Banning Books Over 'Porn' Doesn’t Mean That They’re Porn
A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted this year found that 8 in 10 people oppose banning books discussing critical race theory, LGBTQ concepts, sexual wellness, slavery, and other topics. The American Library Association also published a report noting that the group’s Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library materials in 2021.
Parents, by all means, have the right to control what their children read in the home setting. However, conservative politicians across the country have argued that books dealing with sexual wellness and education, gender identity, and LGBTQ topics amount to porn somehow. This assumption is revisionist.
Porn is the depiction of one or more consenting, legal-aged adults acting out and experiencing sexual fantasies and fetishes often in some sort of controlled environment like a set or a performance space. Adult entertainment is regulated and governed by laws. Performers can join performers' guilds, a union, and receive agency representation.
There are charities that offer performers free or discounted mental health and medical services. There are self-regulatory groups that coordinate with public health officials to ensure that occupational safety measures and safe sex practices are standard across the adult industry. Adult entertainment is also broad when dealing with professions.
It encompasses pleasure products, film production, animation, video games, audio, webcam modeling, and other types of modeling.
Lawyers, sound engineers, screenwriters, cinematographers, journalists, animators, salespeople, high-risk payment processing consultants, web designers, merger and acquisition professionals, medical and health professionals, public relations strategists, and age verification consultants comprise this entertainment industry and its segments.
Companies also assist in countering sexual slavery, human trafficking, the distribution of non-consensual porn (i.e., revenge porn), intellectual property theft, and content piracy.
This is what "porn" is. And, even then, porn is viewed differently in the industry as compared to cam modeling or the production of more home-grown, performer-produced content found on sites like OnlyFans. A cam model isn't necessarily a porn star. Adult content creators or adult performers are excellent terms used to describe the range of categories.
But, the definition of porn used by those looking to ban books (including important literature regarding sexual wellness and LGBTQ issues) is politically charged and misguided.
The Supreme Court defined the Miller test as a way to identify obscenity. The court ruled that obscene materials are defined as those that the average person, by applying "contemporary community standards," would find appealing to "prurient interests." These interests would depict, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by the appropriate state laws. The material, further taken as a whole, would lack any serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to the cultural conversation.
Interpretation of Miller generally holds that it is likely unconstitutional to maintain "national contemporary community standards'' as a defining factor in identifying obscenity. Community standards are also varied by jurisdiction, with the fact that certain content might be considered obscene in one locality whereas the jury in another might not consider it obscene at all. Unless the content in question is found to fail the Miller test, arguing that something is obscene and should be prohibited is an affront to the First Amendment. At that, attempting to implicate a book as obscene via the Miller test is likely to require an extremely heavy burden of proof to support censorship.
The First Amendment protects free expression. Just like the right to spirituality and religion, sexual expression and the right to read and learn are sacrosanct in the United States.
Banning books is censorship of the highest order.
Michael Dean McGrady Jr. is a journalist and commentator based in the United States. His work covers the adult entertainment industry, drug legalization, and harm reduction.
