Imagine thinking that your boss has access to your camera, laptop or phone. That’s the reality I faced when I was featured on a site that describes its mission as follows, with intelligent English: “we are committed to creating and fostering an adult space to safely, consensually, and freely express and explore sex and sexuality, without fear of being exposed to dangerous, illegal, or hateful and discriminatory content.” I’m inclined to be supportive of such an initiative. Afterall, when our brain is able to pick an original and authentic idea that could potentially become a project larger than life, we might need both guidance and protection; but since we’re talking about ideas, are we supposed to define creativity? Maybe a prominent musician under writing scrutiny would say something like: “nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.” But I personally don’t think imagination is morphologically fit to describe adult businesses: let’s draw a line between online views and real life companionship; synesthesia and your future baby’s name; image and emotion; damage and collateral damage; influence and difference.

If you’re into grammar, in addition to or in spite of everything else, you’ll take an approach like this: “fear”, “fearless”, “fearlessly”, “fearlessness”. Noun or verb, adjective, adverb, compound noun. Grammar specialists will disagree. Poets will say fear is a verb, but even among poets, you’ll hear someone say: “a verb is an act, and to act is not to fear.” I’m not an Elizabethan reader, but you one could largely affirm that safety comes first, and we’ve learned that payments giants have refused to back the adult landscape. I wonder what twist of logics that might imply: adults work, not necessarily in “adult work”. But in 2022, you have so many confused robots and incompetent “linguists” actually making money that you’d start wondering if the apostrophe is still a thing, how people use the plural and why…

Shaping policy without fear is arguably the work of a head of State. An authoritarian, presumably or not. But the shift from authority to authoritarian is blurry. Presumably. Nobody will deny they want freedom and safety, but when you look around and nobody’s heard of Tether, the option for adults to be able to work and get paid, then you start to wonder: who’s in charge of this system? And many have looked at Aria Nathaniel as a person of power. Rather, she’s a person of (very significant) influence. Informally, which is the option left for her in the job she probably thought was a dream, she tells her audience that when her mom found out that, in terms of tech, the company she was going to work for was one of the biggest on the planet, she was “super proud”. Globally, that’s sure to cause some friction. And, well, it has. But you see… the globe doesn’t have a CEO. I think we need to review media history, in order to build its next chapters. Otherwise, people will be able to judge our entire character and possibly even the right to breathe an air already polluted by profitable businesses, based not on our best, but our worst moments and most classless words–and actions.

Image: Reddit