Lately, as I've been working on migrating my shop from my previous platform (Square) to Shopify and painting a highly suspect peach for social media, I've been contemplating the ways in which the shared visual language we use to communicate some of our more carnal desires has become increasingly warped by its ability to pass the ultimate arbitrator of social acceptability: credit card processors.
Because, obviously, the painting is just a painting of a peach. It's totally not. But it's just obfuscated enough to make it acceptable for international sale without triggering a cascade of legal ramifications that, maybe aren't always enforced, but I tend to always been on the unlucky side of such things.
From the credit card processor standpoint, the calculus is almost entirely clinical; the fact of the matter is that items and artwork of a more "spicy" nature have a much higher incidence rate of chargebacks than other items which puts an industry that is highly based around thin margins at impossibly large scales in a position to say "This thing is more trouble than it's worth." One would suppose that such an industry would gladly let us all buy anything if they legally and profitably could.
However, I believe this explanation belies a much more malicious societal belief. The system almost always trusts at face value when a person calls their credit card company and says that "I would never mean to purchase pornography! I must have been hacked!" In effect, this therefore translates to:
- The only conceivable way someone could have possibly purchased erotic materials is if they were coerced into doing so and therefore
- The work in question has no inherent value that could have possibly been an actual net benefit for someone
- Therefore, we view the false negative (theft of that creator's work through blatant use then refund) as being much less of a concern than a false positive (accusing someone that, maybe, they were horny when they weren't)
To anyone with eyes, it's pretty blatant that theft has much more of a net cultural negative than someone getting mad about being accused of being horny and not receiving a $20 refund. I think that if credit card processors really wanted to, they could develop a reasonable machine learning models to deny false chargebacks for these "risky" categories if they wanted to and lower the overall "risk" for the category. They just don't want to and aren't really pressured by the genpop to do so.
So to avoid all that and have basic access to the conventional finance industry, I feel like content creators who specialize in depicting the risqué components of human existence end up fundamentally having to squeeze their works into a hole that was purposely designed to exclude them or splitting their work into two mutually exclusive halves. It makes it really difficult to escape the containment of sites like Twitter since you're basically having to do double the amount of content work if you want any sort of visibility.
Hence the spicy peach.
To be clear, innuendo is not inherently a malicious thing limiting our freedom to communicate clearly. I think so much of it is a beautiful and creative twist to communicate our desires. What I chafe against is the idea that the only socially acceptable way to communicate desire is through innuendo.