This hasn’t gotten a lot of press because, frankly, it shouldn’t matter. But, every political issue – big or small – is contentious.
Someone’s ox is always getting gored, since the time when Hammurabi promulgated his body of law. So I’d like to talk to you, bro, heart to heart. This is a topic that would have been very important to me around 1999, when I was still strongly concerned about the 1st amendment and pornography. Let me be frank: I was quite the fan from the mid 1970s, until about 4 years ago when some unfortunate brain damage killed my ability to do sex stuff. So, technically, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but if you do enjoy the occasional screaming hard wank you might want to vote against MAGA and project 2025. I know that sounds nuts, right? The women are all up in arms about abortion, which is an issue if you knock one of them up, but did you know MAGA also wants to put pornography on the table?
I remember the 80s, when I’d sneak out to get porn, and had to bicycle down to Calvert St and go into the creepy store with the creepy guy and the sign on the door that “this store sells educational materials for adults, you must be 18 to enter.” And there were my female ideals: Traci Lords, Desiree Cousteau, and Veronica Hart. In the early 80s, you didn’t even buy VHS tapes because a VHS player was $500, but eventually the price came down and the document box in the back of the closet got pretty crowded. Todays bros, like you, don’t have to worry about that, yet, right? You grew up with search engines and pornhub, and as long as you’re not searching for stuff that gets flagged as kid porn, you’re OK. You can search for “spanish biker nuns giving enemas to batman” and the internet will probably find it for you. Because you’re used to living in a fairly permissive environment – one which has not slowly and coldly had the screws tightened on it, the way abortion did until that was outlawed in many states. But, see, MAGA nuts want to do that to your porns. I don’t know if you’re aware, but MAGA Mike Johnson, the creepy little shitweasel speaker of the house, has some kind of deal with his son where they monitor eachother’s porn use [rs] like guys on a diet who pledge to slap cheeseburgers out of eachother’s hands if they see them buying one. Most of us have dealt with that kind of thing – some friend who says “if you see me trying to snort coke, stop me” and you find your evening ruined because you’ve got to decide if you’re your brothers’ keeper or, fuck it, he’s an adult – let him go.
To me, of course, the issue has been whether you’re an adult or are violating a commitment. If I were in a relationship and part of the rules of order were a pledge that I’d not consume porn, I’d keep it (but there’d have to be some heckin’ counter-pledge for me to sign up to that) and there are sound Marxist economic critiques of the pornography industry (see notes). Maga Mike is admitting a lot of things when he says he has manipulated his son into agreeing to that pledge, because – his son may not realize – there is a tremendous difference in the sap-producing capacity of a healthy young man, and a creepy political sociopath. I don’t know about MAGA Mike’s boy but, bro, if you’re like I was, you’d be able to use your output to make sculptures, like some kind of clam-smelling 3d printer… But, not if MAGA win.
Let’s talk about Project 2025. Item 6.
You need to understand that these guys are nutbag religious ideologues, who are are operating under some Leviticus-like interpretation of god’s will – they are trying to stomp out onanism [ai overview]
Onan’s story is told in Genesis 38:4-10. After his older brother Er died, Onan was expected to marry Er’s widow, Tamar, and produce an offspring in Er’s name. This was required by the Law of Moses, and was known as the Levirate law. However, Onan acted selfishly and prevented Tamar from conceiving by spilling his semen on the ground. God punished Onan with death for this wicked act.
See, MAGA Mike accepts as given that god doesn’t want your sperm to go to waste, per Monty Python, “every sperm is wonderful, every sperm is great, if you waste just one of them – god gets quite irate.” As I mentioned earlier, there are good critiques of pornography (see Notes) but bronze age jizz management is not one of them. But MAGA Mike and his ilk are upset on god’s behalf about what you are leaving in your gym socks. They are worried that god will fuck you up, for doing that thing that happens pretty naturally when you touch yourself and are thinking pretty normal thoughts.
Think about how upset and worried MAGA Mike and company are about abortion, which is not mentioned in the bible – and poor old Onan is. They have concerns about your consumption of pornography and, believe me, it’s a moral issue for them, not a matter of Marxist economics. If you enjoy porn, by definition, you are a bad person to them.
And, bien sûr, if they come to power, they have plans for how to keep you out of winding up in Hell in some burning pit next to Henry Kissinger. In terms of the MAGA crowd, a genocidal nutbar like Kissinger is probably not as bad as a harmless bro who bangs off a quick one into a kleenex. That’s you.
The Project 2025 documents [2025] say:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender
ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot
inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its
purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product
is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
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.
See? If you like to spatter wallpaper paste around your dorm room, they are putting you in the same political category as child pornographers and misogynists. They want to ruin your 15 minutes of free time stress relief and make you into one of the Bad People. These are crazy fucknuts batshit christian ideologues and do you think they’re going to stop there, if they succeed? Hell no. They’ll keep tightening the screws until you’re back to the 1980s, when you have to sneak home with a suspicious-sized brown paper bag under your arm, if all you want is a harmless wank to a Trump pee tape.
I will specifically not get into commenting on the mental spirography that was necessary for the evangelical right, represented by MAGA Mike and others, to adopt Donald Trump as their moral leader; that man has had sex with more porn actresses than most of us. [Note I am careful not to use the term “star” to describe Stormy Daniels. She was never close to a star. Karen McDougal was close. But it’s not like Trump was frolicking with Traci Lords in her heyday or anything] But you need to understand that the basic christian evangelical push behind MAGA means they will not be happy until they have created a theocracy that will be more controlling than Saudi Arabia – like The Handmaid’s Tale only really fucking stupid.
Think about this, bro. If you vote for Trump next week, you’re going to see MAGA Mike’s face:
He observes your shame as you lube up
This asshole has invited himself into your sex life. Think about that, then multiply that by about 102,000 and you’ll have a vague idea how women are angry that he has invited himself into their medical choices.
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.
“Pornography should be outlawed” – in order to do that, an objective criterion for “pornography” that does not include all of the great art in the world, will need to be developed. Or, alternatively, the definition of “pornography” will be islamic. I spent some time in Saudi Arabia and chose not to watch the thieves hands being cut off, but it was an entertainment option. Naturally, as a skeptico-nihilist, I see this as nothing but a mechanism for political control, but I don’t want that mechanism being applied to you, or me. They are calling for imprisoning all of the people who make their living showing off their god-given stuff on Instagram, to promote their onlyfans, i.e.:
Ok, that young entrepreneur there, a marketing genius who noticed that guys will click on any picture with bouncing breasts in it, who has done a good job of hacking right up to the terms of service of Instagram – she deserves prison for that? She’s not leading men’s souls far astray, she’s just leading them over to her onlyfans. But MAGA won’t stop there. They’ll be trying to bring back the Comstock Act days and having police raid magazine stands to see if they have any printouts of jpegs from onlyfans before it was taken down, still for sale.
You get the point, bro. This is a freeze peach issue. They are, in fact, intruding on your rights. Grab your AR-15 and go fucking protest somewhere far away from me. The entire MAGA movement is not just about Donald Trump and his free speech, it’s the spearpoint of an attack against modernism in general. What’s depressing is that a lot of bros have been attracted to the MAGA pro-gun stance and are ignoring the MAGA anti-porn stance. And which do you use more often, bro?
Notes:
I would be more unhappy having Karl Marx disapprove of me than Moses. Just sayin’
Marxist critiques of the porn industry: This is fairly simple. The means of production (the women) are largely being controlled by men (capitalists) who skim off the bulk of the profit from their enterprise, while paying them a minumum. In fact, Marx would look at today’s environment and probably point out that onlyfans has done a tremendous amount to allow the workers to control the results of their production, and it is therefore less exploitive than many other industries. I do not wish to go into an entire discourse on the topic, but if you look at Brownmiller’s original writings about pornography, she was making a sound economic critique that women were subjected to huge inequality in labor in the porn industry. She was writing to the late 1970s, when a “star” actress might be filmed for a hit movie, and get paid a $1000 non-recurring fee. The male actors seldom did much better, but some of the bigger hit movies such as Debbie Does Dallas are still more popular and probably sell better than a Ben Affleck movie. Brownmiller’s point (and Dworkin’s too) was that there was massive inequality built into the pornography industry and that should be addressed or the industry should be regulated as exploitative of its labor. I actually agree with that position. What happened in the last decade was that the workers took control of the means of production – people of both genders started doing their own erotic material catering to wide or narrow audiences, and some did quite well. Some have done quite well. Some of the early onlyfans workers were in a position to choose and control their own content, not have to share the profits with an industry or producer, and there were some notable pornographers who retired extremely wealthy in a year or two [$50 mil plus]. This has, to me, largely satisfied the Marxist critique: it is no longer a controlled market in which the profits are skimmed by capitalist parasites, the content creators are making the bulk of the profits.
I will also note, with great pleasure, that Belle Delphine’s onlyfans is has not only a larger viewership than Fox News, it is far more profitable. No, please, that does not mean I will subscribe to Alina Habba’s onlyfans – but I predict she will open one in less than a decade.
As a side note, any country that has a “right to life” movement that does not take into account “right to go to school without getting shot by a right wing freak drone” is clearly missing the point on rights and probably needs to study Rousseau’s treatise on inequality. [Again: not a total Rousseau fanboy but he really lays out the problems with a great clarity]
Sympathies for your 2020 mishap! Maybe the aces will have a big debate over whether to allow you in their club.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug …
I’ve read a fair amount of trans advocacy and explication, even hardcore stuff like Crip Dyke’s, and have yet to experience any prurience from same (nor withdrawal cravings if I go without). Do I need help?
that took a long time
the only thing i’ve seen traci lords in (i like ’em bigger) was a zero budget action movie about an earthquake and evil corporations & there was a random strip club scene where the ladies were all shaved which was kinda weird, but she wasn’t in that scene, playing a crusading lady scientist or journalist or something, and playing it completely straight? it was not good bad, but i appreciated somebody was willing to let her do that.
chigau@#2:
that took a long time
I am afraid. I have been hiding under the bed, but the supply of frozen burritos finally went bingo.
Great American Satan@#3:
the only thing i’ve seen traci lords in (i like ’em bigger) was a zero budget action movie about an earthquake and evil corporations & there was a random strip club scene where the ladies were all shaved which was kinda weird, but she wasn’t in that scene, playing a crusading lady scientist or journalist or something, and playing it completely straight
She was quite the thing when she first broke onto the scene. A few of us thought “gosh she looks awfully young” but when the porn industry discovered she was 15, her videos pretty much vanished. I won’t say she was much of an actress but. She has done a good job of trying to move toward mainstream. If she could have done an onlyfans, circa 1987, she’d be very, very rich.
I thought Traci Lords was in a bunch of the 80s/90s John Waters movies, but looking on Wikipedia, not as many, and not the same ones as I thought.
John Waters is a treasure though, and he hosts/emcees(?) a local punk/whatever festival, so I got to see him introduce Bikini KIll (which I didn’t really listen to until after they broke up (some of my tastes developed a bit late…), and Le Tigre (the same), as well as some other groups I’m not terribly familiar with, but it was amusing. FWIW, the right wouldn’t hesitate to label his films as porn, although it’s really just slightly trashy NSFW stuff that is hilarious. Apologies for the tangent.
I’m also reminded of the post PZ put up a week or so back (maybe longer, I’m getting old and am bad at time) about someone who was affiliated with a university, and put some online self-produced amateur(?) pron out with their spouse, and basically was fired for it. This one: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/03/its-wisconsin-im-surprised-they-didnt-fire-him-for-veganism/
There’s a lot of fair criticism with the porn industry, with some performers/producers/etc. taking advantage and or outright assaulting other performers, and the performers should have a larger share of profit and some legal rights to their work. a couple years back, I saw a youtube mini-documentary about Mia Khalifa, and how despite being superpopular on Pornhub and other sites quite a few years later, made very little directly from her performances. It was interesting, but I can’t remember the name, and a quick google search of “youtube documentary Mia Khalifa” is turning up a lot of incel-sounding bullshit that I don’t have the fortitude to wade through…
But I think that’s a problem that’s best solved through well-thought-out regulation, with lots of input from current and past performers, and not outright bans. I wish we could decouple this old idea of sex acts being inherently immoral for whatever reason, and just focus on consent, coercion, and just being nicer to other people.
If someone doesn’t like porn, then, well, they can just not consume it. And similar, if someone feels some sex acts are icky, then they can just not participate. sex work is work, and sex workers are people, and deserve to be treated as such.
Another tangent, when I was enlisted (USMC infantry), we would periodically have “health and comfort” inspections of our barracks. It was conducted under the pretense that they were making sure the barracks met living conditions, etc., but unlike our weekly “field day” (cleaning) inspections, they could order us to unlock our drawers, closets, etc. and rifle through the contents. Just a work around privacy rules to periodically search for unauthorized weapons, drugs, and porn. For some reason, we weren’t allowed to have porn mags. It became this weird thing, were people would stash stuff (mostly porn, some knives, and a couple other things i probably shouldn’t speak of) in personal vehicles, and then it became this whole weird tradition that when people went on/returned from deployment, they would bequeath their precious porn stash to someone they knew in another unit. (couldn’t bring it to/back from deployment because it would get confiscated (“confiscated”(?)) by customs. It was a weird time to be one of the few people with a computer and internet access…
fbi agent! she was an fbi agent. looks like the whole thing is on yewchoob, i am not curious enough to see if the full frontal nudity is still in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqHmAEJdDrc
I’ve had more experience with christian nutjobs than I need. You’re right in that they’re not just after abortion, but reproductive activities generally. Sometimes I think their morality focuses on that. They’re going to come after everything from tubal ligation to condoms if they can. Good luck.
While I’m fully on board with leveraging any issue to try and split the coalition on the right, and so am happy to endorse this message, I think there’s maybe a flaw in your analysis.
See, when they say “pornography”, I don’t think they actually mean pornography as you or I (being sensible people) actually understand it. The clue is in that bit about “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance”… Sure, they’ll throw in some stuff about “misogynistic exploiters of women” as a bit of cover, but what I think they really mean is “sex stuff that does not conform to our ideological preferences”. I don’t believe they honestly give a damn about regular heteronormative porn, or the exploitation of women as long as it’s within the appropriate set of gender and power relations. What they’re upset about is anything that undermines their understanding of the gender hierarchy.
For example, when they say “sexualization of children”, what they really mean is any sex ed that would allow children to understand when they’re being sexually abused, or that non-heteronormative options are available. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson can get up on stage and share his teen daughter spanking fantasies with an audience of thousands and they’re all just fine with it.
This is exactly parallel to the bait-and-switch they’re playing with immigration – they claim to be concerned about “illegal immigration”, but what they’re really concerned about is race, regardless of immigration status. (As discussed by Amanda Marcotte here: Elon Musk’s “illegal” past doesn’t feel like hypocrisy to MAGA — Trump’s hate rally in NYC shows why.)
They are not using words in the same way that we are. Words like “pornography” and “illegal immigration” are shibboleths – they mean quite different things to insiders than they do to the rest of us, which enables them to semi-openly talk about what they really want in a way that is understood by the target audience, but is still deniable.
The right wing bullshit parade is the same thing it always is: a bunch of hucksters and conmen selling gullible people the “right” to feel better than everyone else for made-up reasons.
This part of it is just the usual xtian nonsense about pimping for Jesus. It works like this:
1. Tell people the normal human (and animal) drive to mate is bad. Nothing against the ACEs out there, I know they find magic reasons to treat you all like shit, too.
2. Ignore the atrocity you’ve committed by telling people their mere existence is evil.
3. Sell marriage or in other words the only moral way to exercise your sex drive according to them.
4. something, something
5. Profit. Profit bigly. Rake in the dough. For centuries. And when a few people figure out your con and talk about it openly, make them Enemies of All That Is Good (at least according to your bullshit stories).
Pimping for Jesus. It’s never been about anything else. It never will be about anything else. Just profit and control so you can keep your profit.
There’s also the fact that wealthy people always have access to the illicit, so banning pornography really just means that poor people don’t have access to it.
Trump says he would ‘protect’ women, ‘whether the women like it or not’
I’m with Dunc @6 – “Pornography” here is code.
Just as “illegal immigration” means brown people, “pornography” means any ideas, concepts, art, materials that might be tangentially related to sex – so long as they don’t conform to [regressive choad]’s personal views of what is right and wrong.
With all that said, it does point to fracture lines in the right-wing coalition. Currently united under the baffling spell that is donald trump, the US right wing alliance is really quite a few disparate groups with completely incompatible goals. If trump fails to secure power, I think he’s going to become a disuniting figure within a few years as people who saw him as their ticket to accomplishing their goals grow frustrated with him, and while his cult prevents any other right-wing aspirant to power from attaining anything beyond local popularity.
Cory Doctorow wrote about this better than I could:
These are the lines that the coalition will eventually fail on.
But as for porn? You’ll have to take that from my cold dead hands! Or at least, my warm sticky ones.
Oops, forgot to drop the link to Cory Doctorow’s article on project 2025.
Just noticed NPR put up an article about this today.
Meet the Democrats using porn ads to convince Trump voters to stay home – npr.org
Dunc and Snarkuntr nail it: it’s not only about Teh Porns, it’s about the definition of it. Anything so defined is up for grabs, which makes anything in the world liable to be censored/grabbed/burnt.
As you said, it’s like The Handmaid’s Tale, only stupid. Problem is, these Saudi Arabia wannabes were once just a reliable source of entertainment and nothing more, shown off like a laughably irrelevant minority.
Right now they are mainstream, and not too far from winning. Fingers crossed for the present round, but the main point is:
THIS WON’T GO AWAY WHEN TRUMPOLINI CARKS IT.
I think end stage Maga would be something like a cross between Russia and Iran.
At the top will be the warring kleptocrats trying to carve out whatever pieces of the nation’s flesh they can in order to build ever-more-ridiculous yachts. The professional administrative state will be largely purged, retaining just enough functionality to keep suppressing the poor – but serving no other functions.
At the bottom, you’d end up with the MAGA morality police – a dumping ground for every filthy-minded little fascist without the connections or talent to start stealing like the big boys. A way to reward them and keep them onside by allowing them to inflict their perverse ideo-religious obsessions on the rest of society. While Bannon and friends are looting, and Stephen Miller is building concentration camps for anyone he suspects of possession of melanin, the anti-woke police run by Former Speaker Johnson will be harassing anyone with coloured hair and inspecting children’s genitals for evidence of trans-ness.
And you’re absolutely right. None of this is caused by Trump himself – he’s a symptom. Things are going to get a lot more dangerous when he finally leaves public life. Trump’s spotlight hogging and immense jealousy ensures that no credible successor can exist without him crushing thme. Once he’s out of the way there will be infighting and eventually another fascist candidate will emerge, almost certainly smarter and more politically capable than Trump himself is (it would be hard not to be). In many ways, Trump has been a boon to the progressive left – he’s delayed the period where the fascists can actually act, because he himself is not interested in acting.
If the Democrats actually manage to come through the election with power intact, there’s every chance they’ll fumble the game by pretending that everything is back to normal. The pro-fascist forces will be trying to lull them “See, Trump is gone now, don’t bother with systemic reforms, we’re all going to play nice from now on!”. The only way the US survives as a democracy is if the Democrats start ripping up all the old ‘norms’ and replacing them with laws and actual checks/balances. Starting with the diseased supreme court and working down from there. Anti-corruption, anti-money-laundering, meaningful open-government and oversight laws with actual teeth. These are what will stop the fascists, nothing else.