Sick of the anti-porn bullshit
I’m about sick to death of all the anti-porn bullshit. I’m seeing it everywhere, from the Supreme Court to this fucking website, and I’ve had enough.
And yes, I make porn. But no, I’m not going to “defend porn.” I’ve done that a bunch already and you can use the search button as well as I can.
The point I want to make today isn’t that porn is good or bad. (It’s neutral, like most things in life.) My point today is that porn is political.
I don’t mean like Nailin’ Palin. I mean that what a society considers to be pornography is malleable, hotly contested, and ultimately comes down to who is in power and what they want to accomplish at any one time.
Porn is, fundamentally, in the eye of the beholder. The difference between a tasteful nude and something more salacious is subjective.
It should tell you something that the organization leading the push to criminalize pornography also wants to ban Sports Illustrated.
Pornography is cultural. Victorians considered the bicycle so inherently sexual that some erotic photographs consist of a fully clothed woman merely standing next to one and smiling.
The Comstock laws banned “obscenity.” But Anthony Comstock didn’t go after pornographers as currently understood. According to The Porn Wars, he went after a little old lady for writing marriage advice for young men. He believed telling young people anything about sex, other than not to do it, violated his religious beliefs.
Reminder: Keeping children ignorant about sex facilitates sexual abuse. It does not prevent, or even delay, premarital fornication.
The effort to stigmatize and ban pornography is, always has been, and always will be a political project.
I just cannot stress this enough: Whatever harms you think “pornography” is doing to girls and women will very, very quickly pale in comparison to the harms of further stigmatizing and criminalizing political speech.
If porn isn’t political, why is it perfectly okay to show rape, but not nipples?
If pornography is so dangerous, why are the countries that make it easiest to access also the safest for girls and women? If pornography is so dangerous, why did rates of violence against girls and women plummet after it became widely available online?
Wake the fuck up. This isn’t about porn. It ain’t even about sex. The same people who want to ban porn are literally trying to take away your birth control (again). We’ve already seen this movie.
Every single supposed harm of porn is actually due to stigma.
What best predicts “porn addiction?” It’s not time or money spent on it. It’s shame, especially religious shame, around watching it. Why are performers so mistreated while they’re in the industry and why is it so hard to transition out? Stigma! Why are we blaming porn for men’s problems despite the paucity of evidence for a causal relationship? Stigma! Why are kids learning about sex from porn? Because Evangelical Christians pushed for and won abstinence-only sex education and parents are too embarrassed to do their fucking jobs. Or, to put it more simply: STIGMA!
You do not need the state to protect you or your family from pornography. There are these things called content filters that you can download onto your devices and your children’s devices. You absolutely do need protection from the people who want to ban porn.
Further stigmatizing and banning porn to solve the downstream effects of sexual repression is just pouring gasoline on a raging fire. Put out the fire first! Start talking to your kids about sex. Start talking to your spouse about sex.
Stop thinking that if we do the very thing that created the problem we’re trying to solve hard enough this time, things will turn out differently.
Indeed. I've begun to think the religious right is simpler than I used to think. They're unhappy, bored people who don't want others to enjoy anything. They're miserable and want to spread that. They mostly don't want to live insular lives, but they've locked themselves into a weird pact to do so and can't get out.
Also, I must point out that the Supreme Court used to gather once a month to watch movies and decide if they were obscene. Justice Harlan was nearly blind, so his clerks would narrate for him, while he said things like "By Jove! Extraordinary!"
I wonder how many other emotive issues are affected by this same mental move of "X feels like it must be harmful, so when studies show that X is associated with harmful thing Y, I am not going to bother thinking about whether this is actually causal or not".
I read Tangle for news balance, and the editor, Isaac Saul, generally impresses me as a very careful thinker. But his recent thing about age verification laws falls straight into this trap. His deep dive cites a bunch of studies that say heavy porn use is associated with some bad outcome, but when you look at the study they are literally just reporting the association, not even trying to establish causation.