Olivia Alphonsine Zivot

Introduction – Pornography is Everywhere and Everything

The technological innovations of the past 30 years have created unprecedented, exponential opportunities to both produce and consume pornography, and the consequences continue to reveal themselves. As smart technology and the Internet infiltrated everyday life, so too did pornography. In many ways, pornography itself has become mainstream, though not without significant legal and social repercussions. Moral opposition to porn is nothing new, but since the dawn of Internet porn, empirical research on the sociocultural effects of pornography has proliferated. Unfortunately, much of the published research has proven problematic; empirical investigations on the effects of pornography tend to be politically or religiously biased and rife with uncontrollable variables. Nonetheless, attitudes towards pornography have become more polarized than ever as society traverses these new realms of thought and as new legal precedents are established. Pornography itself is by no means new, but since porn has become mainstream, issues of rape, sexual abuse, and consent have been skyrocketed to the forefront of society’s concerns. The rise of the “amateur” genre further blurred the lines between pornography and reality, and simultaneously created a vacuum for abuse and the widespread circulation of non-consensual content. Yet, the Internet has also provided a platform for feminist and queer communities to redefine the landscape of pornography, producing content that empowers, rather than objectifies. Ultimately, debates about pornography will always be underpinned by moral attitudes towards sexuality, and the Internet has forced society to address these issues head on. Porn can not be gotten rid of, so it is imperative that we continue to seek to understand it from an empirical, interdisciplinary perspective.

The Technological Erotic Imperative

Artistic depictions of sexuality have been present since the dawn of civilization, some of which have become notorious examples of mankind’s flair for erotica. One such treasure of historical erotic art is the Kamasutra, known worldwide as the “oldest extant Indian textbook of erotic love,” (O’Flaherty, 2016). It was translated to English from the original Sanskrit in 1883, just as the first ever censorship laws in the West were gaining momentum. And yet, a century and a half later, the decadently illustrated sex positions and pleasure-centric prose remain a cultural phenomenon. It has become clear that depictions of sex and eroticism capture the public imagination in a way that both inspires and enrages; but ultimately, whether one feels inspired or outraged seems to heavily depend on both societal and individual attitudes towards sexuality. According to the journalist John Tierney, “the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation, virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.” Tierney called this phenomenon “the erotic technological impulse.” In his book The Player’s Ball, author David Kushner illustrates Tierney’s claim with examples:

“With cave art, there came sketches of reclining female nudes on walls of the La Magdelaine caves from 15,000 B.C. When Sumerians discovered how to write cuneiform on clay tablets, they filled them with sonnets to vulvas. Among the early books printed on a Gutenberg press was a sixteenth-century collection of sex positions based on the sonnets of the man considered the first pornographer, Artenio – a book banned by the Pope.” (Kushner, 2019).

The sexual revolution of the 1960s paired with a boom in accessible video technology paved the way for the so-called “Golden Age” of porn in the 1970s and 1980s. When the Internet was born

in the 1990s, pornography itself was again, re-born. The Internet made pornography a part of everyday life for most Americans, for better or for worse. Today, pornography continues to evolve into new and futuristic mediums such as virtual reality, sex robots, and artificial intelligence – though not without contention.

Groping for a Definition

As porn becomes more convoluted, defining it becomes more difficult. The word pornography finds its roots in the Greek word pórnē, meaning “prostitute,” and gráphein, meaning “to write or to record” thus, “writings about prostitutes.” Classical language scholars have referred to the Greek word pornographos as “a bookish, and therefore non offensive, term for writing about prostitutes” (Talvacchia, 2010). Considering the controversy that surrounds prostitution today, the “non-offensive” nature of these writings is notable; classical Greek and Latin texts are full of fondness and appreciation for brothels and prostitutes, which were at the time, a part of everyday life. The french word pornographie entered the English language in the mid 19th century, and since then has undergone numerous redefinitions as pornography itself has evolved. The now infamous opinion penned by former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio) seems less axiomatic as pornography itself expands into new forms and society undergoes pornographication – that is, the “mainstreaming of pornography” and “the ways pornography and pornographic imagery are fragmenting and blurring into traditionally nonpornographic forms of popular culture” (Tyler & Quek, 2016). Thus, defining pornography is more exhausting than ever as it becomes harder to differentiate porn from other forms of media. The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary has three definitions for pornography:

(1) the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement;

(2) material (such as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement;

(3) the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.

The first two entries are relatively straightforward – pornography has historically been about sex, and most of it still is. The term “erotica” is sometimes used interchangeably with pornography, but there does appear to be a distinct difference between erotica and porn. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines erotica as “the arousal of or the attempt to arouse sexual feeling by means of suggestion, symbolism, or allusion in an art form.” In his 2007 book A World Made Sexy, historian Paul Rutherford frames eroticism as “a discourse, a way of ‘talking’ about sex, a special repetroire of words and images that seek to provoke desire” (p. 26). A prevailing criticism of modern pornography has been that it lacks “artistic intent” thus distinguishing between erotic art, which is socially and morally acceptable, and pornography, which is subject to censorship. In Rutherford’s words, “erotica was refined and cerebral, pornography was crude and physical” (p.25). The British journalist Rowan Pelling used more candid terms to distinguish the two: “porn goes straight to the groin, but erotica goes to the head first” (Rutherford, p. 25, 2007).

The third Mirriam-Webster definition of pornography is indicative of a more modern application of the word. On the Internet and in common vernacular, porn has become a suffix or prefix for anything that stimulates and provokes that “intense emotional reaction” described in the third dictionary entry. A common example of this phenomenon is food porn. According to the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, “while the connotation is often of ‘guilty pleasure,’ or allowable ‘indulgence,’ the term [food porn] can also (sometimes simultaneously) negatively connote food which is regarded as ‘bad’ and which should be avoided” (Rousseau, 2013). Food porn is at least tangentially connected to sexuality, in the sense that both hunger and sexual arousal are biological in foundation, but porn can also be applied to subjects outside a sexual context. The hashtag #EarthPorn on Instagram brings up 1.3 million photos and videos of strikingly beautiful places on earth, but the content is often edited to appear better than reality – highly saturated colors and striking perspectives that the human eye could never see without the help of modern technology. The intention of Earth porn is to stimulate an intense feeling of so-called wanderlust (a desire to travel). A desire which, for most people, has nothing to do with sexuality. A more mundane example comes in the form of r/powerwashingporn – a community on Reddit with a whopping 1 million subscribers – where one can go to relish in “all things that have been satisfyingly power or pressure washed” (Reddit.com, 2021). Power washing porn doesn’t seem at all related to mainstream porn, let alone sexuality, but it does demonstrate how casually the word porn can be applied in modern vernacular and how familiar the concept of porn has become.

In 2006, film critic David Edelstein coined the term torture porn to describe a certain new brand of horror depicting hyper-realistic gore, torture, nudity, violence, and mutilation. A prominent example of torture porn in popular culture is the massively successful Saw franchise, which grossed $457.4 million worldwide over eight films. Modern film techniques make these films shockingly realistic in their depiction of the ways in which humans (especially women) can be brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically. For some, it’s intolerable and disturbing – but for others, the horror is inherent to the thrill. The intense, emotional reaction is the goal, not a byproduct, thereby making it pornographic. The troubling connection between violence and sexuality has become especially relevant as pornography itself has become more violent. It can be argued that the objectification of the female human body in horror films is derivative of the way female bodies are objectified in pornography. “One of the most researched and debated aspects of pornography has been aggression against women and its effect” (Fritz & Paul, 2017).

According to a content analysis from 2010, more than 80% of the pornography analyzed contained “physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping…Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female. Targets most often showed pleasure or responded neutrally to the aggression” (Bridges et al). According to historian Paul Rutherford, the eroticization of violence, “now a persistent motif in the pornographic repertoire,” was a “twentieth-century specialty.” Rutherford goes on to explain:

“During the 1920s and 1930s the term ‘pornography’ acquired an even broader meaning as any symbolic practice that violated the dignity of the human body, which was why, for example, films of Holocaust victims or new photos of starving Africans have been deemed ‘pornographic’” (p.26).

In the 1950s, French philosopher Georges Bataille argued that death and eroticism were two sides of the same coin, inextricably intertwined in the human psyche. He linked eroticism both to religious ecstasy and to violence and death, arguing that “the source of eroticism is the dialectic of taboos and transgression” (Rutherford, 2007, p 26). Since the 1980s, opponents of pornography have made feminist arguments against the violent treatment of women in pornography, claiming it damages society by normalizing the sexual objectification of women and perpetuating gender inequality. To be sure, the movement for gender equality has grown exponentially over the past century, and conversations about sexism continue to evolve. In this context, and with Bataille’s comments in mind, it is possible that violence towards women is proliferating in porn because it is increasingly socially unacceptable.

Obscene, or just offensive?

In the 19th century, American society was deeply influenced by Victorian attitudes towards sexuality. It was the Victorians who established the first ever obscenity law, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (Rutherford, 2007). The rise of puritanism in America and the “crusade against pornography,” was, in the words of historian Eric Berkowitz, “dominated by one outsized character: the Brooklyn dry-goods salesman and Olympian busybody Anthony Comstock,” (2013, p. 364). In 1873, the United States Congress passed their own version of the British law, the federal Act for Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use – colloquially known as the Comstock laws. Comstock established a government sponsored organization called the New York’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, “building on ‘scientific’ theories about the harmfulness of masturbation” (Berkowitz, 2013, p. 365). Comstock was so vehemently devoted to purging society of vice that he earned his own place in the English lexicon: comstockery – otherwise known as overzealous prudishness. Unfortunately, his efforts applied to anything that even remotely related to sex, including information about birth control and medical textbooks with accurate illustrations of genitalia. To quote Berkowitz:

“During his forty-year career as an antismut crusader and protector of American youth, Comstock proudly claimed to have confiscated sixteen tons of ‘vampire literature,’ organized more than four thousand arrests, and caused the conviction of enough people to fill sixty train coaches. He also caused the suicide of about fifteen people.” (p. 364)

Comstock’s legacy lives on through a variety of organizations in both the private and public sector which lobby for stricter censorship of the porn industry. Many such groups claim that their ultimate goal is to protect children and women from the harmful effects of pornography, but it’s clear that ulterior political and religious motives are also at stake.

As pornography became more widely available and culturally relevant throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the American judicial system was forced to wrestle with issues of obscenity and censorship like never before. Opponents of pornography gained widespread support on a platform of emotionally charged moral arguments, but pornographers had the First Amendment on their side. Adopted to the Bill of Rights in 1791, the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteed the right to freedom of expression, but gave the Supreme Court the power to interpret “the extent of the protection afforded to these rights” (Egemenoglu, 2020). The issue of obscenity and censorship is perhaps one of the most “controversial and confounding areas of First Amendment law” (Hudson, 2009). Legally speaking, not all pornography is considered obscene, and determining what is and isn’t worthy of censorship has been no easy task for the courts, especially as platforms for sharing pornography and the pornography itself have continued to evolve. In the United States, “there are two types of pornography that receive no First Amendment protection — obscenity and child pornography.

The First Amendment generally protects pornography that does not fall into one of these two categories — at least for adult viewers” (Hudson, 2009). So it has been left to the courts to define obscenity on a case by case basis, which causes a multitude of problems. The current legal standard for identifying obscenity, now known as the Miller Test, was established by the Supreme Court case Miller v. California in 1973. The criteria are as follows: (1) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, (3) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Even with the Miller Test, navigating the legal landscape of obscenity has been no straightforward endeavor. Moreover, the advent of the Internet as a vector for pornography brought about a whole new set of problems for lawmakers. In the summer of 1995, society was rocked with a new wave of pornography-induced anxiety; the July cover of Time Magazine showed a young boy sitting at a computer, bathed in blue light and staring up at the screen, mouth agape and eyes wide with horror. The headline read “CYBERPORN: a new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids – and free speech?” 25 years later, these questions are still being asked.

Rule 34 of the Internet: If it exists, there is porn of it

The threat of porn on the Internet was so disturbing to Americans that the federal government saw an urgent need to intervene. Shortly after the Time Magazine article was published, congress penned the Communications Decency Act, or CDA. The structure of the law was heavily based on a paper that had been published in The Georgetown Law Journal, called “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway.” When President Bill Clinton signed the CDA into law in 1996, he said “today, with the stroke of a pen, our laws will catch up with the future.” Unfortunately for champions of the CDA, the only study that politicians had consulted to write the act – which happened to be the same study Time Magazine cited – was soon thereafter resoundingly discredited. It was discovered that the study in question, authored by an undergraduate student from Carnegie Mellon University, had been published “without peer review – feeding conspiracy theories that it was all the machinations of anti-porn activists” (Kushner, 2019, p. 90). A little over a year later, the CDA was struck down by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Reno v. ACLU (1997). The court’s decision, penned by Justice John Paul Stevens, read:

“In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another… It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the governmental interest in protecting children from harmful materials. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults.”

Thanks to the First Amendment, Internet porn was officially free from government interference, and making a fortune in the process. Unsurprisingly, this did nothing to soothe the public’s anxiety about the negative influence of porn on minors.

As Internet culture proliferated and became enmeshed with every day life, so too did pornography. A longstanding example of this connection between Internet culture and porn is illustrated by “Rule 34” – if it exists, there is porn of it. Rule 34 originated in 2003 as a webcomic drawn by Peter Morley-Souter, depicting his disgust with seeing Calvin & Hobbes parody porn (Dewey, 2016). Since then, it has become commonly understood Internet wisdom, mostly due to the fact that there really does seem to be parody porn of everything… From Star Wars to Tetris, Teletubbies to Super Mario, the Internet is full of pornographic re-interpretations of mainstream media. Pornhub, one of the world’s largest porn websites, reported a staggering 42 billion visits in 2019, an average of 115 million visits per day. It was listed as the 10th most visited website in the world according to the web analytics service SimilarWeb, ranking higher than Netflix, Reddit, and Amazon. Dr. Laurie Betitio, Pornhub’s resident doctor of human sexuality, explained why parody porn is so enduringly popular: “It’s always fun to see our favorite video game or movie characters portrayed in a sexual manner. Maybe it makes the characters seem more complete. It certainly speaks to our desire to step out of reality and into a world of pure fantasy.” But parody porn is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, when it comes to the vast scope of porn genres.

The Highs and Lows of Amateur Porn

Pornhub has always been enthusiastically candid about the massive amounts of data they collect from those 42 billion visitors. They actively publish articles on their Insights blog, in their words, “all to explore the intricacies of online porn viewership.” However, in many ways the blog serves as a public relations tool for the company. By adding a social scientific perspective, they aim to normalize discussions about Internet porn use and distract from the more troubling aspects of their platform. Intriguingly, the authors of the Insights blog remain anonymous, with the exception of occasional input from Dr. Laurie. Every December between 2013 and 2019, Pornhub released annual “Year in Review” reports, summarizing the year’s various trends and comparing them to previous years. The reports are filled with vividly illustrated, highly specific data, ranging from basic global viewer demographics (age, gender, location, etc.) to more peculiar statistics, such as how elections and major holidays affect porn viewership and search trends. The 2019 report found that the year’s most popular search term was “amateur,” something Pornhub attributed to “the incredible number of new verified amateur models that joined the site.” Amateur porn’s surge in popularity stems from a number of social and cultural phenomena: over the past decade, the omnipresence of smartphones and the influence of social media have normalized the act of uploading images of others and oneself to the Internet, though different social media platforms have different content guidelines when it comes to explicit photos. To quote Betito in the 2019 report:

“It seems that people are looking for more realistic depictions of sex. “Real” people vs. actors seems to be the draw. It’s interesting that more and more people are putting themselves out there as amateurs. Sex has become so much less taboo that those who get a kick out of exhibitionism can do so with very little experience or equipment. The message is: anyone can be a porn star!”

The exponential rise in amateur content is framed by Pornhub as proof that society’s is becoming more sex-positive, while ignoring the less savory consequences. When Betito says, “anyone can be a porn star,” what she hopes to mean is that anyone who wants to be a pornstar can be one. Unfortunately, that bright outlook doesn’t account for those who are victimized in amateur porn: those who did not consent, and those who could not consent.

The popularity of amateur porn makes it difficult to tell the difference between explicit content made with the intention of being shared online as porn, and explicit content that was never intended to be shared. Furthermore, it is impossible to know if the subjects in the video are even legally adults. A sinister consequence of this surge in amateur content comes in the form of so-called revenge porn, but according to the non-profit organization the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “the term ‘revenge porn,’ though frequently used, is somewhat misleading. Many perpetrators are not motivated by revenge or by any personal feelings toward the victim. A more accurate term is nonconsensual pornography, defined as the distribution of sexually graphic images of individuals without their consent,” (2021). Regardless of the perpetrator’s motivation, most courts agree that circulating nonconsensual pornography is a serious crime: in America, 46 states (plus Washington D.C. and the territory of Guam) have laws against revenge porn, and legislation continues to evolve as the issue becomes more commonly understood. In 2014, hundreds of nude pictures of dozens of female celebrities were leaked online and widely circulated, in what has since been referred to as both “The Fappening” (a portmanteau of “fap,” Internet slang for masturbation, and “happening”) and “Celebgate” (an obvious nod to the Watergate scandal of 1972). Suddenly, the problem of revenge porn became world news, and public opinion on issues of consent intensified.

Since then, there has been a significant increase in public discourse on issues of rape and sexual assault. There have been several high-profile cases wherein survivors of sexual abuse (most of whom are women) have been empowered to speak out and pursue legal action against powerful male celebrities. Notable examples include Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly. These conversations have in turn shed a spotlight on the alarming presence of sexual assault and rape in porn, as well as the many ways in which the Internet enables the distribution of nonconsensual porn. On December 4, 2020, the New York Times published an article by Nicholas Kristof detailing the many ways in which Pornhub had failed to rid their site of nonconsensual pornography, including videos depicting the rape and abuse of minors. To quote Kristof:

The issue is not pornography but rape. Let’s agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable. The problem with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein was not the sex but the lack of consent — and so it is with Pornhub.

Since the publication of Kristof’s article, there have been demonstrable consequences for Pornhub: several of their major corporate sponsors, including Visa, American Express, and Mastercard, publicly withdrew their support and condemned Pornhub’s lack of action on the issue of nonconsensual porn. In response to the public outrage, Pornhub removed several million user-uploaded videos, and changed their policy to ensure that only verified models – that is, models whose identities have been confirmed directly by Pornhub – can upload content. Moreover, the Pornhub Insights blog neglected to post a 2020 Year in Review report amid the controversy. In a statement released by Pornhub they were angry and defensive, blaming the criticism on anti-porn sentiments in society:

“It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform…These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association. Today, it happens to be Pornub.”

Whether or not Pornhub agrees with the changes that have been forced upon them, it is clear that attitudes towards pornography are highly relevant to their business model. It is important to note that Pornhub is just one hosting website of many, and countless others lay in waiting to host the content that Pornhub no longer allows. Even after removing all the unverified content (nearly 75% of their videos) Pornhub still has nearly 3 million videos available to view for free, all of which now (hopefully) contain only consenting adults.

“The Public Health Crisis of the Digital Age”

Since the rise of the Internet, there has been a marked increase in demand for research that might offer solutions to the social problems created by the ubiquity of online pornography. One such issue causing social concern and controversy is the outpouring of individuals experiencing problematic Internet pornography use, colloquially known as porn addiction. The problems that come with porn addiction are well understood by society, but the scientific community remains skeptical. Currently, neither the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) nor the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) classify compulsive pornography use as a mental disorder or addiction, even after many years of research on the subject. According to a recent meta-analysis by Williams, Thomas & Prior, studies that explore “sex and pornography addiction are frequently rife with problems, including missing precise or consistent definitions of addiction, relying exclusively on correlational data, and not controlling for preexisting psychosocial issues or accounting for potential extraneous variables” (2020). This is not to say that individuals experiencing compulsive and problematic use of pornography are not in need of support – but “professionals must utilize training based on thorough scholarship, including sound empirical and critical research,” (Williams et al. 2020). It seems that the medicalization of pornography use as an illness provides a culturally palatable frame of reference in which to address the problem. The same has been accomplished in the context of other socially unacceptable compulsions, such as pathological gambling, which is currently the only behavioral addiction classified by the DSM-5.

Predictably, the lack of empirical support for applying an addiction model to pornography use has done little to soothe public concern, and large scale efforts continue to fight against the ever-growing cultural presence of porn. The non-profit organization Culture Reframed calls online pornography, “the public health crisis of the digital age.” They lament how pornography teaches teenagers “that degradation, humiliation, and violence are central to relationships, intimacy, and sex,” and provide resources to support parents in educating their children on the dangers of porn. Culture Reframed is just one of many anti-pornography groups claiming that research proves how damaging porn can be on developing adolescents, but again, the empirical evidence is lacking. Moral bias appears to play a significant role in which research is considered valid – publications that agree with their claims against porn are listed as sources, but publications with divergent conclusions are conveniently omitted. This is not to say that children and adolescents who are exposed to pornography online are left completely unaffected, but it has become evident that the majority of social research on pornography, especially that which involves minors, is rife with uncontrolled psychosocial and cultural variables. In fact, a recent study found that pornography use had neither a positive or negative effect on several psychosocial outcomes, including “sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes, and mental well-being.” (Charig et al. 2020). The authors of the study claim that previous attempts to study the effects of pornography have been methodologically flawed, in that they seek to validate pre-existing beliefs about the harm caused by pornography: “the assumptive focus on harms may circumscribe the findings of such studies… for example, selective measurement of problems/undesirable outcomes can preclude detection of beneficial effects” (Charig et al. 2020). And so, it seems that much of the dogma circulated about the harmful effects of pornography is based on moral judgments rather than actual empricism. Unfortunately, this spread of misinformation becomes problematic when sex-negative attitudes influence legislation.

The same moral biases infiltrate public discourse about most topics of a sexual nature. Prostitution has historically been a hotly debated topic in the United States; regulation and legislation of prostitution is not in the enumerated powers of the federal government, so the responsibility rests upon the states to pass and enforce their own legislation. Currently, Nevada is the only state with legalized prostitution – and only in the form of regulated brothels – but of course, that doesn’t mean prostitution isn’t still happening in the rest of the country. Just like with pornography, the Internet provided a new and improved platform for prostitution, and sex workers became the happy beneficiaries of the new virtual marketplace. But again, just like with pornograhy, there has been significant pushback from conservative groups who morally object to sex work of any kind, and who are actively trying to remove sex work from the Internet. In 2018, under the guise of cracking down on any websites that enable or allow sex trafficking, Congress passed the highly controversial Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). According to Kendra Albert, an instructor at Harvard Law School’s cyber law clinic who specializes in free speech issues, SESTA/FOSTA created “an exception that would make websites legally liable for any content that helped facilitate sex trafficking or prostitution — even if it was consensual. The laws are important because they very much changed the way that people think about online risk related to hosting sexual content,” (Tung, 2020). Among the unexpected consequences of SESTA/FOSTA was the surge in public discourse about sexuality in the digital marketplace. Social media and digital communication empowered sex workers to form virtual communities, organize amongst themselves, and speak out against the legislation that negatively effects them. Slowly, parts of mainstream society are beginning to realize that human sexuality is more destructive when it is repressed, and therefore must be addressed head on.

Silver Linings

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, multiple studies confirmed that the overwhelming majority of Internet porn viewers were men (French & Hamilton, 2018), and most research has focused on the negative effects of consuming pornography on the Internet. However, the past decade has seen a marked increase in female pornography viewership, a phenomenon which stems from a variety of sociocultural factors, including the rise of the sex-positive feminist movement. In response to this trend (specifically among young liberal women) there is a growing effort in the academic community to “identify possible beneficial outcomes of pornography-use” (Charig et al. 2020). Indeed, it can be argued that pornography entering mainstream culture has had some significant positive effects. Among the most recent findings is how pornography can have a “positive educational benefit” among women, especially if the

pornography itself is female-centric (created by women for women). The Internet has provided a platform for feminist pornographers to communicate directly with their audience about what kind of content they want to see. Erika Lust, a feminist pornographer based in Barcelona, is a gleaming example of this new model. According to their values statement:

Erika Lust Films is part of a new wave of adult cinema made with an ethical production process challenging mass produced mainstream pornography. These are the principles we follow to adhere to this sex-positive mantra: equal pleasure, diversity, equal pay, transparency, safe sex environment, no surprises, worker standards, and fair commissions. (2021)

In 2005, Dan Savage (author of the syndicated advice column Savage Love and avid LGBTQ activist) founded the pornographic film festival HUMP! to, in his words, “disrupt the stale and stigmatized tradition of professional porn, and to celebrate sexuality, creativity, and kinky fun.” Since then, HUMP! has gained a following in the sex-positive movement, as it aims to disrupt “the way America sees, makes, and shares porn” (Savage, 2021). As more people engage with this type of ethically produced pornography, public discourse about women’s pleasure and sexual agency reaches new audiences, and perhaps, new conclusions. Given the omnipresence of Internet pornography in modern society, the continued empirical study of human sexuality has become imperative. Time and again, history has proved that pornography is resilient, and efforts to censor or control it have been met with failure. It is therefore abundantly clear that porn is never going away, but the negative consequences may be neutralized by prioritizing conversations about power, consent, pleasure, and eroticism.

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