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quietly-by-myself · 1 year

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A Wicked Work of Art - Prologue

I don't know if I'll continue this but here's my medical whump brain rot. You have @demondamage and @sparrowsage to thank. Also brought to you by: roleplays I had online when I was 14.

Constantine and Vasiliki are mages born of the light arts. The subject is a mage born of the dark arts. Vasiliki will warm up with time, if I continue this. The subject is being prepared to be sold or kept by the handlers for training other mages born of the dark arts for sale.

CW: fantasy racism, test subject whumpee, experiment whumpee, medical whump, doctor carewhumper, dehumanization, fantasy setting, trans whumpee (ftm), sick whumpee, dubcon medical treatment, medical restraints, panic attack, death wish, begging, dubcon sedation

===

“There’s something dark about him.”

Vasiliki looked up from the subject standing before him and right at Constantine. “Something dark?”

Constantine nodded, motioning to the eyes of the subject. The subject himself had dark, almost mulch colored hair that was in mats. His eyes were striking, yes, hazel, but Vasiliki couldn’t see anything special about them.

“Do you not see the ring?”

Now that Vasiliki looked harder, he did notice it - a silver ring around the hazel, as dark as his pupils.

“He invited evil. Do not feel bad for him.”

Vasiliki looked up at Constantine with surprise. “Don’t feel bad for him? Would I really be here if I believed these creatures were the same as us?”

Constantine laughed a little. “No, you wouldn’t. However, you’ll see what I mean soon enough.”

Vasiliki looked at Constantine hesitantly. “What… exactly did you do to him over there?”

“Nothing important,” Constantine said dismissively. “We did what we were ordered to do on him and trained him properly. Now, it’s your turn to patch him up so we can move onto the next step, whatever that is.”

Vasiliki nodded. He lifted the chin of the subject, looking at the bruises on his neck. The skin of the subject was very warm to the touch. “Well, then, he’s in my hands. I’ll make the determination of if I want to keep him for my work or not.”

Constantine nodded. “Of course, Vasiliki. You’re the best we have.”

Vasiliki was not one for modesty. He just nodded gracefully. He took the leash of the subject as Constantine left the room. Vasiliki needed to get the subject to a bed quickly. The subject’s labored breathing, the way that he winced, forcing himself to stand wasn’t lost on Vasiliki. His doctor instincts had kicked in, no matter how much he despised the subject’s kind.

It wasn’t even twenty steps before the subject collapsed, thrown into a coughing fit by whatever he was fighting off.

Vasiliki looked at the curled up figure on the floor, the pained way that he coughed. Vasiliki took a small pager out of his pocket and dialed for someone to bring a bed to him. It wasn’t the first time he’d treated a subject that was so severely wounded. Sickness was another thing entirely. Luckily, Vasiliki couldn’t catch their illnesses.

Once the bed arrived on wheels, Vasiliki quickly lifted the feather-light form of the subject from the floor and placed him onto the bed. Vasiliki waved the nurse off. He didn’t want what he was about to ask to be on the books.

He wheeled the bed down the hall, down to the special ward where the subjects were treated and into a private room, as all subjects had. Vasiliki, for a moment, considered the soft restraints on the edge of the bed. The subject wasn’t fighting, but it could all be a trick. Vasiliki was no fool.

Vasiliki took the leash off of the subject’s collar, then strapped his hands and feet into the restraints. No resistance. Interesting.

“What’s your name, subject?”

“My designation is 7634.” The subject’s voice was robotic. From the scratchiness of his throat, Vasiliki could tell that he was struggling to breathe.

“Not your designation.” Vasiliki leaned over the subject. “Your name.”

The subject hesitated. Normally, Vasiliki might’ve hit the subject, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere with someone so sick.

He moved to the oxygen tank near where he’d set up the bed. While the subject chewed on the idea of spitting out his name, Vasiliki worked to put a cannula in his nose, an IV in his arm with Lactated Ringer’s, and electrodes to his chest.

As Vasiliki moved aside the subject’s gown, he noticed the scars on his chest.

“You weren’t born a man?”

The subject was quick to answer. “No, I wasn’t.”

Vasiliki hummed. “I assume they gave you the appropriate treatment at the other place?”

“Yes, sir.”

Vasiliki continued his work on the subject’s electrodes. Soon enough, the machine was beeping away. Vasiliki took a sticky tape and attached the finger stick to the subject’s right pointer.

His oxygen was 85%.

Vasiliki was glad he put the subject on oxygen right away. He’d likely need antibiotics or testing to see if it was viral.

“Now, I asked you a question. What’s your name?” Vasiliki was running out of patience for the subject. He needed the subject to know that it was different with him.

The subject immediately began to pull at the restraints. Vasiliki cocked an eyebrow as panic filled the subject. The rings in the subject’s eyes grew larger. He was coughing and hyperventilating and more than anything, looking absolutely petrified.

“Listen, subject,” Vasiliki tilted the subject’s head so that he met Vasiliki’s eyes. “I want to make one thing clear. I’m different from them. I don’t see you as human, no, but I do not intend to hurt you like they did. Now, take a few breaths. Whatever is inside of you wants to come out.”

“Just kill me. You’ve done enough to me. I don’t want to live anymore.”

The subject was in tears. Vasiliki couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed. Why couldn't the subject see that he had the subject’s best interests in mind?

“I will do no such thing. I’m a doctor. I heal. I don’t kill.”

That sent the subject sobbing, pulling at the restraints weakly and coughing. “I can’t. I can’t keep going.”

Vasiliki debated sedating the subject. It would make him more comfortable, not to have to suffer with all the anxiety he was clearly going through. Whatever the others had done to him, Vasiliki was sure it had left the subject completely traumatized. More so than usual. Maybe he’d been a fighter.

Maybe that meant that sedation was what was best for him.

Vasiliki went over to the cabinet and pulled out a small pill bottle. From the bottle he shook out two pills. Vasiliki poured a glass of water from the sink in the room, then walked back over to the subject.

“Take these. You’re too anxious.”

The subject looked at him, wide-eyed. The subject paused. Not obedient. Most would’ve taken Vasiliki’s gift without hesitation.

Eventually, the subject opened his mouth. What Vasiliki saw inside was disturbing, even for him. All of the subject’s teeth had been removed. Now, he was certain that they would grow back, but it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t wince at the sight.

Vasiliki placed the pills on the subject’s tongue, then allowed him to drink from the glass. The flinch from the subject wasn’t lost on him.

“I’ll be back soon, subject. By then, have your name ready.”

With that, Vasiliki sighed and left the room, sliding the one-way glass door shut and turning the lights off. The subject would probably be asleep when he came back. However, Vasiliki was fine with that. Sleeping subjects were easier to work with than ones that were awake.

===

Tags: @i-can-even-burn-salad @whumpsday @pigeonwhumps @oddsconvert

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someone-will-remember-us · 11 days

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Adults-only website OnlyFans has made aspiring porn stars rich and celebrities richer. But a Reuters investigation found a darker side: More than 120 people have complained to U.S. police agencies that they were featured in the site’s sexually explicit content without their consent – including a woman who alleged a video of her rape was sold on OnlyFans. Laws often protect web giants while victims struggle for justice.

SAMMY remembers nearly every detail of the night in April 2022 when she says two men raped her.

The Miami apartment, stark and empty, where it happened. The loud music as she screamed and told them to stop. The fear and the pain, the overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

Sammy, recalling the night in an interview, also remembers seeing a phone perched on a dresser and thinking: Am I being filmed?

Two months later, on June 30, an edited recording of Sammy’s alleged assault was posted on OnlyFans, a website where people can create porn and charge for it. The video was marketed by one of her alleged assailants as “train” sex, jargon for multiple men having sex with one woman, according to screenshots obtained by Reuters.

“The full train video is here guys,” he said on OnlyFans. “Who wants it?”

OnlyFans is an adults-only website where anyone – celebrities, porn stars, cash-strapped moms and aspiring influencers – can sell sexually explicit videos of themselves. Top earners make millions of dollars a year. Created in 2016, OnlyFans now boasts almost 240 million users and has achieved mainstream fame. Beyoncé namechecked it in a song lyric. Rapper Iggy Azalea said it had brought her a small fortune.

But other people have reaped pain, not profit. They describe lives upended after sexually explicit content featuring them was posted and sold on OnlyFans without their consent. Some videos, like Sammy’s, involve alleged sexual assault. Law enforcement has struggled to monitor such nonconsensual pornography on the website, while victims often have limited legal recourse.

OnlyFans says it is building “the safest social media platform in the world.” But a Reuters investigation identified 128 cases in which women and men complained to U.S. law enforcement agencies that sexual content featuring them ended up on OnlyFans without their permission – and was often sold for profit – between January 2019 and November 2023.

Under public records laws, Reuters sought documents on cases involving OnlyFans from more than 250 of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States – the platform’s biggest market. Fifty-six of them produced records in which people complained of explicit, nonconsensual posts on OnlyFans. Reuters also interviewed police officers, prosecutors, legal experts and nine people who said their sexual images appeared without their consent.

Most of the 128 police complaints were lodged by women against men who were former sex partners. They often said the content was produced consensually but was posted without their permission – or even their knowledge. In about 40% of the complaints, the videos also appeared on other popular social media sites, usually as snippets to promote lengthier and more explicit material for sale on OnlyFans.

The cases highlight how technology has transformed modern relationships and the porn industry. Today, anyone with a cellphone and an internet connection can make and distribute sexual videos and images. Filming and sharing these is now an accepted part of many intimate encounters – so long as it’s a lovers’ secret. Posting those videos online, however, can feel like a major betrayal. It can also be illegal.

Some women said their unwanted appearance on OnlyFans had nearly destroyed their lives.

“A whole company has made money off of my biggest trauma,” said Sammy, 21, in her first public comments on the case. She requested that her full name be withheld.

In Texas, a woman described being forced to install a home security system after being harassed by stalkers who saw an OnlyFans video of her that went viral. A Nebraska woman said she struggled to go out in public, terrified that people might recognize her from a sex video her ex-boyfriend was selling on OnlyFans for $15. An Illinois woman said she learned that naked images of herself were circulating from her teenage daughter, who saw them online.

In response to a detailed account of Reuters’ findings, an OnlyFans spokesperson said that “in the few examples where bad actors have misused our platform,” OnlyFans “removed the content swiftly, banned the user and actively supported investigations and prosecutions.”

The spokesperson said OnlyFans had reviewed the cases of Sammy and others described in this report and found that those accounts were deleted either by OnlyFans moderators or the creators themselves. Those deletions sometimes occurred a year or longer after women complained to police, a Reuters review of police records and account information from OnlyFans found.

The spokesperson didn’t elaborate on the cases but said OnlyFans tightened its consent verification procedures in late 2022. The company requires “proof of identification and consent from all individuals featured in any explicit content uploaded to our platform, and we moderate all uploaded content,” she said.

She declined to respond to questions about how explicit content of non-consenting adults could have ended up on the site when OnlyFans says it moderates everything.

Combining social media glamor and the business of sex, OnlyFans casts itself as a new breed of adult website. Most big porn sites offer content for free and make money mainly from advertising. At OnlyFans, revenue is generated by its 3.2 million creators, most of them amateurs. They sell content to their subscribers, or “fans,” usually for a monthly fee of between $4.99 and $50. One-off sales of videos and images through the site’s direct-messaging function can be even more lucrative.

The terms are attractive for OnlyFans creators: They keep 80% of their fans’ payments. For OnlyFans, which takes the rest, it’s a goldmine. According to the most recent filing by its British parent company, Fenix International, OnlyFans’ pre-tax profit in 2022 reached $525 million – almost a hundred-fold increase in just three years. Revenue expanded at least twenty-fold to more than $1 billion.

OnlyFans doesn’t know how many of its creators are making “adult content,” the spokesperson has said. The platform says it also features sports, music and other non-explicit material.

Beyond the United States, OnlyFans has also seen explosive growth – along with allegations of abuse against celebrities and other content creators.

In Australia, a Queensland man faces trial after being accused of filming himself raping his unconscious girlfriend in 2021 and uploading the video to OnlyFans, according to court records. The man hasn’t entered a plea, a court official said. In Thailand, a married couple was arrested in October on suspicion of drugging and raping four women and a 17-year-old girl, then selling videos of the acts on OnlyFans, Thai police said. The couple hasn’t entered a plea but denied the rape charges, police said.

In Romania, former kickboxer Andrew Tate is awaiting trial on rape and sex-trafficking charges connected to running an operation that allegedly forced women to create porn for OnlyFans, said Romanian prosecutors. Tate denies the charges.

In Britain, Stephen Bear, a former reality show contestant, was sentenced in March 2022 to 21 months in jail after posting a sex video of his ex-girlfriend on OnlyFans without her permission. Bear, who denied all charges, was released in January after serving half his sentence. He didn’t respond to a request for comment. Reuters documented another 17 cases in Britain in which people had complained to UK authorities of nonconsensual porn appearing on OnlyFans, according to public records obtained from the country’s police forces.

Despite the attention generated by high-profile cases, law enforcement officials say the sheer size of OnlyFans and the paywalls surrounding its individual creators have made it nearly impossible to monitor systematically. OnlyFans is largely a black box to outsiders, much less accessible than social media sites like Instagram, X and Facebook.

The paywall “absolutely, unequivocally adds a barrier,” said Joseph Scaramucci, a deputy sheriff in Texas who formerly worked on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security anti-human trafficking task force. Some law enforcement agencies won’t subscribe to OnlyFans accounts due to budgetary constraints, he said.

There are other reasons perpetrators of nonconsensual porn aren’t held to account, Reuters found. Some people were reluctant to press charges against former lovers. Police often lack expertise in gathering technical evidence of cyber-crimes or view the cases as low-priority misdemeanors. Women can be hesitant to share explicit images with male police and prosecutors.

No federal law specifically criminalizes nonconsensual porn. It has been prosecuted under federal anti-trafficking statutes in at least three cases – none of which involved OnlyFans. Complaints typically are handled by local authorities enforcing a patchwork of state laws, and they usually focus on individuals who post abusive content, not on the sites that host it.

OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair has said that “100 percent” of content is reviewed by human moderators aided by artificial intelligence. But the cases documented by Reuters, including the video of Sammy’s alleged rape, point to significant gaps in this system.

“The victim is clearly saying no” in the video, said Todd Falzone, a lawyer for Sammy. “So if they were really moderating that video, they would have seen and heard that.”

Her alleged assailants, Michelson Romelus and Bendjy Charles, face charges of sexual battery and distributing obscene material. They have pleaded not guilty.

Separately, in federal court in Florida, Sammy is suing the two men – and OnlyFans. Her lawsuit is the first to take on the platform itself under a federal sex-trafficking law that prohibits companies from financially benefiting from commercial sex abuses, according to a Reuters review of court filings and interviews with legal experts.

Sammy’s sex-trafficking claim is part of a growing number of lawsuits by people who accuse social media sites of profiting from abusive sexual content. The suits could signal a reckoning for OnlyFans and others in the industry, said five lawyers who specialize in porn and sex-trafficking cases.

“The legal landscape has shifted,” said Julie Dahlstrom, a human trafficking expert at Boston University School of Law. “You’ve seen judges interpreting trafficking laws more expansively,” and “lawyers and survivors understanding that they can bring those cases.”

NO FACE, NO CASE

For some people, the shock of seeing their naked images on OnlyFans was followed by a futile fight for justice.

Amanda Dicrosta’s battle began in Florida in February 2022, when she walked into the Tampa Police Department to file a sexual cyber-harassment complaint against her ex-boyfriend, Mike McFarland, a former player for the National Football League’s Indianapolis Colts. “I was just hoping that they would take me seriously,” she said.

The two had dated for about a year and then split up. McFarland afterward posted videos of them having sex on his OnlyFans and Twitter accounts without her permission, she told police.

Dicrosta, 28, told police that McFarland recorded some of the sex videos without her knowledge or consent. She knew other videos existed but said the couple had an understanding that those were private.

When Dicrosta first learned in June 2020 that McFarland, 32, had posted the videos on OnlyFans, she confronted him, and he initially took down the videos, she wrote in a sworn police statement. But in August 2021, when she revisited McFarland’s OnlyFans account, she discovered not just those videos but also new ones recorded without her knowledge, she told police.

When she saw videos of her advertised on OnlyFans for $5 each, she felt sick. McFarland had “exposed my entire body for $5,” Dicrosta told Reuters. “I can’t even buy a full meal at McDonald’s for $5.”

Dicrosta said she contacted McFarland again. This time, he refused to take down the videos, she told police.

On Twitter, McFarland posted snippets of the videos with links to his OnlyFans account, according to screenshots Dicrosta provided to Reuters and police. Another ex-boyfriend recognized her body in the videos and shared them with friends, some of whom assumed she was now in the business of “doing porn,” she said.

McFarland told police that Dicrosta knew the recordings would be posted on OnlyFans and Twitter. “It was with her consent,” he told Reuters. “I have nothing to lie about.”

X, as Twitter has been renamed, declined to comment on Dicrosta’s case but said it works to limit sensitive adult content from being shared.

After consulting with the state attorney’s office, police told Dicrosta the case couldn’t be prosecuted. The videos showed her private parts, underwear and a bathing suit – but not her face. For the case to proceed in court, the police report said, the videos had to include information that more specifically identified her.

Police closed Discrosta’s case in July 2022 and told her they’d reopen it if she located any such videos.

“I felt hopeless,” she said. “Do I just need to strip naked and show you my naked body for you to believe me? What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to prove to you that this is me?”

To violate Florida law, explicit images shared nonconsensually must contain “personal identification information,” such as unique physical attributes.

Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington D.C., studies the issue of nonconsensual porn and is familiar with Florida’s law. After reviewing Dicrosta’s case at Reuters’ request, she said the case could have been prosecuted because there was enough context of Dicrosta in the video to allow someone – in this case, a former boyfriend – to recognize her.

The case speaks to a broader problem, Franks said: Not all police departments are familiar with the nuances of laws on nonconsensual porn, especially as some laws are relatively new.

A Tampa police spokesperson said that detectives “dedicated over five months to the investigation,” but the evidence did “not meet the criteria to establish a criminal violation.”

Dicrosta felt angry and let down. She thought about the “personal identification information” demanded by Florida law and came up with another way to protect herself in case a sexual partner secretly filmed her in the future.

She walked into a tattoo parlor and had the words “not yours” etched on her backside.

BARRIERS TO PROSECUTION

Dicrosta’s experience illustrates the long odds of holding people who post nonconsensual porn to account.

Of the 128 U.S. cases Reuters documented, only 28 ended in an arrest and eight resulted in any sort of criminal conviction. Three people went to jail – two for 48 hours each.

Police closed 90 of the cases, including nine for lack of evidence, 12 because investigative leads were exhausted, and 10 because the accusers decided not to pursue charges. The other 38 remained open, including 15 cases marked as “inactive.”

Police documented some cases for “informational purposes only” when the accusers didn’t want to pursue charges but wanted a record of the incident.

Forty-eight states, Washington D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico have criminalized nonconsensual porn in the past two decades. But many laws have loopholes or are weakly enforced, according to lawyers, academics and victim advocates. Repeated efforts by the U.S. Congress to pass federal laws that criminalize nonconsensual porn have failed, largely due to objections by free-speech advocates.

Thirty-eight states classify the sharing of nonconsensual porn as misdemeanors, a low-priority crime for some police departments. Some investigators blame the victims for allowing themselves to be filmed, said Franks, the law professor. “There’s not much sympathy for victims to begin with,” she said.

Many of the state laws now used to fight nonconsensual porn are designed to combat “revenge porn,” in which someone posts explicit images to retaliate against a former partner. But in the OnlyFans cases documented by Reuters, the motive often isn’t just retribution. It’s money.

That’s a barrier to prosecutions in some jurisdictions.

In Florida’s Okaloosa County, a man contacted the sheriff’s office in September 2022 after discovering his ex-girlfriend posted a sex video of them on OnlyFans without his permission. Under Florida law, however, the video must be published with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.”

“Although the victim expressed emotional distress, the intent of the suspect was financial gain, and therefore the elements of this crime have not been met,” the investigating detective said in the case report, which redacted the man’s name.

Police dropped the case.

‘IT NEVER ENDS’

Many OnlyFans creators rely on other social media to promote their content to potential subscribers. Some videos on OnlyFans are published or leaked on other porn sites. And some are disseminated so widely that victims are powerless to stop them.

Adreiona Prater said she was caught in a viral nightmare.

Prater was 18 when a sex video of her appeared on OnlyFans and other websites. She was attending junior college, studying criminal justice, in Tyler, Texas, in July 2019, when she met and briefly dated Anthony Reshon Scott, then 20.

Prater said she reluctantly allowed Scott to record them having sex but afterward asked him to delete the video. Scott assured her he did, she told police.

In February 2020, Prater discovered the video on Pornhub, another big porn site, and contacted Tyler police. She said she dropped the case after Scott promised to take the video down, but later discovered it on OnlyFans. She watched helplessly as it took off on social media.

On Oct. 6, 2020, a clip appeared on Scott’s Twitter account, revealing her face and naked body, police records show. The caption read, “Check out my onlyfans with over 200+ girls,” and provided a link to Scott’s OnlyFans page. An eight-minute version was also posted to Reddit by an anonymous user, watermarked with the address of Scott’s OnlyFans account.

In comments under the Reddit post, someone identified Prater by posting her social media information, according to screenshots she shared with police. On Instagram, one person asked her: “That was you in that onlyfans vid?”

After being harassed by online stalkers, Prater said she installed a home security system, changed her phone number and called police again, this time in Arlington, Texas, where she’d recently moved.

“I just felt so scared,” she said.

An Arlington police detective investigating Prater’s report ran into a problem: the OnlyFans paywall. It required a $5 monthly subscription fee. “So I was unable to view the contents,” Detective Jacklyn Donalson wrote in a case report. Donalson told Reuters she knew from experience that it would be tough to convince her superiors to pay for a porn subscription, especially when there was no guarantee it would provide usable evidence.

“Like all government agencies, our resources are finite,” said Tim Ciesco, spokesperson for the Arlington Police Department. “We have to be strategic about the way we disperse them.”

The case might have stalled there. Without a subscription, there’s almost no public information on OnlyFans accounts available to investigators. Some seek subpoenas to force OnlyFans to disclose account information, but that involves persuading a court that it’s relevant to an investigation.

In Prater’s case, however, Donalson said she ultimately was able to document enough evidence of a crime without Scott’s OnlyFans information because the video appeared on other platforms, including Twitter.

Spokespeople for Reddit and X didn’t comment on Prater’s case but said their platforms strictly prohibit nonconsensual porn. Pornhub operator Aylo said it “expeditiously” removed the video when it learned about it.

In August 2021, a Tarrant County grand jury indicted Scott for violating Texas’ “revenge porn” law, a felony. The jury cited his Twitter post that advertised his OnlyFans page.

In a conversation that Prater recorded and submitted to police, Scott told her he would pay her to drop the charges, according to the recording, which Reuters reviewed. This time, Prater refused.

Scott pleaded guilty in June 2022 to publishing intimate visual material without Prater’s consent, and received three years of community supervision, akin to probation. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Scott said in an interview. “I want to leave it at that.”

As police investigated her case, Prater wrote to OnlyFans on Feb. 23, 2021, to complain about the video and give them the name of Scott’s OnlyFans account. The company replied the next day, saying the video would be removed if confirmed to be nonconsensual, according to a screenshot of the message that Prater shared with Reuters.

“We take all reports of this nature extremely seriously,” a help desk representative wrote to her.

Prater said she never heard from OnlyFans again.

According to OnlyFans, the complaint contained “no actionable information.” The company did not elaborate but told Reuters its moderators deactivated the account in April 2022 – more than a year after Prater’s takedown request.

Versions of the sex video remain online, the OnlyFans watermark still visible.

“I still get harassed about it to this day,” Prater said. “It never ends.”

’MY HEART DROPPED. IT WAS ME’

The surge of pornography unleashed by OnlyFans and other websites in the smartphone era is reminiscent of the “Golden Age of Porn,” a period in the 1970s and 1980s when another technological advance – home video players – brought porn to a much wider audience.

As the porn market expands, turbo-charged by social media, so does the challenge of verifying consent.

OnlyFans’ terms of service say creators must have documents to prove the age, identity and consent of other people who appear in their content, unless OnlyFans has already vetted those people as creators too. But multiple creators said in interviews that they have uploaded porn featuring others without providing that proof.

The OnlyFans spokesperson said the company strengthened procedures in late 2022 to require proof of consent before creators could post content on the platform. Yet Reuters found more than a dozen cases filed with U.S. law enforcement agencies in 2023 in which people alleged that explicit videos or images were posted without their consent.

In addition, of the nine people Reuters interviewed who said they were victims of nonconsensual porn, all said they were never asked for documents.

“Even if you have content moderation rules that are fairly clear against nonconsensual intimate images, those rules are abused regularly,” said Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who has studied online abuse on porn platforms.

While CEO Keily Blair pledges that OnlyFans monitors 100% of content, the terms of service say the company has no obligation to do so: “We are not responsible for reviewing or moderating Content.”

The company spokesperson didn’t address the apparent inconsistency but said: “We know the legal identity of all our creators and work closely with law enforcement around the world. This approach means OnlyFans is an extremely hostile environment for anyone” seeking to share nonconsensual sexual content, she said.

Some women said they were only able to confirm suspicions or rumors of their appearance on OnlyFans by buying access to images or videos of themselves.

Jennifer Aviles told police she initially heard about the explicit videos of herself from her 15-year-old daughter. The teen discovered Twitter posts by Aviles’ ex-boyfriend, William Lewis, that advertised his OnlyFans account with images of her face and body.

“I got my only fans set up if y’all want to see some really GOOD STUFF,” Lewis tweeted on Oct. 18, 2020.

“I looked at it and my heart dropped. It was me,” Aviles, 40, of Woodstock, Illinois, recalled in an interview.

Aviles knew that explicit images and videos had been taken during their eight-year relationship. “I enjoyed being recorded, then watching afterwards,” she said. “I think it’s why most people consent to do intimate videos.”

But she told police that she had asked Lewis to delete the images after they broke up. “Being vulnerable like that involves a lot of trust. Little did I know years later it would haunt me.”

Wanting to know exactly what Lewis had posted of her on his OnlyFans page, she paid for a $50 monthly subscription to his account, she said. She discovered photos and videos of her naked body and of her engaged in sexual acts with Lewis.

Aviles called the Woodstock Police Department.

On Aug. 29, 2021, a detective brought Lewis, 41, to the police station for questioning. During the videotaped interview, which Reuters reviewed, Lewis initially denied posting explicit material of Aviles on OnlyFans or Twitter. Then he said he couldn’t remember. Then he broke down in tears. “I’m hoping this doesn’t ruin the rest of my life,” he said.

In May 2022, Lewis pleaded guilty to one count of nonconsensual dissemination of a sexual image – a felony. He received 24 months of probation.

“I am remorseful,” Lewis told Reuters. “I do feel bad about putting it out there into the universe.”

OnlyFans confirmed it responded to a police inquiry about Aviles’ case in March 2021 and that the account had been deleted the previous November. X didn’t comment on the case but says it bans non-consensual nudity on the platform.

Far from giving consent, 11 women and five men involved in the cases reviewed by Reuters told police they had no idea that images featured on OnlyFans even existed until after they had been posted. Each said the videos had been recorded without their knowledge.

Taysha Blase, 29, was among them.

The Nebraska woman said she had subscribed to her ex-boyfriend’s OnlyFans account out of curiosity. What she found distressed her. Her ex, Vincent Tran, 31, sent out a notification in July 2021 offering his OnlyFans subscribers a 47-second sex video of a “PAWG,” or Phat Ass White Girl, for $15.

The video showed a distinctive tattoo. Blase said it was hers.

The next morning, Blase contacted the Omaha Police Department. She told Reuters she also submitted an online complaint to OnlyFans about Tran’s account but never received a response. According to OnlyFans, “no actionable information” was provided to the platform at that time.

About a month later, Blase said, she heard from the police that her case would be forwarded to the domestic violence unit. By that time, Tran had taken down the video, but Blase still wanted him charged, fearing the post could resurface, she said.

For months, Blase said, she felt distraught and uncomfortable in public, wondering who might have seen her on OnlyFans. “For all I know,” she said, “that person may now know what the most intimate parts of my body look like, and there’s nothing that I can do about it.”

On Dec. 12, 2023 – more than two years after Blase reported the incident to police, and nearly four months after Reuters first inquired about the case – an arrest warrant was issued for Tran. It alleged he recorded and distributed an intimate video of Blase without her consent – felonies in Nebraska.

Tran remains at large. Reuters reached him by telephone, however, and asked about the case.

“That’s something I don’t want to talk about,” he said.

‘WHEN I HAVE SEX … I ALWAYS FILM IT’

One alleged victim of nonconsensual porn is setting her sights on OnlyFans itself: Sammy, the college student.

Her lawsuit, filed in November 2022 in federal court in southern Florida, isn’t just about her alleged rape, but also about who profited from it.

It’s the first of its kind against OnlyFans and tests whether the website is liable under federal statutes designed to protect people from companies that “knowingly” benefit from sex trafficking – defined as commercial sex produced under “force, fraud, or coercion.”

“Those types of claims require that there be a financial benefit to the platform,” said Carrie Goldberg, a New York lawyer specializing in nonconsensual porn cases. “There’s really no easier platform to prove that for than OnlyFans,” she said, because the website takes a 20% cut of every transaction.

Sammy’s lawsuit cites violations of the same sex-trafficking laws used in a high-profile case against Pornhub. In 2021, its parent company, MindGeek, settled a sex-trafficking lawsuit brought by 50 women who accused the site of hosting nonconsensual porn and sought $100 million in damages.

The parent company – now called Aylo Holdings – said it has comprehensive safety measures to eradicate illegal material.

Sammy’s case, if successful, could bring similar attention to OnlyFans and its effectiveness in policing millions of creators, four legal experts told Reuters. It could also spur more lawsuits, they said.

OnlyFans did not comment on the experts’ assessments.

In a court filing, OnlyFans’ U.S. subsidiary, Fenix Internet, said it will seek to have Sammy’s sex-trafficking case dismissed, citing free-speech protections that shield social media platforms and other websites from liability for content posted by users. If the two men did post the video, they would have violated OnlyFans’ terms of service, the company said.

Sammy’s lawsuit against OnlyFans is on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case against the men, Romelus and Charles.

Reuters couldn’t access the video of Sammy’s alleged rape posted on OnlyFans, which her attorney said lasted about 10 minutes. Instead, reporters viewed screenshots and listened to parts of the recording played by Miami-Dade detectives while questioning Romelus and Charles. They also pieced together Sammy’s story from other law enforcement records and interviews with her.

It was spring break in 2022, when Sammy, a music production student and aspiring singer, met Charles, 24, on a dating app. He invited her to a party at his apartment, she told police and Reuters.

She was excited when Charles picked her up that night with Romelus, 27, in the passenger seat. But when the three arrived at the apartment, no one else was there. After some drinks and dancing, the men grew sexually aggressive, she said.

Their behavior culminated in an attack in the bedroom, where Sammy said she was stripped, slapped, raped and sodomized – all while a phone recorded her from atop a dresser.

“I was disoriented, shocked, scared,” she told Reuters. “I was just overwhelmed with how powerless I felt.”

She gathered her clothes and tried to take refuge in the living room, she said, but was again raped there. She said Romelus stood over her, holding his phone close to his head. At the time, Sammy thought he was on FaceTime, talking to someone, and shielded her face with her hands.

In fact, police said, Romelus was recording.

Afterward, the men took her to the workplace of her friend, Chris Philbert. As he drove her home, she broke down, punching the dashboard and swearing, Sammy and Philbert said in interviews. She opened the car door and tried to hurl herself onto the highway, because it felt “like the moment I’m supposed to die,” Sammy said. Her friend pulled her back in. “It was bad,” Philbert said. “It was just a terrible situation.”

Later, she checked herself into a hospital, where she called police.

Meanwhile, Philbert, after learning from Sammy that she might have been filmed, found Romelus’ OnlyFans page. Using OnlyFans’ messaging function, he said he was interested in buying a video of three people having sex, according to screenshots of his chats with Romelus provided to Reuters by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office.

On June 30, Romelus sold Philbert the video for $20, the screenshots showed. “More good videos coming my boy,” he told Philbert.

Philbert shared the video with investigators, and on July 26, 2022, Miami-Dade police arrested Romelus and Charles. They both denied they had raped Sammy. “Nobody forced her,” Romelus said in a video-recorded interview with two detectives, which Reuters reviewed.

The detectives played the OnlyFans video for Romelus on a phone. “In the video she says, ‘No, stop.’ Did you hear her?” Detective Nicole Wells said to Romelus. “She’s pushing you off.”

Romelus said he thought she was protesting because he was penetrating her too deeply. She knew she was being recorded and consented, he added. “When I have sex with somebody I always film it.”

When the detectives played the video for Charles, he said he couldn’t hear Sammy saying no and didn’t know the video had been posted on OnlyFans.

It’s unclear how long OnlyFans hosted the video or how many customers viewed it. Eleven days after it was posted, a lawyer for Sammy emailed police and said she was seeking to have it removed from the site “ASAP,” according to Miami-Dade Police Department records. The video has since been removed.

According to OnlyFans, it deactivated the account on July 29, 2022 - three days after Romelus’ arrest. It didn’t comment further on the case.

The OnlyFans video remains key evidence against the defendants, who are out on bond and due to stand trial later this year. Charles declined to comment, as did the public defender’s office representing Romelus.

The detectives questioned Romelus for an hour on the day of his arrest, then left him alone in the interview room.

A camera in the room continued to record.

He sank his head into his hands and spoke quietly to himself. The man who had filmed Sammy seemed unaware he was now being filmed himself.

“I should have never posted that video,” Romelus said. “I’m so stupid.”

#radblr #radical feminism #gender critical #radfem #radical feminist #terfblr #terf #terf safe #radfem safe

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Eternal Soul

On the heels of her best-selling debut, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, fifteen-year-old Aaliyah was rocked by a sex scandal that would have crushed a lesser talent. But breaking ties with her label and former producer and paramour R. Kelly afforded the teenage singer to create a new musical life for herself. She joined forces with production/songwriting duo Timbaland and Missy Elliott, who crafted a set of funky and futuristic soul tracks that took audiences and stale R&B radio by storm. Aaliyah showed strength and resilience—and effortless cool—and went on to garner multiplatinum sales, becoming a huge star. But her comeback was short-lived. At twenty-two, just as she released her third album and started an acting career, Aaliyah lost her life in a plane crash. However, icons never die, and her musical legacy endures.

published online Wednesday, December 9, 2020 Originally published in Issue 59, Summer 2014 By Michael A. Gonzales

It was the last weekend before Labor Day 2001, and the sidewalks of New York City were brimming with Saturday-night folks looking for fun. While a decade before the Meatpacking District was literally just that—with refrigerated trucks parked in front of dingy warehouses and the cobblestone streets sticky with animal blood—by the new millennium, those same blocks had transformed into a chic section of town overflowing with boutiques, restaurants, and clubs blasting the songs of summer that included P. Diddy’s Black-rock single “Bad Boy for Life” and Destiny’s Child’s pop-tart anthem “Bootylicious.”

As I was passing one trendy spot, pop sensation Aaliyah’s latest single, “We Need a Resolution,” blared from the speakers. With a voice that was shy and sexy, the mesmerizing track was the first from her self-titled third album, released a month before. Produced by frequent collaborator Timbaland—whose signature cyberfunk explorations into sound put an electrifying mojo on Black radio in the mid-’90s beginning with Aaliyah’s sophomore album, 1996’s One in a Million—her cool, broken-hearted soprano blended perfectly with the heat generated from his funky, futurist machine dreams.

Like Rachael, the emotional android in Blade Runner, Aaliyah became a cyborg chanteuse, a digital diva for a new generation of soul children. With the music being stuck in a rut of stylistic nostalgia and neo-soul mania, One in a Million made R&B’s potential feel limitless again, as it pulled listeners into the future.

Coming a year before Björk’s equally brilliant 1995 album Post, Aaliyah’s debut, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, came from a teenage girl from the D who brought the rhythmic weirdness first.

In 1995, Aaliyah Dana Haughton met Timbaland when she was sixteen after leaving her first label, Jive Records, amid much controversy of an illicit marriage to her then twenty-seven-year-old producer R. Kelly, who’d written most of the material on Age. Although both sides denied the allegations, a marriage license was later published in Vibe magazine.

While the “pied piper of R&B”—as Kelly proclaimed himself—had gained much fame since the release of his multiplatinum 12 Play album in late 1993, and was given a pass by the press and his fans, Aaliyah was portrayed as a Lolita seductress. When her picture was shown at the 1995 Soul Train Awards (she wasn’t in attendance), audience members booed.

Years later, allegations of Kelly’s alleged sexual misconduct continue to overshadow his music, including an infamous golden-shower sex tape, a housekeeper who sued him for sexual harassment, and rumors of millions doled out to settle “dozens” of “harrowing lawsuits” brought by scores of underage girls the musician reportedly sexually abused.

Although Age was a platinum-seller for Jive, the label allowed Aaliyah to be released from her contract. Her management company, Blackground, owned and operated by her mother’s brother, Barry Hankerson, who also managed R. Kelly, signed her with Atlantic Records. At the urging of Atlantic vice-president of A&R Craig Kallman (who in 2014 is the label’s chairman), Tim (aka Timbaland) flew to Aaliyah’s hometown of Detroit, Michigan, with fellow producer, songwriter, arranger, and rapper Missy Elliott.

Initially, Aaliyah’s second album was supposed to be helmed by the jiggy prince of production Puff Daddy (P. Diddy) and his trademarked, sample-heavy touch with the Hitmen team (Chucky Thompson, Deric Angelettie, Ron Lawrence, Stevie J., and others), but it never happened.

“I went to Puff’s studio in Trinidad for a week,” Aaliyah said in 1996. “We started working together, but we couldn’t finish the songs on time. I had to leave, because I had to go to Atlanta to record with Jermaine Dupri.”

Setting up shop in Detroit at Vanguard Studios, which was owned and operated by producer/guitarist Michael J. Powell, who’d overseen Aaliyah’s demo material when she was twelve, Tim and Missy went to work. “The first song we recorded was the title track [‘One in a Million’],” Timbaland told me in 1999. “From our first session, I was blown away by how talented she was.” While Missy later claimed that “If Your Girl Only Knew” was the song recorded during their first session, what remains undisputed was the closeness the trio felt during that time.

The Black noise duo christened the beautiful Brooklyn-born, Detroit-reared singer “Baby Girl,” and they became inseparable. Staying at Vanguard for a week, the three of them later flew, according to Missy Elliot, on “a little, little plane,” to Pyramid Studios in Ithaca, New York, to finish their work. The end results were the six groundbreaking tracks and two interludes from her second disc, One in a Million.

Legendary engineer Jimmy Douglass (who worked on countless Atlantic R&B classics) connected with them in Ithaca. “Aaliyah was coming off such a big debut,” he says, “so it would’ve been all right for her to be bratty, but she wasn’t. She was such a nice human being. Aaliyah was very quiet, but when she sang, she sounded great. I was impressed.”

In July 1996, a month before One in a Million was released, I interviewed Aaliyah at the Sea Grill, a restaurant at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Having first met her two years before, I realized that Aaliyah was always a sweetheart, yet very guarded. After a sex scandal that might’ve squashed a lesser talent, she was obviously resilient. She answered questions thoroughly but tried not to disclose too much about R. Kelly or the alleged marriage.

“I faced the adversity,” Aaliyah said. “I could’ve broken down, I could’ve gone and hid in the closet and said, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.’ But I love singing, and I wasn’t going to let that mess stop me. I got a lot of support from my fans and that inspired me to put that behind me, be a stronger person, and put my all into making One in a Million.”

Sitting next to her equally beautiful mother, Aaliyah was radiant, coy, and confident as she talked about Tim and Missy’s production skills. “At first, Tim and Missy were skeptical if I would like their work, but I thought it was tight, just ridiculous,” she said. “Their sound was different and unique, and that’s what appealed to me.

“Before we got together, I talked to them on the phone and told them what I wanted. I said, ‘You guys know I have a street image, but there is a sexiness to it, and I want my songs to complement that’; I told them that before I even met them. Once I said that, I didn’t have to say anything else. Everything they brought me was the bomb.”

Besides Tim and Missy, she also worked with producers Kay Gee (Naughty by Nature), Daryl Simmons (L.A. Reid and Babyface), and Vincent Herbert (Toni Braxton), who laced her dope remake of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Got to Give It Up,” which featured a smooth Slick Rick rap. Aaliyah explained how the remake came about: “I wanted some real party songs, so when my uncle played me that [original track], I thought of how I could make it different. Slick Rick [who’d been in jail] was on work release at the time, so Vincent got him on the song.

“I don’t know how Marvin Gaye fans will react, but I hope they like it,” she continued. “I always think it’s a great compliment when people remake songs. I hope one day after I’m not here that people will cover my songs.” Aaliyah’s uncle and manager Barry Hankerson was the person most responsible for making his niece a star. “Barry was bringing Aaliyah to the studio to record when she was twelve years old,” remembers producer and Vanguard owner Michael J. Powell via telephone from his home in Detroit. “At the time, Barry was trying to get Aaliyah a deal with MCA, and he came to me to make her demos.”

Powell was a Chicago native whose studio, Vanguard, was a place that made sophisticated soul. Best known for the lush retro-nuevo production on Anita Baker’s incredible Rapture album in 1986, Powell has also worked with Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, and Gladys Knight, who was married to Barry Hankerson from 1974 to 1978. “As a producer, Michael is a very patient person with great ears,” says Bill Banfield, composer and professor at the Berklee College of Music. A friend of Powell’s, he has also recorded with him. “Vanguard was the second generation of Motown with a live band, polished arrangements, and Detroit soul.”

Powell, who is still working in Detroit, recalls working with the singer back before her debut: “That was the time before Aaliyah went to work with R. Kelly, and she sang in a full, powerful voice that was like Whitney Houston’s. We recorded a few covers—‘The Greatest Love of All,’ ‘Over the Rainbow,’ and ‘My Funny Valentine,’ which she had sung on Star Search. She could handle big ballads, and she had great range. I have heard her do things the public have never heard. She was a natural.”

One of Aaliyah’s first professional gigs was singing with her aunt Gladys Knight in Las Vegas. “We performed at Bally’s five nights a week with a little break in between,” Aaliyah said in 1994. “Singer David Peaston [whom Hankerson also managed] opened the show, and then Gladys would bring me out to sing ‘Home’ with her, and then we did ‘Believe in Yourself.’ I loved it; for me, it was like being on tour.”

In 1996, while Aaliyah cited “One in a Million” as her favorite song, the label chose to release “If Your Girl Only Knew” as the first single. However, having debuted in 1994 with the more traditional soul stylings of R. Kelly writing and producing Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, not everyone was pleased with the singer’s new direction.

That album broke ground with its experimental tempos and drum programming and hip-hop soul songwriting. Jason King

“Me and Tim were so excited, because this was the first production we were doing outside of DeVante’s camp,” Missy explained. In addition to Jodeci and their famed producer DeVante Swing, the aforementioned camp of young upstarts included Sista (Missy’s rap quartet), Ginuwine, Magoo, Playa, and Tweet. “We were only supposed to do one record, but Craig [Kallman] kept asking us for one more; but, when they played [the singles] ‘If Your Girl Only Knew’ and ‘One in a Million’ for radio programmers, they were afraid to embrace it. They said the beats were too different and it wouldn’t fit in with their playlist. They wanted something that sounded like Puffy.”

Still, when a few braver souls started playing the record, it just took off. “That album broke ground with its experimental tempos and drum programming and hip-hop soul songwriting,” says Jason King, cultural critic, musician, and the director of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

By 2001, Aaliyah released a handful of Timbaland-produced, soundtrack-supported singles that pushed the experimental sound even further—including the Grammy-nominated scorchers “Are You That Somebody?” from 1998’s Dr. Dolittle and “Try Again” from her costarring vehicle Romeo Must Die in 2000. As pop critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote in 2001 in the New York Times, “ ‘Try Again’ helped smuggle the innovative techniques of electronic dance music onto the pop charts, establishing Aaliyah as pop’s most futuristic star.”

The lyrics of both songs were penned by former Playa member Static Major, who also wrote “We Need a Resolution.” Like Missy and Timbaland, the songwriter was once a protégé of Jodeci producer DeVante Swing. Engineer Jimmy Douglass, who has worked side by side with Timbaland on every production since the early days, says of the late songwriter, who died in 2008 from myasthenia gravis: “Static was like a brother to Tim, and he knew exactly how to write to Tim’s music. The first record they did together was Ginuwine’s ‘Pony,’ and that led to their [musical] history.

“We recorded ‘Are You That Somebody?’ at Capitol Records’ studio in Los Angeles,” Douglass recalls, “and it was a soup-to-nuts session, which means we did the entire song in one session. Wrote it, tracked it, and mixed it from 11:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m.; the next to last thing we added was the sound of the baby, and the very last time was Tim saying, ‘Dirty South.’ It was a union studio, so they weren’t used to working overnight; we were trying to finish that song as quick as possible.”

Douglass also engineered the “Try Again” sessions, which began with Static writing a song that was inspirational. Recorded in New York City at Sound on Sound Studios, “Try Again,” as Douglass recalls, “was originally written to inspire young people, but Barry [Hankerson] heard it and told them, ‘It’s got to be about love.’ The melody and hook were the same, so Static changed the lyrics and it became a love song.”

In addition, Aaliyah had begun an acting career that was taking off. Cast in the Joel Silver–produced kung-fu crime flick Romeo Must Die as well as the Anne Rice vampire thriller Queen of the Damned and the Matrix sequels, Aaliyah hadn’t released a full-length album in the five years. “I wanted to take a break after One in a Million to just relax, think about how I wanted to approach the next album,” she told journalist Elon Johnson that April. “Then, when I was ready to start back up, Romeo happened, and so I had to take another break and do that film and then do the soundtrack, then promote it. The break turned into a longer break than I anticipated.”

Back in the Meatpacking District that August night in 2001, I gathered with friends at the then-popular club APT where DJ Chairman Mao spun old-school hip-hop and soul as high-heeled girls sipped crimson-colored cosmopolitans.

Two hours later, a strange vibe could be felt in the wood-paneled room as folks began looking strangely at their Blackberries, pagers, and cell phones. Standing beside me, a female friend suddenly blurted, “Oh my God, it says here that Aaliyah died in a plane crash.” Seconds later, along with other women in the room, she began to weep.

The accident occurred when she and her team were returning to Miami, Florida, from the Bahamas, where she shot the video for “Rock the Boat,” the third single from Aaliyah, her third album finally released in 2001. Their small twin-engine Cessna plane was several hundred pounds overweight and crashed after takeoff, exploding on impact. The pilot was found to have had cocaine and alcohol in his system and had falsified data in order to receive his FAA license.

At the age of twenty-two, Aaliyah Dana Haughton became the latest pop star to enter that rock-and-soul heaven that the Righteous Brothers sang about so many years before. Glancing around at the crying females, most no older than Aaliyah herself, it became obvious to me that she was much more than a star—she was one of them.

Harlem resident and former Jive Records executive Jeff Sledge, who had known the songstress since she was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, had returned from the movies with his fiancée when he heard the news. “It was supposed to be hip-hop night on Hot 97, but they were playing a mix of Aaliyah songs instead,” he recalls thirteen years later. “And then [DJ] Red Alert announced that she had died. I was stunned.”

Of course, he wasn’t the only one. For days, the world mourned the young star with television specials, radio interviews with her contemporaries and friends, and a candlelight vigil in front of her alma mater, the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts. Furthermore, her stunning movie-star features were plastered on the covers of newspapers and magazines.

Although she had the looks of a femme fatale, she was a sweet girl who’d been forced to grow up much too fast and died too young. However, as we all know, icons never die, because the images are forever. In her short lifetime, Aaliyah must’ve had her picture taken a million times, made countless videos, and created music that is still relevant to fans as well as to fellow pop idols Beyoncé, Drake, Chris Brown, Rihanna, and others.

“There are so many artists trying to re-create the Aaliyah vibe in their music,” says singer Courtney Noelle, who was in seventh grade when the Black pop princess died. Growing up on the East Side of Pittsburgh, Noelle made up dances to “One in a Million” while watching the video constantly. “Aaliyah was so relatable and cool; she wasn’t over-sexualized, so we didn’t worry about Mom disapproving,” Noelle continues. “She sang, danced, and acted, but she did it all so effortlessly. She was just so beautiful and graceful.”

While One in a Million was a landmark, the adolescent wonderfulness of Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number is often overlooked when Aaliyah’s small canon of work is examined. Of course, as Jason King points out, “Age has been marred by their troubling marriage and the [statutory] rape/pedophilia allegations that would come later. I don’t think we can now hear Age, particularly given the title, without taking the issue of teenage rape into account. So when I’m listening to Age, I’m struggling to try to listen to it out of context, but mostly I’m hearing R. Kelly as an alleged predator presenting to us his sonic and musical vision of how he wanted Aaliyah to exist in the commercial marketplace.”

Still, for me, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number connects with many memories of the ’90s soul years that gave us debuts from Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, D’Angelo, Faith Evans, Maxwell, Erykah Badu, and the era’s most successful singer, writer, and producer, Robert Sylvester Kelly.

In 1991, R. Kelly and Public Announcement signed to Jive Records a few years before Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys took them mainstream. Better known for being the home of top-tier hip-hop acts A Tribe Called Quest, Boogie Down Productions, Schoolly D, and E-40, the Jive label was put into the business of soul by the success of Kelly’s post–New Jack Swing sound on Born into the 90’s and 12 Play.

“Barry Hankerson had been talking about his niece Aaliyah since she was twelve, but [label owner Clive Calder] thought she was too young,” says A&R man Jeff Sledge, who began working at the label in 1992. “When she turned fourteen, Clive agreed, but only under the condition that R. Kelly produced the whole album. Musically, it just made sense.”

For Robert Kelly, 1993 was a hell of a year. A bittersweet twelve months that included a substantial development in his R&B sound, the death of his beloved mother, Joanne, and the success of his album 12 Play, which was praised by critics and fans alike. It was also the year he began working on the material that would eventually become Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.

Although R. Kelly attempted to uphold his Chi-Town swagger after the death of his mother, the man was a mental mess. There were bizarre reports of the singer locking himself in hotel bathrooms during press days, blowing off Rolling Stone photo shoots, and sleeping in the closet. “His mother was the sweetest lady,” Jeff Sledge says. “When she died, he had a nervous breakdown. During that time, he was also making Age, so Aaliyah was always around to comfort him. After his mother’s passing, all he felt he had left in life was his music and working with Aaliyah.”

R. Kelly’s love for music began when he was a fifteen-year-old student at Chicago’s Kenwood Academy where he encountered famed music instructor Lena McLin. The niece of gospel innovator Thomas A. Dorsey, she taught her students opera, gospel, jazz, and soul. As a child growing up during the Depression, she lived with Reverend Dorsey and played in church. While other girls wanted dolls, Lena McLin wanted sheet music.

McLin taught R. Kelly everything she knew about the keyboards, pushing him by anointing her student “the next Stevie Wonder.” Encouraging the poor lanky boy from the South Side to put down his basketball and sit at the piano, she started him writing songs as well as teaching him discipline. “He didn’t have much,” McLin explained to me in 1995 in a Chinese restaurant in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. “He came from a terrible ghetto and sometimes wouldn’t have the clothes the other kids had, but I had a vision of what he was going to be. The Lord told me he was a genius, and I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

So, what exactly is a genius? “A genius lives in the present day, has studied the past, and preconceived the future,” explained McLin. “Robert’s mission is to bring back the real essence, the real creativity, the real soul to the music.” Although Robert dropped out of Kenwood when he was seventeen, he already had five hundred completed songs in his portfolio, according to McLin. “Well, I don’t think it was five hundred, but it was a lot,” R. Kelly told me in 1995 while mastering his third album at the Chicago Recording Company (CRC). Founded in 1975, it is billed as the largest studio in the Midwest. The studio became R. Kelly’s main sound factory in the early years.

For R. Kelly, the state-of-the-art room became the rhythmic cathedral where he would expand on the musical legacy of Windy City soul—his city where the Chi-Lites once doo-wopped on street corners, Leroy Hutson made gangster-lean tracks for Curtom, and a young rapper named Common was recording his Resurrection album somewhere across town.

“Miss McLin started me writing every day,” Kelly said. “I’d write a song and she’d tell me it was the most beautiful song she’d ever heard. She also started me messin’ around with the piano. I just wanted to make her happy.” Growing up in the notorious Ida B. Wells Homes, Kelly found those streets a lot more dangerous than the days of Cooley High.

“I had a lot of ups and downs, lots of lessons, and trials and tribulations,” Kelly said. Avoiding the gangs, he spent much time at a neighbor Willie Pearl’s house playing her keyboards. One of the first songs he wrote, “Orphanage,” was inspired by a television program. Singing in L stations throughout the city, he waited for strangers to drop change in his chitlin bucket.

Kelly was discovered by house-music pioneer and former Trax Records employee DJ Wayne Williams. After seeing him perform original material at a friend’s barbecue, Williams had to convince his new bosses at Jive Records to sign him: “I was constantly telling them that R. Kelly was the shit, but it took Barry Weiss, the president of the label, coming to Chicago, before they finally said yes. Jive had full confidence in him and gave R. Kelly creative freedom.” While Kelly’s debut, Born into the 90’s, sounded as though it was jacked wholesale from the Teddy Riley/Aaron Hall school of Harlem boogie, by the time 12 Play came out in 1993, the brother had perfected a baby-makin’ style on tracks “Bump N’ Grind,” “Your Body’s Callin’,” and the epic erotica of “It Seems Like You’re Ready.”

Additionally, the album’s more danceable tracks, “Summer Bunnies” and “I Like the Crotch on You,” showed his dance-floor diversity. Still, whether the tempo, Kelly’s lyrics were often sexually explicit, filled with lustful references and obvious double entendres. “He grabbed the brass ring by stepping fully into the role of hypersexual super-stud,” Jason King says. “That’s an archetype in Black music that stretches very far back and that Isaac Hayes took to new heights in the early 1970s. Songs on 12 Play were very much musical analogues of the celebration of Black, freaky, and carnal culture in the 1990s.”

Soon afterwards, Kelly began applying his newly developed, smoothed-out, seductive sounds to singles for Hi-Five (“Quality Time”) and Changing Faces (“G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T.”), and was more than ready to tackle a full-album project for his manager’s niece. “With the flair and energy he puts into his music, we can feel it,” McLin said. “Even when working on songs for others, he touches all the talent he comes in contact with; Robert’s mission is to bring soul music back.” Inspired by an extensive list of vocalists, musicians, and producers including Quincy Jones, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, and Tyrone Davis, he turned himself into an R&B auteur on the Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number project.

R. Kelly was determined to become a one-man Holland-Dozier-Holland with a splash of Phil Spector eccentricity to keep things interesting. “Age was solely an R. Kelly production intended to not only introduce us to Aaliyah, but to show off R. Kelly’s polymath awesomeness,” says King. “It’s hip-hop soul in the way that Mary J. Blige, Xscape, and SWV fused those genres. But, Aaliyah embodied the hip-hop soul merger in a different way. She had the sweet, soothing, and slightly reserved soprano more associated with Diana Ross, Minnie Riperton, or Janet Jackson. I don’t think any producer understood what contemporary R&B audiences wanted to hear and pushed them further in the 1990s more than R. Kelly.”

In the summer of 1993, with Aaliyah on break from the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts, she spent her entire vacation holed up inside the CRC. “The first song we recorded was ‘Old School,’ which I loved, because it had an Isley Brothers flair,” Aaliyah said. “That song didn’t take long to do, maybe two days. At first, I had to get comfortable, but I had been around Robert, so it was cool. Both Robert and I are perfectionists, and if you listen to the music, there is a lot of passion in it.”

Like Batman, one of his favorite comic book characters, R. Kelly worked best at night. “Most people are asleep, so it’s just the moon, the stars, the quiet, and the music.” Subsequently, the nights spent with the underage singer led to Kelly’s first accusations of statutory rape when an alleged affair began between them. Although there was a twelve-year age difference, the affair supposedly led to marriage, which paved the way for scandal and an annulment. While R. Kelly and Aaliyah always denied these accusations, the man who wrote the title track to Age tellingly said, “I write from everyday experiences and what moves me; that, to me, is a true writer. I love all forms of music. Everything that comes into my mind and hits my heart, I write it and record it. I love songs that mean something, and have some kind of truthfulness to them.”

Photographer Terrence A. Reese (aka Tar), who shot the album covers for 12 Play and Age, recalls that during the shoot “Aaliyah relied on Robert to teach her. He was like Berry Gordy to her Diana Ross. The following day was her fifteenth birthday, and she was also going to film the ‘Back & Forth’ video, so they were working on the dances and styling. You could see the attraction between R. Kelly and her.”

Turning back the hands of time to Good Friday, 1994, I was on a flight from New York City to Detroit to interview Aaliyah. Hired by Jive Records publicist Lesley Pitts, who was also my girlfriend, I was assigned to write the budding singer’s bio. Having worked with TLC and Toni Braxton on their debuts, Lesley was excited about the teenager’s pop potential.

Aaliyah’s first single, “Back & Forth,” was already being played on the radio and video channels. Unlike the broken-glass balladry of Mary J. Blige, which was hard as the Yonkers ghetto she hailed from, Aaliyah’s voice had a soft strength that reminded me of the Black pop women (Dionne Warwick, Marilyn McCoo, and Barbara McNair) I’d grown up listening to in the ’70s.

For weeks, Lesley had been bragging that this new kid was going to be large; after hearing a few tracks, including “At Your Best (You Are Love),” her lovely cover of the Isley Brothers’ ballad, I was hooked. “I like to groove to artists like Parliament or the Isley Brothers, because that was when music was really real,” Aaliyah said later that day. “I just think the Isley Brothers are so unique.”

After my jet landed in the Motor City, I took a short cab ride to the Sheraton Hotel and within minutes was sitting in the dining room with Aaliyah, her mother Diane, and Lesley. Dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, Aaliyah wore her shades, but soon took them off as she became more comfortable with me. “When I was younger, I used to go around the house singing with my mother,” Aaliyah said, her voice poised and proper.

Coming from a middle-class family, she was a product of nice schools and an artistic yearning that was encouraged with classes. “I’m a big fan of Johnny Mathis, so I used to sing ‘Chances Are’ with my mom. Luther Vandross was another favorite. I was so drawn to singing, because I could get away from everything, and I just loved it.”

Uncle Barry first introduced Aaliyah to R. Kelly when she was twelve. “He was just completing Born into the 90’s, and I sang for him,” she smiled, her voice lightening. “I sang for him, and he liked what he heard. Still, we didn’t start working on the album until a few years later.”

Arriving first in January of ’93, when there was snow on the ground, Aaliyah returned in the summer, and their relationship clicked in the studio. “We vibed off of one another, and that’s how the songs was built,” she said. “He would vibe with me on what the lyrics should be. He’d tell me what to sing, and I’d sing it. That’s how the whole album was done. We put in a lot of hours; as far as the music, we’d be in there all night making sure it was perfect. There were times when I was tired, but I knew I had to push on if I wanted to come off.”

When the two weren’t recording, they’d be in the studio watching horror movies. “Silence of the Lambs was my favorite,” she said. “The studio can be hectic, so sometimes we went to McDonald’s.”

While some of the Kelly’s double entendres could be embarrassing, Aaliyah defended “Back & Forth,” a song whose title hints of sex. “It’s not a song about love or whatever; it’s about going to a party and having fun. I have songs about love, crushes, or whatever, but that song is about dancing. This album is about teens and what they go through.” One of the more forward crush records was the sensually upbeat “No One Knows How to Love Me Quite Like You Do.” Aaliyah smiled when I asked about it and said, “Every girl looks for that one person who is going to love them right. That song is saying, when it comes down to it, I like how you satisfy me.”

Months before Age was released on May 24, 1994, the stylish Millicent Shelton–directed clip for “Back & Forth” was shot at Aaliyah’s performing arts school in Detroit, where teens were recruited to be in various scenes. “That was my first video, but Millicent made me comfortable.” Between takes, she listened to the music of Tupac, Wu-Tang, and Gang Starr. “They all rap on an intellectual level.”

In the studio, she was a sponge who later spoke about her aspirations to produce and write: “When we were recording ‘Down With the Clique,’ I watched how Robert [Kelly] laid the drums and everything. He taught me to play the piano a bit, and I’m also trying to learn the mixing board, though it looks complicated. The studio is my first love.”

After wrapping the interview, Lesley and I went upstairs to our hotel room. Once inside, I turned to her and bluntly stated, “I know this sounds crazy, but I get the feeling R. Kelly is sleeping with that girl.”

Looking at me as though I was losing my mind, Lesley was appalled. “Why would you say something like that?”

“It’s just a feeling I get.”

“Well, it’s not true, so don’t say that,” she scolded, more protective publicist than loving girlfriend. Of course, a few months later, the entire sordid story became yet another tale in the Babylon that is the music industry that eats its young.

In 2013, journalist Jim DeRogatis, who broke the R. Kelly sex scandal in 2002, told the Village Voice, “I had Aaliyah’s mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter’s life was ruined. Aaliyah’s life was never the same after that.”

Six days after the disaster that ended Aaliyah’s life as well as the lives of the pilot and seven members of her team, I sat in my Brooklyn apartment watching footage from Aaliyah’s funeral on Entertainment Tonight. There were images of the white horse-drawn carriage that carried her casket from Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel to St. Ignatius Loyola Church on East Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan.

After the funeral, in front of thousands of fans, twenty-two doves representing the years of her life were released in front of the church as her mother Diane, father Michael, older brother Rashad, Uncle Barry, and fiancé Damon Dash cried. The only person missing, for obvious reasons, was R. Kelly.

Six years before—just a year removed from his notorious split with Aaliyah—R. Kelly sat inside his studio at CRC telling me about producing for other artists, including Michael Jackson (“You Are Not Alone”) and Kelly Price (“Friend of Mine”). “I have many styles,” he said. “I’m more than just the 12 Play guy. I don’t write one kind of thing.”

Looking at him closely, I asked, “If there was just one person you could work with right now, who would it be?” Without hesitation, he held his head high and shamelessly answered, “Aaliyah.”

#aaliyah #Aaliyah's musical legacy endures

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mikepercy123 · 6 months

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Learn about the advantages of an omnichannel customer experience and its impact on loyalty, sales, and positive interactions. Discover why it's essential for your business. This brave, new, hyper-competitive world demands an omnichannel customer experience. Unless you can provide seamless experiences, your business will suffer no matter where people are. Today's workforce has grown up with the internet and expects things to be quick and straightforward. They don't want to be forced to jump through hoops to get what they want. They will look elsewhere if they cannot find what they want on one site. Allowing customers to connect and receive personalised service across eCommerce, social media, email marketing, in-store, and other channels is critical to keeping them satisfied and engaged. Without that flow of information, you may find they consider yours a poor customer experience, which can lose business and negatively impact your brand. The solution is to deploy an omnichannel customer experience. What is an Omnichannel Customer Experience? An omnichannel customer experience is the ability to interact with a company across all channels consistently and seamlessly. Customers should receive the same service and understanding whether they interact with the company online, in-store, or through a mobile app. Customers trust and remain loyal to brands that provide a consistent experience, whether they interact with the brand online, in-store, or somewhere else. An omnichannel customer experience can help brands increase leads, sales, and conversion rates and provide a positive customer experience. According to research, customers who have a positive experience are more likely to make purchases than those who do not. In fact, according to Ipsos, 52% of consumers who have a negative experience with a brand will tell their friends or colleagues about it, so it pays to come up with a solution that keeps your audience satisfied. What Defines a Good Omnichannel Customer Experience? Several factors contribute to a successful omnichannel customer experience. First, brands need to clearly understand their target audience and what they want and need from the brand. Second, brands need to ensure that all of their channels are integrated and working together seamlessly. Third, brands must provide employees with the training and tools to deliver a consistent experience across all channels. Whilst the definition of success might differ from business to business, some general principles can be applied to ensure an excellent omnichannel customer experience: Ensure that customers have a consistent experience across all channels. Provide customers with the most relevant information and options based on their previous interactions and behaviour. Aim to provide a seamless, personalised experience for each customer based on their specific needs and preferences. How to Improve Your Omnichannel Customer Experience You can do several practical things to improve your omnichannel customer experience. Start by understanding how your customers interact with your brand and how they move between channels. You can do this with a unified data hub or customer experience software that collects every interaction your customer has with your brand, no matter which channel they are on. With this data, you can create a customer journey map and outline the path your customers take to complete a typical task, like booking a vacation. You can also outline the path your customer would like to take to accomplish a task. For example, you can trace a route for a customer who wants to book a vacation but does not yet know where they want to go. 1. Make sure your website is optimised for mobile devices. More and more people are using their smartphones and tablets to browse the internet, so your website must be optimised for these devices. This means having a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and ensuring that your website loads quickly on mobile devices.

Mobile devices often have slower internet connections than laptops or desktops, so making your website load quickly on all devices is essential. You can do this by compressing images, using smaller videos, and keeping your website lightweight. It's also necessary to ensure your website is easy to navigate on a small screen. People often use their smartphones to shop online, so you must complete the experience as quickly as possible. This means having a clear call to action that stands out on a small screen and removing any unnecessary navigation on your website. 2. Integrate your online and offline channels. Customers should be able to move seamlessly between your online and offline channels, such as viewing online product information in-store or picking up an online order in-store. This provides a more seamless customer experience and helps to build brand loyalty. Additionally, you can use your online channels to generate traffic in your offline stores. For example, you could offer a discount code that can only be redeemed in-store. This can help improve conversion rates by making your online channels more relevant to each customer. 3. Offer multiple channels for customer support. Customers should be able to contact you through multiple channels, such as phone, email, live chat, social media, etc. This allows them to choose the track they're most comfortable with and ensures that you can provide them with the support they need. It's also important to be responsive and provide quick replies. This will show your customers that you value their business, and they can expect a high standard of service. By setting up different channels, you can also segment your customers. This will allow you to provide a more tailored approach to your support. 4. Use customer data to personalise the experience. Collecting data on your customers' preferences and behaviour allows you to personalise their experience with your brand. This could include showing them relevant product recommendations, providing targeted discounts and offers, or simply making sure they see the most relevant content when they visit your website. Data-driven marketing starts with the correct data, and you need a strategy to collect the correct data; the best way to do this is to create a persona for each of your target customers. Personas are representations of your ideal customers, and they'll help you to collect data that are relevant and meaningful to that person. From there, you can start to design your marketing strategy. Where are you managing your data from? What kind of data do you need? What do you want to achieve with your data-driven marketing strategy? 5. Provide a consistent experience across all channels. Customers should have the same experience regardless of which channel they're using. This means using the same branding, tone of voice, and level of customer service across all channels. Consistency helps to create a brand that people recognise and trust. It also helps to create a cohesive experience that customers can expect. By using the same language and terms on all channels, you can help customers find the information they're looking for. It's also essential to ensure that your customers get the same service level across channels. This means hiring and training your customer service staff to be knowledgeable about your products and services across all channels. It also means ensuring your customer service staff is trained in the same level of customer service across channels. Summing up Customers will notice the effort you've put into giving them what they want and therefore feel valued and special, leading them to recommend you and remain loyal to your business. Giving your brand a voice also makes it easier for new staff to join the team because they will have a common understanding of how to talk to customers. As well as consistency, your customers will appreciate variety in your messaging. By delivering different information to different

people depending on their needs, you avoid boring your customers and give them more reasons to keep coming back. This article was first published on AIO Spark: https://www.aiospark.com/omnichannel-customer-experience?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=fs-share&utm_campaign=auto-social

#GENERAL_MARKETING #COPYWRITING #MARKETING #SEO

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coochiequeens · 2 years

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A victory for women

When Wendy Kou read the headline on a Chinese social media platform about whether sanitary pads should be sold on railways, she frowned. The debate was heated. Some felt it provided a basic women's health service, while others vehemently opposed it as a private matter and felt that women should come to trains prepared.

"I found the request totally normal. It is surprising to see that so many people are against it and raising it to the level of bigger issues," she told NPR by phone from Chongqing city, where she currently attends university. For her, the question should not even be asked.

But for many people in China, a country that ranks 107 out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2021 Gender Gap Index, it is still considered embarrassing to openly discuss menstruation or to take out sanitary pads in public.

"Private items such as sanitary pads are not sold on railways, and passengers need to bring them by themselves," a customer service representative of China Railway, the state-owned railroad operator, replied via social media when a female passenger requested that pads be sold on trains.

But who decides what is private?

Kou decided to speak up. Majoring in visual design, she drew up a series of posters about menstruation and posted them around her university's campus. "I think that 'period' shouldn't be a shameful word for women to speak out in public," she said.

One of her inspirations comes from the common experience of buying sanitary pads in China: The checker always wraps them in a black plastic bag before handing them back to customers, assuming it is embarrassing to be seen with them.

"It is like an unsaid convention. So, why not design a transparent plastic bag, with 'NO PERIOD SHAME' [printed] on it?" Kou said.

A male relationship influencer with nearly 1.3 million followers on Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, doesn't think the discussion has anything to do with period shame. "Sanitary pads are not emergency supplies, unlike Band-Aids, disinfectants, or quick-acting heart relievers. Therefore, since it is a commodity, the cost must be considered," he posted, opposing the idea of selling pads. "Don't be a giant baby, whether it is provided or not by the railways, you should learn to plan ahead and be independent," he added.

Another tech influencer put it more directly. "Railways only provide food, they are not grocery stores," he wrote on Weibo. "Are you asking railways to sell sanitary pads together with peanuts and beers in the dining car?" He showed his embarrassment by using a facepalm emoji. The post was liked 17,000 times.

For Zudy Zheng, co-founder of Period Pride, mainland China's first social innovation group focusing on menstruation health and hygiene, the driving force behind this debate is gender inequality.

"We are not asking for free pads on trains, but a commercial sale of these products, as meals and poker cards are all being sold on trains," Zheng said. "The society is operating according to a default standard set up by men, so it is difficult to understand women's needs."

Calling for pads as an essential item

A group formed by young women, Period Pride wants to bring the subject of menstruation out into the open in China and works to fights against the stigma surrounding it. To celebrate 2021's International Women's day, it launched an online campaign called #NothingToBeAshamedOf, encouraging women to openly share their hygiene products and personal stories related to menstruation.

During the past two years, they have been helping women obtain menstruation products in some cities where China's zero-COVID policy enforced stringent lockdowns, limiting access to these supplies.

"Government only sent us masks, and some families with difficulties would receive food like rice and oil; sanitary pads were never provided," Xiaomin, a health worker in the Chinese city of Ruili, on the southwestern border with Myanmar, told NPR by phone, "When the city is locked down, you cannot go anywhere, it is hard to buy them," Xiaomin said, giving only her first name because of security concerns.

As a health worker, Xiaomin needs to wear an airtight hazmat suit for at least four hours a day, which is especially uncomfortable when she has heavy menstrual bleeding.

"Once the suit is on, we can't drink and go to the toilet," she said.

When she received pads sent out by Period Pride, which raised money and managed to transport thousands packages of pads to Ruili during the lockdown, she felt like she was being supported. "I hope that pads can be provided as an essential item to female health workers. It is our natural need."

Promoting open discussion of periods

Growing up with her parents and her brother in a village outside of Chongqing city, Nova Tan knew that her period should not be discussed openly, as her mother always hid sanitary pads carefully and threw them away immediately after usage.

"Behaviors are even more convincing than words. My mom has never left any traces of period at home," said Tan. "So without saying it explicitly, I know that period is considered embarrassing."

Tan learned about menstruation from an older sister, which saved her from panicking when her first period came. It wasn't until high school that menstruation was mentioned in her biology class, "but it was too late," she sighs.

Her situation is not unique. A 2020 survey conducted by China Family Planning Association and Tsinghua University showed that only half of nearly 55,000 students surveyed from thousands of universities nationwide said they received sex education in school, and less than 15% said they felt "very satisfied" with what they were taught.

Today in some parts of China, menstruating women are still seen as "dirty." Tan remembers that she was told not to go to wedding ceremonies when she was having her period, which would be seen as inappropriate at festive occasions. "Especially in rural areas, this is a widely practiced custom," she recalled.

"If we can have a scientific explanation of the period when we were young, we won't feel ashamed when having a period," Tan said.

Last year, Tan created a podcast called "TruffleRice." Her idea is to have conversations about female issues with two friends, and their first topic was menstruation.

"Discussing these issues openly would probably help to empower women," Tan said.

As for who won the debate on whether to sell sanitary pads on trains, it's hard to say. But two weeks after the social media firestorm, some noticed that the period products were being sold on China Railway.

#China #menstration #Wendy Kou #Access to menstrual products #Of course this made some men mad #Period Pride

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dankdeliverydc · 1 year

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Recreational Weed in DC: Dispensary vs. Delivery - Which is Right for You?

Recreational weed in DC, Dispensaries are physical stores with skilled staff who can help consumers choose the best cannabis products. They provide a personalised shopping experience and an extensive range of cannabis goods. Delivery services, on the other hand, let customers buy comfortably from home and offer convenience and privacy. Also, they frequently have a greater selection of goods than dispensaries, including unusual strains and merchandise. Nevertheless, they don't provide the personalised attention and in-person interactions with educated service agents that dispensaries do, and there is a fraud risk because of the significant number of unregulated delivery companies operating in the region. The decision between dispensaries and delivery services ultimately comes to personal tastes and requirements.

Dispensaries

Brick-and-mortar shops called dispensaries are dedicated to the sale of cannabis-related goods. Government regulation forces them to abide by stringent rules in order to guarantee the security and calibre of their goods. In addition to smoking and vaping devices, dispensaries sell a variety of cannabis goods, such as flowers, edibles, concentrates, and topicals.

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Here are a few advantages of going to a dispensary:

Employees at dispensaries are typically well-trained and educated about the various cannabis products and their effects. Based on your requirements and tastes, they may assist you in selecting the ideal product.

Dispensaries provide a personalised experience that enables you to peruse the various goods, smell the flowers, and closely examine the various concentrates.

Dispensaries are subject to government regulation and must adhere to tight rules in order to guarantee the safety and calibre of their goods.

Dispensaries must adhere to stringent rules and quality requirements to guarantee that the cannabis products they offer are suitable for human use. As a result, customers can be sure they are purchasing high-quality items that have undergone testing and verification.

To meet the various needs and tastes of customers, dispensaries offer a wide variety of cannabis products. The alternatives available to customers at dispensaries range from foods to tinctures, oils, and concentrates.

Disadvantages of Dispensaries:-

If you're seeking a particular strain or product that is rare, dispensaries might not have it in stock.

Dispensaries can be crowded, therefore there may be a line to buy something.

A few Trustable Cannabis Dispensaries are:-

Mr Nice Guys DC

Leaflyweednyc

Green2greenweed

Mr Nice Guys BK

Delivery

The convenience of having your cannabis items delivered right to your home is provided by delivery services. Your products will be delivered within a few hours if you place a purchase over the phone or online. The following are some advantages of using a delivery service:

You may shop from the comfort of your house with the help of delivery services, which provide the utmost convenience.

Delivery services frequently offer a wider range of goods than dispensaries, including uncommon strains and goods.

There are no lines to stand in or crowds to navigate with delivery.

Cannabis delivery services give people who are unable to leave their homes due to illness or a disability a method to get the products they need without having to leave their homes.

Customers who use cannabis delivery services can buy cannabis goods in a covert and confidential manner. For those who might feel uneasy visiting a real shop or who want to use cannabis in privacy, this is very advantageous.

Disadvantages of Cannabis Delivery Service:-

When you receive your order by delivery, you are unable to speak with knowledgeable service representatives or see the products up close before placing an order.

Due to the large number of unregulated delivery businesses operating in Washington, DC, there is a risk of fraud with delivery services.

A few Trustable Cannabis Delivery Services are:-

Dank Delivery DC

Lex Weed

Kushkarts

Exotic Weed NJ

Conclusion

Your own tastes and requirements will determine whether you decide to order recreational cannabis in Washington, DC from a dispensary or a delivery service. Dispensaries provide a specialized experience with skilled staff, a large selection of products, and rigorous adherence to safety and quality standards set by the government. On the other side, delivery services provide convenience, privacy, and a greater selection of goods but lack the in-person interaction and personalised care of dispensaries and run the danger of fraud due to a lack of regulation. To get more about Cannabis you can also visit at https://www.themagazine.io/.

#cannabis #cannabis delivery #cannabis store #dankdeliverydc #usa #cannabis dispensary #cbd #thc

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akhtarkincaid · 2 years

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Sap Bpc 10 1 S4hana 1610 Bpc Embedded Planning Optimized

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koldingbuckley · 2 years

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The Highest 8 Advantages Of Inbound Marketing

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mariacallous · 6 months

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Palestinian graphic designer Bilal Tamimi’s YouTube videos from the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank have received 6 million views during the past 13 years. His uploads document joyous festivals and peaceful protests—but also violent skirmishes between Nabi Saleh’s 600 residents and occupying Israeli soldiers. “I need to show to the world what’s happening in my village and the suffering of my people from occupation,” he says.

The platform has helped Tamimi broadcast to his more than 20,000 subscribers, but he’s locked out of YouTube’s revenue sharing program that pays a share of ad sales to more than 2 million video creators in 137 countries or territories. When Tamimi tries to sign up, YouTube’s app says, “The YouTube Partner Program is not available in your current location Palestine.”

The internet has given some Palestinians a global audience, but many benefits of online life that billions around the world can take for granted simply don’t work for people in Gaza and the West Bank. In addition to YouTube’s partner program, money transfer services such as PayPal and ecommerce marketplaces, including Amazon, largely bar Palestinian merchants from entry. Google tools for generating revenue from web ads or in-app purchases are technically open to Palestinians but can, in practice, be inaccessible due to challenges verifying their identity or collecting payment.

As Israeli forces have bombarded Gaza in pursuit of Hamas, tech workers’ and rights activists’ frustrations with the region’s digital inequality has grown. Palestinians are barred from YouTube’s Partner Program and struggle with intermittent connectivity. Israeli YouTube channels in the program could be bringing in some revenue from conflict-related content. Popular Israeli singers have drawn views with songs honoring victims of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, while travel advice channel Traveling Israel has received millions of views on historical explainers.

Human rights organizations say the disparity in access to online sources of income weakens the Palestinian economy. "Many Palestinians who work online struggle to be paid," says Marwa Fatafta, a policy and advocacy manager at the rights organization Access Now. YouTube’s policy “fits a larger pattern of tech companies’ discriminatory approach to Palestinians.”

Google spokespeople, who asked not to be named for safety concerns, say in a statement that the company is committed to creating economic opportunities for Palestinians through services and training. The YouTube Partner Program won’t be available in the Palestinian territories until Google launches a local version of YouTube, which involves customizing features and options to the language and culture. "We continue to invest in the infrastructure that's needed to offer more tools to monetize with Google to ensure it’s a seamless process and follows local legal requirements,” one of the spokespeople says.

To get a sense of how Palestinians are excluded from or face barriers to tapping the world’s largest ecosystem for making money online—Google’s—WIRED reviewed popular Palestinian YouTube channels, news websites, and apps associated with the region. Interviews with content creators, activists, and current and former Google staff familiar with the region and company policies helped fill out the picture. The investigation revealed how a series of Palestinian projects and companies hit financial dead ends when attempting to monetize online in ways easy for people in countries such as the US and Israel. Others resorted to complicated geographic workarounds that siphon off revenue.

The Google sources not authorized to speak to media allege those challenges reflect years of internal politics and neglect of Palestinian users at the company. The sources say a localized version of the company’s search engine, Google.ps, launched in 2009 only after a desire to provide more relevant results narrowly beat out concerns about public backlash for an action some people could view as endorsing disputed territories. But there hasn’t been management resolve in recent years to risk changing the status quo to introduce a Palestinian YouTube that would give local creators access to monetization.

US congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin says Israel’s current attack on Gaza underscores how wrong that pattern of online exclusion is. “When massive companies make money hand over fist from creators but deny them their fair share just because of where they live, that is just plain wrong,” he says. It is crucial, he argues, that “Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have equal opportunities for economic participation.” In May, Pocan led several Democratic US lawmakers in urging PayPal to allow Palestinian accounts. PayPal, which declined to comment, hasn’t changed its policies.

Duty First

Tamimi, 57, started posting on YouTube in 2010 and views it as a duty in service of his villagers, not a way to get rich. He first tried to join the service’s revenue sharing program a few years ago as a way to defray his costs. “I would for sure try to improve my work, to have a good camera,” he says. “And maybe I can help other people who are doing what I am doing through workshops and cameras.”

Today Tamimi uses an iPhone 12 Pro Max he bought himself and camcorders and equipment donated by B'Tselem, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit organization that aims to document human rights issues in Palestinian territories.

Tamimi’s focus on winning attention over profit is no different than other YouTube creators, says Bing Chen, who once led global creator initiatives at YouTube. “Revenue is of course an incentive, but fame is more so,” says Chen, who now develops and invests in creators through his company AU Holdings.

You don’t need a fancy camera or editing to draw an audience. When Israeli professors analyzed about 340 TikTok videos from 2021 related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they found pro-Israeli videos had higher production values but received lower engagement. They argued that viewers preferred Palestinian content because public sentiment tends to favor those seen as victims.

At a time of widespread suffering now on both sides of the border and an intense period of global attention on the region, Palestinian channels like Tamimi’s could be drawing record engagement and revenue—money that could, one day, make rebuilding easier.

Instead, Tamimi has withdrawn from YouTube. He started posting only infrequently after his village stopped organizing weekly protests around 2018 and with no income available feels no loyalty to the Google service. When an incident flares up, he is now more likely to livestream on Meta’s Facebook, where he draws thousands of viewers. “YouTube is like an archive,” he says, not a place to share new content.

Geographic Gaps

YouTube’s revenue program for creators, known as YPP, launched in 2007 and pioneered the concept of a major social media platform turning amateur stardom into a well-paying job. It now has competition from Meta, X, and TikTok—which also don’t offer their programs to people in Palestinian territories—but remains the leader in influence and geographic reach.

Despite YouTube’s dominant position, WIRED’s review found that YPP doesn’t let in creators from over a quarter of the world's 100 most populous countries, most of them in Africa. It welcomes people from many countries with smaller populations than the Palestinian territories, where, combined, an estimated 5 million people reside. Creators from Iraq and Yemen, also Arabic-speaking places troubled by conflict, are listed as supported.

Chen, who helped develop YPP while working at YouTube, believes that the platform’s leaders may want to avoid funding creators whose content puts them at risk from local authorities, and also worry that language barriers or limited staffing could make it difficult to provide suitable customer service.

But it’s not impossible for platforms to work with creators in Palestine. California-based fundraising service Patreon gets money to Palestinian users through the payments provider Payoneer, and smaller money-moving tools such as Saudi Arabia’s PayTabs say they support transactions with Palestinian accounts.

Other parts of Google’s vast empire claim to serve Palestinians businesses, but people reached by WIRED say the reality is very different.

Google documentation says the Google Play app store allows developers from 163 markets, including one listed as “Palestine,” to sell apps and in-app purchases and that Google’s AdSense advertising system supports 232 countries or territories, including “Palestinian Territory.”

Odeh Quraan, who runs a Ramallah-based software development agency called iPhase with overseas customers, says the sign-up process for AdSense requires entering a PIN mailed by Google. But Israel controls the flow of mail to the West Bank, and many items never arrive, he says. He circumvented that by using Stripe’s Atlas service to establish a company in the US state of Delaware without ever setting foot there. But it comes with downsides. “Taxes are a headache, and transferring money from the US bank account to the local banks has turned out costly,” Quraan says.

Three out of 12 popular Palestinian news websites display ads using Google technology, compared with 11 out of 12 well-known Israeli news sources, WIRED found. One of the Google spokespeople says the company in late October began notifying websites in the region about a virtual alternative to the mailed PINs, though the option is not stated in public support documentation.

Elsewhere in Ramallah, software development company Mongid stopped offering in-app purchases from an ecommerce app on Google Play and abandoned a YouTube channel with tutorials on using online learning tools because it was too difficult to receive revenue via Google, says CEO Mongid Abu-Baker.

This month, he and two other app developers interviewed by WIRED have been stymied by a new Google Play requirement that all developers get verified by global professional services firm Dun & Bradstreet. Neither the Palestinian territories nor their country code for phone numbers are listed as options on sign-up webpages, and Palestinian developers must seek customer service from Dun & Bradstreet through offices in Israel rather than an Arab country.

Abu-Baker calls the lack of recognition an affront on his identity. “Palestinian companies hold an importance no less significant than any other worldwide,” he says. He downgraded his account to avoid verification and now worries about losing access to some Google Play features.

Efrat Segev, chief of data and product for Dun & Bradstreet in Israel, says hundreds of Palestinian businesses have finished verification over the past two years and that complaints are few but that it is trying to remedy the concerns. Google declined to comment.

The difficulties faced by Abu-Baker and others in Palestine clash with messaging from Google’s leaders in California about its work in the Middle East. Last year, Google chief financial officer Ruth Porat announced that the company would spend $10 million over three years to help Palestinian graduates, developers, and entrepreneurs “advance their digital skills and find employment.” Just weeks before the recent war broke out, Google said it aims to serve 3,500 Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem through the investment.

Asked on stage at a conference this month about Google’s role in contested areas like Gaza, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company can be a critical technology partner. “We don't see it in the geopolitical context,” he said. “We see it in an enabling context.”

Some Israeli creators, like those in Palestine, feel Google isn’t living up to that. Oren Cahanovitc, owner of the Traveling Israel channel, says videos discussing politics are being flagged by YouTube as not suitable for ads. Corey Gil-Shuster, the Tel Aviv-based creator behind the Ask Project, which interviews Israelis and Palestinians about their views on the conflict, says he’s seen the same pattern.

YouTube’s screening tools can deem videos showing violence or capitalizing on war as inappropriate for advertisers, although partner program participants also get some revenue from paid subscribers to YouTube who don’t see ads. That business, and revenue stream for creators, is growing.

Palestinians lack the opportunity to receive checks from YouTube at all. The Israeli creator Gil-Shuster says the disparity was news to him and that the fix seems clear. “Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, obviously,” he says, “should have equal right to benefit from monetization as anyone else.”

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