Houston, We have a Problem (Update)

And it's not good news...

Stripe Update

Again, I’m sorry to have to post this, but this is an update to my earlier post and as you may already know, things have gotten worse.

Please see Riley’s post about her situation, but the bottom line is that what Stripe is doing is pure bullshit. They’re lying. They are lying fucking hypocrites. That’s all there is to it.

I’m putting a button below so you can support Riley. You can support freedom of expression and resist the assholes who are throwing their weight around simply because they can; because they think it’s fun, because they crave the power to decide what we can and cannot do, while they consume in copious quantities the very things they refuse to let content creators get paid for. It is entirely and absolutely fucked up.

Also, here’s her Monthly Subscription Link.
And her Annual Subscription Link!

So I’m not going to put subscribe buttons on my Substack posts from now on. I’m going to put Support Riley buttons instead. She needs your support much more than I do. Really, the main reason is I have a paywall is to keep kids from seeing things I don’t think they should see.

Good healthy sex and erotica are absolutely vital to the lives of mature adults. But kids should not be exposed to that. They need to become mature responsible adults first. It’s as simple as that. So a paywall is the only option I see on Substack to maintain that separation. Yes, I super-appreciate the support and a little money comes in handy for creating the content I want to make. But other things are more important.

I can’t let this go without explaining a bit just how fucked up this is. Riley already did a good job of that in her post, but please forgive me as I get this off my chest.

I reposted below some of the communications she already put in her post that she got from Stripe to highlight the fuckupedness of this.

Screenshot of email to Riley from Stripe

Look at what Stripe is saying. First they claimed this was about posting content with nudity. She took the nudity down. So then they responded, and said, no it had absolutely nothing to do with the content. It’s her business that is restricted. Basically, she has erotica in the title of her Substack, so they won’t allow her to be paid regardless of what she posts.

Here’s the info on Stripe’s Restricted Businesses. Read what they say about what constitutes a “restricted business”:

Adult services, including prostitution, escorts, pay-per-view, sexual massages, fetish services, mail-order brides, and adult live-chat features

Adult video stores

Gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs

Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery, and other media) designed for the purpose of sexual gratification

Any artificial-intelligence generated content that meets the above criteria

That line about any mature audience content that is “intended for sexual gratification.” And note that they say any content; images, videos, literature etc.

So according to Stripe’s policy, all romance that includes a spicy scene is restricted. All cable shows and movies that includes tits, someone’s ass, or a love scene is restricted (to say nothing of the orgy scenes Riley mentioned, and all the fucking I saw on HBO’s Rome years ago). I suppose Michelangelo’s paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are restricted! Classical Greek nude statues are restricted! There are places where guys get super-turned on by the sight of a woman’s ankles or the nape of her neck uncovered. Showing that would be “intended for sexual gratification.” So that has to be restricted! I could go on and on and on about this.

I’ll also note that when I checked the link they provided (https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses), I got 404 error. Just great, assholes.

Screenshot of Stripe’s page. URL: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

So that statement is just fucking bullshit that they put in to allow them (they think) to do any fucking thing they want.

Then there’s this statement from Stripe about “industry guidelines”:

Screenshot of email to Riley from Stripe

This too is absolute bullshit. Stripe is under no such “obligation” and the credit card industry has no such guidelines that impose “strict limits.” If it did, as Riley points out, HBO, Showtime and Netflix accepting credit card payments would be shut down. Amazon would be shut down because it definitely sells erotica and straight-up porn. Obviously, megaporn sites would be shut down.

Is Only Fans still up? Have any of the megaporn sites been shut down? Not that I’m aware of. Amazon is certainly not been shut down and HBO, Showtime and Netflix are still being allowed to accept credit card payments. And on and on…

So this is just lies and rank fucking hypocrisy. Stripe—and Visa who I suspect is putting pressure on Stripe—want to go after small creators who can be intimidated, so they can make a show of combating “evil porn,” while making untold billions off Megaporn, to say nothing of all of the other industries that include something that may be intended for sexual gratification, which is most of them when it comes to producing content.

And oh yes, that “through review” bit. They’re lying about that too. As Riley said, they aren’t reviewing a goddamn thing. They have a bot that sends out lies for them. Maybe at some point, a human being will send out a message reinforcing that lie? We’ll see.

Since Stripe brought it up, I’m going to say a little bit about what the industry standards actually are (or maybe I should say were?) because I worked in this industry.

What the credit card industry really cares about is chargebacks. As you probably know, chargebacks happen when a customer feels they’ve been ripped off; they’re completely different from refunds, which are just good business practice.

So the credit card companies track each individual business to see what their charge-back rate is, for the same reason that banks check people’s credit before they lend money. It’s the charge-back rate that determines what a merchant’s risk profile is. If it gets above a certain number, the credit card companies charge higher fees or could terminate that merchant’s ability to accept credit card payments altogether.

It has nothing to do with content. If you as a merchant make a habit of ripping off your customers, the credit card companies will cut you off. And that is completely legit.

But as I detailed in my last post, about 15 years ago Visa decided it could make extra money off adult sites by charging them an annual fee to accept credit card payments, because they were supposedly higher risk.

Now it’s true that adult sites, especially when they started out, got a sketchy reputation for the way they billed customers. There were also scam sites that used porn to get people to pay for something that really didn’t exist. And there are other issues, specifically related to adult site’s customers, but I’m not going to go into that because I’m already rambling.

The point I want to make is sketchy billing practices are not limited to adult sites. In fact, I got a notice not quite 3 weeks ago that Amazon settled a massive lawsuit over Prime. Amazon was accused of enticing people to sign up for Prime using deceptive practices, making it hard to cancel and other unethical shit. Part of the evidence included records of Amazon execs boasting about it. (See here.)

Rather than let it go to trial, Amazon has decided to pay out $51 to tens of millions of customers whom it’s alleged they either ripped off or attempted to rip off by getting them to “accidentally” sign up for Prime. The total settlement amount is $2.5 billion.

My point is, that this is exactly the kind of behavior that the credit card industry will shut a merchant down for. And Amazon is being forced to pay fucking billions for their alleged unethical business practices.

Do you think Visa is going to stop Amazon from accepting credit card payments? Don’t make me fucking laugh. For one thing, I think Amazon is probably bigger than Visa. I think it’s possible that if Visa told Amazon, “Oh, you’re a high risk business. We’re not going to process payments from you,” Jeff Bezos would simply say, “Fuck you! We’re buying your ass.” And that would be that. (The SEC might not like that idea, but that’s a completely different topic.)

Again, I’m sorry for the rant. I don’t want this to turn into Robin’s Rant Nest. But this shit makes my blood boil.

I’m going to end with one last comment. Substack is not innocent here, as Riley pointed out. They use Stripe—and only Stripe—to process payments for the creators they host. And I haven’t heard a word from them about Stripe’s policies.

The one really black mark against Substack is that they are impossible to get a hold of. All they have is this worthless AI Chat thing that gives you bad information and won’t allow you to actually talk to a human being to resolve your issue. So there is no way online to get a hold of actual people at Substack to ask them what they think of Stripe’s policies and what they intend to do about it. As Riley pointed out, Substack presents itself as a champion of free expression, so if that isn’t just bullshit, they need to take a stand and explain whether they agree with Stripe or not.

Now I will say, I think this policy—if you can call it that—from Stripe is new. My evidence for this is that Ream, another site you may be aware of that I checked out before coming here, also uses Stripe for their payment processing. Ream is basically an adult site, in that when I checked them out everyone I saw that was making any money there published erotica. In fact, Ream was created by an author who was tired of her books getting banned or restricted by other platforms. She wanted a platform where erotica would not be restricted or censored, so she got her partner to build one. Then she picked Stripe for her payment processor.

I really doubt she would have picked Stripe if Stripe had a restricted-business policy that banned any and all content that someone somewhere might consider erotic, which of course is exactly what they’ve done.

So this must be new and I’m wondering how she’s responding to it. So this is not just an issue for Substack. But Substack still has an obligation to speak up, and I’m waiting for that. Sadly I’m not very hopeful.

Okay, I’m going to say one last thing and then I’ll end this sad ramble. If Stripe really has this policy, as much as I disagree with it, they pretty much get to do that. But here’s the deal: if this is a legit policy, they have to enforce it in a consistent manner. That means they have to stop accepting payments for me too. Just like Riley, I have erotica in my title. And I do create some sexy content. But so far they haven’t done that. My Stripe account is still active.

Based on their communications with Riley, to act in consistent way, Stripe must stop accepting payments from any creator who has ever put up for sale—anywhere, at any time—any content that involves nudity or anything spicy. Because they clearly state it’s not the content on Substack that matters, it’s our business that’s restricted, and if our business is in any tainted by the “erotic”, they can’t process payments from us.

And Stripe is not doing that. I see no evidence that they are doing that or even attempting to do that. They are picking on a few small creators, like Riley—but not me, so far—to scare the rest of us into taking our content down, since we can’t be paid for it.

That makes them a bunch of hypocritical lying sacks of shit. That means it has nothing to do with this bullshit about industry standards, or even that they’re being coerced by Visa. If they were serious about that, they would simply stop accepting payments for every creator who’s flirted with nudity or the erotic, according to their own fucking fake policy.

I’ll accept serious policies I don’t agree with (as long as they aren’t imposed by monopolies; I hate monopolies). What I can’t accept is the lying and hypocrisy. That shows they don’t believe in these policies; they’re trying to hide what they actually are doing. And that makes them despicable.

I have to echo Lincoln’s famous comment in response to the Dred Scott decision. He said if things continued the way they were going, he would prefer to immigrate to someplace where “they made no pretense of loving Liberty... where despotism could be taken pure without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

That pretty much sums up how I’m feeling these days.

What can we do about all this? If history is any guide, not much. It would take a whole lot of people protesting this utter bullshit to force these motherfucking assholes to change their tune. Frankly, I don’t see that happening. Our society, for the most part, has given in to these monopolies and is just bending over and taking it because of a bunch of reasons. That is another rant, which I won’t go into here.

The rest of us are faced with the choice of tilting it windmills, as we used to say, or doing what we can to get on with our lives, in spite of what assholes like Stripe are doing to us.

What you can do though, is support Riley through PayPal. Please consider it.

Thank you for listening. I very much appreciate it. Again, I apologize for the rant.

One positive thing I can say, is it tomorrow is another Clothing Optional Friday! Maybe that’s something we can look forward to? 😄

PS: If you’re in a letter writing mood, here are the addresses you can send letters too. Obviously, those would be polite and firmly worded letters. I can’t say that it would do any good; I have no expectations of that. But who knows…

Stripe
354 Oyster Point Blvd, South San Francisco, 94080.

Substack
111 Sutter St 7th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104.

Here’s the address of Patreon. I’m only including it because you’ll note that all these companies are in San Francisco. Why am I not surprised?

600 Townsend St., Ste. 500, San Francisco, CA 94103.