat the fines that come with supporting merchants with more than 1% chargeback. The reason why there aren’t many more of them isn’t morality it’s just very hard to maintain profits in this environment. Patreon will have to pay fines if they have high chargeback rates and those fines are intentionally huge so for them it’s a none-brainer they need to reduce chargeback rates and their adult content creators are likely one of the biggest offenders and even if they are not they are an easy sacrifice to the PCI gods.

marcus_holmes 8y ago

I used to work for a payment processor. Our upstream bank would not allow us to handle any adult content at all. The justification used is that adult content is too risky because of chargeback rates. Apparently the chargeback rates on adult content is really high. Anecdotally, it makes sense. You buy the nude pics, your husband sees the charge on your card, "I was hacked" boom, chargeback. You buy the nude pics, do the nasty alone in your room, have some regrets once the pressure to do the nasty is gone, try to get a refund, get refused, boom chargeback. I'm not sure that quite holds up in our post-Pornhub world, where everyone is openly admitting to using porn these days. But banks are conservative (in all the ways) and slow to change.

turnitoff 8y ago
That's not the real reason (source: used to work in adult). High chargebacks in high-risk industries are related to three things: 1) The goods are digital and delivered immediately. This means that if I just got a hold of a 100 stolen CC numbers and want to test whether or not they're legit before moving on to physical goods, I'm going to test them out at one such service - which shoots up the CB/refund rate. 2) This also creates a secondary market for illicitly opened accounts / access, which is easy money (and anything else you can imagine down the lane on piracy etc.) 3) Because the margins are so low due to high marketing costs + competition, many sites (especially in the past) would sign the user up to endless recurring billing schemes which are nigh impossible (or costly) to cancel, also driving up the chargeback rate.
- brettz 8y ago
  Yes this is true. Also most porn subscriptions have "cross-sales" meaning you get signed up to another subscription when you join the first. This leads to higher chargebacks. I run product for Pornhub Premium, we have a clean, no cross-sale offer and it's very easy to cancel, our chargeback ratio is near 0.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    AMA? Would be interesting to hear more.

Lazare 8y ago

I believe the logic is: 1) Porn (crypto, gambling, etc.) transactions are significantly riskier than other transactions. 2) CC processing involves a long chain of intermediaries. 3) At every step of the chain there's strong pressure upstream for better rates, and strong pressure downstream to ensure the blended payment stream is safer. So, eventually, someone in the chain gets told "sure, we can give you better rates, but only if you can improve the risk profile of your payment stream". And then they crunch the numbers, and decide it's worth it, knowing they'll lose some volume but hoping they can make it up with better margins. And then the people who churn find one of the remaining partners who hasn't adopted strict policies, and this repeats until all the "dodgy" payments are going through a high-fee chain that can't possibly afford to change their policies, and everyone else is going through a low-fee chain. If you check CCBill, their "Blue" package that allows adult content runs 10.8% to 14.5%, with a $1,000 yearly "high risk registration fee". And even their normal plan (which doesn't allow adult content) seems to be 5.9% + $0.55 per transaction? Braintree is 2.9% + $0.30; Stripe is the same. You can see why, eg, Stripe would be happy to leave CCBill to have a virtual monopily on adult transactions: There's not that many of them, they're so risky you'll need to charge absurdly high rates just to cover your costs, and just touching them at all will potentially taint your other transactions in the eyes of your upstream partners, driving up your rates. Conversely, you can see why CCBill will never kick the adult payments off their platform; it's the only thing they have to offer. Disruptive startups work best when they can start with a niche and then grow from there, but the logic of the financial system makes that very difficult.

girvo 8y ago
> adult transactions: There's not that many of them I genuinely wonder how true this is. Does anyone know of any stats/data that have been released about it?
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Even for people who but lots of it, what percentage of their monthly transaction count will it be?
- Paul-ish 8y ago

shawn 8y ago

iTunes for porn You're the only other person I've seen use this phrase. If you're serious about working on this, contact me.

digianarchist 8y ago
There’s never going to be iTunes for porn because micro payments are an unsolved problem. Solve that and you’ll make more mone.
- shawn 8y ago
  https://spankchain.com/ https://spankchain.com/ seems to solve it.

lizardskull 8y ago

I am about to go put myself at risk right now with a casual partner. I believe in a another simulation where porn did not exist I’d be snuggled up and listening to some snores of my beautiful wife and newborn. But it exists and grows.

stickfigure 8y ago

I was the CTO of kink.com in the mid-2000s. My biggest challenge of that time was reliable billing. That said, it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be. When you have a long history of low chargebacks you can make some deals, and even then there were a few options. We always had a few processors integrated at any one time because 1) any processor could pull the plug on us with minimal notice and 2) these organizations tended to be technologically inept and their platforms were not reliable. Some payments we processed through our own merchant account. We tried to get more merchant accounts and were unsuccessful. It's difficult because (IIRC) banks only allow a certain percentage of their total volume to be "high risk" and porn is in that bucket no matter how low your chargeback rate is and how long you've been established. It's something you could probably arbitrage profitably if you were a bank, but by the time you get to be a big enough bank you are bound into the stodgy culture of banking ("ewww porn"). That ship has sailed however; there's not much money in porn anymore. The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before, and you can get it free... uploaded to tube sites by the very producers themselves, hoping to get exposure.

cantrevealname 8y ago
> The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before. Then why is so much porn still being made if there's so little money in it today?
- thefounder 8y ago
  Because it's easier to produce?
- sametmax 8y ago
  There is money. But for current players, not disrupters. Ads and paid niche content manes the bulk of it. Source: work with porn people.
  - pdimitar 8y ago

bambamboom 8y ago

What does progressive have to do with "seeing X-art as art"? Who made that definition?

Broken_Hippo 8y ago
It isn't about seeing x-rated stuff as art, but rather about the ability to be open about sex. Traditional-minded people are rarely as open about it in my experience. I'm female. I watch porn. So does my spouse. There is no secret there. If either of us were going to a strip club for whatever reason or visited a prostitute somewhere legal, we can simply tell each other about it knowing the other won't be angry. We can openly discuss folks we are attracted to. We understand that finding others attractive is normal human behavior, and would rather not lie about it. On the other hand, I've known plenty of women that get angry about men watching porn. I have known plenty of men that won't admit to their wife - this person they claim to trust - that they watch porn or have visited a strip club. There are others that actively protest against porn for whatever reason. In general, you find more "porn is morally wrong!" arguements in conservative environments.
- jjuhl 8y ago
  Most sane stance I've seen yet.
  - sizzle 8y ago
    "visited a prostitute" That's pretty fringe...
    - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      That in particular is, and hasn't been something that happened. But you know, if either of us want something the other isn't so willing to do, we both understand. Not such a big deal for us - though I do understand where it would be a line for other folks. And that's OK, the main point is to be open about this sort of thing and be able to discuss it without fear of the other being angry. Yes, this has been discussed in my household, more in the theoretical sense because we both have some hesitations about the other person not wanting to be involved or worse, forced by a third, unknown party... even where it is legal. My own main reasoning for wanting such a thing is because I'm bisexual, and there are lots more men available for me than women. Folks have urges and get stuff stuck in their head, after all. Being able to share these thoughts is pretty great. The rest of it is pretty normal stuff (watching porn, being physically attracted to others), though it is stuff folks tend to not discuss openly.

nasredin 8y ago

The 2257 is the law requiring proof of age paperwork be kept for adult performers IIRC. It's the "custodian of record" you MAY see at the beginning of a FakeTaxi or Hospital.

fastball 8y ago

Seems like a pretty good use case for cryptocurrency.

otakucode 8y ago

Adult content usually sees large volumes of chargebacks. This is because when people are aroused, their inhibitions markedly decline. Because modern people do not see themselves as fundamentally sexual beings, when the arousal has passed they feel regret, shame, or that the person who made the charge "wasn't them" or similar, so they feel no moral reluctance to refuse to pay for the content they enjoyed. It's not really something that can be fixed, the human element of it anyway. What can and should be fixed are payment processors. They are very lightly regulated taxing bodies whose policies are not decided by elected representatives, yet control the majority of our economy. If payment processors wanted to actively override the decisions of the Federal Reserve and set national monetary policy they could do it tomorrow. It's really pretty absurd how a handful of companies who do nothing but shuffle numbers from one place to another not only charge steep fees for the service, but also manage to charge a percentage of the transaction - as if transferring a bigger number down a wire cost more! In the past there was some sense in that there were liabilities involved, but most all of that has been eliminated and only the fees remain.