NEW YORK — Writer and former performer Jessica Stoya discussed the current state of online porn culture and the attempts to censor it, in a conversation published last week by Document Journal.
Stoya spoke with Motherboard journalist Samantha Cole and Document’s Camille Sojit Pejcha for a feature about “coming of age online, the internet’s horny history and the shadowy forces that determine what kind of porn you see.”
Cole and Pejcha also touted Cole’s recent book, “How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.”
Pejcha prefaced the discussion by noting that FOSTA-SESTA “incentivized social media platforms to crack down not just on problematic sexual materials, but all sexual speech. On TikTok, for instance, users have resorted to codewords like seggs and corn to share sexual education information without activating the censorship tripwire — an issue that poses particular challenges to sex workers and free speech advocates, but should be equally worrying to anyone paying attention.”
Stoya explained that when she first started spending time on the internet, it was “a very different, very uncensored place.”
“I remember I got all of my sex ed from the internet, in a very wholesome way,” she noted, adding that early access to adult discussions of boundaries helped her protect herself and “do less harm” when having sex with others.
“I just naturally picked up how to be, like, Hey, what do you like, is this okay?” Stoya recalled. “And I applied that to all of it — not just whips and chains and power dynamics, but like, Hey, do you wanna hold hands?”
Before Tumblr banned porn, Stoya explained, the site offered “amazing wealth of knowledge about sex and identity and sexual health.”
“That’s where I learned about asexuality; the community pointed me to resources,” she shared. “Tumblr was the place for people to learn and process together. Now, how are we even supposed to get that information out? That’s not going to rise to the top of the Pornhub algorithm.”
The retired performer and longtime writer on sex worker issues also repeated the oft-stated maxim that “porn is the canary in the coal mine.”
“We tried to warn you, but the coal mine’s on fire now,” she remarked. “We were screaming from the rooftops, but our warnings fell on deaf ears, because whores’ opinions don’t count, and there’s not enough squirting in the world to put it out — so I hope someone has an actual fire hose. Everyone should read Hannah Arendt and learn the history of fascism. Because we are multiple steps into a repeat of the previous century.
“If sex and porn and all these things are shadow banned, downranked, and deplatformed,” she added, “how do you even access that information?”
To read the Document Journal feature on internet censorship, click here.
