Being in the business of sex means routinely dealing with bank-account closures, account seizures, and removal of services — actions that disproportionately affect female entrepreneurs.
Targeted
A decade of reports across multiple sectors shows that companies like PayPal, Chase, Square, Amazon, and WePay have denied female entrepreneurs in sex-related businesses access to equal economic opportunities. And despite what companies like Square say about “leveling the playing field,” the situation is only getting worse. People involved in sexually oriented businesses of all kinds have faced sudden and unexplained bank-account closures, crowd-funding campaign shutdowns, online payment-processor account shutdowns, account seizures, and the removal of such services as wish lists. These actions occur without recourse, with companies citing policies related to obscenity, risk assessment, or terms prohibiting pornography, which is often listed alongside illegal activities.
That porn stars are treated poorly by banks, fundraising websites, and social-networking sites is common knowledge to anyone who keeps up with national news. The most-cited detail in press coverage is the complainants’ occupations; less frequently noted is that they’re predominantly female — as are most Western porn performers, sex workers, independent sex retailers, erotic writers, and a sizable chunk of the internet’s new generation of online pornographers. The problem goes beyond a string of isolated incidents, and the same company names appear frequently — though Chase and PayPal emerge as the undisputed leaders.
When JPMorgan Chase closed the accounts of several porn stars in April 2014, Penthouse Pet Teagan Presley told Vice magazine that Chase Bank (a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase) had terminated her bank account because she was considered “high risk.” Shortly afterward, performers Dakota Skye, Layton Benton, and Veronica Avluv also received letters from Chase notifying them of immediate account termination without explanation. Adult-film director David Lord was targeted as well, in what became a sweep that some believe was tied to the Justice Department’s bank-fraud program, dubbed Operation Choke Point.
After Presley’s letter of termination was published online, the story made national news, and an online petition urging Chase to stop discriminating against porn stars garnered 10,000 signatures. JPMorgan Chase went on the defensive. The company told Mother Jones magazine that Operation Choke Point had nothing to do with the closures: “There’s not a targeted effort to exit consumers’ accounts because of an affiliation with an industry [and] we have no policy that would prohibit a consumer from having a checking account because of an affiliation with this industry.”
When organizations are pressed for a reason, the conversation inevitably returns to risk. But even the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council instructs that in a bank’s risk-assessment processes, “it is essential that banks exercise judgment and neither define nor treat all members of a specific category of customer as posing the same level of risk.” The FFIEC notes the types of customers considered to be high risk, like some professional service providers. (One significant example of concern noted is not porn stars or erotica writers, but lawyers.)
It’s up for debate just how “high risk” adult entrepreneurs are — or whether Chase, PayPal, Square, We Pay, Amazon, and other companies are simply getting away with “redlining” — the practice of denying services based on discrimination.
During the time porn stars were losing their accounts, Chase refused to process payments for Lovability CEO Tiffany Gaines, whose company sells condoms. In the harsh light of media attention, including CNBC pointing out that Chase Bank handles the mergers and acquisitions of Trojan condoms, Chase relented. But Gaines said when the CMO of Chase Paymentech called to “apologize for the ‘misunderstanding,’ she agreed to process my company’s payments, but would not agree to officially remove condoms from the ‘prohibited adult’ category.”
But for banks, employment-based redlining is business as usual. In 2013, the porn star Stoya was denied an account outright by Chase, while Penthouse Pet Chanel Preston experienced sudden account termination at a different bank, Los Angeles City National Bank. In 2012, Cindy Gallop launched a company called MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, a user-submitted porn site based on Gallop’s infamous TED Talk, which played with the idea of “real-world sex” versus “porn sex.” She discovered what countless other sex entrepreneurs go through when trying to do simple banking and payment processing. Gallop had raised $500,000 from an undisclosed angel investor, but “couldn’t work with PayPal, couldn’t work with Amazon, couldn’t work with Google Checkout, couldn’t work with any of the main merchant partner gateways.”
Gallop adds, “We thought: Let’s go back to Chase; we have a business banking account there; let’s apply for a commercial account. Unfortunately, that application surfaced the nature of our business within higher levels at Chase. And it resulted in a meeting with a more senior guy, who essentially said to us, ‘Not only can we not give you a commercial account, but you now need to close your business bank account.’”
While the internet ushered in an empowered landscape for sex workers and porn, and facilitated access to a market eager for women-run and -directed porn businesses, denial of access to economic opportunity has also blossomed. Over the past ten years, PayPal — the world’s most ubiquitous payment processor — has become notorious for seizing accounts and keeping money. Five years ago, PayPal banned dominatrix January Seraph and any business run or owned by her “for life.” Blogger and adult-industry writer Cara Sutra was banned by PayPal for selling a corset through her sex blog. Porn performer and producer Maggie Mayhem tried to do a fundraiser to do relief work in Haiti; PayPal closed her account and seized her funds after she linked to it from her sex blog. PayPal told Mayhem that the “dispute was ultimately with a Visa policy about ‘blasphemy.’” Vicki Gallas, a former escort, was banned from using PayPal to process payments for her memoirs because they included stories about sex work. The Seattle Erotic Art Festival also had its account frozen, even though it only used the service to process fine-art submission fees.
Erotica writers were purged from PayPal’s business channels in 2012 when the company told online booksellers BookStrand, All Romance Ebooks, eXcessica, and Smashwords to remove titles PayPal considered “obscene” under parent company eBay’s policies. Author Selena Kitt, owner of eXcessica, noted in her exchanges with PayPal that the company was “targeting legal sex between consenting adults.” As Kitt put it, “PayPal considers anything BDSM to be rape.” To stay afloat, the retailers and publishers gutted their catalogs, essentially banning their own books, which marked a setback for independent erotic authors so large that a collective created the website BannedWriters.com.
Square, thought by many to be a more progressive version of PayPal, has shown itself to be no different in its practices. Many sex workers report having their Square accounts frozen and money seized. Feminist pornographer Courtney Trouble was shut down by both PayPal and Square. Searah Deysach is the owner of Chicago’s highly respected, education-focused sex-toy store Early to Bed. She told Penthouse, “I tried so hard to work with Square for Early to Bed, but they would not budge.”
When it comes to commerce, it’s not just in banking that women connected to sex don’t get a fair shake. Amazon removes wish lists if they belong to sex workers or happen to list “inappropriate” items, such as porn or personal massagers of a “suggestive shape” — bizarrely, of course, items that are listed for sale on Amazon’s own site. Porn star Tanya Tate was one of many women — along with phone-sex worker Miss Fiona; cam models Emma Ink, Blaze Fyre, and Rose Red; and adult performer Jenna J. Ross — whose Amazon wish list was removed in 2013. Amazon told Tate it deleted her wish list because the company believed it was for “bartering purposes” — then closed her account and seized all the money on her Amazon gift cards when she tried to create a new wish list that was unconnected to her adult-entertainment life. (Amazon eventually returned the gift-card funds.)
When porn star Eden Alexander was suffering from a staph infection that caused organ damage, her crowd-funding attempt to raise money for medical bills was shut down by We Pay. The company stated that its terms and conditions “restrict fundraisers of a pornographic nature” — and that the more than $1,000 she’d raised toward her $4,000 goal would not be collected and disbursed to her.
As with Chase, when Alexander’s experience with We Pay made national headlines, the company backpedaled and offered her help with a new fundraiser. Alexander already had set up a new medical-expense fund on another site, Tilt, that promised not to remove it.
Michelle Austin is another sex-themed entrepreneur shut down by We Pay, allegedly because her business was linked to an adult company; PayPal seized her donations when it discovered a porn shoot on her blog. Queer porn star Andre Shakti attempted to raise funds to travel to the 2014 Feminist Porn Awards; platform Fundly shut her out for being in the “adult” category, forbidden under the terms of its processor, We Pay.
In the aftermath, WePay told Salon that it had targeted Alexander because it had to “abide by the rules and regulations of its acquiring bank (the financial institution that processes credit-card payments on behalf of WePay and our customers) and the operating regulations of the Card Networks (e.g., Visa, MasterCard, American Express). Both acquiring banks and the card brands generally restrict the processing of payments for any activity that is deemed unlawful, high risk, or ‘brand damaging’ to the networks.”
Interestingly, Banned Writers contacted Visa and MasterCard in 2012 to ask if either could confirm or deny whether they had pressured PayPal to enforce banning the sale of erotica books containing taboo subject matter. MasterCard told Banned Writers, “MasterCard had no involvement in the decision made by PayPal to refuse to process payments for certain books …. In this particular scenario, MasterCard would not take action regarding the use of its cards and systems for the sale of lawful materials that seek to explore erotica content of this nature.”
Visa’s response to Madeleine Morris of Banned Writers was similar. Visa’s Doug Michelman, former head of Investor Relations, wrote, “We want to clarify that Visa had no involvement with PayPal’s conclusion on this issue …. Visa would take no action regarding lawful material that seeks to explore erotica in a fictional or educational manner …. Visa is not in the business of censoring cultural product.”
Sex Work Targeted
Regardless, history shows that to companies that handle money, any link to sex, however weak, is an excuse to deny service and seize funds with no recourse. It contributes to a rising inequality that doesn’t come from market forces. And it’s not because banks and online-transaction services favor stability or risk-averse businesses — if this were true, start-ups and app makers would also be disproportionately affected by seizures, denials, and shutdowns.
To the extent that porn stars, erotica writers, sex-toy shop owners, sex workers, lingerie sellers, and the internet’s surge of female porn entrepreneurs have been targeted by financial companies, the conversation seldom centers on the fact that sex is a woman’s business. Why should this matter to companies like Chase, PayPal, and Square? Because in a culture where Chase Bank spearheads initiatives in India for gender equality in business, “trying hard to ensure that women are not deterred from remaining in the workplace,” it might help if all women in business were treated like everyone else.
Within the Legacy section, we have seen editorials that speak of problems which still exist even forty or fifty years later. It should come as no surprise then that the unfairness present in sex work being targeted a mere decade ago still beats our industry up today. In general, a certain percentage of the population will always view any kind of “public” sex as completely inappropriate — if not immoral. Add a commercial aspect to that behavior, and they quiver with either anger or shame. With those people, we will never make any inroads as regards mere acceptance, let alone fair treatment. While a simple search engine query will give you dozens of places to consider should you wish to either educate yourself more — or even contribute to the cause — today, we have found SWARM and the Zepp Wellness to be among the most active. We live in a new/old world here in America for at least the next few years. Doing nothing may not be an option anymore.
