An interview with Allie Eve Knox
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of sex work news. After Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed in the New York Times, Visa/Mastercard pulled their payment processing services from Pornhub, which shuttered their Modelhub program, where content creators got paid for their work. After the announcement, Clips4Sale announced that they were changing their Terms of Service. These abrupt changes have left many porn performers wondering what’s next.
To shed some light on this issue, I turned to fetish performer and content creator Allie Eve Knox, who has been an outspoken proponent for sex workers’ use of cryptocurrency.
What did you think about Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed, the one that sparked Visa/Master’s decision to pull its services from Pornhub?
To me, it sounded like he was trying to get my parents’ feathers ruffled—people who don’t know much about the porn industry and also don’t realize who Kristof is.
This was a fluff piece to get clicks. There is no discussion of what it would take to actually help performers, no solutions to remedy unsafe working conditions, and certainly no resources.
When Kristof turns to groups like Exodus Cry, they can’t offer solutions as to how to solve the problems on MindGeek’s platforms, they can’t tell us how to fix it. However, if he would have turned to performers—people who actually make their living on the platforms—it would have been different. We have ideas.
When Kristof turns to groups like Exodus Cry, they can’t offer solutions as to how to solve the problems on MindGeek’s platforms, they can’t tell us how to fix it. However, if he would have turned to performers—people who actually make their living on the platforms—it would have been different. We have ideas.
This is a war on porn. It’s a win for them, and the question is: what’s next?
Were you surprised by the news of Visa/Mastercard pulling their services from Pornhub?
I was off-line for probably 10 hours when this announcement came, I saw it hours later and people were like, What does this mean?
There were a few OG’s that I follow who predicted that this was going to happen. When I read the announcement I thought, I know what this means: the fire has just been lit.
I think a really good indication of this is that Clips4Sale immediately changed their Terms of Service in the wake of the announcement.
Editor’s note: Clips4Sale has a “business partnership” with MindGeek, the owners of Pornhub.
Is it unusual for payment processors like Visa/Mastercard to control porn companies in this way?
Not at all. I’m surprised that it took Visa/Mastercard so long to crack down on Pornhub. On iWantClips, the platform where I sell a lot of my content, we have been running a list forever of what we aren’t allowed to post, a list generated by Visa/Mastercard. I can’t, for example use words like “coerce,” “intoxicate,” or “force.” Now that Clips4Sale is covering their asses preemptively, they are using this same list.
When I worked for SpankChain, they sent us this list, and said that they will send out spiders to crawl the site to make sure we aren’t in violation of the rules.
Editor’s note: See Ana Valens’s reporting on hypnosis porn and our previous Peepshow Podcast episode with Lorelei Lee for additional context.
Why do you think it took so long for Pornhub to face consequences?
It is like the Wild West over at Pornhub, they have never followed rules. The fact that they are being blasted for doing some shady stuff now isn’t surprising. They suck.
But Pornhub’s problems were ones that could have been solved, and performers have been saying this. Want to prevent child porn? Have all uploaders sign 2257’s.
Part of the problem with PornHub is that their leadership is very opaque. If you try to go up the chain of command you don’t get very far. If you try to find out who the executives are, that information is impossible to get online.
How do you think this will impact performers?
I know that there are performers who have built their living on Pornhub, who have become famous because of Pornhub.
I don’t work on Pornhub and I don’t know what kind of money these performers have been making, but I do believe that it will be a huge problem for them.
But for everyone in the industry, if Visa/Mastercard are going to pull from large companies like Pornhub, we have to believe others will be next.
You’re known for using crypto currency, both through your employment with SpankChain, and in your own business. Do you think that this is a good solution to the problem?
They say 3% of porn is paid for. And 1% of the people who pay for porn do so with cryptocurrency. So right now, you are talking about 1% of 3% of porn consumers. It’s a very small number.
However, there is an opportunity here: We can teach people to use alternative forms of payment. And, it’s becoming easier.
There are some exchanges where you can buy it in the morning and get it by the end of the day (it used to take much longer).
However, it’s still a complicated process and someone needs to figure out a way to get crypto in the hands of more people and teach them to use it. As of now, it’s hard and complicated. It’s easy to lose your wallet, to lose your phrases, and to make bad exchanges. No one has quite figured out how to streamline this except Coinbase, and they hate sex workers.
Are there other problems with cryptocurrency?
The crypto community needs to be nicer to people. Once you enter a crypto space, the people are terrible. I don’t recommend it as a community ever! They are babies, and there’s very toxic shit over there. Honestly, I hate crypto, but I don’t really have any other options, so I have to make crypto work.
Say more about that? Why is crypto your only option at this point?
Even though I don’t like crypto—the community around it sucks, and it is clunky and difficult to use—it is a solution to my and other sex workers’ problems. What are the other options to get paid if the platforms no longer can process payments for us? Venmo, CashApp, Square? If you name it, I don’t have it. The only thing I have is Google wallet. Everything else has been shut down permanently.
When they shut down all of my payment processors and limit my income, I have to turn to other ways, even if I don’t like them.
Would you recommend crypto to other sex workers facing the same fate?
Even given all of those reasons, I still recommend crypto, because it is the only option left.
I would prefer it if I never had to learn this hustle to sell my socks, I would have preferred to run all of my transactions on conventional payment platforms. But this is survival.
I would prefer it if I never had to learn this hustle to sell my socks, I would have preferred to run all of my transactions on conventional payment platforms. But this is survival.
But I will say, I have recently found out that I am under federal investigation because I used crypto as a sex worker. All of my former employers (in the past 6 years) have been subpoenaed.
Wow, that’s terrible.
Yeah, it is crazy to me that the solution is to push sex workers further and further underground. We also saw this with FOSTA/SESTA and with the shuttering of Backpage. This did not make things more safe for sex workers, and it also shut down lines of communication that would make things better for everyone.
Sex workers don’t want revenge porn to exist, we don’t want child porn to exist. We know how to prevent these things.
What do you think comes next?
We are going to have to start educating our people. We are going to have to start making our own websites, getting out our own newsletters, etc. We need to start beefing up, this is a battle cry.
We need to protect ourselves and change the optics. I don’t know how we do it, but we need to convince everyone that the whores are good, because we are!
People need to start seeing us as real fucking people, then maybe they are going to care about what is happening to us.
Allie Eve Knox is a fetish performer and content creator. You can find her on Twitter @allieeveknox.
Jessie Sage is a sex worker and writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. She’s also the co-founder of Peepshow Magazine and the co-host of the Peepshow Podcast. Her words can be found in the Washington Post, VICE’s Motherboard, Hustler Magazine, Men’s Health, BuzzFeed, and more. She’s currently writing a book on sex work, motherhood, and illness called An Unexpected Place (forthcoming on West Virginia University Press).
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