Last year, the crowdfunding site Patreon—on which hundreds of independents artists and content creators rely for income—began quietly cracking down on erotic content, as AVN.com reported at the time. Artists reported that kink and fetish content had been targeted by the platform as “glorifying sexual violence.”
Now, according to a Taiwanese artist who uses the screen name Waero, Patreon has extended its censorship to hentai artwork—a type of sexually explicit, anime-style cartooning.
According to a report by The Daily Dot, Waero said in a viral post that Patreon had forced him to remove several examples of “Japanese style” artwork—with “Japanese style” essentially a euphemism for the anatomically exaggerated, porn cartoons popular in Japanese anime and manga (comic books).
The problem, according to Waero’s post, was that given the way that hentai typically depicts its characters, Patreon claimed it could not certify that the characters were intended to be adults.
“Details like a big head, big eyes, and short height can make the characters look younger,” an official Patreon statement quited by Daily Dot said, in reply to Waero’s post. Enormous breasts and hips were insufficient to establish that female characters were intended to be adults, the Patreon statement said.
“In order to make them look like adults, the face is the most important part—so even if it’s a stylish option to make your characters look innocent and sweet, you should always bear in mind that this also makes them look younger,” Patreon said, according to Waero’s claims.
When Patreon updated its rules on adult content in October of 2017, it specifically singled out “incest, bestiality, sexual depiction of minors, and suggestive sexual violence.” But at the time, the site denied that it was “cracking down” on adult material.
But with the Patreon guidelines failing to account for hentai artwork in which adult characters may be perceived as underage by those unfamiliar with the style, Daily Dot cited Japanese media critic Haru Nicol as condemning the site’s policies as “xenophobic, racist, and extremely cisnormative.”
Another Asia-based artist, who asked not to be named publicly by Daily Dot, also accused the site of cultural bias.
“I do think this general attitude is very linked to white people’s inability to tell East Asian people’s age,” the artist wrote. “This ban—if accurate—is pretty xenophobic.”
Photo by Niabot / Wikimedia Commons
