5 likely harms of criminalizing and stigmatizing pornography

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The War on Porn is ramping up.

VISA and MasterCard recently dropped Pornhub. Wealthy agribusiness barons accused of human trafficking are funding disinformation campaigns to implicate porn in human trafficking. Porn stars are concerned that our latest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, may erode First Amendment protections for pornographic content.

Many conservative commentators are calling for porn bans and further erosions of Section 230. As of 2019, 16 states had declared pornography a “public health crisis,” a first step toward banning porn. 

Many of the supposed harms of pornography are in fact myths. The proliferation of online porn is actually associated with a decrease in violence against women. There’s no good evidence to suggest porn addiction is a real or widespread phenomenon. Porn use is actually positively associated with more gender egalitarian views among men. The vast majority of non-consensual sexual material is posted to social media sites, not porn sites. And there is absolutely no demonstrated link between widespread access to online porn and human trafficking or child molestation. Porn use is not associated with marital dissatisfaction and it actually increases the average person's attraction to their partner.

As things get going, I wanted to quickly share a short list of five likely potential harms of criminalizing and stigmatizing pornography:

1. Stigmatizing porn triggers the “rebound effect”

I’m currently listening to Tell Me What You Want, which is just excellent so far. In it, Dr. Justin Lehmiller refers to the “white elephant” study, where students who were told not to think about a white elephant thought about it twice as much as the control group. 

As it turns out, telling people not to do something doesn't generally work very well. And telling people not to think about something generally backfires. For another example, it turns out that telling racists not to be racist actually makes them more racist. 

While there’s a dearth of studies on the rebound effect and pornography specifically, we do know that people in conservative states consume more porn than people in progressive states and that more conservative Christians (such as Evangelicals or Biblical literalists) are more interested in pornography than more moderate Christians (such as Catholics or Lutherans). 

2. Criminalizing porn leads to black market porn

Just as alcohol and drug prohibition led to black market alcohol and drug production and distribution, banning porn would simply create a black market for porn. Most porn production would simply move overseas, putting US porn workers out of a job and depriving the US of profits from the industry. Banning porn would actually increase rates of human trafficking.

As Peter Suderman points out, banning porn would create a thriving black market. 

As porn moved underground, the production would almost certainly become less safe for performers working in illegal operations; those performers would also be at risk of legal punishment.

Black market porn would create a flush new revenue stream for individuals and organizations comfortable working outside of the law, helping to fund all sorts of other illicit activities, not all of which would be consensual.

Drug prohibition has not meaningfully reduced drug use and decriminalizing drugs has not led to large increases in drug use where it’s been tried. There’s no reason to think banning porn would work better.

3. Speech restrictions won’t stop with porn

One big challenge with banning “porn” is that it’s not at all clear what’s considered porn. Such bans would open the door to banning sex scenes in movies, for example. 

And it’s unlikely such bans would stop at sexual material. There’s no justification for banning porn that doesn’t equally apply to any other type of media. Porn itself is a subjective, fluid category. If violent “porn” causes violence (it doesn’t), wouldn’t violent movies and video games (they don’t, but why let facts get in the way of a good story)?

If you want evidence of just how arbitrary obscenity prosecutions are, check out the Cambria List.

“If they can go after material that is believed to be corrupting to our character, it’s really not at all clear why it would stop with pornography,” Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson said. Olsen further asked why such bans couldn’t include unpatriotic speech or speech that encourages parental disrespect, or plain old bullying and rudeness. 

4. Porn bans will require major incursions into privacy and freedom

The War on Drugs has dealt massive blows to Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, including anal probes at traffic stops, warrantless mass surveillance, and deadly no-knock raids. The War on Porn will be no different. 

While the War on Porn would start with shutting down Big Porn, after that, writes Suderman:

You would need to go after amateurs by finding some way to stop tens of millions of iPhone-wielding Americans from making home movies—many of which would resemble professional products in quality—and distributing them anonymously online, or even just amongst trusted circles of friends. For prohibition to be effective, authorities would need new powers to surveil and arrest, as well as new oversight over popular technologies, and countless other new ways to intrude on the private lives of citizens.

5. Porn bans will lead to more police abuse

Drug prohibition helped justify and fund the militarization of police, police abuse and brutality, and lawlessness among police officers. Even as we ramp down the drug war, police have kept their military-grade weaponry and tanks, continue to abuse and brutalize citizens who have been convicted of no crime, and enjoy immunity from legal accountability for their actions.

There is absolutely no reason to expect cities to not use a war on black market pornography to justify and fund further militarization of police, police abuse and brutality, and lawlessness among police officers. 

“Law enforcement, if it took prohibition seriously, would end up spending a considerable share of its available time and resources cracking down on illegal porn makers and consumers, many of whom, in the age of ubiquitous high-quality camera phones, would be the same people,” writes Suderman. 

In conclusion

Like drugs, a small minority of users are harmed by their overuse of pornography. But, like drugs, prohibition and stigmatization of use is a cure far worse than the disease. For those who need help, treatment and harm reduction works far better than prohibition and stigmatization with far fewer unintended consequences.