And—Which is More—You’ll Be a Man, My Stepson!

My bedroom wall just got banned from a porn platform.

Working in the porn industry sometimes (often) feels a bit like being a leper in biblical times. And I have to report that being treated that way isn’t always especially fun. Perhaps you might expect it from non-porny outsiders, but when the phobic, “ewwwwww, a sex worker, tho 🤢” attitude seems to come from within our ranks, it’s especially troubling. Let me tell you about what happened to me last week.

I’m quite (very) lazy when it comes to the mise-en-scène of my content creation. The part of the job I like is the acting, not so much the actual film making. I shoot a good 50% of my work, both stills and video, in my bedroom, and I almost always set my ring light up next to the window, because that’s where the most convenient electric socket is. That means the background for a lot of my content is a corner of my bedroom (shown above).

I never expected it to become controversial in any way, but last week I got a notification from LoyalFans, one of the four main platforms I sell my work from.

During a routine review conducted by our third-party AI service, a message containing content you shared was flagged. Upon further examination by our team, it appears the content features words/actions/imagery that conflicts with our platform’s guidelines.

Report Reason: Banksy’s artwork on the wall in the background depicts a minor. (Girl with Balloon)

Please remove the image from your wall for all future content produced as we’re not permitted to have any depictions of minors on our servers in any form, and we have to follow the regulations set forth by Visa and MasterCard.

As you’ll notice, it didn’t actually tell me which piece of my content had been removed. This is annoyingly standard, and makes replacing the content quite challenging. It sounds as though it might have been one of my pay per view videos, but I’m guessing here, based on the fact they said it was a ‘message’ that had contained the banned Banksy.

And perhaps that doesn’t sound too bad. I post around fourteen pieces of content on my Loyal Fans each week in one form or another, so having one piece go missing shouldn’t be a massive deal. The problem is that I shoot and schedule everything in advance. I have a long-standing back injury and a challenging autoimmune disease to manage, so I don’t dare shoot anything ‘just in time’. At the time of writing, I’ve got content scheduled right into March 2027. And at a conservative estimate, 50% of it will have my Banksy print in the background.

Obviously, I can take the print down. I already have — as soon as I got the first email, I moved it to the wall next to the window, behind my ring light. It’ll never appear in shot again, that way. But there’s nothing I can do about all the content that’s already been scheduled. Now, it risks removal, which would blow a huge hole in my carefully constructed schedule. The one I’ve put in place to ensure my customers will never be left without new content, even if one of my health conditions flares up badly. It’s a potential disaster for my customer relationships.

So of course, I did what any responsible creator would do. I posted a message on my LoyalFans page, explaining the problem and apologising for the possibility that there might be gaps in the schedule if LoyalFans chooses to take action against everything I’ve shot since April 2026, which is when I hung the Banksy print. The post never went live — it never got through LoyalFans’ compliance. Instead, I received another email.

Your post regarding the removal of an image displayed on your bedroom wall has been removed.

Content In Question: Jesus, Censorship

As explicitly expressed in the original notification that I personally sent to you after reviewing, any depiction of minors, is strictly prohibited by Visa and MasterCard standards and cannot be displayed on adult platforms.

These are not rules made up by LoyalFans, but enforced by our banking partners, and we are at their mercy to comply.

So, warning my paying customers appeared not to be an option either. I’ve not yet established why that was. Possibly, the reason is that I had to use the word ‘minor’ in my post, to explain what the problem was. ‘Minor’ is of course a banned word across all adult platforms, but I wasn’t exactly using it in a porny context. Which you’d think LoyalFans might understand, given that they have to use it too, in the Terms of Service on their website. Sometimes, it’s impossible to explain what you mean without using words, you see.

I’m not best pleased. I work hard, as we all do, to make sure the flow of my content is uninterrupted, and sites like LoyalFans owe their success in large part to the appetite many modern porn consumers have for behind-the-scenes, real-life insights into the lives of the creators they follow. OnlyFans, LoyalFans et al weren’t set up for studio porn, they exist to allow performers like me to sell content shot in our own spaces, in our own clothes, inhabiting our own lives. It never occurred to me that one day, not only would Visa and Mastercard want to exert control over what we do on screen, but over our homes too. I don’t want to censor the contents of my own home. I’m not just a vagina on legs — I’ve got lots of interests beyond sex, and I want my fans to know about them, because I want them to recognise porn performers as real people. I think that this humanising of performers is good for all of us. I’m not especially passionate about Banksy, to be honest, but that specific print has some personal significance to me. It wasn’t on my wall because I thought it might be sexy for my customers. It was on my wall because I shoot in my home, which reflects me in a multitude of ways. It also has antique weapons, and a framed sample of some Georgian wallpaper, and a Punch cartoon of a suffragette, and a set of LM Montgomery postcards, and some pieces of WWII propaganda on the walls. I’d never expected my home decor to be the business of Visa and Mastercard, and I’d never expected it to form the basis of an accusation that I was depicting children in my homemade porn.

But actually, I don’t think this specific new layer of censorship is coming from Visa or Mastercard. I think this is an unfortunate combination of anxiety from the platforms, who don’t want to be shut down or fined, and the blunt-tool AI programs that the platforms are using to assist them in moderating the daily flood of content being uploaded. It was the AI that identified the picture on my wall as Girl With Balloon, and then LoyalFans panicked about the age of the figure in that image. And it’s not as though I can show a model release for her, or a photocopy of her passport. Because she is, you know, not a real girl. Not only is she not-real, she’s also twenty four years old if you want to be pedantic about it, having been created in 2002.

I’m all for protecting children, and even a hardened, leprous pornographer like me can see it’d be pretty distasteful of me to start interacting sexually on-screen with a picture of a child, however non-realistic that picture might be. Similarly I’m absolutely on-board with keeping photographs of anyone, adult or child, off the walls. Real, live, people shouldn’t be in the background of porn films unless they’ve consented to it. But who exactly is protected by making porn performers like me take their artwork down? Certainly the Girl With Balloon isn’t going to care. And surely, we’re not going to pretend that customers watching my work might stop paying attention to the full-sized, latex/lingerie/leather-clad adult performing for them, in favour of gawping at a piece of graffiti art in the background of the shot. No one is going to be corrupted by my bedroom wall.

But the problem goes way beyond my Banksy print, and that’s the reason why I’m writing about it. Moving one picture is no big deal. But the precedent it sets is alarming, and it’s by no means the only picture on my wall so I’m not sure where this approach will end, even before factoring in other performers’ situations. Above Girl With Balloon is a picture I bought in Botswana when I was working there in 2005. It’s of two elephants. Bestiality is, understandably, banned on all platforms, but if an incidental picture of a child is suddenly child porn, what is a picture of an elephant? Bestiality, I guess. Above the elephants, I’ve got a portrait of Elizabeth of Austria. I do not have a model release for Elizabeth of Austria. I do not know if she was of age at the time of posing for this painting. It’d probably be safest to take it down, along with the bestiality.

Then, on the other side of the corner, I have Maya Angelou’s poem, I Rise. It’s about slavery, I’m afraid. Obviously, it’s not endorsing slavery, and neither am I. But that doesn’t matter, if Girl With Balloon is child porn. We’re not allowed to make references to human trafficking on the platforms I use. I normally manage to avoid that in my porn, but it hadn’t occurred to me before now that I’d need to censor my wall, too, in case it seemed to be promoting trafficking. And next to I Rise, is Rudyard Kipling’s If. Lovely poem, of course, but a terribly problematic final line, once you look at it as though it’s pornography. “You’ll be a man, my son!” We’re not allowed to make references to family relations, you see. I can’t talk about having a son in a video, even though I don’t have a son, so he’d only ever be fictional. Stepsons are allowed, for now. But I feel as though Kipling might be quite irritated to be accused of writing incest-themed poetry, simply because he’s on a pornographer’s wall now. Just like I feel, suddenly discovering that according to these updated standards for content moderation, the presence of a pornographic performer turns perfectly innocuous objects around her into pornographic signifiers in their own right. There is no innocent picture of a child, or animal, or wineglass, or sword, or pendulum. There is only child porn, animal porn, and visual references to INTOXICATION, and WEAPONS and disallowed HYPNOSIS. Even if it’s just a picture on a wall, with a performer in her lingerie standing in front of it, making a self-shot video and talking about the party, or hospital appointment, or photoshoot she’s going to later.

How absolutely exhausting. How insultingly stigmatising. And I cannot for a minute imagine that Visa or Mastercard had this in mind when they published their guidelines about depictions of minors in pornography. We desperately need some clarity, and some cross-platform uniformity regarding the enforcement of these rules. I don’t want performers like me to be treated as though the only thing stopping us from shooting the most reprehensible, harmful, exploitative content, is Big Brother’s hand. We already follow the law of our respective countries. Being treated with this level of suspicion, not only by financial institutions but by the platforms who take vast commissions off us, is infuriating. I can’t advocate for myself directly to Mastercard, but a platform with millions of users absolutely can. It’s not as though they can’t afford staff for the job.

I don’t have any solutions for now, I’m afraid, and I’m not sure about my future with LoyalFans. I don’t feel good about making money for any platform that doesn’t advocate effectively for its creators, and I’m not at all comfortable about having my communications with my own customers deleted for reasons that have (so far) not been explained to me. I like being gagged, but only in a sexual, consensual context, and this doesn’t qualify. But at the moment, it’s not clear whether there are any platforms that are substantially braver than LoyalFans, or a great deal more courteous to creators.

But I’ll carry on creating my jolly, homemade porn, obviously. “Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you” instructs Rudyard, rather grandly. Maya tells us “Still I Rise” and that sounds like a challenge to do the same. They probably weren’t writing to pornographers specifically, but still, I’ll try to take their advice. “Then you’ll be a man, my stepson” Kipling will intone, approvingly, if I should succeed. Which will be wrong on several counts, but still, I’ll take it.