There’s a whole wonderland of online porn out there, but even your favorite XXX sites have some limits. Want to watch hot girls fisting? Not on Chaturbate. Craving a little piss play? You won’t find it on OnlyFans. Got a kink for menstrual blood? Too bad — it’s not allowed on XHamster, Fansly, CamSoda or a handful of other porn sites you probably visit. You shouldn’t give up, though — the sites that host all your kinkiest fetishes can be found in this comprehensive, kinky spreadsheet humbly titled “Site Restrictions.”
Site Restrictions contains an in-depth breakdown of which fetishes are banned on every major clip, tube and subscription site. It’s open source — anyone can view it — and it’s regularly updated to include recent bans and purges. It also links to porn sites’ terms of service, in case anyone wants to pry into their intricacies themselves.
It was in summer 2019 when Sophie Ladder — a trans porn performer, photographer and web developer — released the first version of the spreadsheet, which has since become a Holy Grail resource for fetish fans and porn creators alike. “I just got sick of trying to keep track of the [censorship] rules on all these different websites,” she tells me. “If I want to make content with pee in it, or period blood, or fisting, which sites can I upload that to?” After scouring the web for similar databases and finding nothing, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Two years and countless updates later, the spreadsheet now provides invaluable information on which sites allow more niche, fetish-based content like “animal dildos,” lactation and kidnapping role-play, as well as intel on banned words and search terms (you can’t say “bong” on iWantClips, apparently). It’ll even suggest alternate terms to use — if hypnosis porn is banned from a site (as it is on OnlyFans and Pornhub), it’ll throw out other words like “mesmerize” or “mind-fuck” so that creators can skirt the rule.
So far, it’s been incredibly useful for the vast community of kink performers who are frustrated by the porn world’s constantly shifting censorship goalposts. Especially on OnlyFans, the list of banned words and content is seemingly extensive and difficult to track down — creators recently found the term “pegging” is banned, as are the names of competitor sites, like “Fansly.” Fetish performers like Lauren Kiley tell me that having all these rules laid out has been a “godsend” — figuring out exactly where to upload specific kink scenes has long been a pain in her ass, and checking the spreadsheet saves her time on a regular basis.
Along those lines, Ladder says a lot has changed since she started making porn full-time in 2018. “Things have gotten a lot more restrictive,” she explains. “Some sites that were lax have tightened up their rules, and that increase in censorship definitely picked up around the end of last year, with the Traffickinghub campaign.”
She’s referring to a now-infamous New York Times op-ed published last December, entitled “The Children of Pornhub.” Written by long-time contributor Nick Kristof, the piece platformed a campaign called Traffickinghub that aims to erase online porn entirely. The campaign is linked to Exodus Cry, a religious right organization “founded by a member of Christian Dominionist ministry, which has advanced anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-Semitic views,” according to Playing the Whore author Melissa Gira Grant.
The knock-on effect in porn has been catastrophic. Payment processors severed ties with Pornhub almost immediately, making it way more difficult for creators to monetize content and sparking a site-wide purge of non-verified accounts. Later this month, despite months of protest by sex workers, Mastercard will introduce restrictive new policies that force porn sites into a state of hyper-compliance. Unsurprisingly, many have opted to remain squeaky-clean — and that means banning a litany of fetish search terms.
“Rules are especially tight around hypnosis content and incest role-play,” says Ladder. “There’s also been an extreme crackdown on menstrual blood, which is disappointing but not surprising. Some rules are just weird, though. You can have all four limbs tied up if you’re being spanked, but if you’re being penetrated, you have to untie one limb, because otherwise it’s considered non-consensual. I don’t think freeing a single limb makes that much difference!”
Perhaps this is why the spreadsheet also contains a handful of shrug emojis, which basically mean, “Who the fuck knows?” Ladder relies on sites releasing extensive terms of service to update the database, and oftentimes the answers creators want just aren’t there. Moderation is an issue, too. Some sites allow blood only if it’s fake, but an algorithm or machine-learning censorship tool wouldn’t necessarily be able to make a conclusive call on whether or not that’s the case.
The same applies with kinks like fisting, often allowed if they’re not “extreme” — what the hell constitutes “extreme” fisting? — and fauxcest, which is sometimes allowed if a creator makes it explicitly clear that it’s role-play. “There’s a real self-censorship aspect to all of this,” Ladder continues. “If I upload something that gets my account shut down, that’s a loss of income for me.”
This is particularly concerning on sites like OnlyFans, where funds stay in a creator’s online wallet until they withdraw money. When an account is shut down — often with little notice — and this cash is left in limbo, it’s generally refunded to subscribers, leaving creators with no payout and no chance to withdraw.
Thankfully, a new crop of more progressive sites have popped up. FemScat, a scat site, is one example. VXPages, a site-builder that allows creators to build their own online hubs where they can stream cam shows, sell content and interact with fans, is another. There’s less censorship than usual on them, which Ladder assumes is because the founders are based in Germany. “The one thing I remember is that you definitely can’t have horses,” she recalls. “You can’t even have a horse poster in the background.”
That, of course, will definitely go on her spreadsheet.
Jake Hall
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist, fashion features editor and author. Their debut book 'The Art of Drag' is scheduled for release in May 2020.
