On today’s internet, porn is just a click away. It’s now so easy to get our hands on sexual content that we can forget how hard it once was to look at anything explicit. Watching porn used to be taboo – illegal, even. It was only after 1969 that the Supreme Court held that US citizens could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes. Throughout the history of America, publishers like Grove Press fought for our freedom to express ourselves sexually – but now, a group of conservative Christians want to take that freedom away.
If you’ve been following the presidential campaign over the past year, you’ve probably heard about Project 2025. It was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank associated with Trump and very concerned with “traditional values” (think trad wives on steroids). The plan is thorough, covering broad reforms that they want Trump to implement if he gains control of the White House, including getting rid of no-fault divorce to criminalising abortion.
The introduction to Project 2025 boldly proclaims their desire to criminalise even pornography: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualisation of children […] has no claim to First Amendment protection […] Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
While in today’s context this may seem like an unhinged statement to make, the reality is that pornography was illegal for many years in the United States. In fact, the history of pornography is not dissimilar to the history of abortion. The right to abortion is not protected by law, but by the legal precedent of the Supreme Court case Roe v Wade. This is why feminist advocates have pushed Democratic candidates to pass a law that explicitly makes abortion legal. This would prevent states from easily banning abortion even if the Supreme Court overturned their opinion on Roe v Wade. Similarly, the right to distribute and consume pornography is not protected by any law in particular; distributing “obscene” content (AKA porn) is actually technically illegal. In the past, it wasn’t just hardcore pornographic videos which were censored in the US; it was nearly all art with explicit sexual themes.
Plane flying above Madison reads, “Trump Will Ban Porn.” pic.twitter.com/AecgS0YNp9
— chali (@chalipittman) November 4, 2024
A landmark Supreme Court case that opened up the ability for people to engage with porn didn’t concern an explicit video. It was a book: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. When Miller first tried to publish the book in 1934, copies were seized at the border by US Customs, destroyed, and the book was banned. In 1961, a small publishing house called Grove Press decided to re-release the book in the United States. Again, books were seized and the book was banned, both at the US border and by post offices throughout the country. This time around, though, things were different.
The man running Grove Press, Barney Rosset, was wealthy enough to hire a team of excellent lawyers to defend the book. In fact, he had fought a similar court case before. In 1959, he released DH Lawrence’s very horny novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and when the book was seized by the US Postal Service, he successfully defended it in court. Grove Press advocated for Henry Miller’s work, and in 1973, the Supreme Court declared in Miller v California that Grove Press must be allowed to publish and distribute Miller’s book. The court’s opinion made it clear that content is not considered obscene if it has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”. After the Supreme Court made it more difficult to throw people in jail for making art about sex, law enforcement gradually stopped arresting people who made porn, allowing a diverse ecosystem of erotic content producers and distributors to flourish.
Much like banning abortion by overturning Roe v Wade, the easiest way for conservatives to ban porn would be to overturn Miller v California. The way the Heritage Foundation wrote about pornography in Project 2025 makes this very clear that this is their strategy, especially their mention of First Amendment rights (The Supreme Court wrote that Tropic of Cancer was protected under the First Amendment).
What would be the consequences of rolling back Miller v California? Without Tropic of Cancer, there would certainly be no Fifty Shades of Grey or any of the ‘spicy’ romance novels which have become so popular on BookTok. Even beyond romance novels, there would also be no Beautiful World, Where Are You, no Bridgerton, no Game of Thrones. Each of these books (and the films and television shows which followed) have such explicit depictions of sex that they would have been considered pornography in the past. Do we really want to return to such a world where these pieces of art would be illegal?
The fight for freedom of speech about sex resulted in protection for speech of all kinds
The disturbing thing about a ban on pornography is the ripple effects it will have on other types of speech. The mechanisms of censorship that allowed the US government to seize and destroy pornographic content also allowed them to destroy political content, like leaflets distributed by communists or Black Panthers. The fight for freedom of speech about sex resulted in protection for speech of all kinds. In the past, because most information was distributed through the mail, the easiest way to limit speech was through censorship by the US Postal Service, which had sweeping rights to seize material they thought might be illegal. After Miller v California, it became much more difficult for post offices to seize mail without cause. Now, most of us get our information from the internet, not from our mailboxes. This is a large part of why the right has been fighting to ban porn online; it makes it easier to ban any kind of content they dislike.
In 2018, a conservative Christian lobbyist group pushed a bill called FOSTA through Congress. The bill was a Trojan’s Horse: Congress members were told by lobbyists that this bill would criminalis eonline advertising for child sex trafficking, but the language of the bill didn’t address children. The language of the bill instead made internet companies liable for criminal charges if they hosted ads for “prostitution”, or in other words, consenting adult sex workers who physically engage with their clientele. Social media companies and other online platforms began shadowbanning or outright censoring sexual content of all kinds, even if it had absolutely nothing to do with in-person sex work.
Because there was so much sexual content already online, these companies needed to use algorithms to censor content instead of manually deleting posts that violated the new rules. Sex workers around the world, not just those in the United States, noticed an immediate drop in engagement with their posts, if not an outright banning of their accounts. Now these same algorithms are used to censor political speech; they were used in 2020 to artificially limit, censor, or completely ban accounts associated with movements as diverse as Black Lives Matter and the alt-right. Even if you find the idea of porn disgusting, you should be very concerned about these conservatives’ desire to eliminate sexual content, because it’s almost inevitable that mechanisms to censor sexual content will also be used to censor political content as well.
When I was a small girl, my grandmother told me that it was very important to watch how any man I went on a date with treated the waiters at the restaurant. “If they feel comfortable treating service workers poorly in public,” she told me, “they won’t think there’s anything wrong about treating you the same way behind closed doors.” Perhaps the same can be said for sex workers and politicians: anyone who wishes to police the sexual activities of sex workers probably wants to police the sexual (and political) activities of everyone else as well. Do we really want Donald Trump, the man endorsed by the group which drafted Project 2025, in charge of our government?
