It was the height of the porn wars. More than abortion or homosexuality, the rising tide of pornography in America was, in the 1970s, becoming central to conservative Americans’ perception of a civilization in decline. For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade. He fought to remove adult content from convenience stores. He went to court to battle Hustler and Penthouse. And he never forgave Carter—who ended up winning the White House in 1976, carrying the evangelical vote along the way—for his original sin of talking to Hugh Hefner’s publication. “Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of his day,” Falwell said in 1981. [...]
From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument—its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences. It was treated as a matter of urgency not just by the religious right, which decried the hypersexualizing of society, but by the radical left, which denounced the objectifying of women. Liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals found themselves unexpectedly allied in vilifying the adult entertainment industry. After decades of intensifying conflict, Ronald Reagan convened a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985; two years later, Reagan held a press conference to announce his administration’s plan to combat illegal obscenity—and issue a warning to the porn professionals: “Your industry’s days are numbered.” [...]
When it landed, the 1,960-page Meese Report surprised exactly no one: It concluded that pornography was a threat to society and recommended harsher enforcement of obscenity laws. In a particularly memorable passage, the report said the link between porn consumption and violence “requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence,” yet concluded, “We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions … that are plainly justified by our own common sense.” The commission came under immediate criticism for its lack of scholarly rigor; academics whose work was cited by Meese protested the report’s misapplication of their data, and even National Review concluded that the commission “has to some extent found the conclusion it was looking for.” That the report’s findings were by and large empirically unsupported mattered not. Its recommendations allowed the Justice Department to execute what Reagan’s supporters were agitating for: a crackdown on porn. [...]
Terrorism was suddenly an all-eclipsing concern for Americans across the ideological spectrum. As evangelical Christians grasped what this meant for their porn campaign, their concern turned to frustration and eventually anger. Religious conservatives watched in horror as big porn hitched itself to the rise of big tech, giving obscenity a foothold in corporate America and solidifying the adult industry’s product as culturally tolerable. In December 2003, the magazine published by Christian organization Focus on the Family noted how, in 2000, “conservatives celebrated what they thought marked the end of hard-core’s unchecked reign.” Three years later, the article concluded, “those celebrations have given way to disappointment.” [...]
One might think the #MeToo era, with its fierce backlash against toxic masculinity, would give new energy to the enemies of an industry that traffics heavily in the filmed subjugation of women. Some conservatives have tried to capitalize on this point; earlier this year, Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Let’s Ban Porn.” Feminists, however, are decidedly less vocal than they were in past decades, split internally over the question of whether filmed sex empowers women or exploits them. “Some have broken with the faith-based organizations, but we haven’t, even though we’re a different breed—progressive, lefty feminists,” says Gail Dines, a prominent anti-porn activist. “For us, this is still all about gender equality. You can’t pick and choose. You either believe that women and men have the right to the same political, social and cultural respect, or you don’t.”
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