By Matt Taibbi

Long before controversies in Canada and Russia saw financial services politicized, porn star Cheri Deville warned about payment processors having too much power over speech.

Over the last few years, you may have read stories explaining that Visa and Mastercard were imposing new rules to “stamp out illegal activity” in pornography sites. In these pieces, company spokespeople are often heard evincing concern about human trafficking or “missing or exploited children,” which sounds more than reasonable. Who doesn’t want to stop trafficking and child abuse?

As porn star Cherie DeVille explains, the story is, and has been, a lot weirder than that. Because Visa and Mastercard hold effective duopoly status all over the world — controlling 98% of credit transactions in the U.K., 80% in the E.U., and over 70% in the U.S. — no porn performer can afford to cross the rules for acceptable content the two companies have laid down. And those rules are beyond strange.

“Women are allowed to squirt, but we’re not allowed to urinate,” DeVille says. “We can’t insert our panties into our vaginas anymore, because that’s an object. I tried to use a carrot-shaped dildo. That’s a problem because that’s an object, too, but a phallic-shaped dildo is apparently okay.” She shakes her head in amazement. “The rules are completely nonsensical.”

Officially, terms of service use vague language like, “Mastercard prohibits merchants from processing any transaction that… may damage the goodwill of the corporation” or “reflect negatively on the marks,” or is “patently offensive and lacks seriously artistic value.”

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