Conversation: Sex & Censorship

'Sex Not Seggs' by Lucy Roeber

For our first instalment of the Conversation: Sex & Censorship, we’re making editor Lucy Roeber’s essay ‘Sex Not Seggs’, published in the spring/summer issue, available to you all to read for free. We are publishing it in its entirety because we believe that digital censorship is a vitally important issue that affects everyone in 2026. We spend an average of 76% of our time online and when it comes to our erotic lives, what we can read, search, find and engage with is decided by a small, unelected group whose focus is completely commercial.

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In May 2025, @eroticreview received a text from Instagram (Meta) stating that our website, ermagazine.com, had been added to a “block list” for “either containing or promoting ‘pornographic or graphic sexual content’”. This was not a query or an investigation. It was simply a notification that a judgment had already been made about Erotic Review Publishing Ltd by a digital gatekeeper.

While the word “erotic” had been causing us issues since our relaunch in 2024, this was the moment I really started questioning what was going on. Who, exactly, was making these judgments about us—and on what basis? What recourse exists when a site is blocked unfairly? Who is this censorship really protecting? Is censoring everyone and everything that brushes up against online sex effective? Most importantly, what are the wider consequences of such censorship for our erotic lives, including those of the young people we are all trying to protect?

When I was offered the opportunity to take on the Erotic Review in 2022, I spent a couple of months weighing up whether it was a good, bad or simply mad idea. I knew the 30-year-old title was flagging. I was warned that print publishing was in a state of collapse. I also suspected that editing a publication whose title prompted awkward sniggering amongst my compatriots would be tiring.

What I hadn’t even considered was how difficult it would be to run a business that is restricted online. In 2026, few ventures can exist effectively without a digital presence. Those of us with access—currently 73.2% of the global population, according to Statista—live simultaneously in the real and virtual worlds. We buy, communicate, promote ourselves and sell our products online, with UK adults spending an average of 76% of our waking lives there (Bionic Services). As I’ve also learned, securing any kind of financial support for the Erotic Review requires stating ambitions to “scale online”, in reach and/or commerce. We are constantly reminded of the promise of exponential growth if we get this right; by contrast, analogue growth—limited as it is geographically—looks insubstantial, slow and unappealing. Yet for those of us operating in the murky world of sex in any of its medical, activist, wellness, pornographic, charitable or pleasurable spheres, an online existence is routinely discouraged, limited or outright banned.

My first inkling that things weren’t going to be easy came before I’d even published a word or relaunched ermagazine.com. In August 2023, I created a tiered membership programme to fund the project, setting up a Shopify platform to process subscriptions and funnel payments to our NatWest business account. Within weeks, I had raised thousands of pounds—but then Shopify contacted me to say it had frozen payments while its banking partner, Stripe, investigated my company.

Shopify suggested that while I was under investigation I might consider moving to a provider such as Bankful, a payment platform for “high risk” businesses including firearm sales and gambling. I wrote back explaining I was selling subscriptions for a print publication before joining PayPal as a temporary solution. Within a week, PayPal also froze my transactions, warning me it might take up to six months to release the funds. There was no appeal process, no recourse, no way to respond. I can only assume that Erotic Review was “investigated” and ultimately prohibited because: “You may not use PayPal services for activities that: 2. relate to transactions involving (i) certain sexually orientated materials or services.”

In hindsight, I should have been more alert to the complex relationship that payment platforms, banking services and the commercial ecosystems that rely on them have with “adult” content in a digital world. However, I presumed that the boring truth would win out: the Erotic Review is an art and literary journal—think The Paris Review but exploring desire. Fortunately, within three weeks, Stripe allowed us to trade on Shopify. PayPal, however, released our funds eventually but permanently blacklisted the company.

For businesses operating within the sex industry, existing ethically, legally and above ground often means paying extortionate interest fees for the perceived “risk” and living in constant fear of accounts being closed without warning or explanation. When it comes to the finances of the erotic, pragmatism, legality and justice are routinely stifled. Stating your case and backing it with documentary evidence doesn’t work. And in a digital economy dominated by automated systems, arguing with a wall of nonhumans is pointless and demoralising. Many sites, like PayPal, don’t even offer you that basic recourse.

Simply because of our publication’s name, the monopolies that shape and police digital behaviour have acted punitively to limit our reach. Google judged that ermagazine.com must be hidden in SafeSearch—its automated system designed to filter content based on keywords, images and user behaviour to protect users, “especially children”—and have not responded to our attempts to reverse that decision. As a result, we have now been blacklisted by certain servers, with inordinate commercial consequences for a start-up. For example, at the Barbican’s ‘Dirty Weekend’ in late November 2025, we sold loads of magazines and many more people wanted to sign up to our free monthly newsletter. Yet about a third of those I counted trying to subscribe on their smartphones were blocked. These were adults prevented from accessing information about our events and reading our conversations with authors. The insidious impact of the moral judgments being made about our magazine seeps through everything in the digital ecosystem. One reason our former audio platform, in association with Spotify, refused to display their adverts in our content was that “the artwork of the podcast looks to be a part of the female body.”

The irony is that if the internet has taught us anything, it is that human beings are profoundly interested in watching and engaging with other humans having sex or selling sex. The FT’s Hot Money podcast estimated that around 8% of all internet traffic in 2022 was pornographic—an extraordinarily high figure when you consider that this content is purely recreational. Last October in Berlin, I attended ‘A Sexual History of the Internet’, a lecture performance by Mindy Seu. In a darkened room lit only by mobile phones, she traced how the internet was developed and built through sex: from teletext to payment platforms and video streaming. Porn streaming companies have made untold wealth. Today, the dominant online porn monopoly is Aylo (formerly MindGeek), a conglomerate which owns mainstream platforms such as Pornhub and YouPorn. Its headquarters are in Montreal, Quebec, but its corporate structure is scattered across a number of different countries including Luxembourg, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom.

Cindy Gallop, the New York-based activist and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, spoke to me about the difficulties of being an independent sexual content provider over the last 17 years. “As with any other industry, the result of a monopoly is a complete stranglehold on the industry and a complete obstruction of individual creativity, innovation, disruption,” she said. After the PornFilmFestival Berlin last October, I was left with a strong sense of how this online monopoly is devastating the smaller, queer, feminist, arthouse producers, educators and artists—profoundly narrowing the breadth of experience on offer. But that’s another subject.

Many talk wistfully of the early internet as a free space where communities flourished, but one of the dark sides of such freedom was criminal activity. Governments have been reactively legislating ever since, while continuing to promote an unrestrained capitalist model. Dr Carolina Are, a researcher in social media governance at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens, told me that a major shift in censoring the erotic happened in 2018. “Since the approval of the FOSTA-SESTA exception to the US Telecommunications Act’s Section 230, which makes platforms liable for hosting content that facilitates sex trafficking, the internet has become a sanitised, unwelcome place for sex workers and sexuality in general,” she said.

It now seems generally accepted that it’s better to hide “adult” content entirely—even if access to sexual education, connection and health is lost along the way. As Carolina notes, “Many search engines (and email providers) downrank ‘adult’ material, relegate it to spam and make it difficult to search. Sometimes they block the opening of websites by default, unless you lower the controls in your settings. This then takes a life of its own on social media platforms. For instance, on platforms like Instagram, if you are ‘shadowbanned’—if your content is not recommended to people who don’t follow you—your username can only be found if it’s typed in full. That throws up additional barriers to finding your profile and essentially thwarts your visibility.”

In this way, sex workers have emerged as the “canary in the coalmine” of the digital world, as businesswoman Helena Whittingham told me. Her talent agency and consultancy Lover Management works across sex-positive culture, representing sex workers as well as educators, activists, artists, writers, performers and creators whose work intersects with sex, bodies and desire. Over the last four years, as legislation has tightened, Helena has become adept at bargaining with Meta to protect her clients’ social accounts and their right to exist online. That includes running campaigns like 2022’s #stopdeletingus, which she launched with Carolina Are.

Progress, however, is slow. The wider impact of the online ecosystem’s moral gatekeeping is that anyone whose work or story intersects with sex, the body or even fertility is thrown together into a vast digital dustbin where their work cannot be found unless explicitly searched for. It’s a strange place to land, this “dustbin of the erotic”, among activists, therapists, sex workers, artists, educators, academics, doctors and pornographers alike. These are people in idealistic opposition, all flattened into a single category where nuance is erased—misogynists and feminists sitting side by side.

What is lost is the possibility of conversation. It would be fascinating if discussion were actually allowed between us. As an editor and writer, I’m increasingly concerned about the impact of stifling discussion and ideas. A healthy society allows debate, conversation, discussion; it doesn’t censor the breadth of human experience as expressed in words. Yet accessing education, buying services or reading thoughtful discussion about sex or the body online is constrained. We exist in a digital world of extremes: flooded with porn that is often racist, misogynistic and violent, consumed in the privacy and shame of our own bedrooms, while any discussion of sex is sanitised or rejected by the platforms altogether.

The most visited essay on ermagazine.com, written by author Rebecca Rukeyser for issue 1, explores gooning, gluttony and the US. Yet it can only be found by people who search our website directly. In the UK, it is safer for journalists, writers and educators to publish erotic commentary on the printed page—newspapers, books and magazines. The work that is then put online must often be chosen to avoid being flagged, especially on other platforms. Many writers I know have complained that they cannot link their printed articles in respected papers like The New York Times or the Guardian on LinkedIn, Facebook and, increasingly, X.

The consequence of making words unpublishable in these ways doesn’t just affect writers. I spoke to Dr Soum Rakshit who, since 2014, has been developing a non-invasive treatment for STIs with doctors at King’s College London. His company, MV, is shadowbanned and unable to advertise. Another medical start-up I spoke to, Jack Fertility, which sends sperm count tests to people’s homes, complained that LinkedIn banned posts that included the word “sperm”.

If our written erotic lives are to exist online at all, our only option is to adapt, veil or censor ourselves—choosing words and ideas with caution. On platforms like Instagram, we self-censor with “algospeak”, a coy, infantilised distortion of language. Although companies like Meta, YouTube and TikTok deny the existence of banned-word lists and instead describe moderation as the emergent behaviour of algorithms, there are enough examples of voices being amplified or buried to ensure that anyone taking the risk accepts the possibility of deletion.

All this means that prudence with words has become second nature for @eroticreview and many others. We adapt by using alternatives: sex becomes seggs; porn is corn; breasts are chest; dildo becomes toy; masturbate becomes self-pleasure; nipple is nip, etc. By tricking the algorithms with emojis, archaic language and approximations, we go some way to having the conversation. But what does this say about sex in 2026? What are we accepting? And what, now, counts as obscene?

As a publisher, what I find most astonishing about the digital censorship of “erotic” words is how it runs counter to the UK’s hard-won obscenity laws. In 1960, publishers fought for—and won—the right to print Lady Chatterley’s Lover in full. It was and is generally regarded as a triumph of freedom of speech over a fusty establishment out of touch with society. Today, we read Lawrence’s book with affection, wondering how the authorities could have banned a novel that’s predominantly about class and industrialisation, punctuated by moments of sexual compulsion. The ban now seems absurd.

Online censorship represents a similar regression: out of line with public attitudes and hostile to freedom of expression. There is a serious, curious, contemporary audience wanting to explore sex and the body through discussion and stories — especially, though not exclusively, younger people who often hold far more expansive views on sexuality and conduct. This is a generation that has grown up with explicit pornographic content as its primary source of cultural dialogue about sex. And this isn’t a story of “niche interests”, as one Oxford academic sneered at me over email. Desire is central to our common humanity; it is the cornerstone of so much artistic expression. Our main cultural institutions in the UK now collaborate and programme work about sex in ways that would have been unimaginable even 20 years ago. The Barbican’s ‘Dirty Weekend’ was a groundbreaking moment: a weekend of film and art exploring sex. What fascinated me was not that pornographer Vex Ashley sold out a Saturday afternoon performance, but that she belongs to the sex industry rather than the art world. Likewise, ‘The Body: Digital/Real/Imagined’, a multi-media event curated by Erotic Review with the Institute of Contemporary Arts in January 2026, sold out completely—to a wonderful, curious and engaged audience.

Sex is being defined online by a small, unelected group whose focus is completely commercial. The curtailing of the Erotic Review is only a minor example of the broader collateral damage caused by the online censorship of “adult” content: damage to how we relate to our bodies, our health and our orientations. Existing within this supposedly “moral” online world is exhausting and demoralising, particularly when it requires relying upon platforms which neither want nor need to collaborate. Government regulation, meanwhile, is prone to be swayed by moral panic, while the online monopolies make meaningful market correction through competition increasingly unlikely. So, where is the backlash?

As Cindy Gallop has pointed out, the “young, white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today, they are not the primary targets online or offline of harassment abuse, sexual assault, racism, violence, rape, intimate image abuse.” Yet sex still remains a difficult cause to champion, burdened by a long tradition of shame and stigma. MJ Fox, co-founder of the queer education and sex party space Joyride, pointed out to me that there is little political appetite to defend sexual expression beyond legislating against specific practices like choking.

And yet there is hope. The people I’ve met and interviewed recently, especially women, who’ve chosen this industry despite the odds, are some of the most inspiring, intelligent and passionate people that I’ve ever met. Perhaps it’s because they understand more acutely than most the danger of being silenced. As Cindy Gallop put it: “I refuse to be relegated to the sex ghetto.”

How, then, can we challenge a global marketplace with no central democratic form of jurisdiction? Carolina Are places cautious hope in the EU’s Digital Services Act, which seeks to force the platforms to be more transparent: “Even if this law isn’t perfect, at least compelling platforms to tell us how they govern could, in theory, lead to better laws and regulation.” She also argues that we must vote for governments willing not merely to gesture at digital regulation, but who “actually hit platforms in their business model of profiting from opacity and the use of our data.”

Another proposal, raised separately by both Mary Jane Fox and Cindy Gallop, is the creation of protected, age-appropriate online spaces where discussion, education, communication and markets for the sex industry can take place freely. However, this doesn’t address the problem for those of us who aren’t primarily in the sex industry—such as literary publishers or health innovators—but whose work nonetheless intersects with sex and the body.

Noelle Perdue is a public speaker on porn history and its influence on culture and technology who wryly describes herself as a “travelling propagandist”. She told me how she grew up embracing the internet as a “potential utopia” but now sees it as an “extremely policed and monitored” commercial space. She also increasingly encounters people around the world who are “pivoting to a significantly more offline life and offline priorities.” In her view, print books—time-consuming and complex as they are to edit—may represent the last stronghold of media value, precisely because they are more difficult to delete or destroy after publication. As a bibliophile and someone who believes in the radical potential of the independent magazine industry, this idea resonates deeply. Yet I worry about all those who cannot access books or ideas in print. When I asked Dr Carolina Are why she continues to fight, her answer was simple: “I became the person I am thanks to the communities I found online.”

As an independent publisher of a biannual literary and art magazine, I’m in no position to offer a technical solution to digital censorship. Yet I strongly believe we must take stock of the ever-expanding commercial world in which we now spend so much of our waking lives before we become numb to the moral assumptions and constraints it imposes. Our desires, our sexualities, our sensual inclinations and practices have been policed throughout history. Women, sex workers and sexual and ethnic minorities have borne the brunt of public shaming, pillory, ritual humiliation, imprisonment, forceful “conversion” and death. In many parts of the world, they are still suffering. The digital landscape of 2026 follows this same insidious tradition of punishment by deletion and censorship.

The punishing of sexual openness, sex work and “deviance” is now so familiar that few politicians risk championing it. Fewer still challenge the insanity of banks charging the same high interest rates for the legal adult industry as they do for arms dealing. Meanwhile, the porn-streaming monopoly has made watching sex more accessible than at any other point in history, even as digital platforms limit porn literacy and education. We exist in a digital world of extremes: conversation silenced somewhere between a woman’s screaming orgasm and an aubergine emoji. It is a commercial world that encourages solitary shame and inhibition; whose monopolies suffocate smaller, ethical creators and publishers, silence the breadth of written human erotic experience and isolate those who might feel scared and alone by denying them access to kinship and community. It is a system that tells us the very words we use to describe our body and our desires should be hidden.

In the digital world of 2026, sex is more of a dirty word than ever.

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