Is it by accident though? Aren't US regulators intentionally (but quietly) pressuring financial institutions to do the enforcement of policies that they know wouldn't stand up to public scrutiny?
look, US politics is a shitshow, regulators are beholden to politics, lobbying is a very big influence in the US. from the crazy anti-porn, anti-abortion, anti-gay/trans, anti-welfare xenophobic fundamentalist anti-anything lobby to the anti-gun, super-duper-pro-trans, militantly-feminist, pro-eat-the-rich lobby.
and during all this banking in the US suffers from all the usual problems, it's 50+ regulatory regimes all in one, banking systems are laughably ambivalent old and legacy plus too new and full of bugs, and so on.
it's not surprising that things are not ideal. there's no need for some extreme conspiracy. big banks are user-hostile. just as the police, as healthcare, and so on.
... it was announced in a public speech on March 20 that year (2013), it was all kinds of bad (very ineffective and probably extralegal, etc)... but it wasn't a secretive conspiracy. (despite what Wikipedia writes.)
this has the same energy as "video games are making us killers", "tabletop RPGs directly lead to Satan (no chance of ever getting back)", "reefer madness, not even once", and so on.
are there negative consequences with regards to women? sure, as with many things.
is it "harmful to women"? oh, yes, maybe we need to put blinders on women and assign a guardian to them to help them avoid this harm!
It's at the least very weird that it's illegal to pay someone for sex unless you pay them to have sex with someone else, record it, and sell the resulting recording.
