Could Porn Be Censored in America?

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Social reformers have long fought against the alleged threats posed by obscene content, whether in paintings, books, live performance, photographs, records, movies or videos. In the 1980s, feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon took up the campaign against pornography and gained significant influence. Their anti-porn legislation was adopted in Indianapolis and proposed in Cambridge, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Dworkin testified before the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (aka the Meese Commission), supporting its campaign to censor sexually explicit materials. (Meese’s effort to stop the sale of  Playboy magazine was ultimately rejected by a federal court.)

The Commission argued that a link existed between pornography and violence. It extended the Supreme Court’s 1973  Miller v. California decision to include real or imaginary harm to children and women. Under Miller, obscene or sexually explicit materials could be regulated if (i) they produced sexual arousal in the viewer; (ii) were offensive based on “contemporary community standards” and (iii) taken as a whole lacked artistic, scholarly or scientific value. In an earlier, 1968 decision,  Ginsberg v. New York, the Court introduced the notion of “harm-to-minor” with regard to obscene materials. The Commission extended the notion of pornography’s harm-to-minors to a violation of women's civil rights. 

“To a number of us," the commission's majority report said, "the most important harms must be seen in moral terms. ... [F]or children to be taught by these materials that sex is public, that sex is commercial, and that sex can be divorced from any degree of affection, love, commitment, or marriage is for us the wrong message at the wrong time.” 

In 1986, the same year the Meese report came out, the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography and Public Health found no scientific basis to believe that minors are adversely affected by pornography; this is the same finding the 1970 Nixon pornography commission reached.

Over the last decade-plus, the U.S. has been witness to an on-again, off-again battle over Internet porn filtering. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA), part of the Telecommunications Act. It was designed to block Internet transmission of sexually explicit materials to minors under 18 years. It prohibited materials "that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." A year later, in  Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, the Court ruled the CDA unconstitutional.

In 2000, Congress passed the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). It required public libraries that receive federal funds to install computer-based filters blocking access to Internet pornography. Librarians and others challenged the act, but in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled it did not violate First Amendment rights. It’s the filtering law of the land.

Cameron’s promotion of anti-porn legislation and the actions by other European countries will likely have little ramification in the U.S. Congress. The conservative Daily Caller noted, “Morality in Media, which, in response to Cameron’s announcement, released a statement expressing their support for private internet filters, failed to address whether they would support federal intervention on the matter.” 

Porn seems like an easy target when compared to the deeper, more institutional problems women and children face. How are we to deal with the widespread domestic violence that wracks families everywhere and is compounded by the never-ending recession, the new economic normal? How are we to end sex trafficking? And what about all those girls and women who experience sexual violence, including date rape, at the hands of a partner?

Porn invokes people’s worst sexual fears/fantasies. Yet, it’s a fight almost impossible to win. Anti-porn activists are unsettled by the enormous increase and easily availability of porn (especially “hard-core or “gonzo” porn). They claim such porn harms women and children, contributing directly to gender inequality, violence against women and children and sex trafficking. This assertion is much debated. It's not been made clear how restricting porn will put a stop to the actions that harm all too many women and girls in America.