Sex sells? OnlyFans was yet another company to ban porn (even though briefly)

Photo by Womanizer Toys on Unsplash

This article was originally written before OnlyFans’ decision to give up on baning sex and pornography from its website. However, I believe that the main argumentos on freedom of speech, sex as driver of innovation and the whole background to OnlyFan’s initial decision remain the same.

Sex has been a driver of innovation even before the invention of the internet, with the porn industry being quoted as the reason why VHS won the battle with Betamax during the 1970’s (which curiously led to a profound change in the porn industry itself which saw the end of its “golden age” around the same time), and also being in the frontier of internet cash transactions, VR, etc.

Besides being a business of astronomical values, 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography that is accessed by billions of people on a daily basis — XVideos and PornHub are, respectively, the 9th and 10th most visited websites as of January 2021.

However big internet companies have increasingly distanced themselves from sex and pornography, adopting conservative and even retrograde positions, leading to situations that are frankly ridiculous such as the punishments given by Facebook to images that its artificial intelligence confuses with breasts or other parts of the human anatomy or even breast cancer awareness videos and images of statues.

Apple adopts measures to bar even apps that allow the sharing of sexual content in its app store — see the case of Reddit, whose app is designed to make it as difficult as possible to access pornographic images and nudity. Tumblr emerges as an example of a service widely used for sharing pornography and that has been relegated to irrelevance by banning such content to please investors.

Like Tumblr, it is now OnlyFans, considered the mecca of alternative and amateur pornography, to announce that it will close its doors to pornographic content in a move that pleases investors, payment platforms and even so-called progressive sectors, which is increasingly approaching conservatives in its repudiation of sexuality and sex work.

If it is true that “sex sells”, it’s also true that religious fundamentalist groups — as well as sometimes feminist groups — have…