Dworkin has been having a bit of a moment lately. Her books got reissued. The Right to Sex brought her up a few years ago. There’s Sophie Gilbert’s new book. The first generations raised by internet porn have come of age, and we have problems like “why is my boyfriend choking me?” and Andrea Long Chu. The libfem talking points have worn thin.
For a dude like Luke Winkie, this is all a bit concerning. But even in the new conservative zeitgeist, a respectable writer at Slate can’t just openly defend “Asian bitch destroyed by BBC”.
Instead, he responds by reporting routine GOP wankery as news.
You may have heard that earlier this week, the Republican-controlled Congress floated a piece of legislation that would effectively ban all pornography in the country. That would be a significant incursion on the First Amendment, and a mammoth victory for America’s freshly emboldened Christofascist front. But what does this bill really argue? Is a full-blown porn ban legally feasible? And most important, how did we end up in a place where such a regressive policy is culturally palatable? Let’s break it down.
It starts in alarmist terms, and then it’s written in an pseudo-interview Q&A format that he doesn’t use for articles on other topics. The questions are being asked by his imagined Prototypical Reader.
What’s the deal with this bill?
It’s called the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, or IODA, and if ratified, it would make the possession of all media related to the “prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion” a criminal act. Legally speaking, the bill aims to recategorize all pornography—in the broadest possible sense of the term—as “obscene material.” This is key, because there’s a narrow and hugely subjective carve-out in the Constitution that prevents the First Amendment from protecting anything considered “obscene.” That exception has been brandished to curtail various forms of sexual expression and enterprise for years. (In 1998, the Alabama state government used the provision to ban the sale of sex toys, of all things.) However, this bill is so clumsy and flagrantly unenforceable that in its original text, it seems like it would abolish the possession of everything from cheeky pinups to back issues of Hustler.
That seems pretty unwieldy! Who put the bill together?
Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee, perhaps better known as @BasedMikeLee on Twitter, who is one of the stranger specimens in MAGAdom. The man has never met a perfidious conspiracy theory he hasn’t immediately fallen in love with, to the point that he has floated the idea that deep-cover federal agents orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection. Lee is also a habitual champion of go-nowhere bills that intend, specifically, to rile up some of the more antisocial corners of the Trump base. He has introduced legislation to remove the U.S. from the United Nations, and advocated for the nation’s exit from NATO, neither of which has gained much traction. More to the point, this latest effort to ban porn is actually the third time Lee has brought IODA to Congress, after two failed attempts in 2022 and 2024.
So the article itself concedes that this is not a newsworthy development, and goes on to explain even more about the implausibility. And yet:
I still feel a little queasy about it though, given how the country is backsliding on all sorts of personal liberties.
Fair enough. I definitely can understand why the bill is making headlines: MAGAdom has made a sharp prudish turn over the past few years, itself informed by a larger anti-sex, anti-pleasure current across party lines. While Mike Lee is not the shrewdest operator in his caucus, it isn’t hard to imagine the Republican Party someday taking up a more serious federal fight against porn. (After all, a comprehensive ban on adult material was a fixture of Project 2025, which, so far, has been the core schematic of the second Trump administration.) We’ve already seen the opening salvos of this struggle: 17 states have blocked porn browsers, and most of them are in the South.
Going back further, you could say the regression began with the passing of SESTA and FOSTA in 2018, which greatly reduced the number of platforms available for sex workers to safely advertise their services online, but also obliterated things like the Craigslist Personals section and Tumblr porn under the auspices of fighting “sex trafficking.” Both bills intentionally conflate consensual adult sex work with illegal, nonconsensual sex trafficking in order to “sanitize” the internet, disenfranchise sex workers, and create a moral panic around sex and porn. In 2025, attitudes seem to be even more conservative and pearl-clutchy than they were in 2018, so it’s not entirely out of the question that IODA would match more modern sensitivities.
In fact, hollering about “consent” while pretending not to understand that poverty means a lack of choices (“agency”) is a classic bro deflection move. What does the word “disenfranchise” even mean in this context? Are we talking about voting? It just sounds like something a Good Liberal would be against. The point isn’t even whether SESTA/FOSTA had good empirical outcomes. He’s less concerned with the actual well-being of “sex workers” than the fact that caring about it would be an illegitimate “moral panic.” It’s important that the reader not agree with any position labeled “conservative” or be old enough to remember the Before Times. How terribly uncool.
This is all so weird. One of the most reliable MAGA demographics are “don’t tread on me” dudebro Barstool types—it’s hard for me to imagine them being in favor of a porn ban.
You’re probably right! If IODA, or something like it, ever passes, I do think it will cost the administration some serious political capital with that constituency. But to be honest, America is in the midst of a significant anti-feminist backlash—spurred on by the flailing rage of those same downwardly mobile young men—and I do think a lot of that ire has been molded into a simmering anti-porn sentiment. Young people are having less sex than ever, and the resulting impotency has inflamed gender relations. The massively successful Twitch streamer Asmongold, who has become something of an incel avatar, recently complained of “hoeflation,” which is a term connected to the toxic idea that women, writ large, are making too much money through ad hoc digital sex work on platforms like OnlyFans. Meanwhile Andrew Tate, who has been enshrined as the ringleader of the so-called manosphere, has gone much further. Last year, he asserted that “Any man who has sex with a woman because ‘it feels good’ is gay.” These are indicators of a society that has fallen out of sync with the liberating pleasures of human intimacy. The typical Barstool Republican might not hate porn, but do they hate women? That’s a more complicated question.
This sentence in particular is doing a lot of work: “Young people are having less sex than ever, and the resulting impotency has inflamed gender relations.” In fact, the concern is that the sex people ARE having is bad due to impotency resulting from porn. It’s not the virginity causing the impotence.
Is it a complicated question, Luke? If you took a random person and had them watch a bunch of porn, you’d expect them to start absorbing the attitudes from it, like any other media. What attitudes would those be? Can Luke explain what “Asian bitch destroyed by BBC” has to do with the liberating pleasures of human intimacy? Perhaps there’s something about that which is obviously, fundamentally, and severely incompatible with the highest forms of human intimacy?
This is getting depressing.
I know, but if it’s any consolation, it wasn’t always just conservatives who’ve harbored these bizarre compulsions about pornography. Perhaps you remember Andrea Dworkin, the second-wave feminist gadfly who led a war on porn throughout the 1980s. Her cause reached an apotheosis in 1983, when Dworkin wrote an ordinance for the Minneapolis city government characterizing porn as a civil rights violation against women. (The city’s mayor, Don Fraser, vetoed the ordinance because it was “too vague.” Sound familiar?) The United States has a history filled with ridiculous crackups about sexual freedom. And in that sense, this too shall (hopefully) pass.
“Bizarre compulsions” is trying too hard. Her actual book, Pornography, asks if there’s maybe something fucked up about a Hustler spread of men in a car with rifles with a naked woman tied to the hood, with a caption about beaver hunting season. It’s important to say BIZARRE COMPULSION BIZARRE COMPULSION to prevent yourself from thinking about that too hard.
Was Dworkin on to something, though? Is porn actually bad for you? Or for society? Do these people have a point?
Look, there is no shortage of sad stories in the porn business. You don’t have to look far to find evidence of exploitation, coercion, or on a more meta level, gross stereotypes about race and gender that have been pounded into the global subconscious by countless vulgar uploads on Pornhub. But, that’s not all porn, and it doesn’t even kind of encompass all people’s experience producing and consuming it. Besides, that’s not really the conversation we’re having here. Is indulging in vicarious carnal excess bad for your brain? There’s never been much evidence to say so, no matter what Mike Lee—or Andrea Dworkin for that matter—might say.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the American Journal of Public Health: “The movement to declare pornography a public health crisis is rooted in an ideology that is antithetical to many core values of public health promotion and is a political stunt. … Consuming pornographic material does not directly lead to health problems, infectious disease morbidity, property destruction, or population displacement. Research suggests that there may be adverse health consequences of pornography use for some, no substantial consequences for the majority, and positive effects for others.”
Why does he have to intellectualize it with phrases like “indulging in vicarious carnal excess?” After making fun of her, he acknowledges that all of Andrea Dworkin’s criticism are actually correct, “but that’s not the conversation.” Instead, let’s talk about straw men and medical journals. It’s notable that his link to the benefits of porn points to a paywalled academic book. This conveys a message that the benefits, which are not obvious, must be some kind of advanced, esoteric secret.
I really wish people could grasp that idea. Surely a nation where everyone is terrified of sex and bodies is unsustainable.
I’m right there with you. If IODA does get off the ground, the next Democratic nominee should absolutely run on a pro-masturbation platform.
Acknowledging the problem with “Asian bitch destroyed by BBC” isn’t the same thing as “being afraid of sex and bodies”, no matter how many times people repeat it.
The Lukes of the world rarely have the emotional capacity to actually envision the utopia proposed by Dworkin et al. He can use a phrase like “liberating pleasures of human intimacy”, but only sarcastically. I wonder if he’s ever experienced, like, taking MDMA with a big crowd of people?
It’s not the same vibe, bro. Andrew Tate thinks it’s gay, yeah, because living from that place is very different than aspiring to be like Andrew Tate.
Importantly, nothing about porn’s production or consumption feels like that. It’s the opposite. So intellectually honest people should be able to admit it’d be better to live in a society that encourages love over porn.
In post-nut clarity, it should be possible to admit that a sad thing has happened.