Thread by @kittystryker

Thread:

Let's talk about the group who pushed Mastercard to further restrict adult content, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, or NCOSE.

This group was originally called Operation Yorkville, and they were an anti-obscenity group. They linked material like "Fanny Hill" to atheism, obscenity, juvenile delinquency, masturbation, murder, sexually transmitted diseases and "high school sex clubs". In 1962.

The group claimed it was about "protecting the children", but First Amendment Law Review wrote that "at times the organization seemed to be using children as a pretext for a society-wide ban".

Sound familiar?

scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewconten…

They had competition for self-righteous moralizing in the Citizens for Decency in Literature, which started in 1956 and made this fucking incredible relic of a film, "Perversion for Profit".



CDL painted themselves as "not anti-sex, but anti-perversion".

Still, CDL lost out to Operation Yorkville, who rebranded to Morality in Media in 1968. They weren't as media savvy, or as politically influential. Charles Keating, founder of CDL, ditched them to become a white collar criminal and they never recovered.

Meanwhile, Father Morton A. Hill of St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church, became president of Morality in Media. He was appointed to serve on the 18-member President's Commission on Obscenity & Pornography by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and had the ear of Nixon and Reagan.

To give you an idea, they also tried to ban George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine, and Monty Python's "Life of Brian". They pressured landlords into pushing out adult stores. They rioted against Time Warner and Disney.

Problem was, while MiM were of their time in the 60s, they were increasingly looking hysterical and dated in the 90s. They were losing the attention and support of politicians. The 1996 Communications Decency Act, which they supported, was ruled unconstitutional in 1997.

Morality in Media kept at it, though, advocating for internet filters and against safer sex education to little avail. In 2010, Bob Peters, part of the leadership, conceded that "the war is over and we have lost".

Then. In 2015. They see anti-porn "feminists" are getting a bit of traction in the UK fighting against extreme pornography and legal sex work. They rebrand again.

Suddenly, they're not anti-porn because of morality. They're anti-porn because of EXPLOITATION.

(To be fair, Morality in Media and similar groups had worked alongside anti-porn "feminists" before with some success. So this wasn't an entirely new strategy. jstor.org/stable/828376)

So now, you have anti-sex work "feminist" academics happily providing biased "studies" to evangelical Christians and Catholics as ammo for their morality war.

That works to win over Republicans, who tout family values but keep getting into sex scandals.

It's a good headline.

Thus Morality in Media rebrands as National Center on Sexual Exploitation & gets into the anti-trafficking game (focused, as so much anti-trafficking stuff is, exclusively on sex trafficking, ignoring other exploitation, cause sex sells)

NCOSE becomes a primary supporter of FOSTA/SESTA, the EARN IT Act, and, you guessed it - began to pressure Mastercard/Visa into ending their payment processing for adult content. Because "trafficking", right?

I absolutely abhor human trafficking, whether it's for agriculture (npr.org/sections/thesa…), hotel work (nytimes.com/2017/04/10/tra…), or rape.

Fact is though, this isn't actually about sex trafficking, or child abuse.

And you can see that by who gets impacted.

Laws supposedly meant to fight sex trafficking end up impacting immigrants, trans people, BIPOC, and consensual sex workers (both at work and in their daily lives)

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…

And as far as Morality in Media - oh, sorry, NCOSE - if a lot of LGBTQ content and sex ed content happens to be knocked offline while they "fight porn", oh well ;)

This is why OnlyFans a) isn't a surprise or a new censorship push, it's the same one that's been going on since the Hays Code and b) this isn't, and never was, just about porn, or trafficking.

It's about forcing the country into "Christian values", they're just savvy now.

ANYWAY I hope that educated some people on the absolute hell we're in right now. If you learned something, consider sending me some $ on venmo - @kittystryker - or subscribing to my Patreon patreon.com/kittystryker

@threadreaderapp unroll

Wanted to add- @mirahimage made a very good point- as US payment processors dominate the worldwide market to the point of being a monopoly, almost all roads lead to Visa/Mastercard. So conservative white supremacist Christian "values" end up informing access to info worldwide.