Backlash from content creators and sex workers prompted OnlyFans to turn the tide. Yet efforts to ban online pornography are gaining momentum. In fact, in recent months, Arizona lawmakers introduced legislation nearly identical to Utah’s law, and the banking industry successfully pressured online porn platform AVN Stars to shut down. .
The high-profile skirmishes over online pornography are microcosms of the larger debate raging over Internet regulation. Large swaths of the American public, as well as federal regulators and policy pundits, have embraced the view that the internet is uncharted and untamed territory.
But when it comes to pornography, the debate is anything but new. For more than a century, government officials, concerned citizens, and producers of erotic media have fought for the distribution of pornography through platforms ranging from US mail to telephone to cable television. These battles offer a cautionary tale as lawmakers strive to regulate the internet. While supporters have historically sold tools to limit pornography as a way to protect public safety and national morality, several generations have used them more as weapons against LGBTQ communities and political radicals — with devastating effects.
In 1865, Congress passed the first law prohibiting mailed “obscenity” in response to reports that Union soldiers received large numbers of pornographic books and photographs in the mail.
Eight years later, anti-vice reformer Anthony Comstock pushed for tougher restrictions on all forms of obscenity, arguing that pornography posed an existential threat to the country’s young people. This effort culminated in the passage in 1873 of the Comstock Act, which prohibited the transmission of pornography, contraceptives, and other sexually explicit materials through the mail.
Appointed Special Agent at the Post Office, Comstock waged a ruthless campaign to cut off the flow of sexually explicit material. But he also used the powers granted by his law to systematically target and arrest members of the free love social movement, whose advocacy for gender equity and against the institution of marriage has earned Comstock’s ire. . He led a multi-year campaign to censor literature promoting women’s sexual autonomy and to penalize free lovers who sent such materials. This push solidified opposition to the free love movement and resulted in a Supreme Court decision upholding much of the Comstock Act – even as the campaign for women’s liberation persisted.
Changing social attitudes towards sexual expression and the liberalization of legal decisions in the first half of the 20th century gradually weakened the legacy of Comstock’s censorship regime – until everything changed after World War II. . Fears over youth sexual corruption and a sharp rise in mail-order pornography sparked a public backlash and renewed anti-pornography efforts at the Post Office.
It was also the time of the “Lavender Scare” – the campaign led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) to purge gays and lesbians from the federal workforce lest they pose a security risk due to communist sympathies or susceptibility to blackmail. McCarthy’s efforts intensified the stigmatization of American gays and lesbians, and in this climate their publications, some sexually explicit and some not, became the Post’s primary targets. In an initiative started by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield in 1959, postal inspectors persecuted gay publishers and consumers across the country, often with devastating personal and legal consequences. Routine bullying from the Adonis Male Club, a gay male pen pal service, for example, leads some to commit suicide for fear of the consequences of being charged with obscenity.
This campaign continued until Lynn Womack, publisher of several popular gay physique magazines, challenged the Post’s claim that nude male publications were inherently obscene, eventually winning her case in the Supreme Court in 1962. .
This victory and several subsequent Supreme Court decisions, including a 1967 decision that protected the right to sell pornographic material to consenting adults, offered new free speech protections to pornography. At the same time, however, these gains for sexual freedom advocates spurred conservative lawmakers to pass legislation that armed citizens with new mechanisms to block content perceived as pornography. In 1967 and 1970, Congress passed anti-pimping laws that circumvented the First Amendment by allowing individual citizens to issue “prohibition orders” preventing anyone from sending unsolicited mail-order advertisements of a sexual nature to their home. , erotically exciting or sexually provocative.
Although non-discriminatory in intent, these laws have been systematically used to target LGBTQ and anti-war publications. Across the country, ordinary people and those in legal and political power, including judges and members of Congress, have filed restraining orders against gay and lesbian periodicals and underground military newspapers on the grounds that they were “sexually provocative”. Organizations receiving these orders faced potential legal ramifications of accidental delivery and bore the cost of implementing the measures. Many spoke out publicly to oppose what they saw as unfair and biased treatment.
As new technologies made print pornography increasingly obsolete in the 1980s, the battlefield shifted to the next generation of communication platforms: telephones and cable television. Fearing that these platforms would make pornography accessible to both children and unsuspecting adults, lawmakers have plotted to censor “dial-a-porn” and “cableporn” – the commercial telephone sex industry and pornography on cable television.
Despite opposition from free speech advocates, in 1989 Congress implemented a “reverse blocking” system that required telephone customers to affirmatively register to access dial-a services. -porn. And the 1996 legislation required all TV manufacturers to equip all US-made TVs with v-chip technology that allowed a user to block specific program categories, namely violent and pornographic shows.
As was the case with postal campaigns of previous decades, these laws disproportionately affected the LGBTQ community. Conservative media activists have frequently attacked LGBTQ content on the phone and on television as pornographic, whether or not it contains actual sexual content. The public outrage that followed, combined with new laws and congressional willingness to act, often compelled companies to censor platforms on their own. American Express, for example, canceled its merchant account with the popular gay phone sex line, The Connector, in January 1983, but continued business with similar heterosexual services.
With the virtual chip, LGBTQ programs faced systematic censorship as they were more likely to be rated for older audiences and therefore subject to blocking. The television filtering debate erupted in 1999 when Conservative Reverend Jerry Falwell claimed that popular Teletubbies character Tinky Winky was gay and that such “sexual innuendo” was inappropriate for a G-rated show.
By the mid-1990s, the Internet eclipsed nearly all other debates about regulating pornography. Courts struck down early Internet pornography regulations due to free speech violations. But in 2000, Congress passed a law requiring all schools receiving federal funds to use filtering software to limit access to sexually explicit content online. Like the virtual chip, this software was often used to block access to a wide range of information, including non-pornographic material related to the LGBTQ community and sexual orientation. Only lawsuits in states like Tennessee and Missouri have forced school districts to grant access to constitutionally protected information about the LGBTQ community.
More recent efforts to block Internet pornography have also perpetuated these historic exclusions. In 2018, Congress passed a legislative package, FOSTA-SESTA, intended to combat online sex trafficking. While regulators rarely use the law, its passage has led to many platforms, including Tumblr, Craigslist and eBay, cracking down on a range of consensual pornographic and sexually explicit content. This has had particularly detrimental effects on the livelihoods of sex workers and the availability of LGBTQ media.
Questions about how best to prevent exploitation and regulate online pornography are only growing. This story provides clues as to the answer. It is possible to craft policy solutions that allow individuals to choose how they encounter online pornography while preserving free speech rights. But only if lawmakers work collaboratively with marginalized communities — including sex workers and LGBTQ people — most frequently subject to censorship under anti-pornography legislation.