In November, four Republican representatives sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to “declare prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority.” The letter touched a fault line within the conservative intellectual world: Libertarians and small-government conservatives declared it a nanny-state heresy, while traditionalists, including the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari, praised it. As Ahmari argued on Twitter, “the Founding generation would likely have reacted to [pornography sites] not with high-libertarian nostrums, but with tar and feathers.” Entirely absent from these rounds of bombast, however, is a realistic assessment of what a successful campaign to restrict pornography might look like.
I, like many social conservatives, am deeply committed to rolling back the influence of pornography on American society. The industry is exploitative, it often profits from sexual trafficking and other forms of abuse, and it has a corrosive effect on both individuals and the wider culture: Studies suggest that consumption of online pornography can wear out the brain’s reward system, that it can alter sexual tastes, and that for men in particular, it can negatively affect mental health, body image, and the ability to form and maintain real-life relationships. Nor is it a marginal problem: One 2018 study found that 80% of men ages 18-35 had watched pornography within the last week.
Yet any campaign to restrict pornography must begin with the recognition that this is a difficult task. Many countries, including China, Japan, and South Korea, have tried, and none have had more than partial success. The question, then, is not one of pornography vs. no pornography, but of what types of pornography will be produced, how it will be distributed, and how easy it will be to access. And because we, unlike the censors of communist China, live in a democracy, we must be able to build broad public support for restriction.
So, what do Americans think about pornography? According to a Gallup survey from 2018, 45% of the public does not believe that viewing it is morally wrong in any way whatsoever. A bare majority disapproves of it, but there is no sign they are ready to ban it entirely. A successful anti-pornography campaign will have to operate within these constraints. That will mean attempting to create a more restrictive online environment than now exists, one where it is substantially more difficult for children to get ahold of pornography, where only adults willing to pay for it can access it, and the industry is held liable for the abuses that it profits from.
Not too long ago, such an environment was easy to imagine. In the late ’90s and early aughts, the adult film industry was very different than it is today. The industry made most of its money through DVD sales or gated websites that required users to pay to access content. Individual performers could create their own sites and make millions through subscriptions, and free pornography was difficult to get ahold of. That world is no more. Performers labor as peons to an unethical global monopoly, and free pornography is everywhere.
The change was largely the result of technology, and specifically, the ability of websites to host and stream video cheaply. The same developments that made YouTube possible made a host of “tube” pornography sites possible as well. Like YouTube, these websites host free, user-generated content, although in reality, much of their content is pirated from the gated sites.
The company most responsible for this state of affairs is Mindgeek, which owns Pornhub and a host of other popular tube sites. In the late aughts, Mindgeek created a half-dozen tube sites and then used the ad profits it made from pirated material to buy out large but struggling studios. By the mid-2010s, the company had a vice grip on the entire industry. Performers now work at a fraction of the wages that they would have earned in 2000. They are filmed by Mindgeek-owned studios, have their performances released by Mindgeek-owned distributors, and then have the same films pirated and uploaded onto Mindgeek-owned tube sites.
The sheer evil of this entire process was put on display in 2019 by a court case filed against a Pornhub content channel named “Girls Do Porn.” The channel’s producers lied to the women in their videos, asking them to sign complicated, fine-print-filled contracts (some while drunk, others while still legally minors) that gave the producers the right to upload the finished product on “tube” sites, even as they told the girls involved that the scenes they were about to film would only appear in “DVDs for ‘private collectors’ in Australia and New Zealand.” The videos were instead uploaded to a channel that has racked up some 677 million total views. Mindgeek knew about the problem for months but would not remove the channel until the producers were indicted on sex trafficking charges. And although Mindgeek eventually took the “official” videos down, it still presides over a media ecosystem in which pirated copies of them will live on forever. Our task is not to ban adult material but to ban the business model that allows companies like Mindgeek to prosper.
How could this be accomplished? As a start, the Justice Department could enforce antitrust laws against Mindgeek, which is now virtually a monopoly. Tube sites should also be stripped of their immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects them from legal liability for the user-generated content they host. Without this immunity, they will be compelled to spend vast sums of money policing every single one of their own uploads for pirated material. In all likelihood, they will soon be faced with hundreds, if not thousands, of court cases. One could further twist the knife by raising taxes on ad revenue for all sites that publish obscene material. Free pornography would soon become a money-losing business.
None of these measures will get rid of pornography. In fact, a world without Mindgeek and the tubes sites would be a world in which studios and performers made a lot more money than they do now. They would prefer such a world full of walls. But so should we. We cannot end pornography, but we can build a world where it is a lot harder to get your hands on it. If done right, such a restriction campaign might garner support from unlikely corners, including not only feminists but some adult performers themselves. That is the nucleus of a coalition whose reforms will stick.
Tanner Greer is a journalist and researcher focused on contemporary security issues in the Asia-Pacific and the military history of East and Southeast Asia.
