Social Media Best Practices
These are general suggestions for posting kink art on popular social sites that may have excessively restrictive rules. Please note the advice will not always work, and policies are updated often.
Ultimately, you cannot dictate your preferences on a third party platform; creating a personal site and hosting your work on your site is the most enduring way to protect your work. Own as much of the infrastructure as you can.
- Platform Agnostic
When describing your artwork (whether in a social media post, shop description, or in tags) - do not use keywords, content warnings, or trigger words that describes specific kinks. Automated detection will easily pick up on them and have a high chance of flagging your work as inappropiate for the platform. US credit card companies have circulated a list of words most likely to be targeted; we suggest you avoid these. This document lists banned words that cannot be used on the iWantClips platform according to Visa/MasterCard rules. It includes over 200 words across various categories that are not allowed anywhere in content, such as categories, keywords, titles and descriptions. Alternative words are suggested for some banned words when used in a fantasy context. Certain situations also require the word "Fantasy" to be added to indicate it is fictional.
These words were collected from a combination of "banned word lists" from onlyfans, iwantclips, smashwords, and various sites.
Abduct | Adult Baby | Animal | Asphyxia | Ballbusting | Bait | Bareback | Blackmail | Beastiality | Bestiality | Bleeding | Blood | Bloodplay | Blacked | Brainwash | Bukkake | Caned | Caning | CBT | Cashapp | Cannibal | Captive | Cervix | Comatose | Coma | Coerce | Child | Choke | Chloroform | Cycle | CP | Consent | Drink | Drunk | Drugged | Diapers | Doze | Dog | Eleven | Entrance | Escort | Enema | Fansly | Fuckfan | Fanfuck | Fetal | Fecal | Foetal | Fist | Fisting | Farm | Flogging | Force | Furry | Forced Bi | Fifteen | Firearms | Gaping | Golden | Gunplay | Gangbang | Hardsports | Hypno | Hooker | Inbreed | Incapacitation | Incest | Intox | Jail | Jailbait | Kidnap | Knocked | Knock | Lactate | Lolicon | Lolita | Menstruate | Menstrua | Medical play | Mind Control | Molest | Mutilate | Necrophilia | Pedo | Pedophile | Pedophilia | Prostituted | Paralyze | Pee | Peeplay | Poo | Piss | Poop | Pegging | Paddling | Paypal | Passed out | Prostitution | Prostitute | Preteen | Rape | Rapist | Restricted | Snuff | Showers | Shota | Strangle | Suffocate | Teen | Toilet | Torture | Slave | Scat | Smegma | Strangulation | Torturing | Tortured | Trance | Twelve | Unconscious | Unwilling | Underage | Urine | Vomit | Venmo | Whipped | Whipping | Watersports | Young | Zoophilia
- Platform Agnostic
Post cropped NSFW images on platforms that censor, and then link to the full uncensored image elsewhere on your site.
- Platform Agnostic
Platforms more "commonly known" to host adult and/or LBGT+ content are at greater risk to being targeted by policy changes or anti-pornography organizations across the globe. Additionally, recent age verification policies around the globe frequently target sites with a certian % of adult work. If it is unavoidable to post on these platforms, always have a secondary platform, personal site, or mirror artistic work elsewhere.
- Debanking
Do not mention NSFW activities in payment processor invoices, whether commissioning creatives or selling commissions.
Print Best Practices
Selling kink artwork on printed media like books, zines, comics, doujin, and artbooks can be in some ways more "hardy" in the long run. It's harder for censors to delete en-masse (such as taking down a personal site), it will live on a person's bookshelf long after the artist has passed away, and is much harder to destroy once when distributed. That said below are general tips to the printing/publishing/distributoun route. Right now the biggest bottleneck for US-based creatives is the payment processors who have their own idea of what's not allowed to buy and sell, versus legally-enshrined rights.
- Printing
There are kink-friendly printers that will print fictional works containing BDSM, zoo, age-gap works, and more (the webmaster has done business with several). To protect their identity, specific printers will not be listed. However, you can always cold-email various printers and ask them what level of fictional content they're comfortable printing. A reputable printer will gladly tell you, and sometimes ask for an example spread so they can judge for themselves.
- Printing
In general, physical printers are much more open to hard fictional kinks than payment processers; the only real limit the webmaster has consistently found is they'll ask for the work to be (a) hand-drawn or written and not photography (or AI), and (b) to have written somewhere on the work that all characters are over 18.
- Printing
Canadian and Chinese-based printers in general are a lot stricter on what kind of fictional kinks can be printed. US and Taiwanese printers, less so.
Personal Site Best Practices
People will often advise kink artists to create their own site. This is due to the simple matter that if you post on other sites, you will always be beholden to somebody else's rules. But if you host your own site, the amount of restrictions decreases rapidly. While this alone will take care of the vast majority of issues most erotic artists run into, keep in mind site hosts are still beholden to the legal regulations of the country the servers are in - which can be an issue for some edge-case fictional work such as lolisho (which is often in a complex grey area). That said there are some actionable ways you can "harden" your personal site if you are hosting such work.
That said, please do your due diligence and your own research. This should not be taken as legal advise.
- Personal Site
Having "a" page where viewers have to click into your website and at minimum click "yes" on "are you above 18" is a smart thing to do in general, and vastly better than nothing. even more secure would be to set up a "paywall" system for the whole site.
- Personal Site
For age verification legal ramifications with kink content, it's typically better to have said artistic work behind some kind of paywall, whether it's even buying a physical book or zine elsewhere. That way a middle school minor has less reason to access it than say, a sophomore in college since by definition most people who tend to have credit cards are adults (though not always). If one was a kink artist, focusing on printed wares versus digital wares is very likely to be more stable in the long term (such as printed zines, comics, and physical pamphlets).
- Personal Site
Hypothetically, if somebody brought obscenity charges against you - an easy way to make your legal case stronger ahead of time is to have a detailed specific artist's statement on your website about why you draw what you draw, so it's more obvious to the court and jury of your peers that the work has artistic merit ("I don't like authority" or similar tounge in cheek responses, sadly, does not work as an artistic statement.)
- Personal Site
For high-risk artists or publishers, "opinion letters" might be worth consulting with a lawyer. where you can make contact with a lawyer in your own state and essentially have them review your work, and pre-emptively write a letter that basically says "this work is not obscene because of x y z" (if they agree with that). there's obviously more details than that but for high risk people it might be worth a consultation.
- Hosting
If somebody complains about offensive content on your site (without invoking legal consenquences), we strongly suggest to ignore them. (If they invoke legal consenquences, please reach out to a lawyer immediately. Lawyers familiar with digital speech rights are listed on this page.) Harassers of all kinds are almost always looking for a reaction. If, however, for any reason you need a boilerplate neutral response, below is an example you can reference:
- Hosting
Doing busines with third-party hard kink content outside of personal commissions (or personal artisic work) is exceptionally fraught, and outside this site's ability to comment on. However, there has been discussion that using a token approach instead of direct payments on a business level is a way to bypass payment processor's draconian restrictions on kink content. Beyond this, please do your own research.
We appreciate your concerns and have reviewed your complaint. However, this type of content does not violate our Terms of Service; therefore we will not be taking any action.