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It's more than that. If you have any regular exposure to the right side of the political spectrum in the US, porn basically came out of nowhere as a political
by Kadin 10y ago
It's more than that. If you have any regular exposure to the right side of the political spectrum in the US, porn basically came out of nowhere as a political issue fairly recently. It's always been there, but it was sort of a fringey thing to get upset about (compared to, say, think-of-the-fetuses, or hating on teh gheys for wanting to get married, etc.). Plus it had a certain whiff of feminism about it, which probably scared off some of the hard-right who can't decide if Andrea Dworkin should be venerated as a conservative or burned as a witch.
But, for reasons that are opaque to me, the intellectual tarpit of the hard right seems to have coughed up pornography as their newest social wedge issue.
And now we're seeing the next phase in the playbook, which is to push various degrees of insane legislation at the state or sometimes even local level, while at the same time they have an army of pundits working the media, beating the drum about "porn addiction" and generally trying to frame it as the latest "public health crisis".
I would not write it off as simply some greedy politicians. That's probably how it was sold to a particular group of self-interested politicians, in this particular instance. But there's a greater strategy at work (whether directed or as a sort of emergent behavior), and it fits together very neatly with other socially-conservative/authoritarian issues.
- mhurron 10y ago> porn basically came out of nowhere as a political issue fairly recently Not everyone would be counting LBJ's anti-porn commission as 'fairly recently.' Even then, it only 'came out of nowhere' if you discount legislating porn as separate from the overall legislating morality platform that everything else you mention is an outgrowth of.