The James Deen Post (Patreon)

On Saturday I turned on my phone to a handful of texts from Matthew and a friend who works adjacent to the sex industry. By now you’ve probably heard that the most popular male porn, James Deen, has been accused of sexual assault by several women, both porn performers and otherwise. If you hadn’t? Yeah, I was just as shocked and upset as you when I found out.

As soon as I could, I tweeted “Just got online and am stunned by the news. Of course Matt and I 100% support Stoya and we're evaluating our future relationship with jamesdeen .com” (edited here for typos).

Pretty quickly I was inundated with replies. I can’t find the exact quote, but someone demanded something along the lines of, “What the fuck is there to even consider about this?”

I understand how a spectator who has no connection to this person and therefore nothing at stake can read the headlines and jump straight to “A Bad Man Did a Bad Thing, He is Dead to Me.” And yeah, jesus, of course Matt and I are fucking horrified about these accusations, because how could we not be? But when you have any sort of social or business (or both!) ties with someone who has done something horrible, there actually ARE a number of things to consider as you move forward.

So, today, here are a few (though not all) of the fucks we had to consider in this situation.

BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP FUCKS

Before I go into my specific business situation, I want to point out another company that is having to navigate their relationship with James Deen right now as well. TRENCHCOATx is a porn site co-owned by Kayden Kross and Stoya, who was the first to publicly come forward about being assaulted by Deen. The most recent update to their site features a video of Deen which was directed by Stoya in 2013, while they were still in a relationship. Kross wrote a very insightful article for Nylon about why their site continues to feature videos of Deen and though it is difficult to stomach, it is because many other people’s hard work and money has gone into producing that content. Pulling the videos of Deen doesn’t show disapproval of him, it financially affects everyone else earning their income from working on content that includes him.

What was our relationship to James Deen and jamesdeen,com? Originally, fans! Matt and I enjoy his porn! On screen he is charismatic, playful, and cute as a button. Before our review of his site went up, we were already running ads to jamesdeen,com on Oh Joy Sex Toy. His affiliate plan gave us a special code to include in our links to jamesdeen,com, so any time somebody signs up we would earn a cut of that sale. The ads performed well enough on their own, but once we published our review, dang, jamesdeen,com became one of our best paying porn affiliates. We had so many sign-ups that Deen’s web PR guy took note and was eager to find more ways to work with us and very respectfully gauged my interest in doing another comic about the process of applying to 'Do a Scene with Deen' and what it might be like to make porn as a regular old civilian. The 'Talking Porn' comic weighed my personal pros and cons about what that experience could ential and it is one of the comics I’m most proud of.

ADS

It sucked to have to remove his ads. Matt had JUST moved OJST off of our previous ad network not for financial reasons but because we felt it the right thing to do for the future of our company. Doing this lost us one decent monthly paycheck, but we were hoping that Matt would be able to make up lost income with his new ad system that he is running himself. The new ads had only been up for about 24 hours (And James’s were already out-performing all the others) when Stoya’s announcement about the assault was made. Leaving ads up to his site would look like we sided with him, so we had to take the financial hit and take them down.

COMICS

We then had to consider our two comics featuring James. Do we pull those down? Do we edit the comics themselves? To say what? Each comic took me a week to create, real work and effort had gone into them: I think they look good, I’m super proud of my Talking Porn comic. Would editing the blog posts be enough? I often lovingly refer to Matt as the brains and me as the heart of OJST. At first we disagreed on whether to remove the affiliate links to sign up for his site from these posts. Matt felt that we should leave those links intact, because if we were going to leave those comics up then we should continue to profit from them (my boy loves making a dollar.) But I countered that we couldn’t pull all our ads while leaving our affiliate links intact for potential subscribers, it’s hypocritical. So the comics were left intact (for now) and the blog posts were amended to direct readers elsewhere and all our affiliate sign up links were removed. Honestly, we still don’t know what to do about the review comic itself.

THE NEXT BOOK

Then what do we do with the comics for the third OJST book? Obviously leave out the review of jamesdeen,com, but then how to handle the Talking Porn comic? Thankfully, we figured out that with a few text edits and one face re-drawing, it’s super easy to remove all references to James in Talking Porn. But do we edit the comic online with this version? Do we completely take down the review comic from the site? People start making conspiracy theories anytime you remove or drastically edit a post. Nothing feels like the right answer and we're still not quite sure what we ought to do.

JAMESDEEN,COM’S BANNER TO OH JOY SEX TOY

Then there’s the banner the James Deen crew wanted to put onto their site for us. It WOULD have been a great source for gaining new readers, who wold hopefully click on our ads ($), buy our merch ($), and maybe even sign up for Patreon ($). Matt and I disagreed on which way to go again, because receiving traffic from jamesdeen,com onto our site which has publicly stated we’ve ended our affiliation doesn’t necessarily implicate us as supporting him, right? But ultimately we settled on asking the banner to be removed.

PERSONAL FUCKS

Alright. So. All financial ties are broken, we’re taking a hit on our income to support our sense of rightness, all within a matter of hours of this news being made public. Situation considered, action taken, case now closed, right?

No, of course not. Removing the ads, amending blogs and making a statement was only the start of it. Because now every spectator on the internet wants my comments and if I don’t word them exactly right then I’m open for attack. People search out my email address (which is not listed anywhere on OJST) to demand how I feel about these allegations. They come to my Instagram to tag me into screencaptures of Stoya’s description of being raped with the kind note written just to me, “FYI”. They make brand new public posts here on my Patreon asking how I respond to this news. They bravely suggest ‘But what if he’s innocent?’ on my Facebook. They’re tweeting “PHEW, aren’t you glad you didn’t do a scene with him after all?” or “How do you even need to consider what to do with your jamesdeen,com working relationship?!?!” and “EVERYBODY KNEW THIS ALREADY I DON’T BELIEVE YOU DIDN’T ALREADY”. This is entertainment for them. This is blood in the water, the latest outrage spectacle and they’ve got their popcorn ready for the show.

And to me? This was a person I was forming the first fledgling legs of a friendship with. This was someone my husband and I had very seriously considered whether I should fuck. We were making plans to possibly get coffee in February. As surface-level as our communications were, James Deen was a human being I enjoyed interacting with. Now, just a couple hours after learning about this, a hundred usernames across the internet demand I package up my personal feelings into bite-size sentences for them to consume and judge by their hundred different standards, all of which I’m failing.

And in this whole horrible situation? We are nothing. Oh Joy Sex Toy’s income was impacted a bit, to be sure, but we’re not a company that stars and distributes James Deen porn. We’re not the employees of James Deen Productions, who depend on him for their paycheck. We’re not one of his co-stars or friends or family or romantic partners. We’re not one of his victims.

On the scale of people who are impacted and hurt by the actions of James Deen, we are at the bottom of the totem pole. If this situation has affected me this much, I can’t begin to imagine what people closer to him are going through.

IN CONCLUSION

“What the fuck is there to consider?”

A lot. There is a lot to consider.

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I really respectfully ask that you please not leave a comment or suggest what you think we should be doing. Matt and I are talking about these things (and more) with people in our real life and the constant feedback from  the internet, both positive and negative, just makes things noisier and more painful for me. Thank you so much for respecting my request :)

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EDITED a couple minutes after posting: Patreon automatically generated links to all mention of the jamesdeen[dot]com URL, so I replaced periods with commas.