Sex workers warn us about Project 2025 – we all need to listen

In today's internet, porn is just a click away. It's now so easy to access sexual content that we can forget how difficult it used to be to watch explicit content. Watching porn used to be taboo – even illegal. It wasn't until after 1969 that the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. citizens could watch whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own homes. Throughout American history, publishers like Grove Press have fought for our freedom to express ourselves sexually—but now a group of conservative Christians wants to take that freedom away.

If you followed the presidential campaign last year, you probably heard about Project 2025. It was created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank associated with Trump that cares deeply about “traditional values” (think traditional women on steroids). The plan is comprehensive and includes sweeping reforms for Trump to implement if he gains control of the White House, including eliminating no-fault divorce and criminalizing abortion.

The introduction to Project 2025 boldly proclaims their desire to even criminalize pornography: “Pornography, which today manifests itself in the ubiquitous propagation of transgender ideology and the sexualization of children (…), is not entitled to the protection of the First Amendment (…) Pornography should be banned. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who share it should be classified as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology companies that promote its spread should be shut down.”

While this may seem like an unhinged statement in today's context, the reality is that it is pornography Was illegal in the USA for many years. In fact, the history of pornography is not dissimilar to the history of abortion. The right to abortion is not protected by law, but by Supreme Court precedent in Roe v. Wade. That's why feminist advocates have pushed Democratic candidates to pass a law that explicitly legalizes abortion. This would prevent states from simply banning abortions, even if the Supreme Court overturned its opinion on Roe v. Wade. Likewise, the right to distribute and consume pornography is not specifically protected by any law; Distributing “obscene” content (also known as porn) is technically illegal. In the past, it wasn't just hardcore porn videos that were censored in the United States; It was almost exclusively art with explicit sexual themes.

A landmark Supreme Court case that opened the door for people to engage in porn did not involve explicit video. It was a book: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. When Miller first attempted to publish the book in 1934, copies were confiscated at the border by U.S. Customs, destroyed, and the book was banned. In 1961, a small publisher called Grove Press decided to republish the book in the United States. Again, books were confiscated and the book was banned both at the U.S. border and at post offices across the country. However, this time it was different.

The man who ran Grove Press, Barney Rosset, was wealthy enough to hire a team of excellent lawyers to defend the book. In fact, he had fought a similar court case before. In 1959 he published the very hot novel by DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley's lover, and when the book was confiscated by the US Postal Service, he successfully defended it in court. Grove Press endorsed the work of Henry Miller and in 1973 the Supreme Court declared Miller v. California that Grove Press must receive permission to publish and distribute Miller's book. The court's statement made it clear that this was content not is considered obscene if it has “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” After the Supreme Court made it harder to put people in prison for making sex-themed art, law enforcement gradually stopped arresting people who made porn, allowing a diverse ecosystem of producers and distributors of erotic content to flourish could.

Similar to banning abortion by overturn Roe v. Wadethe easiest way for conservatives to ban porn would be to repeal it Miller v. California. The way the Heritage Foundation wrote about pornography in Project 2025 makes it clear that this is their strategy, especially the mention of First Amendment rights (that's what the Supreme Court wrote). Tropic of Cancer was protected by the First Amendment).

What would be the consequences if Miller v. California were reversed? Without Tropic of Cancer, That definitely wouldn't exist Fifty shades of gray or one of the “spicy” romance novels that have become so popular on BookTok. Even beyond romance novels, there would be none Beautiful world, where are you, NO Bridgerton, NO Game of Thrones. Each of these books (and the films and television shows that followed) contain depictions of sex so explicit that they were once considered pornography. Do we really want to return to a world where these works of art would be illegal?

The fight for freedom of expression sex led to language protection of all kinds

What's troubling about banning pornography is the far-reaching impact it will have on other forms of speech. The censorship mechanisms that allowed the U.S. government to confiscate and destroy pornographic content also enabled it to destroy political content, such as leaflets distributed by communists or Black Panthers. The fight for freedom of expression sex led to language protection of all kinds. Since most information was disseminated by mail in the past, the easiest way to restrict speech was through censorship by the U.S. Postal Service, which had broad rights to confiscate material they deemed important could be illegal. After Miller v. California, It became much more difficult for post offices to confiscate mail without cause. These days, most of us get our information from the internet, not our inboxes. This is one of the reasons the right has fought to ban porn online. It makes it easier to ban all types of content they don't like.

In 2018, a conservative Christian lobbying group introduced a bill called “ FOSTA by Congress. The bill was a Trojan horse: Members of Congress were told by lobbyists that this bill would criminalize online child sex trafficking advertisements, but the bill's language did not address children. The bill's language instead requires internet companies to be prosecuted if they advertise “prostitution,” meaning consenting adult sex workers who physically interact with their customers. Social media companies and other online platforms began banning or even censoring sexual content of all kinds, even if it had nothing whatsoever to do with in-person sex work.

Because there was already so much sexual content online, these companies had to use algorithms to censor content rather than manually deleting posts that violated the new rules. Sex workers around the world, not just in the US, noticed an immediate drop in engagement on their posts, if not a complete suspension of their accounts. Now the same algorithms are being used to censor political speech; They were used in 2020 to artificially restrict, censor or ban accounts associated with movements as diverse as Black Lives Matter and the alt-right. Even if you find the idea of ​​porn repulsive, you should be very concerned about these conservatives' desire to eliminate sexual content, because it is almost inevitable that mechanisms used to censor sexual content will also be used to censor political content.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me that it was very important to pay attention to how every man I went on a date treated the waiters at the restaurant. ““If they feel comfortable treating service members badly in public,” she told me, “they won’t think it’s wrong to treat you the same way behind closed doors.” Perhaps the same thing can be said about sex workers and politicians: anyone who wants to monitor the sexual activities of sex workers probably also wants to monitor the sexual (and political) activities of everyone else. Do we really want Donald Trump, the man backed by the group that designed Project 2025, running our government?