The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
Related Articles
These are challenging times for the adult entertainment industry, no doubt. Around the globe, governments are passing increasingly strict regulations around age verification and other, more censorious measures putatively designed to “protect minors,” but which legislators and anti-porn crusaders also hope will reduce porn consumption among adults, as well.
If all this is enough to inspire some folks in the adult industry want to wave the white flag, close up shop, and find something else to do for a living, I can certainly understand why. As the name of this site reflects, people in the industry rightfully feel like they’re under siege, waging a battle against forces with a great deal more wealth and power to enlist as weapons than does our side.
As someone who has worked in the adult industry for nearly 30 years (and who has enjoyed its products even longer), take it from me when I tell you none of this is new. Some of the battlefields are new and they are constantly evolving, but the war itself goes back longer than many of us can remember.
In the United States, obscenity laws and other statutes designed to maintain public morals and prevent the corruption of society date back to colonial times. In other words, long before there was an adult entertainment industry against which to wage war, the government was taking aim at sexual expression and conduct.
Fast forward to the 19th Century and there was the establishment of the Comstock Act of 1873, which—among many other things—made it a criminal offense to send obscene materials through the U.S. mail. The Act also made it illegal to use the mail to tell someone where such materials might be found, or how to make them provisions, which was later struck down by the courts as overly broad, thankfully.
To give you an idea of just how much more restrictive the obscenity laws were in the early 20th Century than they are today, you need only look as far as the name of a seminal case from 1933 – United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. Frankly, the contents of James Joyce’s Ulysses wouldn’t even be enough to raise one-half of a would-be censor’s eyebrow these days, yet it was considered positively scandalous in its day.
From an American adult industry perspective, the War on Porn arguably reached its zenith in the 1980s and 1990s, under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1990 alone there were 74 federal obscenity prosecutions targeting adult materials (as opposed to Child Sexual Abuse Materials, which are patently illegal and have no protection under the First Amendment). Contrast that figure with 2009, in which there were a total of six.
Despite the number of prosecutions at the start of the decade, the 1990s were a period of tremendous growth for the adult industry, driven in large part by the advent of the commercial internet and its relatively unregulated environment. What we’re seeing now is what governments might call a “correction” of that laissez faire approach – and what those of us in the industry might call an overcorrection.
Yes, age-verification laws present a challenge. Like a lot of people in the adult industry, I don’t object to the idea of making people prove they’re adults before consuming porn; what I object to is the means by which we’re required to offer such proof and the way those methods compromise not only our privacy, but potentially open us up to extortion, identity theft and other crimes. I’m also not convinced age verification, at least as currently executed, does much to prevent minors from being exposed to porn.
If you were to ask any of the people who have been prosecuted for obscenity for the movies they’ve made, books they’ve written, or magazines they’ve published, I think you’d find near unanimity on the question of whether they’d rather pay a financial penalty, or face serving years in prison in addition to being fined, as the likes of Paul Little (AKA “Max Hardcore”) have done in the past.
My point here is not that those of us currently working in the adult industry should simply thank our lucky stars we avoided the crackdowns of the past or simply accept the current campaign against the adult industry without putting up a fight. My point is simply this: We’ve been under the gun for decades and we’ve not only survived but expanded as an industry considerably along the way.
The bottom line, whether the anti-porn zealots like it or not, is many humans like sexual expression, whether one calls it “porn,” “erotica,” or “filth.” Neither the desire to consume the products we make nor the desire to make them is going away—and neither are we.
