With users roiling in the midst of Tumblr's purge, Facebook's community standards have seen renewed scrutiny. The airbrushing of sexual content stems from a combination of FOSTA-SESTA's sweeping language and the need to maintain an advertiser-friendly atmosphere. In particular, FOSTA-SESTA, a law introduced ostensibly to curb online sex, has rapidly changed the way that platforms handle sexual content. The pressure is for platforms to delete this sort of content, regardless of whether or not it has to do with sex work. It also fails to assure the safety of sex workers.
It used to be a common joke, which may still have cultural cachet, that the Internet was designed for porn. Robot Chicken produced a sketch where the mass deletion of porn resulted in the complete breakdown of social order, comically over-the-top in its presentation. An episode of The Simpsons has an exchange where Homer's co-worker Carl says, “You're the Internet's number one non-porno site,” to which Lenny adds, “Which makes you ten trillionth overall.” Internet porn evolved from static thumbnail images and 30-second video clips to streaming tube sites, VR, and interactive sex toys.
But the true impact of the Internet is understated. While it may have created the cultural notions of a porn stash in a suspiciously-named folder, it also allowed people to safely engage with their own sexual desires. For many, sex was taboo. A lifetime of abysmal abstinence-only education and intense cultural suppression meant that the Internet was the only place they could go. This held especially true for LGBTQ+ people who were still figuring out their sexual orientation or gender identity.
This wasn’t a perfect arrangement. Porn often appeals to fantasies, sometimes transgressive in nature. Modeling one's own sexual practice from porn without any sort of grounding in healthy discussions about boundaries, consent, and the nature of intimacy doesn’t lead to a healthy image of what sex is or what it can be. But for many people, that's the only exposure they ever get. Sites like PornHub and Xhamster have gone so far to include sex education sections of their websites. Laci Green's YouTube channel was an invaluable resource to many, despite her later pratfalls.
What’s most chilling about this new direction is that it's made obvious that we're not talking about content being the price we pay, but people. The sex workers who don't have ways to vet their clients in a world where this is pushed offline are perhaps the most immediate. But it's also the gay teenager in a conservative small town being unable to find an outlet, a young girl who wants to understand safe sex to avoid a pregnancy with her first partner, the kinkster who believes that they’re alone in the world. While one may laugh at the idea of no future porn on the Internet, that will likely be a new reality.