At first blush, it’s hard to see why the creators of a site called Glass Wings are nervous about the Internet censorship bill passed by the Australian Senate on May 26. The site is devoted mainly to storytelling, cartoons and recipes. But its Sensual Celebrations section could become a target of the new law, which is expected to be ratified by the Australian House of Representatives within two weeks and would require Internet service providers to block adult content or face stiff penalties.
Sensual Celebrations is no porn site: It’s a small, and rather tame, collection of essays and stories about relationships and sexuality. Its authors ponder the joys of masturbation, calling it “gonad solitaire,” and guide readers through the challenges of “moving nookie outside of the bedroom” — giving somewhat less than serious consideration to such obstacles as pine needles, grass seeds and flying insects. But even such articles could be endangered by the proposed law, say Glass Wings co-creators Katherine Phelps and Andrew Pam.
That’s because the law would essentially turn ISPs into legal enforcers with a vested interest in expunging sexuality from the Web as it’s accessed in Australia. In an attempt to make the Net safe for children, Australian legislators have proposed fines as great as 27,500 Australian dollars per day — or more than U.S. $18,000 — for ISPs that fail to properly block “prohibited content.”
The proposed law — due to take effect on January 1, 2000 — would work like this: The Australian Broadcasting Authority, which regulates Australian radio and television, will accept complaints about porn or other “prohibited content or potential prohibited content” on Internet sites, then assess the sites and ask the Classification Board to rate them, just as it currently rates films. Any time a site gets an X rating, the ABA will be obliged to issue a take-down notice to the domestic Internet host; an R rating means only people over 18 can access the site, although it’s not clear how this provision would be enforced. The host has 24 hours to comply — and classifications cannot be reviewed for two years. The ABA may also order Australian ISPs to block access to sites overseas by filtering proxy servers.
Critics see huge potential for the law to result in a complete eradication of material even vaguely related to sex. “Service providers are being required to determine for themselves the likelihood that certain material will be R, X or RC [for restricted content] rated,” says Phelps in a Freedom of Sexpression article, running under the banner “Freedom? Fuck Yes!” on the Glass Wings site. “These people who have specialized in networking expertise are qualified in what way to make these determinations? In order to be safely within the law, service providers are likely to remove content far more broadly than legally required.” And she believes relationship-advice articles and safe-sex stories like those on her site could be the victims.
The way her partner Pam sees it, ISP-level filtering is inevitable: “The incentives are huge for ISPs to take down sites to be on the safe side,” he says, adding that the law could easily result not just in overzealous censorship, but a winnowing-out of ISPs. Considering how quickly the Net community reposts anything that “authorities” have ordered taken down, it’s unlikely that anyone has the resources to police even a specific naughty photo spread, much less an entire Web’s worth. The cost of continuously monitoring content and updating blacklists “would be prohibitive,” says Pam, “and Australia’s 650 ISPs will be dramatically reduced.”
The law has provoked a chorus of criticism both on and off the Net. Street protests have been held in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, and the government’s e-mail servers were bombarded with so many complaints to the bill’s author, Sen. Richard Alston, Australia’s minister of communications, that the system was shut down. As their U.S. peers did when the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, many Australian ISPs and sites turned their pages black in protest on the days immediately following the Senate’s passage of the bill. Some Web servers introduced filters to block Internet access requests from the .gov.au domain, effectively shutting out some Australian government access to the Web.
Prime Minister John Howard was not amused. “I say to those who are protesting against it that you don’t understand the mood of middle Australia on this, you don’t understand how deeply many parents feel about it, with some justification,” he said on a radio program last week.
For the country’s online adult entertainment industry — ironically based in Canberra, the national capital — the writing is on the wall. The Eros Foundation, a national lobby group for the Australian sex industry, says up to 50 percent of its members are already arranging to move their Australian-hosted content overseas. Eros spokesman Robbie Swan says, “This bill is a disaster … It’s a bad situation and it will get worse.” Some Eros members are moving not just their content, but their entire operations offshore: “Now the bill has been passed, we won’t get any new members [who run adult sites] because they can’t host their sites here.”
The icing on the cake of this bill is a provision that exempts any Australian ISP from legal responsibility for voluntarily conforming with the legislation and removing sites even before they have been prohibited by the ABA. Proprietors of a site that is filtered out or taken down are left with little ground to stand on and little legal recourse for what could be deemed a denial of their commercial rights.
So even sites that don’t offer porn are looking into contingency plans. Glass Wings, for example, has been looking for overseas partners that will mirror the site to keep the Sensual Celebrations section alive even if the site is blocked by local ISPs. And Pam says he knows of other sites attempting the same strategy.
But even as sites concerned about their future scurry to make contingency plans and angry Net users wage protests, many observers argue that the proposed law doesn’t stand much chance of achieving its goals. Apart from the difficulty of monitoring the vast number of sites hosting adult content and the ease with which material can be moved from site to site, the law’s focus on actually taking sites down could prove its undoing. ISPs will only be responsible for abiding by such take-down notices based on “the technical and commercial feasibility of taking the steps.” It’s not clear what would happen in the event that it was too difficult or expensive to block prohibited material.
But it is likely that the more famous porn sites from overseas will suffer more than the lesser known mom-and-pop shops. For example, the ABA would likely have the Playboy site blocked, but not the thousands of smaller sites it doesn’t know exist.
Though critics contend that this legislation was put together hastily and rushed through the Senate, the law has lengthy antecedents. Australia’s Parliament has been examining the issue of Net censorship since 1995, holding inquiries into the control of bulletin-board services and the then-nascent Web.
Since then, Australia has achieved the second-highest percentage of households online in the world, and the Net — once perceived as the domain of young men — has become a family entertainment medium. But as it has grown, so has public concern that children are, as Prime Minister Howard has said, “being bombarded with pornography.” And Alston, the communications minister, says the law he drafted isn’t meant to broadly censor the Web. It intends simply to ensure that “the Net is a clean place to visit, ” he says. “Even children are worried about their younger brothers and sisters being exposed to this sort of material.”
For Pam, the law “amplifies an existing trend” toward greater censorship. Australia has no bill of rights guaranteeing freedom of speech, although it is a signatory to the U.N. human rights convention on free communications. Australia’s approach to censorship has inspired critics to compare the democracy to regimes like Iran, Burma, China and Saudi Arabia. In fact, the proposed law is more like a collage of measures used in a number of less repressive countries. Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom all have watchdog committees to act on public complaints, and the United States has made two efforts to pass laws restricting Net content. While no other democratic country has imposed a ban on Net porn, it’s unlikely that Australia’s new law will result in an all-out ban.
In theory, the ABA will only require that sites be blocked if someone lodges a complaint against them. And the Australian government doesn’t propose to mandate what hosts must do to block offensive material from overseas. Instead, the Australian law requires the industry to regulate itself through a “code of practice,” which the law would require the industry to create. Should the Net industry fail to come up with its own code, the ABA will impose its own.
ISPs might agree, for example, to use regularly updated content filters or offer customers software like NetNanny. Many Net users feared that overseas content would have to be filtered at the ISP level, but the law has set that forth as only one of several options. (The government’s own scientific advisors argued that blocking by blacklists or packet filtering was futile and could screen out innocent content or even have an adverse effect on e-commerce.)
Pam of Glass Wings anticipates a profound cultural effect with nasty long-term consequences for the Australian online industry. He predicts a further exodus of technology workers — primarily to the United States, where they can make more money and avoid the potential hostility of the Australian Net environment. In the wake of the Australian Parliament’s attempt to censor the Net, some are already planning to move their sites, if not themselves, offshore.
It’s not as if one expects subtle political discourse from Hustler. But come on.
Larry Flynt’s venerable publishing enterprise has, throughout its history, championed freedom of expression in its own unique way. In 1984, Flynt famously went all the way to the Supreme Court over the right to run a parody ad of inexhaustible loon Jerry Falwell reminiscing about losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Tasteless? Yes. An obvious lampooning of a public figure? Also yes. But when Hustler recently ran a photo of conservative writer S.E. Cupp Photoshopped to look like she was performing oral sex, that was something altogether different.
The Cupp photo exists as a “celebrity fantasy” – i.e., an imaginary hate bang. And though Hustler takes pains to cover its butt, noting that “No such picture of S.E. Cupp actually exists. This composite fantasy is altered from the original for our imagination, does not depict reality, and is not to be taken seriously for any purpose,” it ponders, grossly, “What would S.E. Cupp look like with a dick in her mouth?”
Of course, the usual conservative suspects have come out of the woodwork for this one, pointing an accusatory finger at what the Blaze helpfully refers to as “the liberal media” for this. Yes, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, Hustler – it’s all the same to us! On Wednesday, Glenn Beck begged, “Is this wrong, Democrats? Is this wrong?” — as if Democrats were responsible for what Hustler publishes. Who put that penis in that lady’s mouth? Probably Obama. And Cupp herself, on Beck’s show, seized the opportunity to condemn the National Organization for Women, and to add, “I wish that these media entities that perform this kind of misogyny would just come out and do what Hustler did, instead of beating around the bush and pretending to be fair, pretending to be above that. They’re not above that. This is exactly what they do every single time.”
Way to seize the moment, Cupp — except that liberals don’t like fake blow-job putdowns either. Nor do you see a lot of them out there in, say, the Nation. Want proof from the despised “liberal media”? How about how Audrey Ference explained in the L Magazine, “It’s Not Cool to Photoshop a Dick into a Woman’s Mouth, Even if You Disagree With Her Ideas. In These Times’ Lindsay Beyerstein, meanwhile, condemned the photo as “beneath contempt.” And on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan noted that “More than 50 years after the women’s movement began, we’re still trying to silence women with dicks.” Even the always combative hosts of “The View” unanimously welcomed Cupp Thursday, with Whoopi Goldberg saying, “This is offensive. This is not the dialogue that we have when we disagree.” So Cupp and company, please extend your detractors the courtesy of believing that we think this is gross too? True liberals don’t pretend that degradation is social commentary.
Flynt, for his part, defends the photo, saying “That’s satire” in an email to the Daily Caller. That “satire,” by the way, consists of the aforementioned blow-job pic, accompanied by the sad commentary that Cupp’s “hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.”
It’s pretty obvious that a company whose porn movies are cleverly titled “This Ain’t” – as in “This Ain’t Celebrity Apprentice” and “This Ain’t Dancing With the Stars” — is not trying terribly hard to distinguish itself from the people it’s lampooning. Also: apparently “Dancing With the Stars” porn is a thing. So Hustler may hide behind the false equivalency that sticking a penis in Cupp’s mouth because she hates Planned Parenthood is the same as its movie parodies or its glorious, long ago triumph of putting Jerry Falwell in an outhouse. But it’s not. It’s a photo of a real person, for starters, which means it can and likely will be distributed across the Internet pell mell and willy nilly without its disclaimer. Second, it’s exactly the kind of crap women have to contend with on a near constant basis — that we exist to be objectified, screwed and shut up.
Sticking a penis in the mouth of a woman whose opinions you don’t like isn’t satire, especially when you’re in the business of putting penises in women’s mouths all the time. It’s aggressive. Worse, it’s stupid. But at least both the image and the lame excuse for it achieve something Hustler and editors know a lot about. They suck mightily.
I was at a neighborhood bar when in walked a man that I’d slept with before — virtually speaking. We had traded intimacies without ever having met.
I grabbed my friend’s arm and whispered, “My favorite male porn star just walked in the door.” She looked at me dumbfounded: “You have a favorite male porn star?” OK, so the competition isn’t steep and, yes, I’m one of those mythic women who actually like porn (but for the record, we make up an estimated one-third of visits to adult sites). When I first clicked across this man — with his smoldering eyes, strong nose and athletic body — it allowed me to forget for a moment that porn is largely made by and for men. He’s a rare male performer who is charismatic, young and handsome — everything the infamous Ron Jeremy is not.
Seeing him in person, there was one thought on my mind: I need to sleep with him.
I’d been practicing for this moment since puberty. At age 12, I started investigating the world of sex online like a naughty Nancy Drew, desperately trying to solve the mystery of the male sexual psyche — and, given that I now write about sex for a living, I guess I’ve never stopped. From early-’90s chat rooms to hardcore gonzo porn, I’ve plumbed the depths of men’s desires, desperately trying to figure out exactly what men want in bed so that I could be exactly what men want in bed. Somewhere along the way, I started to explore what I desired — beyond just being desired — thanks in no small part to the men of porn.
It took ordering a shot of whiskey and a PBR — twice — before I could even begin to imagine talking to this man, let alone sleeping with him. Even still, my strategy was that of a grade-schooler — a tipsy one: I asked my friend to tell him that I liked him and then ran and hid at the bar. Mid-sip, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “I hear you’re a fan of my work,” he said — and suddenly I was starring in my own personal porno, bad script and all.
Unlike the cocky man he plays on-screen, he seemed stunned by my interest. “I don’t run into female fans all that often — or ever.” His voice was much higher than expected. I realized I’ve only watched him with the sound off for fear of a roommate overhearing.
We grabbed a pair of bar stools and he started getting into character. “What is it that you like about my work?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. My face aflame, I stumbled: “Well, um, you know, like, everything?” He seemed confused, like maybe this was a big practical joke, so I offered, “I like it when a girl,” I started to whisper, “goes down on you?”
Dirty talk doesn’t come naturally to me in the bedroom, let alone in a bar. No matter, he placed his hand on my thigh and then I realized: This is actually happening. I was about to sleep with a man that I’d watched on-screen countless times. Soon, his tongue was in my mouth, spinning wildly like he was trying to burrow inside me. His gyrations stretched my jaw to maximum capacity; it was like getting a routine teeth cleaning — only at an X-rated dentist.
Eventually, he pulled away and said, “Isn’t your boyfriend going to be mad when he sees us together?” I looked at him, puzzled, and then realized that he was trying to improvise a scene. I hardly needed role-playing to spice things up, but I tried to play along. The naughty improv ended with him grabbing my hand and purring, “We better get out of here” — and we did.
As we walked to my apartment, there was a voice in my head playing on repeat, begging: What the hell are you doing? It isn’t that I didn’t want to sleep with him, it’s just the sex-shame came rushing in: Once I do this, won’t I forever be a girl who’s slept with a porn star — ruined, tainted, stained?
What would my mom think?
Back at my place, we sat on my living room couch and I engaged in the nervous banter that usually arises from having a relative stranger in your house. Only I was keenly aware that while I felt clueless about how to smoothly transition from small talk to sexy times, he was a professional. “Can I get you anything?” I asked, nervously. He smiled — everything was a double-entendre — and then his mouth was on mine, his tongue down my throat again. “Mmm,” I lied. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was all happening too fast to be felt; he was moving at the speed of smut.
Eventually, we transitioned to my bedroom. Before I could reach for the switch on the wall, we were both naked and he was pulling out a condom; he’s used to performing with the lights on. It felt like this was my shot at the X-rated equivalent of the Olympics: How would I stack up against all the professional sex symbols that he’s been with? Would my years of training and YouPorn mastery count for anything?
There’s no need to go into great detail — do a Google search for “porn” and you’ll find an approximate representation of what followed between us. It’s exactly what I had breathlessly watched him do many times before, but this time it seemed mechanical and theatrical. Instead of being entertained, I was doing the entertaining, and I suspect he was too — but for whom, exactly? We were the only audience.
All of which is to say: It was like nearly every casual hookup I’ve ever had. Here were two strangers connected only by their fantasies of who the other was.
Afterward, he stood up, stark naked, and strutted around my room with his hands on his hips. He nodded as he circled, taking in the belongings of the woman he’d just fucked, pro bono. Then he clapped, “Well! I better be getting home now.” No snuggling with the porn star. “Of course,” I said. We did the perfunctory exchange of numbers and I showed him out.
Despite the emptiness of it, I felt a sense of accomplishment over my conquest. I mean, I slept with my favorite male porn star! But when I texted my roommate with the breaking news, she wrote back, “Is this supposed to be a good thing?” Where was my high-five? A man in a similar situation would be heralded a hero by his friends. What had originally felt empowering — the unabashed pursuit of something I strongly desired — began to feel shameful. I started wondering, “What kind of man will want to be with a woman who’s slept with a male porn star?”
As it happens, not too long thereafter I got into a relationship with just such a guy — although I didn’t know it until recently, well into our relationship. I sat him down, poured two glasses of red wine, and said: “Babe, I have something to tell you.” He looked terrified as I paused and then forced myself to continue, “Before we got together, I slept with my favorite male porn star.” His response was immediate: “On camera?!” When I explained that, no, I just slept with a man who happens to make his living having sex on camera, he seemed confused: “That’s it?”
Exactly, that’s it. He has no reason to feel threatened by the encounter: It’s in the context of our relationship that I’ve felt comfortable enough to stop striving to meet a sexual standard set by porn — no performance, no faking. This isn’t a story about forsaking smut, though. Sleeping with my favorite male porn star was thrilling and fun. It’s a memory that I occasionally turn to for private titillation — when YouPorn doesn’t do the trick. But I do have a whole new appreciation for the difference between fantasy and reality, and how much sexier the latter can be when you aren’t striving for pornographic perfection.
There were lots of things to poke fun at in Rick Santorum’s anti-porn pledge, but the element perhaps most deserving of mockery has been widely ignored: his claim that “a wealth of research is now available demonstrating that pornography causes profound brain changes in both children and adults, resulting in widespread negative consequences.”
You want to know what’s profound? How scientifically inaccurate that statement is.
Pornography surely changes the brain in some ways — but so does everything. “Watching the NCAA playoffs is going to change your brain, eating chocolate — any time you have any kind of experience, it’s going to change your brain,” says Rory C. Reid, a research psychologist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. “The real question is, ‘Are those changes substantial enough that there’s going to be some observable effect?’”
As to Santorum’s claim that such damning research exists, Reid says: “Well, if there is, I’d sure like to see it!” He continues, “There’s not a single study to my knowledge that has even demonstrated half of that [claim].” Allow me to put into perspective Reid’s expertise: He not only specializes in neuropsychology but he’s also one of the world’s top experts on hypersexual behavior. If any such evidence existed, let alone “a wealth of research,” he would have seen it.
Still, he humored me by logging onto PubMed, a database maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and doing a search for any studies involving neuroimaging and pornography. Plenty of related research showed up, but none reliably demonstrate “profound” brain changes. The problem with much of the research in this arena is that it’s limited to (in nerd-speak) cross-sectional and quantitative data — it doesn’t establish a cause and effect.
In order to reliably demonstrate such a brain-damaging impact, researchers would have to engage in the sort of study that no review board would approve — especially when it comes to the impact on children. “You would have to get a group of children that had never looked at porn and then divide them into two groups,” Reid explains. They would all undergo brain scans and then half would have to be repetitively exposed to pornography before another round of brain scans. In addition to then showing “that there had been changes in the brain that would be detrimental, you’d also have to correlate that with behavioral outcomes,” he says. (That’s not even mentioning the issue of how to define pornographic material. As David Ley, a psychologist and author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction,” says, “The Supreme Court couldn’t answer that, but Santorum can?”)
Lest you think Reid is a pro-porn activist, he’s not. He’s written a book titled “Confronting Your Spouse’s Pornography Problem.” He works with patients with sexual compulsivity problems and believes that porn “can be a gateway to developing problems.” He tells me, “Philosophically, I’ve got all sorts of problems with porn. It’s not that I have this liberal perspective that there shouldn’t be any constraints on our sexual behavior … but this idea that consumption of pornography causes cortical atrophy that leads to negative consequences? We haven’t seen that.”
In an email, Bruce Carpenter, a researcher at Brigham Young University — of all places! — made a point of expressing his moral opposition to pornography, and his suspicion “that pornography has larger deleterious effects upon individuals, family, and society,” before writing, “Now to the evidence. THERE IS NONE.” He adds, “There is not a single study of pornography use showing brain damage or even brain changes.”
Similarly, Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers University psychologist who has done groundbreaking research on the brain during climax, says, “As an experienced reviewer of neuroscientific research literature, I would welcome the challenge of reviewing and commenting upon, the ‘wealth of research’ that the statement claims exists,” he says. “I invite the claimant to make it available to me.” In other words: Bring it on.
Not even a smidgen of such evidence exists, let alone a “wealth” of it. As psychologist Michael Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University, told me, “Santorum is simply trying to wrap his religious ideology in scientific garments. But the emperor has no clothes.” If he’s so interested in the science of porn’s impact, maybe Santorum should add federal funding of sexuality research to his platform — and discourage his GOP brethren from attempting to defund such studies in the future.
This article is the second in a
new series of oral histories by former and current sex workers, in which they describe the moment they told their family what they do.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 18 years, and I’ve always been around porn. For a long time, I worked behind the scenes, at a couple of companies’ websites and stuff like that, but I had never wanted to do porn because I wasn’t secure with the way I looked or I had a boyfriend who was against it. Around 2009, those weren’t problems anymore. I got approached to do some nude photo shoots, and one of them ended up being picked up by Men Magazine, which at that time was kind of a big thing. At the same time, a friend of mine was directing a video that he wanted me to be in. At first I just wanted to be an extra, and then he was like, “Why not just have sex in it?” And so I did. Then another director found out about me, and then another, and then I was scheduled in four videos in pretty much the same time.
I liked doing porn. Though I never wanted to be in a situation where I was doing it to pay my rent, I wanted to do it to enrich my life, so I could do things I wanted to do or so I could go on a vacation I wanted to go on. I was making good money, and all that kind of stuff. I filmed my first films in the beginning of 2009, and things started to come out in August 2009. I got tons of press and everything, but I didn’t tell my mom — not because I was skittish about it. My mother was a free love hippie-type person, and she’s always been very sex positive. But it was not something I needed to tell her. My parents divorced when I was really young, but I don’t talk to my dad. I came out to him when I was 17 or 18, but he is very anti-gay, so I haven’t spoken with him in 17 years.
Then in February of 2010 I got a phone call from my mom. My mom never calls me. Never. It’s like pulling teeth to get her to talk on the phone, but she called me and she was like, “Are you on the cover of a magazine?” I had been voted Man of the Year in Unzipped Magazine that month, so I said, “Yeah … how do you know that?” And so she told me this story: It was a Saturday night, and she had had a date with a guy and he had stood her up. She wanted to entertain herself so she went to the adult bookstore to buy a dildo, and she decided to browse the gay magazines because she said that’s where the hottest guys always were. And there I was on the cover of the magazine.
Later on she called me again. She had read the article that went with my photos in the magazine, and she said it was really beautiful. She cried a little bit and I was like, “Oh, that’s really nice.” I think at one point she wishes she could have done porn, which is a strange thing to hear from your mom. Now we talk a lot more and there’s always the feeling that I don’t need to be hiding anything from her. If you’re open to your mom with the fact that you do porn there’s not really any other secret you can have.
Porn is much more out there these days. So many celebrities have sex videos, and everybody has naked pictures on their phones, and there are so many amateur porn tube sites. But I know a lot of people who come from conservative religious backgrounds whose parents have completely disowned them or distanced themselves from them, and it’s unfortunate. It’s hard to come out as a gay person, but it’s even more difficult to also come out as a person who has sex for a living. It can be hard for some family members to take. But that’s their loss, unfortunately.
My partner also does porn and his porn coming-out started when his aunt, who had a lot of gay friends, found his blog online. Then she told his mother. And she was shocked at first. But now she’s completely accepted it and makes jokes about it, like, “If I do porn, my porn name is going to be Luscious Lynn.” My mother is actually coming to visit in a week for a few days, and she’ll be meeting my partner for the first time, which is great.
I’ve never seen doing porn as a negative thing — ever. Just because it’s sex doesn’t mean it’s not moral. I’m not swindling people. There are plenty of white-collar jobs with bigger ethics and morality issues. I know the rest of society doesn’t see it that way, and it’s always a little frustrating to be an intelligent, educated, articulate person doing porn and have people thinking that you’re a high school dropout.
My mom’s just happy that I’m successful and not on drugs and happy. Anything else is a bonus.
As told to Thomas Rogers.
Samuel Colt is a gay porn performer living in San Francisco.
After publishing an anti-pornography pledge on his website last week, Rick Santorum courted questions this weekend about how, exactly, he plans to attack smut. He didn’t make it clear and instead continued to rely on vague rhetoric about the threat to children.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, he said, “Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously than they are … under the Obama administration.” He added, “My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they’re putting the unenforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that.”
If one were prone to uncritical acceptance of political rhetoric, it would be easy to assume from Santorum’s remarks that the Obama administration isn’t prosecuting child porn. In all of his statements about smut, the GOP candidate is always careful to bring it back to the children. Santorum takes no care to clearly define what the threat to children is, exactly – whether it’s that they might be forced into illegal underage porn or that they might happen upon adult material online. The conflation of adult pornographers with child pornographers is a classic anti-smut move, much as child sex trafficking gets uncritically folded into debates about consensual adult sex work.
Let’s be clear here: The Obama administration continues to prosecute child pornography just as the Bush administration did. The real change is in obscenity prosecutions involving consenting adults: As I’ve written about before, the Obama administration hasn’t put a priority on these cases. Three holdover cases from the Bush years have been prosecuted, and to pathetic ends: a plea bargain with no prison time, a dismissal and, most recently, a mistrial. It’s hard to see how those cases – the very best the Department of Justice could find – were a good use of taxpayers’ dollars.
Presumably, hopefully, Santorum understands the distinction between child porn and adult porn, obscenity law and child pornography law, but he’s using ambiguity here to help his case. The truth is that the prosecution of adult obscenity cases — which are nowhere near as legally clear-cut as he suggests — has very little to do with children. If his concern is about kids being able to find adult material online, he could propose stricter access laws. What he’s really after, though, is making consensual, adult porn to which he morally objects disappear. Children just make for a much better excuse.
(Credit: Wallenrock via Shutterstock/Salon) 
Rick Santorum (Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel) 
(Credit: Unzipped.net) 
