The sex industry is in rude health. Having already seduced academia, health services and, most recently, the police, it is now feeling up financial services under the boardroom table.
Pornographers have had a contentious relationship with banks. The latest example came earlier this week, when The Telegraph reported on dominatrix Madelaine Thomas’s dispute with Barclays.
Thomas not only flogs explicit pictures and videos to losers on OnlyFans (OF), she also promotes a watermarking tool that promises to track media being shared without permission. She claims Barclays refused to open a business account for her start up and later shut down an account linked to her porn income after querying the source of funds. Barclays responded that it has a legal duty to verify where money comes from and only closes accounts when that cannot be done.
“It is crazy that I am trying to get a business bank account for technology that is going to change the landscape in terms of violence against women and girls and yet I am now being investigated for, I do not even know what,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “Barclays don’t like that I earn via platforms like OnlyFans.”
While we can all agree it is wrong that Thomas’s images were leaked without her permission, it is also entirely predictable. Men who use pornography do not care who puts the price tag on the women they masturbate over, whether it is “empowered” women like Thomas doing it to themselves, or Romanian teenagers pimped out by Andrew Tate inspired “agents”. Expressing shock that sites like OF attract scumbags who dehumanise and ignore women’s boundaries is like expressing surprise that an open chicken coop attracts a hungry fox. And this is precisely the point: Thomas’s experience is not an aberration but a comparatively mild example of the abuse endemic within the pornography industry.
This victory put financial services squarely in the crosshairs of the pornography industry
When campaigner Laila Mickelwait revealed that PornHub was hosting, and profiting from, videos of rape and child sexual abuse, she persuaded Visa and Mastercard to pull payment services. Within weeks millions of illegal videos vanished. Today she estimates that roughly 90 per cent of the site’s content has been removed. Mickelwait’s extraordinarily effective campaign exposed the porn giants’ vulnerabilities and demonstrated that banks are the only force they genuinely fear.
As Robert Jessel and I predicted in Pornocracy, this victory put financial services squarely in the crosshairs of the pornography industry. The United States based Free Speech Coalition, the industry’s mouthpiece, has been lobbying federal regulators and White House officials to challenge what it calls “banking discrimination”. The aim could not be clearer; pornography is to be reframed as a harmless form of labour unfairly stigmatised by outdated attitudes.
This reframing has already reached the United Kingdom. OF chief executive Keily Blair has presented the reluctance of some high street banks to serve pornographers as an issue of financial inclusion. According to the logic of this twisted world, social progress is achieved not by ending the abuses upon which the industry is built, but by ensuring that girl boss pornographers can obtain credit cards.
Should pornographers succeed in their work, the victories won by Mickelwait, which forced the removal of rape videos and child abuse images from a major platform, may never be repeated. Because if banks are pressured, legally or socially, into treating the pornography industry as just another business, organisations like PornHub’s parent company, Ethical Partner Capital, and OF will become untouchable. Refusing to process their money will be condemned as discrimination, and the only leverage campaigners currently have, the threat of reputational damage, will disappear.
Debanking individuals because of their beliefs is undeniably wrong. But stopping banks from profiting from pornography, from taking investments from an industry that is tearing at the fabric of our society, and indeed of what it is to be human, is less ethically fraught. The difficulty is that the focus is so often on self-employed performers like Thomas, who pays a 20 percent fee to OF, rather than on the grotesque industry she represents. There is no clean solution. Financial services can either capitulate and endorse the lie that “sex work is work”, or they will face continued accusations of discrimination, and their most vocal critics will be the women of OF.
Maintaining pressure on banks remains the last meaningful defence against the further normalisation of an industry that hurts and threatens us all. And if the banks fall, the rest of us won’t be far behind.
