In 2013, Vimeo was the home of the Future Sex Love Art Projekt. The platform was where the films lived, where audiences found them, where the project built its first international following. Then Vimeo decided that the work was pornography. The films were removed. The account was suspended. No appeal process. No warning. Just gone.
It was not the last time.
The Pattern
Over the course of fifteen years making the Future Sex Love Art Projekt, Missy Jubilee has been removed, defunded, or restricted by: Vimeo, Patreon, PayPal, Stripe, and Visa.
Each of these companies made the same determination independently: that autobiographical erotic art films, which had won 363 international film festival awards and been classified as experimental cinema by festival juries on six continents, were nonetheless sexually commercial content — a category that their policies prohibit.
The festivals said: this is art. The platforms said: this is porn. There was no hearing, no appeal, no conversation. There was simply a policy, an algorithm, and a termination notice.
Payment Processors as Cultural Gatekeepers
The most consequential platform decisions do not come from social media companies. They come from payment processors.
In 2021, under pressure from a New York Times investigation into child sexual abuse material on Pornhub, Visa and Mastercard suspended payments to the platform. The response to this legitimate crisis, however, became a template for something far broader: the removal of payment processing from any platform hosting explicit adult content, regardless of legality or artistic merit.
Stripe, PayPal, and other processors followed with their own restrictions. The result was not only that commercial pornography platforms were affected — it was that every independent erotic artist, sex educator, and adult content creator who relied on these payment rails found their income severed overnight.
Missy Jubilee’s 215 OBSCENE EXPOSURE — a film that had screened at international festivals — could not be funded through standard payment channels because the company processing the payments had decided, unilaterally, that the content it represented was outside the bounds of acceptable commerce.
The Algorithmic Default
None of these decisions were made by humans who watched the films. They were made by automated systems that flagged content based on keywords, metadata, account categories, and signal patterns. The algorithm does not distinguish between an award-winning autobiographical art film and commercial pornography. It sees explicit content and applies the default.
The default, in almost every case, is removal.
This creates a structural problem for erotic art that does not exist for any other category of sensitive content. A documentary about violence, war, genocide, or trauma can be hosted on YouTube, funded through Patreon, sold on Vimeo. A documentary that uses the female body as its subject matter — even in service of serious artistic, therapeutic, or cultural inquiry — faces removal at every level of the distribution stack.
The Free Speech Question
These platforms are private companies. They are not legally required to host any content. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and civil liberties organisations have documented the chilling effect of platform censorship on legitimate expression, but the legal framework remains limited.
What is at stake is not just one filmmaker’s ability to fund her work. It is the principle that erotic art — work that uses sexuality as its subject matter — deserves the same institutional tolerance that every other form of artistic expression receives. That the female body as subject, authored by the woman it belongs to, is legitimate artistic territory.
The platforms’ current approach says otherwise. The film festivals say the opposite. Somewhere between those two verdicts, 230 films and fifteen years of work continue to exist — here, on this site, independent of every platform that tried to erase them.
364 awards. Zero apologies.