SALT LAKE CITY – Twenty-five years ago, it was rare to see anything porn-related in the news, outside of the occasional headline about an obscenity prosecution, or the occasional pearl-clutching opinion piece in a local newspaper about adult stores (allegedly) ruining property values and causing a spike in crime by their mere existence.

Back then, within the adult industry it was an unquestioned truism that we’d always be a punching bag for the media and a convenient foil for politicians looking for a quick boost in the polls.

To some extent, the adult industry is still those things, of course. If you want to find negative stories about porn, it doesn’t take much searching to find them, and politicians across the country are lining up to pass resolutions declaring porn a “public health crisis” (or, alternatively a “public health risk”) in their states.

One thing which has changed over the decades however, is the size of the viewing audience for porn, which has grown tremendously, thanks in large part to the ease of distribution afforded by the internet. While it’s likely there were more people watching porn 25 years ago than people realized at the time, there’s no question porn is now reaching more people than ever, both domestically and internationally.

One of the effects this expanded reach has had is a change on the perception of porn viewing and porn viewers. Once largely thought of as “dirty old men” who ducked into brick and mortar stores to buy movies, or to watch them on-site in dank, sticky-floored viewing booths, the modern porn-watching demographic is undeniably thought of as more diverse – a fact often celebrated within the industry as good news, while often decried as another horrifying sign of a porn pandemic by anti-porn crusaders.

For those who advocate for tighter restrictions (or outright bans) on porn, porn’s popularity is both an affirmation of their worst fears (the addiction is spreading!) and an indication of the uphill battle they face in winning over the public to their side of the debate.

In a recent piece for the Washington Post (reprinted outside the Post’s paywall by the Salt Lake Tribune), Matthew LaPlante noted that in Utah, “the fight against porn is increasingly being framed not as a moral crusade but as a public health crisis.”

“Although there is significant debate on whether that is actually true,” LaPlante added, “Utahns have been a very receptive audience to the message.”

Later in the piece, LaPlante referenced some statistics concerning the anti-porn movement Fight the New Drug (FTND), numbers which I assume were provided to give readers an idea of just how large the reach is of this modern anti-porn group, which relies heavily on social media to spread its message.

“Representatives from the nine-year-old nonprofit give presentations at schools and churches around the world,” LaPorte reported. “The organization has 1.5 million followers on Facebook and 30,000 subscribers to its YouTube channel. In 2016 the nonprofit’s website had 17.5 million page-views. In that same year, according to Internal Revenue Service records, about 60,000 people-from every U.S. state and 155 nations-were enrolled in the organization’s pornography ‘recovery’ program, called Fortify.”

I suppose 17.5 million page-views in a year isn’t too shabby – unless you’re comparing it to Pornhub’s numbers for the same year, where such a figure would represent a very slow morning.

Even if we assume there’s still a large untapped audience of anti-porn folks out there who haven’t heard of FTND (or are sympathetic to its cause but don’t follow it on social media or watch its videos), based on the numbers alone, the anti-porn group is a local news channel in Ogden to Pornhub’s CNN International. They may both have access to the same internet-megaphone, but Pornhub’s message is being bellowed at the top of our cultural lungs, while FTND is a library-friendly whisper.

This is not to say porn has decisively won the “culture war,” or that there’s no prospect of anti-porn groups making headway in their ongoing call for greater regulation and restriction of porn. But to the extent the squeaky wheel gets the grease where legislatures are concerned, groups like FTND are going to have to turn up the volume on their wheels considerably, if they’re ever to get anything more than symbolic, non-binding resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis.

Then again, even if anti-porn groups do get more than such a resolution – like, say, a new law under which people can sue porn producers for injury done to minors by pornographic material – the aggrieved public still must take advantage of such an opportunity before it will mean anything.

To wit, while Utah passed the legislation linked above last year, so far as Utah Sen. Todd Weiler, the legislation’s author and sponsor, is aware, nobody in Utah has sued any porn producers under the new law, despite all the (presumably ongoing) damage porn is allegedly doing to residents of the state.

Maybe Weiler needs to literally advertise the availability of the new law? If he really wants to get the word out, I happen to know of a website which is reportedly quite popular with Utahns that gets a lot of traffic…

Empty Seats Image © Luka Rister