KickStarter’s Nonstarter TOS
Popular project funding website KickStarter just altered its Terms of Service (TOS) and the internet is not happy about it. Nor should they be, since whoever worded it did a piss poor job of making it sound even remotely workable as a functional set of guidelines. Along with plenty of other misguided platforms in the era of internet censorship, KickStarter has decided to bend the knee and kiss the ring of the major payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Paypal, Etc) which have a tendency to press forward draconian policies regarding material deemed “pornographic,” but in the attempt to comply, they’ve just created a tangled mess of vague and dubious rules that nobody seems able to interpret with any confidence. This has left potential KickStarter users or customers with varying degrees of trepidation, uncertain as to exactly what the fuck is even allowed.
Their email begins by claiming that their platform has always been “a home for bold, boundary-pushing creative work” and lists romance novels, nude art books, and “provocative” comics and insists that this has not been altered by their new Terms of Service, but when we look at the “guidelines” well…we’re not so sure about that. Their very first page of “What’s Supported” claims that “spicy literature, including comics” are allowed but then right on the other side with what isn’t allowed they list “Pornographic or explicitly sexual content.”
Hello? Has anyone told the walnuts at KickStarter Corporate what “spicy” means?
“Spicy” as a concept is, at its heart, a linguistical obfuscation. The term was adopted in spaces such as TikTok and Instagram where the usage of certain words would flag a post for possible deletion, making it imperative that the language surrounding certain subjects be obfuscated in order for it to continue to exist. Some words are invented for this purpose, such as “suicide” turning into “unaliving” while other words are repurposed in order to mask the nature of their subject in order to avoid censorship. Thus: “spicy” replaces “erotic” or “pornographic.” “Spicy” and “pornographic” are synonyms. For anyone at KS Corporate, a synonym is a word that means the exact same thing as another word. You might have missed that episode of Sesame Street but don’t worry, I got your back. Naturally, these two bullet points next to each other on the handy-dandy little table presented to users caused a lot of confusion since it appears very plainly that explicit sexual content is both supported and banned at the same time.
The rest of what is “allowed” are just things presented in a “non-sexual” manner such as swimwear, kissing, cuddling, non-insertable (what the actual fuck, KickStarter) sexual wellness products, etc. Is it just me or is this last one very reminiscent of the catalog advertisements of the 1960’s portraying a very obviously phallic vibrator and framing it as a “neck massager”? Of course it’s not for your wife’s pussy, it’s for her neck you pervert. Meanwhile the other bullet points on the “no-no” side of the table include “Projects created specifically for sexual gratification” as if that’s even remotely enforceable considering the fact that there are more paraphilias than there are people on this planet and literally anything in the fucking world has the possibility to make its way into a spank bank. Not to mention, where’s the threshold? Are they keeping track of how many people comment saying “can’t wait to beat my meat to this art book about trains”? Are they going to go to your BlueSky and take down your photography book featuring old Miatas because they find out you’re fucking your car’s shift stick? What kinds of fetish content will end up overlooked because they can’t prove someone’s made it for their favorite brand of sicko?
Their next table that was apparently an attempt at clearing the air just served to muddy the waters further as they claim that “Romance novels and erotic fiction with mature themes” are allowed but directly on the other side they poo-poo that exact thing in their outlawing of “Copy that frames the project around arousal or access to explicit content rather than the creative or literary work.” Nobody apparently told KS Corpos that romance novels and “erotic” works are made for arousal and that’s why people buy them. Yes, we also like our porn to have a plot sometimes—we’re not completely savage—and even Penthouse Letters segments sometimes have a plot before they get to the good bits. “Erotic” is meant for arousal and erotic fiction is exactly what you’ve just banned after stating that you aren’t banning it. What are we even doing here?
Comic artist Ro Salarian commented on the TOS changes and confusion, “This is the billionth time I’ve been evicted from some corner of the internet for being a filthy degenerate. My world is shrinking rapidly. It’s hard not to feel caged. But I keep going because I refuse to concede.” Many who saw the alterations were shocked by the wildly vague new rules, mocking KS with the old “they’ll know it when they see it” line which is common in censorship cases where a blanket porn ban is set in place without clear boundaries. BlueSky user @ducchunt posted, “The average furry porn comic holds more artistic value than do the atrophied imaginations of any of the bootlicking corpos now turning the screws on artists. Not all art is porn, but literally all porn is art. Stripping porn of its art cred is like when Ben Shapiro says rap music ‘isn’t music’.” The conversation around what gets to be “art” and what is lowered to “porn” is a common discussion in threads surrounding this event with some users reminding readers that the erotic or pornographic and fine art are not mutually exclusive, citing Marian Engel’s Bear or Katsushika Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.
Some users have pointed out that banning “pornographic” material is, naturally, the first step to banning LGBTQIA+ materials before then going for the more difficult targets such as contraception or progressive ideologies that are unaligned with the current regime’s dogma. This is simply KickStarter complying with the morality police in advance, taking the cowards’ way out and fucking themselves over in the mean time. Banning porn is one thing; only half-banning porn and leaving a window open for people to assume they’re fine only to pull the rug out from under them later when corporate decides their spice is too spicy is going to lead to a lot of angry creators who thought they were safe with their ostensibly acceptable obfuscative language.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Americans and the world at large are getting fucking tired of the internet’s new Comstockery and it’s about time we started allowing these censorial stooges to dig their own graves and rot in them. If a platform will not allow pornography, we should not use it for anything, even if that thing is perfectly prudish. Leave them to their good Christians and see just how much money they can make from them. They don’t even have the decency to make rules that are not unduly vague or overly broad, and the subjective nature of their guidelines serve only to cause head-scratching bafflement as nobody’s quite sure for what exactly they can utilize the platform or when/if their current projects are going to end up with a rug-pull without the ability to manage financials.
Would you like to tell KickStarter that they’re a bunch of fucking bootlicking cowards who should go out of business now that they’ve alienated the very demographic that launched them into online prominence in the first place? You can do so right HERE. Maybe be nicer than that. Or not. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life.
