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Zoom protests against sex with Kink.com's fetish history.
The COVID-19 pandemic also seems to bring out the best in people, from critical workers who jeopardize their lives to volunteers who make masks for frontline staff.
Both small and big companies responded to the call and took sometimes exceptional steps to help us overcome the crisis.
That makes it all the more worrying for Zoom to ban virtual sex and block anything deemed "obscene or indecent."
The strong targeting of people using the VCS to link to other people erotically, as well as engage in virtual orgies, is not going without a struggle.
Another new way to do this is to add to one of the largest adult fetish sites: let your next Zoom conference call have one of their new wild backgrounds.
Sex built the cam-to-cam business live streaming
Kink[NSFW] has more than a dozen or so fetish histories to encourage what otherwise would be boring Zoom meetings, which has been a 'domination of porn for 20 years'
Alison Boden said, "Now we want to help everyone get a little kinky fun, because our shelter order has been extended."
But Kink has turned these backgrounds into a statement against this needlessly puritanical policy, as Zoom's new policy of shooting off adult content now emerges.
We asked Kink’s Mike Stabile about Zoom’s new stance and the timely release of these new backgrounds and his answer couldn’t be clearer:
It’s part of our mission, as a company, and a community, to thumb our nose a bit at parochialism. Sex built the live streaming, cam-to-cam business, so it’s a bit much to hear that they now plan to patrol it for indecency.
A Victorian desk, a wrestling ring, and much more ...
Although not sexually explicit, but erotic, the backgrounds are all taken from existing sets on their famous Mission District Armory building in Kink's San Francisco.
With them you can see your next meeting as in the "Hogtied Room, Victorian Noir Drawing Room in the Upper Floor, Ultimate Surrender Wressing Ring, the Dank Abattoir, the Padded Cell, Bonding Wall, Sockel Cages, and a Urinals Bank" as well, as in their press release.
In addition to being amusing, these new backgrounds focus on a rather serious subject: the Zoom would have a detrimental impact in the ability to cope with the uncertainty around the current pandemic by taking this backward approach to how people will use their service.
The question that arises is: why? It is not like having a virtual orgy or being a perfect place for lovers to look closely, but it is something that nobody will consider.
Zoom has, in addition, far more urgent concerns, than their major problems in ensuring the safety of its platform.
Face it, this latest approach is much more uncomfortable with the thought of using its virtual meeting service for something even remotely sexual.
We can only hope that Zoom eventually reaches its corporate senses and takes that unnecessary approach, given how both the individuals and the companies need to be conscientious and supportive of anything that helps all of us get through these frightening times.
However, until then all of us who use their technology or just feel that this unjustified police force has to speak out about how often their pandemic isolation and loneliness is handled.
If we make a comment or touch Zoom directly using a new Kink context, we will inform you that they must become a solution and not an entity that is unnecessarily worsensing stuff.
