LOS ANGELES — Reason magazine has published in its May issue a lengthy, in-depth report on the current social and political attempts to censor sexual expression online.
The report, titled “The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet,” was penned by Reason senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a widely respected longtime reporter on sex worker rights and online freedom of speech.
Under the subtitle “Sex, money, and the future of online free speech,” the leading Libertarian publication explored how “a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business.”
According to Brown, the chilling effect of this War on Porn — which XBIZ has extensively covered — has disrupted the early 21st century's seeming online free speech utopia where “people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution.”
While in the past, she wrote, porn “catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results,” things had changed so that, at least before the current onslaughts in the War on Porn, “audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust.”
Brown provided a thorough recap of recent skirmishes in the ongoing War on Porn being waged by religiously inspired groups like NCOSE and Exodus Cry, and offered relevant context for the new tactics of these would-be censors of sexual expression.
“Though they speak the language of feminism,” Brown noted, “these groups are steeped in the spirit of conservative purity culture — an evangelical ethos popularized in the 1980s and '90s. Purity culture hinges on abstinence rituals like virginity pledges, chastity rings and father-daughter ‘purity balls.’ It's predicated on the notion that sexual activity should be relegated to monogamous and heterosexual married couples, and it preaches strict gender roles, female modesty and total abstinence from premarital sex.”
Crucially, Brown’s article spelled out the reality of how a shared goal of these faith-based groups is “to remake the internet as a sex-free zone by casting a vast swath of nontraditional sexual activity as ‘sexual exploitation’ or ‘human trafficking,’ especially if it involves the transfer of money, even indirectly.”
To read Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s “The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet,” visit Reason.com.