In the nearly 30 years I’ve been lingering around the porn industry like a stubborn barnacle refusing to be pried from the hull of the smut-ship, there’s always been something of a bunker mentality coursing through the industry. Sometimes it has felt overblown, as though we were persistently balanced on the edge of our collective seat waiting for some sort of “government crackdown” that never arrived.
In the early days of my ‘career,’ I got a clear understanding of why so many in the industry, especially those who were part of the ‘old guard’ active in the 70s and 80s, were paranoid about the threat to their means of earning a living. They had been through the obscenity prosecutions undertaken by the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, watching on as some of their peers and friends were hauled off to serve substantial prison sentences. That sort of sight leaves an impression, it’s safe to say.
When the online adult sector exploded in the late 90s, amid the climate of a largely unregulated commercial internet, many of my friends in the old guard were dumbfounded by the cavalier approach to marketing and distributing porn taken by the new generation.
“This craze of giving porn away for free to anyone who lands on your websites is going to come back to haunt you,” Sam Lessner, the dearly departed founder of Big Top Video, once told me. “You fucking internet kids are nuts.”
It took a lot longer than he predicted for the blowback Sam anticipated to hit with full force. We had that conversation sometime in late 1998; the brunt of the pushback didn’t hit until well after Sam died, back in 2012.
The blowback is now in full force, however. All you need to do is take a glance at the Free Speech Coalition’s blog to see the evidence of it growing, day by day and week to week.
While it’s mostly Republican-dominated legislatures coming up with statutes that mandate age verification, the opposition to the adult industry and our products has always been a bipartisan affair, one that involves an alliance of the strangest of bedfellows: The Christian Right and the Feminist Left.
Outside of the service providers and trade organizations directly associated with the adult industry, allies often have been hard to find. That rarity is part of what makes Nadine Strossen, once the President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), stand out.
The other thing that makes Strossen stand out, of course, is she’s part of the Feminist Left from whence so many of the adult industry’s most strident would-be censors hail.
Back in 1995, between the Reagan/Bush obscenity crackdown and the passing of early attempts to rein in the Wild West of the internet (like 1998’s Child Online Protection Act), Strossen wrote the book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights, which advanced the idea that defending porn and free speech rights was part of the fight for women’s rights, rather than promotion of a medium antithetical to that struggle.
In a recent interview with Reason.com, Strossen explained that from the beginning in the women’s rights movement, there were “many of us who opposed censoring pornography, not only because of our commitment to core free speech principles, but also, independently, precisely because of our commitment to feminist goals and principles, and our understanding—based on widespread longstanding experience, in the United States and elsewhere—that no matter how well-intended, censorship of pornography would end up doing women’s rights far more harm than good.”
Expanding on that notion, Strossen noted she’s had “the opportunity to write about other kinds of controversial expression, including—and again, with scare quotes—so-called ‘hate speech,’ so-called ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation,’ so-called ‘extremist’ speech.”
“I’ve come to see that all of these efforts to censor all of these controversial kinds of speech, including pornography, suffer from the same fundamental flaws,” Strossen said. “All of those flaws emanate from the irreducibly subjective and vague nature of the concept, which means that whoever the enforcing authority is—whether the government, whether individual citizens, as would’ve happened under the model anti-pornography law that was proposed by the so-called radical feminists—has essentially unfettered discretion to decide what within that inherently elusive and manipulable concept, in this case pornography, is inconsistent with their values. And that means that for the rest of us who disagree with a particular, individual, subjective concept of either sexual speech or hate speech or disinformation, that our freedom and our equality is undermined.”
What’s more, Strossen asserts, when laws are established to target disfavored speech, those laws are used to target some of the very communities alleged to be most harmed by the disfavored speech in the first place.
“Now, since women and feminists and advocates of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ individuals and advocates of their rights—through many historic periods, and including in the United States—have been in the minority, at least in many communities,” Strossen explained, “it is completely predictable that laws targeting pornography, obscenity, any other disfavored category of sexual expression consistently have disproportionately been enforced to suppress those perspectives, perspectives that are especially important for women’s rights and safety and dignity and health and equality and lives.”
Strossen makes an important point – one we probably won’t hear coming from anyone who testifies in front of Congress about the “harms” of pornography or appears before a state legislature to advocate for the notion porn represents a “public health crisis.”
Lest you think Strossen is stretching to make her point, in her Reason interview, she offered an example of the phenomenon playing out in the real world.
“Andrea Dworkin, a writer, and Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor—their concept of illegal pornography was adopted by the Canadian Supreme Court,” Strossen recounted. “Immediately, Canadian Customs seized a number of books at the U.S.–Canada border that were deemed to be inconsistent with that concept. And among those books were books that were written by Andrea Dworkin herself. Because in the process of denouncing pornography as being degrading and dehumanizing, she of course goes to great lengths to describe it. And you could sort of have schadenfreude and ‘I told you so.’ But it was a sad proof of concept.”
Sadly, there aren’t many voices out there like Strossen’s which makes their cautionary words easy for our lawmakers to ignore. The rest of us shouldn’t ignore them, though, particularly at a time when so many folks are calling for censorship for one class of disfavored speech or another, be it porn, “misinformation,” or hate speech.
To put Strossen’s wisdom in a substantially less intellectual (and substantially more cliché) framing, when it comes to censorship, we should all be careful what we ask for – because we just might get it.
