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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Arwa Mahdawi

The far right’s crusade against porn is a crusade against progress

‘Republicans are already classifying anything they don’t like as obscene pornography and finding ways to ban it.’
‘Republicans are already classifying anything they don’t like as obscene pornography and finding ways to ban it.’ Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Project 2025’s porn problem

The lines between art and obscenity aren’t always clear; pornography can be hard to define. “I know it when I see it,” the late US supreme court justice Potter Stewart said in his famous non-definition of the term.

The far right knows it when they see it as well. And they see pornography everywhere. Experts have noted that worries about pornography among social conservatives seem to go up and down over time: right now we seem to be at a high point of porn panic. The Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley, for example, has repeatedly claimed that feminism has driven young men to “pornography and video games”. And the Republican party has called porn a “public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions”.

Porn also plays a big part in Project 2025: a Christian nationalist manifesto and list of desired policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation that has been described as “a wishlist for a Trump presidency”. (Donald Trump has said he knows nothing about it.) The 900-page plan proposes policies like mass deportations, extreme abortion restrictions and the dismantling of climate change protections. It also says that pornography should be outlawed.

On the surface the conservative obsession with porn doesn’t seem overly problematic. There are, after all, plenty of serious issues with the porn industry. It’s often exploitative and it’s helped to normalize violent acts like strangling during sex. The problem, however, is the incredibly broad way in which Project 2025 Mandate talks about porn. No definition of porn is provided; rather, it’s talked about in the context of things like transgender rights and non-normative gender expression. Porn, we are told is “invading [children’s] school libraries”. The word has been weaponized as a useful way to attack LGBTQ+ rights. See, for example, this extract from the foreword of the Project 2025 Mandate:

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

What does this mean? Well it seems to mean that the far right want to define a book that features a same-sex couple as illegal pornography and throw the author of the book and any distributors of the book in prison. It seems to mean that a book talking about sexual violence could be classified as porn and banned. It seems to mean that talking about the existence of trans people would be “porn” and criminalized. In short: anything that goes against normative gender roles and hierarchies, or interrogates those hierarchies, could be considered obscene and criminalized.

Project 2025, it can’t be stressed enough, isn’t some sort of hypothetical dystopian possibility. The scariest part of all this is that it’s very much under way. Republicans are already classifying anything they don’t like as obscene pornography and finding ways to ban it. There’s been a surge in book bans in American schools, for example. From July to December 2023, PEN America found that more than 4,300 books were removed from schools across 23 states. Many of the targeted titles feature LGBTQ+ characters. Works that address rape and sexual assault are also increasingly being targeted. So don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s preoccupation with porn. The far right aren’t interested in the exploitation of women, they’re interested in controlling exactly what it means to be a woman. This isn’t a crusade against porn, it’s a crusade against progress.

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