WASHINGTON — The Washington Post published an opinion piece yesterday offering a cautionary historical perspective on how anti-pornography crusades like the current War on Porn end up harming marginalized groups like sex workers and the LGBTQ+ community.
The opinion piece was penned by Quinn Anex-Ries, an American Studies and ethnicity scholar at the University of Southern California, whose research examines the historical relationship between technology and sexuality.
According to Anex-Ries, in the past two years efforts to ban online pornography have been “growing in strength.”
“High-profile skirmishes over online pornography are microcosms of the broader debate raging over internet regulations,” he wrote. “Large swaths of the American public, along with federal regulators and political pundits, have adopted the view that the internet is unchartered — and untamable — territory. But when it comes to pornography, the debate is anything but new. For over a century, government officials, concerned citizens and erotic media producers have wrestled over the distribution of pornography via platforms ranging from the U.S. mail to the telephone to cable television.”
For the writer, older incarnations of the seemingly never-ending religiously-motivated War on Porn “offer a cautionary note as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the internet. While proponents historically have sold tools to limit pornography as ways to protect public safety and national morality, multiple generations have wielded them more as weapons against LGBTQ communities and political radicals — with devastating effects.”
Anex-Ries then invoked the name of the founding father of American censorship, “anti-vice” crusader Anthony Comstock, and moved forward through U.S. history to show how anti-porn campaigns have “disproportionately affected the LGBTQ community.”
“More recent efforts to block internet pornography,” he noted, “have also perpetuated these historical exclusions. In 2018, Congress passed a legislative package, FOSTA-SESTA, intended to curb online sex trafficking. While regulators rarely use the law, its passage led many platforms, including Tumblr, Craigslist and eBay, to crack down on a range of consensual pornographic and sexually explicit material. This has had particularly adverse effects on the livelihoods of sex workers and the availability of LGBTQ media.”
Only if lawmakers “work collaboratively with the marginalized communities — including sex workers and LGBTQ people — most frequently subjected to censorship under anti-pornography legislation,” Anex-Ries concluded, will they be able to craft policy solutions “that allow individuals to choose how they encounter pornography online while also preserving free speech rights.”
To read “A New Push to Censor Internet Pornography Could Harm Marginalized Groups,” visit the Washington Post.