The disrimination Behind Your Click
I got a letter yesterday telling me I have to close yet another bank account for Soul Impact Berlin. No explanation in the letter, no information on the phone. I hadn't overdrawn, I had modest but regular financial movement — nothing unusual. So the most likely reason left standing is that they closed it because my business is… well, not quite to their liking.
Too much of an assumption? Fair. Let me show you what actually goes on under the hood before you can even buy a ticket or book a session.
For the record: everything I do is legal
Every part of what I do is fully compliant with German law. I'm registered with the right authorities for the events, and separately for the private sessions. I declare my income, pay taxes and I even have a tax advisor. Everything. Is. Legal. By German standards. It took a while to get there, but I did.
The website that started it all
It began about a month ago, when I wanted to give my website an upgrade — there has been a lot of new content, events and workshops in the past year, and things had started to get chaotic. Before diving in, I asked a friend to audit the site. And this is where one shock came after the other.
The audit flagged that I'm using services which prohibit selling sex — and BDSM services fall under that category, even though I explicitly do not offer, and never plan to offer, p€netrative s€xual services. But impact play makes my content “adult”, and thus unsuitable for hosting with primarily US-based providers like Squarespace. It also (theoretically) rules out payment providers like Stripe (which runs my webshop) and PayPal as a backup.
I looked for alternative website providers and found none that were reasonable for what I actually need, short of paying an agency for ongoing maintenance. Sure I could pay for a private-server-hosted website, but the costs of either time or money would be unreasonable for the size of my business - I just can’t make people pay that much more. So I'm staying put and hoping for the best.
The payment provider math doesn't work
I looked for alternative payment providers too - specialised for adult services. The three or four I found all charge commissions above 30%. That's a huge overhead that would have to show up in ticket prices — it would simply be unreasonable to pass that on to you. So I stay and hope for the best.
The bank account rabbit hole
Given that my current payment providers could drop me at any time, it's good to have a backup to the backup: a bank account. And this is the domain where my mind really started to blow up.
I opened my first account as a private person for Soul Impact Berlin, because my business coach said "they won't look," and because it doesn't cost €30 a month the way business accounts do. So I did. Then I had this desire of just wanting to sleep well at night, so I decided to go for a business account - what can go wrong, dared I say, my business is fully legitimate in Germany and I pay my taxes. So I closed the private account, and went to open a business account at Sparkasse — yes, I'll name it. I was optimistic: as a German bank - since I actually run a legal operation in Germany - they would surely accept the nature of my business from the start.
The woman at the counter was lovely and did everything in her power to make everything legal and transparent as per my wish. Unfortunately, she was powerless against the bank's policy. Only 2 weeks later they asked me to close the account for catering to s€x work.
Oh well, if that’s the issue (which it shouldn’t be, but I wasn’t ready to give up hope), then let me adjust the backend. I decided to split the business in two: one entity for events and workshops, another for private sessions, so discrimination against one side wouldn't take down the other. That means double admin, double tax returns, double account fees, and pricier tax advice. I was willing to pay that price to sleep better at night.
On a colleague's recommendation, I went to Commerzbank for the next business account — this time registered only for events and workshops. They didn't ask about the "nature" of the business, so I was relieved to keep some privacy. It went fine for about two months, until I got the cold letter announcing immediate closure.
I never disclosed the nature of the business to Commerzbank, and even a tax ID lookup would only show "events and workshops." I genuinely don't know how they found out — maybe they went through my website and found the other side of what I do, maybe it was something else entirely. I'll probably never know, and that's its own kind of frustrating.
It's frustrating. It's unfair.
I pay my taxes the same as if I were running a massage business. You, dear taxpayer, will hopefully see the benefits of my VAT in the German state coffers just as much as you do from your hairdresser's income. Nothing I do, business-wise, breaks any regulation. And still, I spend weeks hunting for providers who can offer basic services — so that I can reach the people I need to reach, so they can click that button, so that in the end I get to pay my bills and my VAT to the state.
So what else can I do?!
I don't display explicit content on my website. For the record, I could — I could hide it all behind an 18+ wall that any 17-year-old could click "yes" through in half a second — but I refuse to play that circus. Instead, I've clumsily started masking words on my own site to stay under the radar. It's my placebo: a way of convincing myself the business is safer, so I sleep a little better at night.
I've reached the point where I talk more openly about sex and body parts with my 7-year-old than I do with adults browsing my own website. It's ridiculous.
Why this isn't just my problem
It's not only me who pays for this. It's you too — the person reading this, attending my events, my workshops, my private sessions.
I have limited hours I can, and want to, work. Every hour spent on hold with a bank, drafting yet another appeal letter, or comparing payment providers with worse terms than the last, is an hour not spent writing, teaching, or coming up with new ideas, exercises, or playlists. It's an hour not spent making the thing better for you.
And it's not just my time. It's money too. Every provider that charges me a "risk premium" because of what I do is money that either comes out of my pocket or shows up, sooner or later, on your ticket price. Discrimination doesn't stay contained to me and my admin folder — it goes down to what you pay and what you get.
So when I disappear for a bit, or a newsletter is late, or a project takes longer than promised — there's a decent chance it's not because I forgot about you. It's because I was somewhere on hold, again, trying to keep the lights on for something that is, and remains, completely legal.
It's unfair. So, so unfair.
Any tips? Please, let me know.