Defying The Antiporn Police

Is Sex A Menace To Society? Recent Social Media Purges Are Eerily Evocative Of A Reagan-era Attempt To Censor Playboy.

- James R. Petersen

Last November, Apple’s App Store removed Tumblr from its digital shelves after concerns arose that objectionable images, including child pornography, were slipping through the blogging platform’s content filter. Within a month, all of Tumblr’s explicit adult material had disappeared from public view. The concerns were serious and legitimate, but the rush to purge exploitative items from the site also ensnared vast swaths of perfectly healthy sexual content.

The episode eerily echoed past culture wars. An overly broad effort to stamp out sexual expression? We’ve been there.

In 1968, at the height of the sexual revolution, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Its aim was to determine whether porn had negative social effects, and its conclusions, reached in 1970 and based on scientific study, were clear: There was no connection between consuming pornography and participating in antisocial behavior. A decade and a half later, the Reagan administration decided that it wasn’t going to let little things like facts get in the way of a conservative crusade.

The 1980s were a cultural battleground, a time when misinformation frequently combined with moral panic to great inflammatory effect. Remember the Parents Music Resource Center, the coalition that took on the music industry in 1985 to protect kids from what it believed were inappropriate lyrics? Having labeled a Twisted Sister song prorape, PMRC co-founder Tipper Gore must have been surprised to hear singer Dee Snider testify in a Senate hearing that he was in fact a faithful Christian and that “Under the Blade” was actually about the fear of surgery. “The only sadomasochism, bondage and rape in this song is in the mind of Ms. Gore,” he said.