The #MeToo movement means many things to many people, but for anti-porn activists it’s the ultimate vindication.



The moment has been a long time coming for religious conservatives at war with what they see as America’s culture of sexual objectification. Many see social media-fueled outpouring as a much-needed referendum on a culture that reduces a woman’s worth to her sex appeal.

Fighting porn in the age of ubiquitous internet isn’t easy, but nevertheless the mood was upbeat this week as hundreds of activists gathered near Washington to share stories, talk strategy, and canvass lawmakers on their agenda at a conference organized by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which recently notched up a major PR victory in getting Walmart to ban Cosmopolitan magazine from checkout counters.

“This is what real change looks like in our #MeToo culture,” said Dawn Hawkins, the group’s executive director.

The anti-pornography movement has always been an unusual coalition of religious conservatives and radical feminists, dating back to Andrea Dworkin, the feminist icon who wrote Pornography: Men Possessing Women.



But in the Trump era, defined by pussy hats and pussy-grabbing, the Dworkin-meet-Mike-Pence alliance is a whole new level of weird. It’s also supercharged. With both feminism and the Christian right in the ascendent thanks to the divisive Trump White House, the anti-porn movement has gotten a new jolt of energy.

The alliance has finessed a politically tricky situation by drawing on the values of both sides and using the language of #MeToo and modern feminism to cast the widest possible net.

Of course, Americans have always been much better at denouncing porn than abstaining from watching it.

Porn viewership is likely at an all-time high, though reliable statistics are hard to come by. In 2017 Pornhub alone averaged 81 million visitors per day, and viewership is notably growing among women, some of whom are giving porn a second look through a sex-positive lens.

Dawn Hawkins, executive director at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Photograph: National Center on Sexual Exploitation

But at what might be described as CPAC for the anti-porn movement this week, there was no such thing as healthy engagement with pornography.

As activists saw it, porn and sexual assault were but different points on a single continuum of sexual violence. The key difference was that there was an entrenched financial interest behind pornography – and to a lesser extent prostitution.

“The difference between prostitution and battery, incest and rape is that there’s nothing like the money in pornography and prostitution,” said Melissa Farley, a clinical psychologist and the founder of the San Francisco-based Prostitution Research and Education, who spoke on a panel at the conference.

Porn has been cast as empowering by some feminists. But Farley and other like-minded activists say that misses the “choicelessness” of the vast majority of women who work in the industry, many of whom are forced into it by economic necessity or other circumstance.

What’s worse, they say, is that assuming sex workers have a choice in their profession implies they signed up for the abuse and other mistreatments to which they are often exposed.

“Slaves have been blamed for their own enslavement, children have been blamed for provoking their own sexual abuse,” said Farley, “and women in prostitution have been blamed.”

Liberal advocates of the #MeToo movement have said the spotlight on sexual abuses must be expanded to include all victims, especially those on the fringes of society, beyond famous actresses in Hollywood.

Farley argues that, by logical extension, #MeToo must include prostitutes and porn actresses. “Our worst nightmares are their daily experiences,” she wrote in a recent piece, “given that the nature of their work constantly puts them at risk for harassment, unwanted sexual advances and rape.”

We should be talking about demand [for sex] as a system of oppression on its own Valiant Richey, prosecutor

Valiant Richey, a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office in Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle, contrasted the vulnerable nature of people who go into the sex trade – typically poor, minority women with a history of addiction, neglect and abuse – with the relatively privileged makeup of sex buyers, who are often white, male, and financially comfortable.

It’s a “system of inequality perpetuated by race, economics and gender,” Richey said. “We should be talking about demand [for sex] as a system of oppression on its own.”

Such language might seem surprising coming from a group of social conservatives. But it was everywhere at this conference, which sought to capitalize on the current groundswell of growing gender consciousness.

Iceland, which is consistently ranked as among the best places in the world to be a woman, considered a countrywide ban on pornography in 2013. And in the United Kingdom, an age-requirement for all pornographic websites will be introduced this year.



But calling for a crackdown on the “public health crisis of pornography” puts the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, founded as Morality in Media in the 1960s by a group of clergymen, somewhat on the fringes in the US.

Early concerns that pornography would lead to rising levels of rape, first raised by anti-porn advocates a generation ago, have proven unfounded. Overall rape and assault numbers have fallen precipitously in recent years, even as pornography viewership has ballooned.

The group’s founder, a Jesuit priest named Morton Hill, was selected to sit on Lyndon Johnson’s commission on obscenity and pornography, which was tasked with studying what should happen to laws on the books that banned most pornography. When the commission called for repealing the laws on free speech grounds, Hill authored a scathing dissent calling the majority report “a Magna Carta for the pornographer”.

Still, real concerns remain, especially about pornography’s impact on young psyches.

A rally against sexual violence in Paris. Countries around the world are questioning the consequences of pornography on gender relations. Photograph: Chamussy/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

The scientific consensus on how, exactly, porn affects human behavior is: we don’t know.

A growing body of evidence suggests that many young people, dissatisfied with the sex education available to them, are now turning to pornography to collect information about sexual practices and norms. And such findings have inspired a decidedly socially liberal pedagogy known as “porn literacy”, outlined recently in a lengthy profile in New York Times magazine.

But the Council’s arguments are not completely outside the American mainstream. Writing recently in the New York Times, the popular conservative columnist Ross Douthat said of porn “the belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition”.

Such confidence was behind the Council’s seemingly radical – and surprisingly successful – campaign to get Wal-Mart to remove Cosmopolitan, which they argue demeans women with cheap sex tips and the like, from its checkout aisles.

Following that victory, the NCOSE’s vice-president of advocacy and outreach, Haley Halverson, told the Guardian the group would be reaching out to Target and Walgreens with similar requests. They also have designs for online ads.

And conference attendees buzzed over the recent passage of a bill in Congress that will crack down on ads for sex posted on websites like Craigslist and Backpage.com. Sex industry advocates say the bill could expose legal sex workers to undue legal jeopardy.

It’s a strange thing to be headed to the desk of Donald Trump for a signature, as the president faces down a high-profile lawsuit from Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who says she was paid to keep quiet about their affair.

Indeed Trump – and the numerous accusations of sexual harassment and assault against him – was the elephant in the room at a conference devoted to stamping out sexual exploitation.

But Matt Aujero, who came to the conference from the University of Maryland where he works for the Catholic Student Center, said he found the lack of Trump talk refreshing. “I like how it’s not overly politicized,” he said.

The silence was also likely strategic. As the NCOSE put it shortly after Trump’s election in 2016: “We understand how the Trump victory has caused many to have unsettling feelings about the new administration, but we, of course, must look for every opportunity to advance our cause of ending exploitation … Many within Trump’s transition team are social conservatives for whom issues of sexual exploitation are already of great concern.”

But Gail Dines, an academic and founder of the anti-pornography group Culture Reframed, saw the newly-energized movement as a fitting response to Trump’s “pussy grabbing” boasts.

“Trump got women pissed, really pissed,” she said.