Late Friday afternoon is the classic hour to release news that you don't want widely reported or read about, and this Friday afternoon Ebay announced that it was banning sex on its platform. I did not until now even know that one could buy sex on eBay, and now it's too late.
Among the items stictly prohibited from listing on the site under the new policy are: "items that contain explicit sexual material," "items with sexual content, including showing provocative sexual poses, genitalia, or sexual activity" and "sexually explicit anime, comics, books, films, animation, manga, hentai, yaoi."
Perhaps most alarmingly, in its guidelines for items the site will allow sellers to relist in its Books or Music sections, today's notice states, "You may relist items that do not contain sexual content, profanity or other adult material."
In all seriousness, it's part of a trend of a growing prudishness among tech companies (also expressed by Apple this week to attack competitors), a soft corporate censorship aimed mostly at women (it's never male nipples that get taken down) and marginalized communities.
