An Open Letter to Patreon

Well then quote the whole bit:

> Take a stand behind your creators who make revolutionary independant content. Stand behind your women and LGBT creators.

In my reading they do always lead with the general call to stand behind vulnerable creators, before specifying some more affected groups:

> We know people who would be homeless if it wasn’t for making porn on Patreon – and it’s not a small number. We know people who now employ many queer performers, workers, subcontractors – all working to make beautiful content.

That is inclusive: There is no identity for whom being homeless would not suck, and they don't limit that sentence in any way.

Reality is also that if you are a porn director targeting a cis male audience you have other options than patreon to get work.

But seriously, I am fortunate to be cis male and heterosexual. Yet still active in a scene that is not represented in the mainstream (and where content creators are often targeted by credit card blocks). I had absolutely no problem reading that letter despite not getting a specific call out to my community in it. Because almost all of the authors there are not queer disabled gender-fluid people of color. They might be one of the above, or two. But they wrote a letter that gives shout outs to all these different dimensions that don't affect them directly. And it strikes me as a misreading that they intended this list of dimensions in which you can be out of the mainstream to be exhaustive.

I see zero evidence in this letter that the authors would consider an alternative independent cis male porn creator, who values the independence that patreon brings, not one of them. As somehow excluded from that call.

Queer-normative cis/hetero exclusionary behaviour exists, and I've seen it. In my reading this letter does not contain any.

> When cis white men get threatened with losing their livelihoods by over-active PC campaigners, do you complain that the fact that they are cis white men features in the story?

If they'd start their complaint with "we as white men" I'd get tired of reading it pretty early too.

> When these stories feature the fact that that man has three children to feed, do you complain about the emotional blackmail?

I'll admit I'm less tired of this particular brand of emotional blackmail. Having children is holding responsibility for other people's lives.

But why does your reasoning apply to the USA but not most of the rest of the western world?

I guess the key phrase there is "leverage". Does your performace succeed? In the case of trans people on US coasts, this seems to be changing. For a short time, their identity had leverage, but the fact that this discussion is criticizing the authors of the letter for trying to leverage trans victim-hood, suggests that this leverage is waning.

As an example of a group without victim-hood leverage, see NAMBLA [1], which represents another sexual orientation, but one which bears no leverage. Another victimized group with seemingly no leverage are those victims of child abuse who are suffering from multiple personality disorder. I know, in the abstract one would say that a victim of child abuse certainly has leverage, but if you read the appeals by those who suffer from severe psychological disorders as a result, you will immediately feel yourself recoil in disgust and grant them no audience. People tend to not see "monsters" as victims, and if we find people too weird or frightening we don't see them as victims. What other groups have no leverage? Perhaps some drug users, we tend to blame them for their problems.

I would argue, that leverage is sometimes directly related to power. For example, the Jews were rich before WWII, and are still rich today. Since the holocaust, their victim-hood has born unparalleled leverage. However, in the same holocaust, the Roma people of the Czech Republic were treated just as badly as the Jews, and being poor, far fewer of them escaped. Yet the Roma have almost no leverage from their holocaust victim-hood.

But do you think that trans people have power?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Man/Boy_Love_As...

Does anyone else recollect the expression “no one owes you a business model”?

There’s many reasons Patreon should want to avoid being a porn payments processor. Blame American Puritanism or whatever, but that’s the milieu in which they operate. They don’t owe it to anyone to bear excess risk just so that someone else can have a profitable hustle at their expense.

If this is such a big issue for the LGBT community Fund a goddamn KS to make a porn-friendly Patreon clone. Or just to Fund starting a porn-friendly payments processor. If the model is profitable rather than a charitable infusion by the processor, then it’ll be good for everyone, wont it?