The digital closet, p.9
The Digital Closet, page 9
To my eye, Morality in Media—now NCOSE—has emerged at the forefront of the traditional conservative anti-porn movement in the United States. NCOSE has by far the most robust and sophisticated web presence of any of these groups, producing annual progress reports, sophisticated white papers, how-to guides for citizens to get involved and parents to better control their children’s internet access and achieving headlines by being mentioned in media outlets like the Today Show, CNN News, the New York Times, BBC News, USA Today, and Fox News.138 Their visibility is likely due to the inflammatory rhetoric that they use and their intentional blurring of the lines between pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking, which together make for sensational headlines and easy click-bait on the web.
To get an overview of their take on pornography, one needs only look at their 2017 white paper, Pornography & Public Health: Research Summary, in which they describe pornography as “a social toxin that destroys relationships, steals innocence, erodes compassion, breeds violence, and kills love.”139 Their key argument is that pornography has become so ubiquitous that children are getting exposed to it at younger ages, that its pervasive use leads to addiction, that it negatively impacts women (they repeatedly leverage feminist rhetoric when useful), that its ubiquity infringes on individual rights by making it impossible to live a porn-free life, that private use of pornography has public consequences, that the combination of these last two facts means that it is unmanageable at the individual level and requires state regulation, and finally, that “pornography is prostitution for mass consumption.”140
As is common in many of their reports, NCOSE loosely and reductively stitches together disparate academic research to draw their predetermined conclusions about pornography. As they note,
While independently these studies do not prove that pornography causes harm, taken in totality, the converging evidence overwhelmingly suggests that pornography is correlated with a broad array of harms that adversely impact the public health of the nation. These include higher incidence of STIs, increased verbal and physical sexual aggression, acceptance of rape myths, risky sexual behaviors among adolescents, reduced impulse control and reckless decision making, increased sexual dysfunction, and more.141
It is worth noting that many of the studies they cite take place in cultural contexts outside the United States and have not been repeatedly verified by independent researchers. They are often preliminary results that are being read as objective facts and stitched together to make a leap toward totalization. This is not to say that none of their points are valid or in need of further research but only to bring these issues back into question rather than establishing them as axiomatic for all valid perspectives on pornography use. That said, it would take an entire book to rebut each of the claims that NCOSE makes about pornography, and here we might be best served by restricting ourselves to examining in more detail some of the more heteronormative claims that they establish at the foundation of their anti-pornography platform.
This platform mixes all of the familiar conservative tropes about protecting children, preserving the family, and combating sexual deviance with more contemporary feminist critiques of pornography, a legacy of the alliance between the Moral Majority and feminist porn critics from the twentieth century. The report argues that pornography harms children’s brains, renders them more susceptible to addictions of all kinds as adults, weakens their emotional bonds with their parents, makes them more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors, increases their chances of reporting being victims of physical and sexual violence, makes them more likely to commit crimes, lessens their sexual satisfaction, makes them more likely to have sex with younger adolescents, and increases their sexual uncertainty and casual sexual exploration.142
Much of the research supporting these arguments is up for debate, hasn’t been reproduced across multiple studies, and often took place in contexts outside the United States. Beyond this, though, we can see a heteronormative perspective entrenched in the alignment of research. Sex is understood as a private and adult act that ought to be controlled and subsumed under structures like marital procreation or loving monogamous relationships. The core concern is deviation from heteronormativity. As the report notes, “More frequent use of sexually explicit Internet materials is shown to foster greater sexual uncertainty in the formation of sexual beliefs and values, as well as a shift away from sexual permissiveness with affection to attitudes supportive of uncommitted sexual exploration.”143 The development of a freer and more fluid sexuality is to be combated at all costs, as can be seen in the connections it draws to biological dysfunction, psychological trauma, and association with criminality—though even conservative media outlets like Reason have reported the factual inaccuracy of these links, particularly to crime, which has gone down in a near causal relation with the rise of online pornography.144
We can also see this entrenched heteronormativity in the emphasis on preserving the nuclear family. As the study notes under the heading “Risky Behaviors and Other Harms,” “For males, increased pornography use is correlated with more sex partners, [ . . . ] greater acceptance of sex outside of marriage for married individuals, greater acceptance of sex before marriage, and less child centeredness during marriage.”145 It further correlates pornography use to paying for sex, increased casual sexual encounters, increased sexually transmitted infections (STIs), less condom use, earlier sexual debuts, increased relationship breakups, higher divorce rates, and riskier sexual practices.146 Perhaps most tellingly, the report argues that marriage formation brings demographic and socioeconomic improvements to society, and that “pornography has been shown to significantly negatively impact marriage formation, and in light robust controls, the effect is likely causal.”147 The report thus reflects the standard devil’s bargain of heteronormativity in which sex for pleasure is only acceptable within heterosexual, monogamous, amorous relationships, and, when this is pressed, the norm paradoxically reverts to procreative sex. Pornography is thus a social evil because it encourages libertinism and fuels sexual exploration and expressivity outside of the confines of heteronormative social scripts.
Ironically, despite feminism’s well-established critiques of the nuclear family and an existence centered on child-rearing, a discursive alliance has been formed.148 NCOSE argues that the paraphilic disorders and extreme sex in hard-core pornography teach women to enjoy sexual violence and degradation, instigate sexual offenses and perpetuate rape myths, increase verbal and physical aggression against women, increase female sexual victimization, and fuel the demand for sexual exploitation.149 The study also notes that pornography leads to negative body images for women and pressure to perform the sex acts depicted in pornography: “As a result of viewing pornography, women reported lowered body image, criticism from their partners regarding their bodies, increased pressure to perform acts seen in pornographic films, and less actual sex.”150 While all of these are valid concerns worthy of further study and potential activism, it is clear that NCOSE has failed to engage any feminist thinkers after the early 1990s—with the possible exception of Gail Dines’s radical anti-pornography writings. The report seems totally unaware of the discourse surrounding feminist and LGBTQIA+ pornography, instead understanding pornography as simply consisting of mainstream heteroporn and extremist deviant porn, like child sexual abuse images, incest pornography, zoophilia, coprophilia, urophilia, rape play, and torture.151 In other words, the report takes a historically and culturally specific genre of pornography as the universal form of any and all possible pornography. It thus fails to recognize that a few dominant porn production companies are responsible for implementing and maintaining the dominant genre of mainstream heteroporn that potentially leads to such negative consequences for women. The report comes close to recognizing this but never follows through on its own insight: “Mainstream commercial pornography has coalesced around a relatively homogeneous script involving violence and female degradation.”152 Subsequently, NCOSE is unable to imagine that pornography could ever be different. This severely limits its analysis and shows that it cannot think of porn outside of heteroporn, perhaps another consequence of its entrenched heteronormative perspective.
The one exception to NCOSE’s silence on more contemporary feminist discourse is their uptake of the term intersectionality. The term was coined by Black feminist theorist, lawyer, and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and has achieved public visibility through her 2016 TED Talk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality.”153 For Crenshaw, identity exists at the intersection of various cultural binaries and forms of marginalization. She draws on the experience of Black women to describe intersectionality, showing how Black women face the intersectional marginalization of being both marginalized as women and as Black people. In a staggering recontextualization of the term, NCOSE uses intersectionality as a foundational principle to interconnect sexual exploitation and abuse. As they explain, “Evidence supports the fact that child sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, sex trafficking, sexual violence, and more, are not isolated phenomena occurring in a vacuum, but that these and other forms of sexual abuse and exploitation overlap and reinforce one another.”154 By articulating pornography, child sex abuse, prostitution, and sex trafficking as intersections of a singular social phenomenon, NCOSE is able to “promote a comprehensive umbrella of solutions.”155 As we will see in much greater detail in chapters 3 and 4, nowhere has this intersectional approach been more successful and more damaging to sex workers, adult entertainers, sex educators, and LGBTQIA+ content creators than in the 2017 passage of the FOSTA-SESTA act by the US Congress. At this point in time, though, it is worth reviewing some of the other effects that this intersectional and heteronormative approach has had on government and corporate policy in the United States.
NCOSE tends to overstate its impact on policy and regulation and downplay the small size of its funding.156 For instance, the organization terminated all reported federal lobbying in 2006.157 Despite this, NCOSE claims to host regular events in the US Capitol Building.158 For example, in July of 2015, NCOSE held an anti-pornography summit on Capitol Hill titled “Pornography: A Public Health Crisis” that was meant to educate lawmakers on “how porn fuels sex trafficking, child exploitation, and sexual violence.”159 During the summit, NCOSE compared this health crisis to those of lead poisoning, asbestos exposure, smoking, and HIV/AIDS. The impact of these sorts of events is hard to gauge, but in 2012, NCOSE was able to get GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum to commit on the record to cracking down on pornography, though the sincerity of these commitments was questionable.160 In 2016, NCOSE saw the Republican National Committee include language from its summit in the official Republican platform for 2016: “The internet must not become a safe haven for predators. Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children’s safety and well-being.”161 Between April of 2016 and March of 2018, NCOSE also managed to get draft legislation officially recognizing pornography as a public health concern passed by state legislative bodies in Utah, South Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida, some even going so far as to describe pornography as a public health crisis.162 A number of these legislative bodies passed these resolutions with upwards of 80 percent of the votes, sometimes unanimously. The effect has also been particularly noticeable in the military, which stopped all sales of pornography from military commissaries and now offers sex-trafficking training to all military service members “with the issue of pornography explained as a factor driving demand.”163
NCOSE claims to have directly impacted the corporate policies of major US companies such as Comcast, Google, Walmart, Verizon, Starbucks, and McDonalds. Take Comcast for example, which in 2018 had more than twenty million television subscribers and was pressured to install much stronger parental controls and institute a “Common Sense” rating scheme to allow parents to automatically filter which programming and apps children have access to, including a “Kid’s Zone” in which all content is vetted for children under the age of twelve. The company has also buried pornographic channels, blocked their voice remote from searching for pornographic content, and even sanitized the titles and descriptions of adult entertainment offerings to cut down on the unwanted exposure of children to pornography. Further, pornography has been completely removed from their mobile app. Comcast has committed to future meetings with NCOSE and has publicly noted, “We welcome dialogue on how to continually improve on these measures from third-party stakeholders in family safety and digital health, including the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.”164 Or take Google, which, one year after appearing on NCOSE’s “Dirty Dozen” list, changed its corporate policy and banned all ads with pornographic content or that link to websites with sexually explicit content and further removed all pornographic and sexually explicit apps from its officially sanctioned Google Play store.165 The company also agreed to make SafeSearch much more visible by placing it prominently in the upper righthand corner of Google Images.166
Even if NCOSE is not directly responsible for the number of government and corporate policy changes that they claim in their literature, the organization is representative of a wider and more powerful discourse on pornography and sexuality. Whether or not they originated the set of rhetorical strategies and arguments that they employ, they capture a common sentiment about and comportment toward sex and sexuality in the twenty-first century. This new discourse has selected the few bits of feminist and queer theory from the past twenty years that support their arguments to dress an old discourse up in new clothes. As we’ll see in chapter 3, it is this discourse that has led to the most comprehensive changes in government and corporate policy toward pornography and sexual expression on the internet. It goes without saying that this demonstrates that heteronormativity still has deep roots in contemporary society and is deeply impacting not only the discourse surrounding the internet but also its very infrastructure.
Conclusion
Across the board, all of these contemporary anti-porn crusaders share a commitment to traditional gender roles and heteronormativity. They further share a commitment to leveraging pseudoscientific discourse and the rhetoric of protecting children and families to not only make their ideas palatable in the public forum but also to make it difficult for elected officials to be seen publicly opposing their political platforms. As we’ve seen concretely, the “Pandora’s box of porn” myth is at least untrue insofar as anti-porn crusaders have never stopped organizing or acting in the public sphere to achieve increased censorship. The following chapters will further show how this perspective on gender, sexuality, and pornography permeates tech companies—and internet platforms in particular—and how the untamable flow of pornography has been dammed up through content moderation. These automated content filters have become so strong that they routinely overblock material that is not pornographic, including art, sex education, LGBTQIA+ community discussions and resources, and a random assortment of other nonpornographic content. Further, even where the myth does hold true, for instance on tube sites like Pornhub, the untamable flow of pornography has been channeled into mainstream heteroporn productions, diminishing the heterogeneity of pornography to the point where it has become a rather banal stream of the same limited sex acts described by the same limited keywords. Both of these results of automated content filters are a signal victory for alt-right and Christian conservative activists who are willing to strike a devil’s bargain to allow pornography to persist as long as it remains homogeneously heteronormative and who can use the content moderation infrastructure to systematically attack any low-budget or amateur pornographers who are making content that deviates from the heterosexual norm.
2
Straight Code
Lenna and the Original Sin of Computer Vision
In 1973, Alexander Sawchuk, the father of the JPEG image file format, was an electrical engineer working in the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI). Sawchuk was looking for the perfect image to scan to optimize the new image compression algorithms that SIPI was developing. He wanted an image that was glossy, had a complex mix of colors and textures, and one that contained a human face. The engineers at SIPI came across a Playboy centerfold of Swedish model Lena Söderberg—her name in the magazine spelled ‘Lenna’ to encourage its proper pronunciation. Lenna wore a feathered Panama hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa, which seemed to offer the required image properties for testing their compression algorithms. The SIPI engineers took the top third of the centerfold only so that the image would be sized appropriately to be wrapped around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner and so that the resulting digital image would be 512px by 512px square. The scanner had custom analog-to-digital converters installed to capture the red, green, and blue channels of the scan in digital code that was then stored on a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer.1
Emily Chang has referred to this moment as “tech’s original sin.”2 By 1991, SIPI had made their scanned image of Lenna available for free to researchers across the world. It had quickly become the standard for evaluating image compression algorithms and could be frequently seen in the pages of image processing journals, books, and conference papers.3 As Mar Hicks, historian of technology and author of Programmed Inequality, told WIRED magazine, “If they hadn’t used a Playboy centerfold, they almost certainly would have used another picture of a pretty white woman. The Playboy thing gets our attention, but really what it’s about is this world-building that’s gone on in computing from the beginning—it’s about building worlds for certain people and not for others.”4 Hicks’s comment captures well a sentiment that seems widespread among women working in computer science and engineering.
