Comment Re:Not the outcome I was expecting (Score 2) 111
Problem seems to be with payment processors. They got utterly subverted by woke in the anglosphere, which led to anglo side of the companies demand global censorship rules.
A lot of Japanese erotica and porn sites have been hit with it lately. Wokes utterly despise anime, because woke despises "male gaze", i.e. normal male sexuality. They actually write about it openly both in their academic papers and their DEI releases. It's why a lot of modern Western art features intentionally uglified models, even when it's a body scan.
But East Asians aren't in the grip of the same problem. And they have a massive audience in anglo countries. It's why manga crushes western comics in sales. It's why anime crushed western cartoons. It's why East Asian games are increasingly crushing Western games.
So that's where subverted payment processors come in. It's very difficult to legislate against art that serves normal healthy male sexuality, doubly so because men are biologically primed to spend resources to satisfy their sexual needs. But what you can do is instead subvert the primary ways of paying for those services, as to maximize friction between suppliers and consumers to artificially depress demand. Pixiv is just one of many sites that's been having problems with Visa and Mastercard lately. There have been several others, some of which openly stopped accepting Visa and Mastercard entirely to keep allowing erotica and porn on their sites for anglo visitors. Because those two payment processors have been utilizing selective enforcement of their opaque porn rules to meet the demands of their internal woke agitators to stop servicing anyone who serves the needs of the grandiose evil that is the "male gaze".
So sites have to choose between continuing to offer that which consumers want, but become unable to use most common global payment processors because of the anglo "safety" teams being utterly unhinged woke lunatics. Or you block the anglo visitors from accessing the stuff that serves the "male gaze" so that the rest of the world's men using Visa and Mastercard can continue to shop there just fine.