Then They Came for the Porn

The following article may make some readers uncomfortable. That’s a good thing.

To be more specific, this article is in revolt against the puritanical notions of pornography as a monolithic evil, a space of degeneration and moral rot. Pornography is not perfect; like everything tinged by Capital it begins, at a large enough scale, to see humans as visceral machinery rather than independent humans. This article is not a defense of the “mainstream porn industry” nor material of the Epstein/Maxwell variety. It will, I’m sure, nonetheless earn these accusations.

When I was a child, full of piss and vinegar and righteous indignation about the injustices of the world, it was a pattern for adults to pat my head and offer the patronizing dismissal/reassurance combo of “sweetheart, the world is not black and white. Things can not be solved with a wave of the hand and some hope in your heart.” The same people now tell me that the root of all evil is seeing human genitalia represented upon a screen, and that by ceding my personal information, my fingerprint, a blood sample, a small donor slice of my liver, a retinal scan, and implanting a chip into my frontal lobe to zap away all of the naughty and uncouth thoughts, I might be freed from all moral complexities.

Since the blokes at Unwinnable have been so kind as to permit me this pseudonym, I will not butcher and dress up the matter at hand. I was exposed to pornography when I was roughly thirteen years old. I will concede my exposure was not to naughty videos of the hardcore variety, where the women are caught between moaning and wailing in pleasure or pain or some moral quandary of both at once, nor to the softcore sideboob shots of my forebears.

My first exposure to pornography was smut. And it made me a better person.

You may laugh at that, but allow me to elaborate: at that age I was beginning to experience the first pangs of a great depression. I was beginning to grow cynical about the whole world and my place in it. The literature dedicated to me – Young Adult and below – were at best patronizing and at worst vile and too simple for comfort. I’d witnessed Trayvon Martin’s murderer be acquitted for a digital-age lynching and these authors wanted me to imagine a dystopia where the government unjustly manipulated systems and created artificial fears… but they also impacted white people?

My access to “adult” (in this case meaning the works of Hemingway, Melville, Jackson, et al.) literature was hung up on arbitrary age restrictions and the continued insistence that no child left behind also meant that by god no child should ever get ahead under any circumstances. I found refuge in fanfiction, back in the days of LiveJournal and the eponymous website (fanficton.net). At fifteen I’d started writing for various fandom “Kink Memes.”

This lexicon may be lost on some: back in those days, LiveJournal hosted a sort of forum system where fans of a certain IP (among the largest around me were Harry Potter, Star Trek, and Doctor Who) could anonymously post short fiction requests involving their favorite characters or pairings. Some of these were sexual, even kinky. Others were more fixated on fics that asked “what if?” and resolving open plot potholes.

Here’s the rub: like most nascent adolescents I was beginning to experience the pangs of desire, the longing for romantic relationships. I was also deeply pathetic at the time (and perhaps still am). I was kept away from the realm of the involuntary celibate because I had access to stories that both satisfied by physical and emotional needs, even if it was via transference, and because those romantic depictions of love and intimacy taught me before most of my peers the importance of consent at all times, the necessity of unceasing empathy, and the power of working through conflict. Knowing that there was a profound difference between good sex and ignoble fucking also came in clutch when I began to explore my sexuality at a more appropriate age.

When I was barely eighteen years old, I received my first offer to write pornography for money. It was from a private client, someone who had been a fan of mine for a couple of years without knowing my age nor my circumstances. I hardly remember the prompt at this point, but I remember the offer of eighty dollars buzzing in my ears with vigor. I was already doing requests free of charge! The monetary incentive only encouraged me to further hone my craft to make my buyer feel like they’d gotten their money’s worth.

I wrote my way through college, indulging smut across fandoms, across time periods, across kinks both relatively normal and far-out, and paid for my first apartment with the money I’d earned via what is considered by many to be “sex work.” I paid my taxes according to a freelancer’s obligations, kept the IRS out of my (legal) business, and existed as a good citizen. Spending years writing smut beside term papers and analyses was among the best things I could have done for my literary development, as strange as it may sound. Regardless of the material, it was time in front of a keyboard typing away, honing the word processor in my skull until it was sharper than it had ever been.

I would not be the competent writer I am today without the warm embrace of the Kink Meme nor the hundreds of people who complimented my work and offered constructive feedback at the same time creative writing teachers were telling me that my work was beyond what my skill level should have been, to the point of being immune from criticism from their perspective. I was challenged to grow by reworking canon situations, re-contextualizing relationships and hostilities, to inhabit the voices of existing characters plausibly.

I’ve written a lot of things the average joe would raise his nose at. I’ve written stories of climactic enemies finding solace in one another. I’ve written stories of characters being fucked at gunpoint (dubiously consensual at best). I’ve written stories where people have been captured, violated, and broken by monsters, demons, or god knows what else. My work has depicted liberation of sworn enemies from the bonds of fate in grand rebellions against the gods. My work has also depicted the taking of autonomy and power from characters. But it is all words.

It has taken autonomy and power away from text. The words on the screen right now do not have autonomy but merely the illusion of it when properly fueled with the dear reader’s imagination. Those characters are figments of our collective imagination. Disempowering them for a few moments does not and should not disempower anything material.

In fact, it does the opposite. Years ago I received a message from a fan who told me, in no uncertain terms, that my outwardly “problematic” depiction of an abusive relationship between demon and woman had helped them to recognize the real symptoms of domestic abuse and remove herself from that situation before it could cost her anything more than a few months of wasted time and a couple of bruises. She told me that by the time it clicked in her mind on her own, she might not have either had the materials nor the cognitive willpower to emancipate herself.

This month Itch.io and Steam removed hundreds of pornographic and eroge games from its storefronts as a result of moralist posturing from an Aussie “feminist” organization (really a puritanical amalgam of self-righteousness). Not only were thousands of games de-indexed, this kind of activity often can spark mass speculation. Confusion swirled around award-winning horror game Mouthwashing, which was de-listed though Itch.io states that this happened some time ago and was unrelated. Regardless, both of these types of media have a right to exist: the former, which are explicitly labeled as pornographic and are thus a consensual dive into adult situations; the latter, which in their depiction of uncomfortable subject matter and antisocial behavior provides people a medium through which to internalize just how abuse manifests, how bodily sanctity can be systemically disrupted by an apathetic system or men unwilling to accept their part in sexual violence.

The reality is that sexual content is a bugbear for the moralists authoritarians who see it as a window to plausibly strip people of their creative freedoms, to warp reality by denying the existence of fantasy. The pornographers are like the communists, in a sense – distasteful enough by the common man to go unmissed when disappeared and written out of society. Then, when the next group of “sexual subversives” are taken away, they must be like the pornographers, contributing to social degeneracy and thus equally unmissed. Niemöller’s poem retains its relevance when uncensored.

Give me your blood and soul, says the government man. Give me the keys to freedom within the heart and soul. It is better for the children if you cede that which makes you human. And if you don’t, well, you’re a fucking nonce.

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A contributor that wishes to remain anonymous. 

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This article was updated to address confusion over the listing of the game Mouthwashing.