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The Problem with Banning Porn
154 Plays27 days ago
A new bill is being introduced that would set even stricter guidelines of what can be banned under the guise of it being obscene. We discuss the bill, the deeper implications, and what everyone should be aware of.
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Transcript
Introduction to Anti-Porn Legislation by Mike Lee
00:00:01
Jon McCray Jones
Hi, this is John with the Fun With Sex Podcast. And I'm Natalie. And our federal government trying to regulate the First Amendment and banning porn is back.
00:00:12
Jon McCray Jones
um Mike Lee, a representative from Utah, is introducing a legislation a piece of legislation that would call for a ban of porn. It's how they're marketing it.
00:00:24
Jon McCray Jones
But it's actually a ban on obscene material. How much do you know about this bill? you know I'm aware that porn is being attacked, that content like this is being attacked. I'm not aware of the new bill in particular.
00:00:39
Jon McCray Jones
yeah so Mike Lee has introduced bills in, I think, the last two sessions to try to ban porn. ah Also, there was the kids on safety. Kids...
00:00:51
Jon McCray Jones
Online Safety Act, COSA, that was introduced last session, had a couple Democrats. And that's one of the issues is that this bill is not getting the pushback that it should be because a lot of liberals and quote-unquote leftists and feminists are signing on to it because they think this bad this bill bans porn when in reality it does so much more.
Historical Precedents of Censorship: Children Protection as a Pretext
00:01:12
Jon McCray Jones
And they think that they're marketing it as, oh, we're trying to keep kids safe, as they're doing with everything nowadays. Oh my god, everything is always protect the kids. And the thing is that, like, kids are always a very useful tool for, like, fascism and government overreach because kids can't advocate for themselves.
00:01:31
Jon McCray Jones
A kid can't sit come out and say that, like, no, this bill does nothing to protect me. Anytime the parents want to force adults to do something that they find... that they want those other adults to do, they phrase it in a, well, this keeps kids safe.
00:01:46
Jon McCray Jones
Anytime that, like, we want to protect the status quo in this country under Christian fascism, Christian white nationalism, we use protect the kids. I mean, like, the 90s is a really good example when horror movies, video games.
00:02:02
Jon McCray Jones
ah but What else am I thinking about? Rap music all had legislation introduced to Bannon under the guise of Protect the Kids. Yeah. ah Sex ed, evolutionary um education.
00:02:15
Jon McCray Jones
um What else can you think of? It's like a lot of stuff. Anything that like threatens the status quo, the domination of like Christianity and like white national identity uh actually a couple years ago legislation to ban critical race theory which is just a study of like african-american and like black and brown communities and like other marginalized community studies was banned because they didn't want white kids to feel bad about being white banning the history and stories of people of color uh things that are defined as obs obscene material in state legislation across the country
00:02:49
Jon McCray Jones
we saw over the past couple of years was just like sex ed or queer studies, um the studies of LGBTQ people. So this like protect kids act always protect kids language always be looked at with a very critical eye.
00:03:04
Jon McCray Jones
huh Yeah. Yeah. So this bill does one thing in particular, it changes the definition of of obscenity.
Understanding Obscenity: The Supreme Court's Miller Test
00:03:12
Jon McCray Jones
So going back to the Supreme court Miller test,
00:03:16
Jon McCray Jones
um Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.
00:03:22
Jon McCray Jones
But how the Supreme Court defined obscenity is, A, it appeals to purient interest. It's sexually arousing. B, it's offensive by community standards.
00:03:34
Jon McCray Jones
And the Supreme Court gets to define the community standards. And C, elect serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values. Yeah, and i remember learning about this case. I did a media and law class, and I remember learning about all this sort of stuff.
00:03:51
Jon McCray Jones
And it's really subjective. It's really just up to the judge and the court's ruling of what they define as obscene. So, you know, when you think about in...
00:04:03
Jon McCray Jones
in If we're talking about nudity, it's like, okay, so you're looking at this nude Grecian statue. That's not defined as obscene.
00:04:15
Jon McCray Jones
But we're looking at something like online content of nude bodies, well, that's seen as obscene. It's very subjective. And defining what's artistic too is super subjective.
00:04:29
Jon McCray Jones
That's what i was going to say is like what defines art? Who does who gets to decide what is art? I mean, like one time i went to art museum and I think it was just a shade of red or a shade of one color painted on a canvas. And like for me, i don't I don't see the artistic value in that, but other people do.
00:04:48
Jon McCray Jones
And the problem is that when you allow – Christian conservatives to define what is considered art, you allow them to limit whatever they perceive as offensive or that they think doesn't have any value, like nudity or things that goes against their religious values as non-artistic.
00:05:08
Jon McCray Jones
I mean, like we don't have to go that far back. In the US, s you have the Hays Code where the movie right industry was regulated by what they defined as artistic value and it really toned down sexuality in movies because one part or one board of i think less than 10 people were like well i don't like seeing this body part and it really set our culture and music and cinema expression back by decades and i think the thing with obscenity and what's obscene and what's sexual is also super subjective because
00:05:43
Jon McCray Jones
More vanilla people look at a picture of feet and they don't find that sexually arousing, but there's a lot of people that do. And now that's becoming even more important now that people saying things like drag queens and talking about queer people is too sexually explicit.
00:06:03
Jon McCray Jones
i mean, like, well, first let me define finish defining the bill and then like I'll build up on that. So the new bill shows who gets to define obscenity.
Power Shift in Obscenity Definition: Courts to DOJ
00:06:13
Jon McCray Jones
It shifts it from courts being able to define what counts as obscenity to the DOJ in a different department a federal government.
00:06:21
Jon McCray Jones
So whoever is the current president of the United States, whoever's administration it is, gets to define what counts as obscenity. So that would be the people who wrote Project 2025 under this current administration will be able to define what they believe is obscene.
00:06:36
Jon McCray Jones
The other things that are very important is that it takes out the context that of artistic or educational value and it strips context and community standards.
00:06:48
Jon McCray Jones
So the piece can't be understand in a greater context, either artistically or in the course of a movie or in cinema. So if you have a sex scene, but the sex scene is in the course of a 90 minute movie or 90 minute or 300 page book to help push the story along.
00:07:08
Jon McCray Jones
before under the miller's ruling that context would be taken in to deciding if this is educational or artistic and if it violates obscenity uh clauses versus in this bill that section would have to stand alone and if that section violates what is considered obscene then the entire art the entire piece gets banned jeez and like again I think that you also have to understand, like going back to you were saying, obscenity, what is seen as culturally obscene is defined by the context of the society that you live in.
00:07:45
Jon McCray Jones
So if you go back to 1960s, 1950s America, being in a relationship is obscene. Yeah. And today we are already watching a sexualization of drag, gender nonconforming, gender trans, sapphic, any type of queer relationships, any type of queer representation is viewed as obscene.
00:08:08
Jon McCray Jones
So this bill basically gives the federal government the right to ban any type of queer literature, queer art, queer social media pages, queer books, queer movies.
00:08:19
Jon McCray Jones
It's a Christian nationalist ploy, for lack of better words. Yeah, seems very in line with exactly what they're trying to ban right now, so... Yeah, and the other thing with the law is that purposefully, as outlined in Project 2025, the language around obscenity is so vague that we don't know what counts as obscenity.
00:08:45
Jon McCray Jones
um There's arguments that someone posting a bikini page on Instagram could be viewed as obscenity, and Instagram under this law would have to pull that content down.
00:08:56
Jon McCray Jones
Or like a bikini picture in movies or any type of like
00:09:02
Jon McCray Jones
anything that gives sexuality. And also the educational component where this could be used to ban sex ed. Um...
00:09:13
Jon McCray Jones
things about women's bodies, Planned Parenthood educational links, things about like where to access abortions. This bill is so vague that it allows the federal government to target anything under the guise of obscenity.
00:09:28
Jon McCray Jones
Yeah, very dangerous and very fascist. Yeah, so do you have any thoughts about how this is more to do than just about banning porn, even though this is it's pushed in platform as an anti-porn bill.
00:09:44
Jon McCray Jones
you want to add context of how you think that this can be targeted disproportionately?
The Real Agenda: Suppression of Sex-Positive Content
00:09:48
Jon McCray Jones
Yeah. I mean, I think the way they're marketing it is that they're cracking down on porn. They're cracking down on kids' ability to see obscene content.
00:09:58
Jon McCray Jones
When actually blocking your kids from seeing sexual things is pretty easy. if you're like, actually involved in your kid's life and not allowing them to use certain apps or making sure they're on, you know, YouTube kids, Netflix kids and stuff like that.
00:10:18
Jon McCray Jones
I think really what they're trying to do is one of the biggest things that happens in a fascist regime. One of the first things they want to do is lessen education. So lessen people's access to queer education to sex positive content, to sex education, and basically got everybody to fall in line with their puritanical standards by just not exposing people to these other ideas.
00:10:47
Jon McCray Jones
And like going back to like what were saying before, it's the job parents to stop their kids from accessing websites that they shouldn't be on. Pornhub, when you first click on it, offers links at the bottom. First, there's a disclaimer that says, hey, this website is for people who are 18 and older.
00:11:05
Jon McCray Jones
One of the few industries that self-regulates itself is porn because kids aren't making the money. Kids gets them into legal troubles and lawsuits. Porn sites don't want kids on their websites, especially credible ones.
Consequences of Prohibition: Black Markets and Legal Loopholes
00:11:22
Jon McCray Jones
And here's that's the second problem is that once you start attacking The credible websites, the websites that will follow regulatory biases, you get them shut down. The only websites that are open and accessible are places that are either outside of our country's jurisdiction or stuff like Twitter where you don't have any type of regulation on who's doing the porn, who's acting in it.
00:11:47
Jon McCray Jones
Way more likely chance that these people are being sex trafficked or minors or this is... on consensually recorded sex because they're not following regulatory guidelines.
00:11:58
Jon McCray Jones
Like that's the problem. Prohibition doesn't solve anything. If we learned anything from prohibition in the and the teens with alcohol, all you're doing is creating a black market, which further makes the industry more dangerous.
00:12:12
Jon McCray Jones
Yeah, and that's really what I see happening is the same thing that, you know, happens with full service sex work, where because it's illegal, it's not regulated, and people are more likely to be harmed. I mean, it's the same thing if people have to go to like,
00:12:30
Jon McCray Jones
dark web websites just to view porn. I mean, they will. Yeah, they will. I mean, a lot of these people that are passing legislation, you think they're not watching porn.
00:12:42
Jon McCray Jones
like To catch people up on context of what's already happening in the United States, ah different states are passing age verification laws that basically allows individual parents to sue the porn industry If their kid is watching porn, which then the porn industry says, hey, that puts us at this place where we are financially vulnerable to get random lawsuits from random owners.
00:13:12
Jon McCray Jones
ultra political parents who just don't want porn and the barrier of evidence and some of these conservative courts are so low. And the fact that this is ah a civil lawsuit and we'd have to pay fines, the barrier of evidence is even lower.
00:13:26
Jon McCray Jones
We're just going to ban porn inside of these States. So I think it's almost like half the States in the United States, you can't access porn. For example, I know you can access it in Florida. You can access it in Louisiana, Alabama, Utah,
00:13:41
Jon McCray Jones
a lot of the Bible Belt states, lot of the states, Indiana, a lot of the red states, you don't have access to porn anymore because these age verification laws. And what researchers are finding is that people who would normally use Pornhub or other big major porn sites that follow regulatory guidelines are now downloading VPNs. And they're either accessing, they're making the VPN register them as in a different state where they could access porn or they're accessing porn that's coming out of like Central Europe that has a lot less regulatory guidelines and oversight.
00:14:17
Jon McCray Jones
A lot of porn that is done by women who are sex trafficked, a lot of porn that is done with minors or people who are being exploited and not just in the, we're all exploited under capitalism sense.
00:14:32
Jon McCray Jones
And there's a lot of people who are going to Twitter to have porn because I think it's something like a third of Twitter is like sexual content. And I'm sorry, X. Going to X to watch porn.
00:14:45
Jon McCray Jones
And again, you don't have that regulatory guidelines of any job below can upload a video to X and it doesn't get taken down. And it's like, again, there's a very simple solution to this.
00:14:56
Jon McCray Jones
Having actual sex ed, not just at schools, but talking to your kids about it. And sex ed can be tailored to their age group as well. It's not like you have to do all or nothing.
00:15:09
Jon McCray Jones
But actually talking to your kids about sex and not treating it like such a taboo topic. So that way they can openly ask questions instead of like, oh, I'm really curious about this. Let me just go to this corner of the internet.
00:15:24
Jon McCray Jones
And like my thing too is that conservatives understand that when it comes to guns. They believe that like, hey, if you want to stop school shootings, it's on the job of parents to stop kids from having access to firearms.
00:15:38
Jon McCray Jones
and shooting up a school and killing 10, 20 kids. Again, that's it only an issue that happens in the United States. Other countries have figured out how to stop school shootings. On the other hand, they're saying, hey, my kid is accessing porn.
00:15:54
Jon McCray Jones
Other kids are as accessing porn. Instead of me downloading the adult... media blockers that you can put on your kids' phones that would automatically not let them go to a porn site, they're saying, how about we stop porn access for the entire country, adults included?
00:16:14
Jon McCray Jones
Oh, I don't want to see a sex scene in a movie. How about we pass this obscenity law that bans sex from being shown in a movie? I mean, this is literally like hands-made intel stuff. And I think that like for the last couple of minutes, there's been a rise of Gen Z puritanicals. We're in the midst of a puritanical conservative movement that is disgusted by sex, disgusted by sexuality.
00:16:38
Jon McCray Jones
And when this bill was like introduced and people were trying to raise the fire alarms about it, a lot of Gen Z cis boys and cis girls were...
Cultural Shift in Gen Z: Towards Puritanical Views
00:16:49
Jon McCray Jones
Not cis boys and cis girls. These are dogs.
00:16:51
Jon McCray Jones
These are late teenagers, people in our early 20s. Gen Z men and women are openly, like, cheering this bill on, cheering the black end of porn.
00:17:03
Jon McCray Jones
And, like, I just want to ask you, one, why do you think Gen Z is so, first, anti-porn, and two, anti-sexuality and puritanical in general? I mean, i think a lot of the media and social media has a lot to do with it because these people...
00:17:20
Jon McCray Jones
They are smart about the way they market things and the way they communicate things and what kind of rhetoric they use. So people aren't making TikToks and videos just saying like, yeah, we need to go back to how it was and you shouldn't be able to work other jobs as a woman and you can be just a stay-at-home wife. But instead, it's being marketed as...
00:17:45
Jon McCray Jones
be in your feminine energy, have a soft feminine life, be with a man who brings out the feminine in you And it's marketed in a very different way. So people are more receptive to it.
00:17:59
Jon McCray Jones
And they're thinking, yeah, i do want a soft life. And instead of thinking, wait, the reason why I want a soft life is because I'm overworked due to capitalism.
00:18:11
Jon McCray Jones
People are infringing on my rights as a woman. I'm stressed by the state of the world all the time. That's your true desires for these fucking elitists to make the world better.
00:18:26
Jon McCray Jones
It's not that we should go back to how it was, but you know i think the social media algorithms, they're really smart. I've even seen it myself. I'm obviously like a lot more...
00:18:41
Jon McCray Jones
politically aware of what's going on so I don't fall for it. But know you can just be a girl watching makeup content and consuming stuff like that. TikTok figures out you are a woman in this age range who is into a feminine hobby.
00:18:57
Jon McCray Jones
oh next thing you know, we're going to push videos on you that is basically telling you you should want to be a stay-at-home wife and that's it. I think cis men and cis women in the Gen Z department or like younger millennials, I think they have like very two different pipelines to puritanical culture in the alt-right.
00:19:20
Jon McCray Jones
But like even though these pipelines are almost like oppositional to each other, they lead you to the same space. And like for cis men, I think there's a push...
00:19:31
Jon McCray Jones
that a lot of the reasons why young men hate themselves and hate their lives is because of feminism and women's liberation. And I think that, or not I think, I know that a lot of that resentment comes towards the women that they feel that they're attracted to two the most, that they're ashamed about supporting.
00:19:50
Jon McCray Jones
And that's like sex work. Because religion tells you, and like the manosphere tells you, that a lot of the issues that you have in your life ah The reason why you can't build muscle, the reason why you can't pick up women, the reason why you're horny is because you watch porn.
00:20:07
Jon McCray Jones
And if you control and repress these urges, your life will get in exponentially better. And they project these insecurities and the reason, which porn has nothing to do with or very little to do with clinically.
00:20:20
Jon McCray Jones
ah And so they project these insecurities about themselves onto the women who perform porn. And they're saying, well, porn is obviously making my life worse. I wish that I could just wash my hands from it and I wouldn't be able to have access to it.
00:20:35
Jon McCray Jones
And these are the same guys who are secretly watching porn. behind their own backs. And I also think it's like specifically a lot of shame to do with like specific kinks and stigma that they have. When you look at Southern states, one of the most watched porn is like trans porn.
00:20:52
Jon McCray Jones
And I think a lot of these men are ashamed that they're into like trans women and they don't know what that says about their sexuality to themselves. Or they're into gay porn is really big in the South.
00:21:02
Jon McCray Jones
You have a lot of guys who like, why am I into this? Why I'm into this particular kink? Is there something wrong with me? Oh, no, this porn is corrupting me because I can't possibly be interested with this unless I'm being influenced by an outside source.
00:21:17
Jon McCray Jones
And then if this is happening to me, I wonder how many other men this is happening to. so let's just ban it. I think women are coming at it from a couple of get different angles.
00:21:29
Jon McCray Jones
I think one women are tired of the unfair standard beauty standards. hu And I think that they disproportionately target porn stars ah versus like Instagram models and like the Kardashians and like fitness models.
00:21:51
Jon McCray Jones
But I think that they understand. I think for a lot of like women, there's a lot of insecurity about like the unfair standards of beauty that they're held up to. I think there's also a lot of like sexual insecurity where a lot of men or a lot of people in general where their first interaction with sex comes from porn and people who are like still probably virgins or not that much sexual experience know that what they're consuming and what their sexual partners are consuming is very kinky, very, sometimes very aggressive, very, i don't want to use the word passionate, but like,
00:22:29
Jon McCray Jones
very extravagant sex and they're like well i can't do that or i'm not into that so it makes me insecure knowing that like my sexual partners are into that or that like my sexual partners are fantasizing about this person how they look how good of sex they are when like i can't live up to that and i think there's another lens of like the opposition to porn that comes through like the feminist lens of the idea that porn historically has been rooted in the objectification of women.
Women and Porn: The Debate on Over-Sexualization
00:23:02
Jon McCray Jones
And I think that a lot of them are like, hey, if we want to stop men from going down the patriarchal guideline pathway, I forgot the word I'm looking for.
00:23:14
Jon McCray Jones
ah We need to ban porn because porn are making men worse. When in reality, men have always been shit. like Cis men 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago aren't any less misogynistic.
00:23:28
Jon McCray Jones
If evidence shows us anything, they were more misogynistic than they are now. It's just that the way that men feel about women now are different than how their grandfathers feel. Where I feel like their grandfathers dismiss women as like not important.
00:23:42
Jon McCray Jones
Men today have... misogynistic men today kind of have like a hatred for women that you don't see before, before just kind of like dismiss of their tools, you're seeing like you're going to say something?
00:23:52
Jon McCray Jones
Well, I think a really big piece why so many women on both sides of the political spectrum are against porn is we're just sick of, you know, being over-sexualized, being harassed, being told that your worth is based upon how sexually attractive you are.
00:24:11
Jon McCray Jones
And sexual assault happens to all genders, but it does historically happen more to women. And then when we do come forward, statistically, there isn't really any justice.
00:24:24
Jon McCray Jones
And even outside of a legal lens, you're kind of met with a lot of like, oh, like, he was your boyfriend. and That's just what guys do. Like, what do you mean? um So I think for a lot of women,
00:24:37
Jon McCray Jones
the porn they're familiar with is more of the mainstream porn where there isn't conversations of consent and they're often doing very like kink coded things without explicit consent.
00:24:50
Jon McCray Jones
So that's why the same group of women, men like especially the radical feminists, they're really against kink too because the only kink they can conceptualize is, you know, kink has to happen with consent.
00:25:04
Jon McCray Jones
But what they're conceptualizing it as is well, this guy just randomly choked me and that was super traumatizing to me. And it's like, yeah, that's assault. They didn't get your explicit consent for that.
00:25:16
Jon McCray Jones
And that's what we see in porn is it's just this girl getting throat fucked without any question of like, hey, how are you feeling? Do you want to do this? Yeah. And that's like what i was getting at. And I think that like a couple bad papers that can never be repeat it or that they just can't repeat them suggesting that porn makes men more violent or that porn causes these bad behaviors when reality we look at like the research by nicole cross and like justin lay miller men who watch porn and are okay with themselves watching porn normally have better views on women and normally are less misogynistic they're less violent
00:25:58
Jon McCray Jones
ah the men who don't watch porn, there is a certain demographic of men who are into very violent porn, but they're ashamed of it. These are your conservative men and they are more aggressive to women and more violent to women. But like, of course, that tracks when you have people where they're dealing with their own shame and repression.
00:26:18
Jon McCray Jones
They like this thing, but they probably don't want to find a partner who also likes it because they're ashamed of it. They don't admit to themselves that they like it. They probably don't care about consent. They don't want to care about conversations, which I think like, Hey, there's serious industries with the, there's serious issues with the porn industry.
00:26:35
Jon McCray Jones
And I think that like how you fix that is thing. Make sure that every porn video starts with a consent talk. Hey, fuck it. I wouldn't be opposed to if you want to access porn, um before you click on the website, there's a minute, a minute and a half talking about consent.
00:26:52
Jon McCray Jones
Everybody, every time you access porn, you have to watch 60 90 seconds talking about consent. That do way more than banning porn. And two, provide people with sex ed.
00:27:03
Jon McCray Jones
It was a paper that came out that like almost two-thirds of Americans... their first like experience of sex and her sex ed came from porn. Half sex ed in high school allowed people to learn what ethical porn is.
00:27:17
Jon McCray Jones
Cause like the pushback a kind of about like what you were saying about like why a lot of women are tired of feeling like sexualized. I don't think porn is the culprit though. Like I don't think porn- It isn't. It's our society. They just think it is.
00:27:31
Jon McCray Jones
Yeah. But like what I was going to say is that like, Men weren't any less violent or sexualizing to women generations ago. i mean, we even had like laws that your the job of a good man is to like abuse and punish his wife or the idea that like a woman can't say no to her husband. like Men aren't getting worse, per se, as much as like we now can have conversations openly about bad men.
00:28:02
Jon McCray Jones
And we can like call Batman out on her bullshit. And I think that like a lot of people are short-sighted where they don't know history. So they blame porn for like these conversations about like the acts that Batman have and not the fact that like men being shitty was just normalized before.
Conclusion: Ulterior Motives Behind the Legislation
00:28:19
Jon McCray Jones
And the same people who are pushing to ban porn are the same people who are trying to keep you in the house, stop you from being able to get abortion, stop you from getting contraceptives.
00:28:29
Jon McCray Jones
Like they're, they're, There's alternative motives that these people who are trying to ban porn are and you're co-signing it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that like I covered everything. i have like a whole other like culture war notes in like the bigger picture that want to get into, but we're already at a half an hour.
00:28:47
Jon McCray Jones
Yeah. That's everything for me. All right. Well, this has been the Fun with Sex Podcast. I'm John. I'm Natalie. And have a nice day.