All These Roadworks 2024 Survey Results – Part 3

Here’s the third and final set of responses from my recent survey of 530 readers. In this post I’ll be looking at mental health, payment, and politics.

This post isn’t *fun* in the way that the other two arguably were, so if you don’t want to read about mental health and politics then just back away and skip this one.

Mental Health

Commentary: (The first question, which is cut off in the image, reads in full: Speaking generally, thinking of the people most important to you in your life, including those you love and those who have direct power over you, how would you describe their ATTITUDE TO EROTICA of the kind that All These Roadworks writes?)

I ran this set of three linked questions mostly for my peace of mind. (Although the first question has some implications for the value of privacy to customers, and their perception of the risks of being outed as an ATR reader.)

Over the years, I’ve had a number of people reach out to me to talk about feelings of guilt associated with consuming porn, and specifically some of the more extreme kinks I write. Many of those people were struggling with pre-existing mental health conditions. The majority of those interactions were very positive and healthy. However, a few became very toxic, and I had to cut those people off from me and from my content, and in some cases threaten to involve police.

I wanted to run these questions because if a significant number of readers were in that space of struggling with guilt or other feelings about their erotica consumption, then I would want to be doing more to help them with that. In the end result, the combination of “ashamed/guilty” and “serious negative impact’ came to 5% of all respondents, which is small but significant, so I’m going to consider what I can do to better support that portion of the readership.

The final question about religion is a kind of a control question. We know from extensive research that the consensual consumption of porn by adults is not inherently harmful in any way. It’s not addictive, it doesn’t cause trauma, it doesn’t reduce sexual appetite or weaken real-life relationships. (Although, like any activity, it can impact your life if consumed in great excess, and excessive porn consumption can itself be a symptom of other mental health conditions such as depression.)

But what we also know is that people are vastly more likely to *report* a perception of being harmed by pornography if they are raised in a religious or strongly sex-negative environment – regardless of what they later believe as an adult.

The data here correlates. Those who reported negative feelings and perceived harms overwhelmingly (although not exclusively) were those raised in religious backgrounds. The harms arise from the upbringing, not the porn.

In the short term, I’d like to refer readers to some of the articles I’ve already written on the topic of mental health and safe porn consumption:

• Everyone Should See A Psych (link)
• Aftercare for Degradation Porn (link)

I’d also like to say to those readers who do struggle with feelings about consuming my content that you’re not a “pervert”, and you’re not in a dark place when you visit my site. I’m a perfectly normal person who’s active in my community. My loved ones know what I write and support me. There is nothing wrong with the consensual consumption of fictional fetish erotica.

I want to emphasise that I’m not a psych, and I can’t be your counsellor, but I am more than willing to help you hook up with health services in your area if that’s something that would be useful, or have a short chat to help reassure you that I’m a regular person doing regular person things (and you are too) if that would be helpful.

And I’ll turn my mind to what else I can write in the Reality Check space to better support my readers in exploring their fetishes with me in safe, healthy and affirming ways.

Politics

There wasn’t specifically a question about politics so I’m just going to be talking about the sentiment expressed in some of the free-form responses.

Less real-world politics posts (6 responses)
but also
Thank you for your real-world politics posts (14 responses)

Look, I’ve only made three real-world politics posts in the last five years. In 2020 I told you not to vote for Trump. In 2024 I told you that again. And when he was voted in regardless, I talked about the consequences for my business and my story content.

I don’t tell readers in the UK who to vote for. I don’t tell readers in Canada who to vote for. I don’t tell readers in my own country of Australia who to vote for (or at least not on my professional accounts).

I made a very specific choice to say something about this one specific candidate for three reasons:

(1) Because of how FAR short he falls of the minimum standards we expect of any candidate in a Western democracy, whether conservative or progressive. He’s really extraordinarily underqualified, underinformed and underskilled in ways that no other major-party candidate for national leadership in any English-speaking democracy has been over the course of my entire life. (Not even Boris Johnson.) It should be unthinkable that any party would nominate a candidate facing multiple extremely serious criminal allegations. It is not that hard to find good candidates who are not being charged with crimes. I feel like people don’t get how far outside the space of “reasonable, qualified candidates” Trump truly is.

(2) Because his personal behaviour, and his policies, specifically target the safety and rights of women in an unprecedented way, and the All These Roadworks brand has always been built on the idea that responsibly consuming misogyny/patriarchy/noncon porn requires taking active steps to fight those ideas in the real world. I’m not going to rehash the arguments here. If you don’t understand how voting for Trump was inherently misogynistic then you simply weren’t paying attention, and still aren’t, as Trump has moved quickly to install the architects of Project 2025 into key federal offices.

(3) Self-interest. Project 2025 is very explicit and detailed about its intent to shut down adult industry in the United States, to outlaw pornography, and to jail those involved in its creation and possibly its consumption. Despite Trump’s attempts pre-election to distance himself from that manifesto, he has nevertheless appointed its authors to top-level federal positions, and this is against a background of Republican state governments in the US already attempting to ban porn in several non-hypothetical ways.

While I’m located in Australia, my site host and my payment processor are both located in the US (as are Smashwords and Amazon, as are Discord, Tumblr, Reddit, Meta, Google, X, WhatsApp, and others.) Fetlife and Aylo (Pornhub) are thankfully in Canada.

It is very likely that within Trump’s term all of those platforms are going to become even more hostile to all adult content, by choice or by legislation, with the result that I may have to substantially restructure what I’m doing, or, in a worst-case scenario, shut down entirely and go back to working a day job.

Hearing about all of that is part of the price of entry. If you want to consume misogyny/patriarchy porn, you have to be willing to fight it in real life. Three posts in five years, entirely confined to one extraordinarily terrible candidate, is not a lot. Those posts are very clearly flagged as non-fiction political posts and if you simply don’t click through to read them then there’s not much I can do to stop you.

I RECOGNISE that some of those people asking for “less political posts” (in fact, about half of those responses) mention their mental health. The world is a terrible place. There’s so much bad news and we can do so little about it. Porn is an escape, and it’s reasonable to want it to be separate from your news feed, to let you relax from the stress in a fantasy world. And I really do understand and sympathise with that.

And to that, all I can say is this: it’s three posts in five years, all clearly marked so that you don’t have to click through on them, all related to one extraordinarily terrible candidate. I’m not going to branch out into other elections. I’m only going to be talking to you about politics when there is a real non-hypothetical danger of voting for actual nationwide patriarchal fascism.

(While we’re here, there’s not much to say about the correlation of “no politics” responses to paying customers. About half of these responses were paying customers – including one who appears to be one of my more consistently loyal readers – and about half were not. I don’t draw anything from that one way or the other.)

AND FINALLY I have to look at those flood of responses from people who were grateful for the politics posts. And this ties back to the questions about mental health and guilt.

I hear again and again, usually several times a month, from people who want to tell me that the reason they’re okay buying from me is because of the Reality Check stuff I do. The fact that they know they’re not buying from a monster, or a MAGA, or a misogynist, is what makes them feel comfortable in unlimbering the credit card and giving me money. It helps them feel safe and normalised in buying fucked-up fantasies. It’s good for their mental health, it’s good for their sexuality, and it’s good for their faith in humanity.

That is the single most consistent point of feedback I get, out of everything that people take the time to send me, and I weigh it very highly. And that’s exactly the brand I want to be. I am content to lose sales from people of the contrary opinion in order to be that brand, if necessary (although I’d always hope to find a balance that works for everyone).

So look, I’d like to thank those who engaged with this issue respectfully and constructively, and gave nuanced thoughts, and I’d also like to acknowledge that not everyone who was opposed to political posts was coming from a place of fascism or misogyny.

But I will aim to write more Reality Check articles of various sorts going forward, and I will, from time to time, talk actual politics, where it’s absolutely necessary in order to preserve the safety and rights of women, and to preserve the freedom of sexual expression for all of us, so that you can continue to consensually enjoy fictional erotica without the fear of being jailed for it.

Payment and anonymity

Okay, a LOT of you would like alternate payment options, and I’m sad to say that I can’t offer you good news on that front.

Implement non-traceable payment options (12 responses)

Non-traceable payment means crypto. There is simply no other non-traceable payment system. (And crypto’s significantly more traceable than you may think, when it comes right down to it.)

The reality is that the list of ways to pay for goods and services anonymously is the exact same list as the ways to buy illegal goods and services, and it will probably not surprise you to know that law enforcement and taxation bodies do not like transactions of that sort. They are the sort of things that make authorities interested, and while my business is completely legal, I am nevertheless not keen to make policing and regulatory bodies interested in me.

My mortgage and bills and everyday shopping can’t be paid in crypto. It needs to be paid out of regular bank accounts, which means that at some stage the crypto has to be converted into Australian dollars. Australian banks make automatic reports to the Tax Office. If tax time comes around and there’s a significant sum of money in your accounts with no obvious source and no transaction trail, that’s the kind of thing that can raise questions. Doing my tax is complex enough without questions.

In addition, crypto has a range of risks to do with fluctuation in value, physical and data security, lack of buyer and fraud protection, etc, that I’m just not interested in assuming. And the technical process of enabling my site to take crypto payments for products is also non-trivial.

There may come a time when I am forced to use crypto, by events in the US or elsewhere, but that’s not today, and I’d like to hold out for as long as I can.

But while we’re talking about anonymity of payments, let me walk you through how anonymous you are in buying from me.

My payment processor is PayPal. All payments go through PayPal. I get a certain level of assurance that I’m selling to adults out of using PayPal because (in theory) when you create a PayPal account you assert that you are over the age of 18.

PayPal allows you to pay in two ways – by using your PayPal account (which can include drawing funds out of a credit card or bank account via PayPal), or by processing a credit card.

For any purchase, I get the email address that you provide. (Because everything you buy in my store is, one way or another, delivered via email.)

If you log in to a PayPal account during the purchase, I also get your PayPal email address, which could theoretically be used to obtain the public-facing name associated with that PayPal account (which may or may not be a real name, depending on how you set it up). PayPal coughs it up if you file a PayPal dispute with me, but I otherwise don’t go looking for it.

If you process a credit card, I get the credit card billing information, which includes a name and an address. Otherwise I get whatever billing information you choose to provide, which can apparently be nonsense because I get a fair number of purchases with nonsense billing info.

I also get the IP address you were on at the time you made the purchase, which can generally be resolved to a specific internet provider and rough geographic area (i.e. the size of a city), providing that you weren’t on a VPN, but the IP is a couple of layers deeper in my system so I don’t see it unless I go looking (which I generally only do if I need to actually ban a user).

All of that information is stored in only two places: on the PayPal servers, and on the WordPress/Woocommerce servers. I don’t need any of that information (except sometimes the email, to help with customer service requests), I don’t care about any of that information, and I don’t copy that information outside those servers or store it anywhere. I get thousands of customers a month. I don’t look at names or addresses. I don’t care.

The only minor exception is that if you purchase a membership, I store the user name and email that you provide to my system in a third database, along with any other emails I know to be associated with that account, for the purpose of aligning membership renewals and matching customer service enquiries against memberships. Your data is purged from that database if you go 12 continuous months without being a paid member.

I am the only person in my business. No one else has my site login and no one else ever sees that data. In the event that I were to suffer an accident or die suddenly, my partner will receive the keys to my accounts, but she is well aware of what goes on here and she cares about who you all are even less than I do.

When you purchase a book from me, here’s what it looks like on your bank statement:

As you can see, it identifies that the purchase happened through PayPal, and that the vendor ID was “ATR”. It will not show the name of the book or books you purchased, and it will not include any words like “erotica” or “porn”.

All of the above is in line with, or significantly better than, the arrangements of other adult content vendors, and it’s significantly more private than the experience you’d have on Smashwords or Amazon, in the sense that there’s only one person who sees your data here (me), and you know who I am, as opposed to your data being accessible by thousands of customer service reps and IT techs.

Just finally, putting aside the question of traceability, in an ideal world I would be able to offer you more ways to pay, generally. Unfortunately, there are very few options for processing payment for spicy content, and most of the other options out there are bespoke, less-than-wholly international, and will charge me huge payment processing fees for the privilege of working with them.

(And while we’re here, the REASON there aren’t more payment processors who will service spicy content is… say it with me… US politics. And specifically campaigns originating from the US religious/moral right – although it’s not like the Democrats are good at standing up for adult creators either.)

I’d really love to offer you more ways to pay, but it’s not going to happen in the near future unless I have no other options. (Or unless New South Wales passes the anti-discrimination laws that the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have passed that would prevent payment providers whose Australian offices are in Sydney from denying services to otherwise-legal adult businesses… but that doesn’t seem to be on the immediate horizon.)

===

And with that, I’ve covered all the data I received from the survey.

Thank you to everyone who took part. When I’ve got more energy and time in the medium-future I’ll do more targeted surveys to look into particular aspects of my content and business, but for now I’m satisfied with what I’ve got.

• All These Roadworks
  1 December 2024