WASHINGTON — The Washington Post published today a column by academic Lynn Comella highlighting the important work the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) has been doing for almost three decades to protect the constitutional rights of adult businesses and performers.
The article is titled “The adult industry can survive without government help. Here’s why.”
Comella is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the author of "Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure" and co-editor of "New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law."
“With many businesses across the country closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a national conversation is taking place about industries and workers hit especially hard by work stoppages and how to help them,” Comella wrote. “Unlike other industries, however, no federal bailout money is earmarked for pornography. Instead, the adult community, led by the industry’s main trade association, the Free Speech Coalition, is coming together to take care of its own.”
The article surveys the background of the FSC and gives a short, enlightening master class on the history of the legalization of adult content in the U.S., and also on the many (and still very much ongoing) challenges from anti-porn lobbies and crusaders.
Comella sees the FSC’s “network of national testing sites that screen performers for HIV and sexually transmitted infections to ensure performer safety” as providing “a model for how organized testing and tracing works” and making the industry “ideally suited for combating COVID-19.”
The article also mentions how “with the support of individual donors and companies like Pornhub, the [FSC] has raised more than $144,000 for worker relief, with donations continuing to roll in.”
“In many respects,” Comella wrote, “the adult community is better situated than other industries to undertake such an effort. For over a half-century, it has worked together to fight for its First Amendment rights and advocate for the health and safety of performers in the face of concerted government campaigns to censor and undermine it.”
Click here to read “The adult industry can survive without government help. Here’s why.”
