The year was 1976. Republicans were reeling from Watergate. Christian conservatives were defecting to the Democratic Party. And Jerry Falwell, the Virginia preacher with a booming Baptist congregation and a popular radio show, decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines as he saw American culture succumbing to the creeping forces of secularism. The precipitating event was an interview given by Jimmy Carter, in which the Democratic presidential nominee admitted to having “looked on a lot of women with lust,” and “committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter had never acted on such temptation, he implied, but the admission kept him humble: “Christ says, don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife.”

The doctrine itself was not objectionable. But the language — and more crucially, the venue — was intolerable for Falwell. The interview had run in Playboy magazine, alongside nude photographs of Miss November and articles such as “The Vatican Sex Manual” and “Prurient Puritans.” In his televised Sunday sermons, Falwell began railing against Carter’s courtship of the randy men’s magazine and its 5 million readers. When Carter’s team tried to block one of his antagonistic sermons from being broadcast shortly before Election Day, claiming it violated the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, Falwell raised the stakes. He assembled a group of leading fundamentalist ministers at the National Press Club in Washington and accused Carter of “muzzling a preacher of the gospel from preaching his moral convictions.” The press conference, which cemented Falwell’s status as an ascendant political heavyweight, would be looked back on as the inception of the Moral Majority.

It was the height of the porn wars. More than abortion or homosexuality, the rising tide of pornography in America was, in the 1970s, becoming central to conservative Americans’ perception of a civilization in decline. For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade. He fought to remove adult content from convenience stores. He went to court to battle Hustler and Penthouse. And he never forgave Carter — who ended up winning the White House in 1976, carrying the evangelical vote along the way — for his original sin of talking to Hugh Hefner’s publication. “Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of his day,” Falwell said in 1981.

Forty years after that D.C. press conference, a very different scene unfolded. This one took place in New York and starred Jerry Falwell Jr., inheritor of the family business. Hours earlier, the younger Falwell had introduced the GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump to a massive gathering of Christian leaders, calling him “God’s man,” anointed to lead the nation in turbulent times. The summit was successful beyond anyone’s expectation. As they celebrated back at Trump Tower, Falwell sought to document the occasion with a photo. The future president stood in the middle, flanked by Falwell Jr. and his wife, Becki. Thumbs went up. The camera snapped. Falwell tweeted the photo to his 60,000 followers. There was just one hiccup: Lurking over Becki Falwell’s left shoulder, framed in gold, was a cover of Playboy, graced by a bow-tied Trump and a smiling brunette covered only by his tuxedo jacket.

Honored to introduce @realDonaldTrump at religious leader summit in NYC today! He did incredible job! @beckifalwell pic.twitter.com/e2eBSbQwb0 — Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) June 21, 2016

The photo sparked a frenzy. Nothing, it seemed, could so neatly encapsulate the religious right’s backsliding as Falwell Jr. giving a thumbs-up in front of the very magazine his father had singled out as symbolic of America’s moral decay — while standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who had appeared in a softcore porno flick and who reportedly, as Jimmy Carter might have put it, screwed a bunch of women outside of marriage, including a Playboy model and hardcore adult-film actress.

And it highlighted something else just as striking: the total abandonment of pornography as a battleground in America’s culture war.

***

From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument — its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences. It was treated as a matter of urgency not just by the religious right, which decried the hypersexualizing of society, but by the radical left, which denounced the objectifying of women. Liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals found themselves unexpectedly allied in vilifying the adult entertainment industry. After decades of intensifying conflict, Ronald Reagan convened a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985; two years later, Reagan held a press conference to announce his administration’s plan to combat illegal obscenity — and issue a warning to the porn professionals: “Your industry’s days are numbered.”

Instead, the industry exploded. Today, pornography in America is a societal phenomenon and an economic behemoth. As of late 2018, according to Alexa.com, five of the 50 most trafficked websites in the United States belong to the adult industry. The biggest site, Pornhub, typically ranks around No. 15, in the neighborhood of titans like Netflix and ESPN. In 2017 alone, Pornhub hosted 28.5 billion visits, an average of 81 million per day, the overwhelming majority based in America. All told, visitors to Pornhub last year searched 50,000 times per minute and 800 times per second. And that’s one website — merely the brightest star in a boundless constellation of explicit content.

We know that the ubiquity of porn is a problem: Even as experts debate the science of addiction and the link between consumption and destructive behavior, there is surefire sociological evidence of its exacerbating influence on those most susceptible — people predisposed to violence, for instance, or misogyny or child abuse. There is also consensus that it has, in plenty of cases, contributed to abusive relationships and the fracturing of families. And that’s just where adults are concerned. Millions of kids today are watching porn, a freedom afforded to the smartphone generation, leaving parents, educators and clinicians increasingly anxious. If ever there were a national dialogue needed about porn — if ever there were a moment for some opportunistic politician to make a cause of it — the time would be now.

"Today, you’ve got extreme porn as the new normal — not just for adults, but for our kids" — Donna Rice Hughes, anti-porn activist

Instead, the battlefield has been deserted. When a group of conservatives met last year with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, they hoped to convince him of the need for a return to rigorous Reagan-era prosecution of obscenity. Sessions, a staunch social conservative and longtime Sunday school teacher, shook his head. “There’s not enough resources to combat child pornography,” Sessions said, according to attendees, “much less to enforce obscenity laws.”

With the internet offering an ever-expanding breadth of content, and smartphones and laptops replacing squalid movie houses and black-curtained storefronts, resistance to porn is beginning to feel futile.

“Is this a winnable war? I don’t know,” says Donna Rice Hughes, a longtime anti-porn activist whose organization, Enough Is Enough, encourages a safer internet for kids. “In these cultural battles, the oxygen gets sucked out of the room after so many losses. Today, you’ve got extreme porn as the new normal — not just for adults, but for our kids. So it’s a demoralization due to so many losses and so much collateral damage.” Hughes adds, “When you have a nonprofit like mine, donors want to see progress. And to be honest, we haven’t seen any.”

The political class has largely gone silent. Over a decade spent covering Republican politics, I struggle to recall instances of politicians calling attention to pornography. The lone exception: Diane Black, a congresswoman running this year for governor of Tennessee, blamed the rise in school shootings on adolescent porn habits. She was widely ridiculed and ultimately lost the GOP primary. Her comment was a cautionary tale. Black had attacked a multibillion-dollar industry — one trafficked by many of her constituents — and the only dent made was to her own reputation.

America is an exception in this sense. Many governments around the world aggressively police erotic content; even the liberal nation of Iceland has toyed with a sweeping ban on pornography. A controversial British law requiring internet users to be registered and age-verified before accessing adult websites is expected to be implemented by year’s end. There is no prospect for such action on this side of the Atlantic, in part because the First Amendment’s protections are so strong, but also because political appetite is so weak. In lieu of legislative intervention, advocacy groups work the edges of the issue, pressuring companies such as McDonald’s, Subway, Starbucks and Panera Bread to install filters on their free Wi-Fi networks. This, at least philosophically, represents a conservative’s dream: civic society stepping up to address a problem government cannot solve. But these efforts can go only so far. It has become evident over the past half-century that in this particular theater of the culture war, high-level government action is a prerequisite for victory. Without it, defeat has become certain.

What happened? The pervasiveness of porn is a reminder that politics historically hasn’t been much of a bulwark against the most primitive human desires — money, power, sex and, in this instance, a combination of the three. But it’s also a window into the mentality on the right, which has surrendered the fight on many social issues as America has moved left. Even with Trump in the White House and five conservatives on the Supreme Court, there is no reversing the cultural tides that have swept away the Moral Majority’s footprint on supporting traditional marriage and prayer in public schools. The difference is that some on the right still pay lip service to those lost causes. When it comes to porn — more accessible, more acceptable and less scrutinized than at any time during its history — they don’t even bother anymore.

***

No archaeologist can explore a society without unearthing the remains of what we might now call pornography — from prehistoric sketches of nude women on Ice Age cave walls to the bounty of explicit images and sculptures left behind by the Greeks and Romans. In 1524, with the printing press still less than a century old, the Italian engraver Marcantonio Raimondi published a book depicting 16 positions of sexual intercourse, copies of which spread throughout Europe. Raimondi was arrested and jailed by Pope Clement VII — the first known collision between porn and politics.

One challenge faced by enforcers like Clement is that erotica has a nose for the underground. When British author John Cleland published his libidinous novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure — better known as Fanny Hill — in 1748, he was imprisoned and charged with “corrupting the King’s subjects.” Cleland agreed to cease publication, but it was too late: The material had already been pirated, and replicas quickly proliferated around the Western Hemisphere. When a Massachusetts printer was shut down for distributing Fanny Hill in 1821, he took the case to the state Supreme Court — and lost. Yet the cultural momentum was inexorable. The daguerreotype, a forerunner to the modern photograph, was introduced in 1839; as with the dawn of the internet a century and a half later, one of its primary functions was to reproduce and distribute sexual images.

American legislators tried to head off the problem with the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned mailing of “obscene,” “lewd,” or “lascivious” materials, but new laws couldn’t keep pace with technology. First, it was halftone printing, which cheaply reproduced black-and-white images; then moving pictures, the earliest of which experimented with capturing nude women, igniting a black market of illegally filmed productions that grew steadily from the 1920s through World War II. American policymakers took an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach, hoping to keep the smut quarantined to brothels and private parties; British authorities, fearing they had lost control, introduced the “X” rating in 1951. That same year, Modern Man published its first issue, which featured photos of nude women. Soon enough, the taboo became mainstream: Playboy hit newsstands in 1953 featuring Marilyn Monroe in the buff. The issue sold every one of its roughly 50,000 copies in a matter of weeks. Hugh Hefner had made soft-core pornography a popular commercial enterprise for the first time in the United States.

Government opposition was strong. Hefner spent two years battling the U.S. postmaster general, who refused to deliver copies of the magazine because of its offensive content. In 1957, Samuel Roth, a New York publisher and distributor of adult materials, was tried and convicted of violating the Comstock Act. His case, Roth v. United States, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that “obscenity” was not protected under the First Amendment — and gave the government power to prohibit material “utterly without redeeming social importance.” The threat posed by this ruling to a rapidly professionalizing industry was fleeting, however. By 1960, Playboy’s circulation topped 1 million. It tripled by 1965 and topped 5 million by 1970, besting both Time and Newsweek.

“So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life” — Then-U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1970

Legislators had, in previous decades, looked the other way. But given the confluence of developments in the 1960s — an upsurge of explicit films, books and magazines; advances in the industry’s equipment and distribution; as well as court rulings that chipped away at existing obscenity laws and strengthened individual privacy laws — politicians could no longer ignore porn. In 1967, Congress authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to form a Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. In a preview of the deep political and cultural schisms that would open around the issue, the commission released two reports: the majority of members, liberals appointed by Johnson, downplayed the societal risks and actually suggested easing obscenity laws, while the minority of members, including a prominent conservative Catholic priest appointed by Richard Nixon after his 1968 victory, warned of grave implications and recommended vigorously enforcing those same laws.

The commission’s dueling reports dropped in 1970, prompting Nixon to deliver fire-and-brimstone remarks calling for a wholesale ban on obscene material and declaring, “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.” Instead, the 1970s would come to be known as “The Golden Age of Porn.” The profitability of high-production-quality films like “Deep Throat” was evidence of an accelerating sexual revolution. And there was a legal watershed in the form of Miller v. California, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that, on the 100th anniversary of the Comstock Act, redefined obscenity with a three-part test that invoked state law, artistic merit and “contemporary community standards.” Technically it was — and still is — possible to outlaw pornography. But in practice the ruling meant that publishers and producers enjoyed such broad First Amendment protections that obscenity cases became nearly impossible to prosecute.

The implications were enormous and immediate: By decade’s end, the top adult film stars were household names; Hustler was making Playboy look prudish by comparison; hundreds of X-rated movie theatres were opening nationwide; and for anyone worried about being spotted at an adult cinema, the VCR was starting to make home viewing a reality.

It was in this climate that serious, organized political opposition took root. It was led in part by conservative religious and political figures, most prominently Falwell and Paul Weyrich of The Heritage Foundation, men who pioneeringly understood the value of uniting faith leaders, defense hawks and wonky fiscal warriors under a banner that would become known as the conservative movement. In this particular fight, they were joined by some unlikely allies, most notably feminist leaders such as Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who were working — ultimately unsuccessfully — to pass local ordinances giving more tools to push back against pornography. (The star of Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace, ultimately became a born-again Christian and an anti-porn advocate.)

Reagan smartly harnessed the energy of this opposition, meeting with activists and promising action, but he did little in his first term to address the issue. “Pornography” appeared for the first time in the Republican Party’s platform during Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984. The next year, he convened a new presidential commission on porn, this one headed by Edwin Meese, the archconservative attorney general. Meese wanted to ensure this would not be a repeat of the Johnson-era academic exercise. He used the commission to build an Untouchables-style “obscenity strike force” that aimed to put the fear of the federal government into the porn industry, threatening retailers who legally sold soft-core magazines in a show of brute political force. (Hefner, a fan of free speech and fully nude pool parties, dubbed it “Sexual McCarthyism.”)

When it landed, the 1,960-page Meese Report surprised exactly no one: It concluded that pornography was a threat to society and recommended harsher enforcement of obscenity laws. In a particularly memorable passage, the report said the link between porn consumption and violence “requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence,” yet concluded, “We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions … that are plainly justified by our own common sense.” The commission came under immediate criticism for its lack of scholarly rigor; academics whose work was cited by Meese protested the report’s misapplication of their data, and even National Review concluded that the commission “has to some extent found the conclusion it was looking for.” That the report’s findings were by and large empirically unsupported mattered not. Its recommendations allowed the Justice Department to execute what Reagan’s supporters were agitating for: a crackdown on porn.

Over the next five years, the federal government put obscenity on the back burner. The trick, legally speaking, was exploiting the “community standards” described in Miller, allowing the feds to strategically target pornography producers who were marketing content in conservative parts of the country. At the same time, Meese rewrote Justice Department guidelines to allow for simultaneous obscenity prosecutions in multiple jurisdictions. This tactic worked: Indictments piled up and the adult industry’s momentum slowed down. Congress got in on the action as well, banning “dial-a-porn” phone services and exploring a tightening of telecommunications laws to stem the tide of adult content. Emboldened, the GOP’s 1992 platform called for “a national crusade against pornography” and endorsed sweeping government intervention. Anti-porn activists believed, for the first time, that they were actually winning.

“And then everything shifted, thanks to two factors,” says Patrick Trueman, who led the DOJ’s obscenity strike force. “The rise of the internet and Bill Clinton’s presidency.”

***

Nobody disputes that obscenity prosecutions dropped off dramatically during the Clinton years — as much as 70 percent, according to Reagan-era DOJ officials. And everyone agrees that the advent of the World Wide Web sparked pornography’s historic propagation. The blame game boils down to the chicken or the egg: Did the explosion of internet porn make obscenity prosecutions pointless, or did the lax enforcement invite the explosion of internet porn? Whatever the answer, it’s clear that the 1990s, a time of peace and prosperity and a whiff of libertinism, marked the start of this modern era of mass porn consumption.

With Meese and his anti-porn vice squad no longer running the DOJ, the industry itself grew more aggressive. “Nobody had gotten popped for a long time, so people were pushing and pushing and pushing. More gangbangs, more harder content, more teen-themed videos, and people felt pretty safe in doing just about anything they wanted to do,” Max Hardcore, a former erotic film star and producer, told the Villanova Sports & Entertainment Law Journal in 2007, adding: “Clinton was good for the industry, good for the economy, and he didn’t get us involved in any quagmire wars.”

George W. Bush promised repeatedly during the 2000 presidential campaign to cast a wider prosecutorial net for obscenity.

Sensitive to the perception of being soft on porn, the Clinton administration boasted of focusing its energy and resources on the narrower issue of child endangerment — foreshadowing the approach taken by the opposition today. But even that low-hanging political fruit proved difficult to pick. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, which criminalized the distribution of offensive material to minors, was dismantled by the Supreme Court a year later. In response, a bipartisan group of legislators worked with the Clinton White House to craft the Child Online Protection Act, which focused more specifically on restricting minors’ access to commercial material. But repeated court challenges led to a permanent injunction. The law never took effect.

By 2000, lawmakers settled on a lowest common denominator: mandating internet filters in public schools as a condition for federal funding. That law, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, was upheld by the Supreme Court. It was evidence of success, however incrementally, for an anti-porn movement that felt the fight slipping away from them — and that couldn’t have known at the time how soon smartphones would render the legislation hopelessly antiquated.

Republicans hadn’t yet given up on the political value of an anti-porn crusade. George W. Bush promised repeatedly during the 2000 presidential campaign to cast a wider prosecutorial net for obscenity. In practice, this would mean targeting the producers of hardcore material — depicting, for example, rape, violence or bodily waste — that satisfied the complex Miller test. Bush appeared to mean business when he selected as his attorney general John Ashcroft, a favorite of religious conservatives and a longtime anti-porn crusader himself. In his first eight months on the job, Ashcroft met with activists, organized a symposium, evaluated the department’s operations and handpicked a new leader of the obscenity division. Combating pornography, Bush and Ashcroft told conservatives, would be a federal priority again.

That changed on September 11, 2001.

“9/11 stopped the Bush administration’s momentum,” says Richard Land, the longtime political head of the Southern Baptist Convention. “They were planning to re-Reaganize the Department of Justice on this issue, and then they got completely waylaid.”

Neil Malamuth, a University of California, Los Angeles, psychology professor and prominent scholar on porn, adds, “Bush was going to make pornography a major issue. But when 9/11 happened, his administration made a conscious decision that it wasn’t worth it. They knew they didn’t have the resources, and they knew they needed to rally the public around certain causes. Pornography wasn’t one of them.”

Terrorism was suddenly an all-eclipsing concern for Americans across the ideological spectrum. As evangelical Christians grasped what this meant for their porn campaign, their concern turned to frustration and eventually anger. Religious conservatives watched in horror as big porn hitched itself to the rise of big tech, giving obscenity a foothold in corporate America and solidifying the adult industry’s product as culturally tolerable. In December 2003, the magazine published by Christian organization Focus on the Family noted how, in 2000, “conservatives celebrated what they thought marked the end of hard-core’s unchecked reign.” Three years later, the article concluded, “those celebrations have given way to disappointment.”

Such criticism of Bush from the right faded, however, as his administration wore on. The simplest explanation is fatigue: Having lost so many battles during the Clinton years, only to then see the hope of the Ashcroft era vanish, much of the anti-porn movement ran out of gas. “We put the issue front and center in the ’90s. Congress was engaged, we were engaged and the technology industry was engaged fighting against us,” says Hughes, the internet safety advocate. “We had a bipartisan coalition behind us, but we were losing just about every battle in the courts. And it just demoralized so many people. I think that’s when the white flag came out.”

Around this time, a pair of practical acknowledgments began reshaping the political discourse surrounding porn. The first was that Pandora’s box could never be closed — that with the internet oozing adult content from every portal, prevention and education made more sense than prosecution and enforcement. The second was that, to the extent prosecution and enforcement remained viable, the government’s overriding responsibility should be protecting children — from both viewing mature content and starring in it.

This is what animates much of today’s anti-porn movement. Hughes considered it a “huge victory” when, in 2016, both Trump and Hillary Clinton supported her organization’s Child’s Internet Safety Presidential Pledge, which called for tougher enforcement of existing laws “to prevent the sexual exploitation of children online.” But the developments since have been discouraging. When Hughes raised the issue to Sessions at a meeting last year, he knew nothing about the pledge. Vice President Mike Pence told Hughes in a separate conversation that he supported her efforts — but made clear that only Trump’s active support could truly move the needle. She is not holding her breath.

The public’s shifting attitude toward adult content is due in no small part to mass consumption by nonadults

The truth is, despite federal laws on the books — as well as 25 state versions mandating filters in schools and libraries — efforts to shield children from explicit content have failed miserably. In part, this is because of its sheer prevalence: The Huffington Post reported last year that porn websites account for more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. There has never been a reliable dollar figure placed on pornography as a whole; NBC News reported in 2015 that the industry is worth $97 billion, an estimate that experts I spoke with agreed was severely lowballing. Perhaps the most telling statistic: On planet Earth, only Google and Netflix are known to consume more bandwidth than MindGeek, the umbrella corporation that houses several of the biggest free porn aggregator websites.

Precise statistics related to adolescent pornography use are similarly elusive, in this case because kids worry about getting into trouble for answering honestly. In 2016, a Christian research organization called The Barna Group released the results of a comprehensive online survey based on interviews with nearly 2,800 participants. The findings were stark: Forty-nine percent of children ages 13 to 17 consume pornography at least once a month, with a further 30 percent saying they did so less often. Only 21 percent said they had never viewed pornography.

The numbers jumped considerably when moving to the next bracket, young adults ages 18 to 24. Among those respondents, 71 percent reported consuming pornography at least monthly, with just 9 percent saying they had never viewed it. These findings are consistent with the work done by academics; setting aside disagreements over morality and consequences, the consensus within the community of pornography experts is that young people are consuming explicit content in near-universal fashion. A study of the subject in 2009, undertaken by a researcher at the University of Montreal, had to be canceled. The reason: He could not find a control group of men in their 20s who had not viewed pornography.

The public’s shifting attitude toward adult content is due in no small part to mass consumption by nonadults. In the survey, when respondents 25 and older were asked about the morality of watching porn, 54 percent said it was “wrong.” Yet among respondents ages 13 to 24, just 32 percent said viewing porn is “wrong” — compared with 48 percent who said the same of overeating, and 56 percent who said the same of not recycling.

Younger people are not the sole driver of porn’s mainstreaming, however. At the beginning of the decade, Gallup began tracking the percentage of Americans who found porn “morally acceptable.” The number was 30 percent in 2011. By 2018, it had spiked to 43 percent. Age aside, the sharp uptick can be heavily attributed to softer perceptions of porn among single men, nonreligious people and Democrats. Yet a greater acceptance of porn is apparent across virtually every demographic, including women, married men and churchgoers; among Republicans, the “morally acceptable” figure has jumped 11 points in the past eight years.

Still, 43 percent approval leaves a majority of Americans disapproving. In political terms, 57 percent represents a winning issue. There is no question most Americans feel that there’s something wrong about porn; it’s barred at workplaces and unwelcome in polite company. In polls its acceptability registers lower than other hot-button culture issues like abortion, gay marriage and legal pot. So why won’t anyone in government go after it?

***

In the dimly lit bowels of a Washington hotel complex, hundreds of politically active Christians gathered in late September for the annual Values Voter Summit. This year’s exhibit hall offered advocacy for all seasons: expanded religious freedom, tighter abortion restrictions, counseling for relatives of ex-gays, paid family leave, single-gender college dormitories, refugee settlement programs, faith-based financial planning, the preservation of Social Security and much more.

One issue, however, was not represented: pornography. The closest thing to a mention of porn at the conference was in literature provided by the group Concerned Women for America, which combats “sexual exploitation.” When I asked the two young women working the exhibit about specific advocacy related to porn, they shifted uncomfortably in their seats and produced a synchronized shrug. At a neighboring booth, Frank Mitchell, a Christian activist and veteran attendee of the summit, gave me his theory of the case. “The fact is, times have changed and we have bigger issues to deal with. If we’re sitting around debating pornography, we’re wasting our time,” Mitchell says. He tells me the American Family Association was once the tip of the spear in combating obscenity; as fate would have it, he had just attended a lunch sponsored by that group. Did porn come up? “It didn’t come up. It never comes up,” Mitchell shook his head. “It’s not like it’s been pushed to the side. It’s been pushed off the table.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the Values Voter Summit, won’t go that far. “It’s still a very big issue, but it’s not necessarily a policy issue because the internet has made it so that it’s everywhere,” he says. “I mean, even before the internet, the government didn’t do a good job of policing it. So how do you get the genie back in the bottle?”

This is the fundamental question facing an anti-porn movement that is attempting to rebrand itself. The adult industry’s most notable modern adversary is Fight the New Drug, a well-heeled organization that grabbed headlines a few years ago by plastering “Porn Kills Love” billboards all over San Francisco. Hoping to transcend the stereotypes attached to the old opposition — stuffy, Bible-thumping zealots — Fight the New Drug markets itself as stylish and tech-savvy. The crucial distinction is emphasis: Rather than attacking porn as a moral evil in and of itself, Fight the New Drug focuses on the practical harms to people, relationships and families. That said, the wheel isn’t being reinvented: The group calls itself “non-legislative and non-religious,” but it publishes updates on political activities and was seeded with millions of dollars from Mormon church officials, a fact it downplays.

If politics is downstream from culture, and culture has accepted porn, why wouldn’t politicians do the same?

Morality in Media, a faith-based organization that was central to anti-porn efforts beginning in the 1960s, was rechristened in 2015 as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Its president is none other than Trueman, the former DOJ “obscenity strike force” chief who says he is “trying to revitalize the movement against pornography” to fit the times. “We knew it couldn’t be and shouldn’t be just a religious conservative issue, because pornography affects the issue of sex trafficking, it affects child sexual abuse, it affects sexual violence against women, it affects the rape crisis on college campuses,” he says. “We needed to create a new movement, and we knew it needed to be broad-based in order to win.”

One might think the #MeToo era, with its fierce backlash against toxic masculinity, would give new energy to the enemies of an industry that traffics heavily in the filmed subjugation of women. Some conservatives have tried to capitalize on this point; earlier this year, Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Let’s Ban Porn.” Feminists, however, are decidedly less vocal than they were in past decades, split internally over the question of whether filmed sex empowers women or exploits them. “Some have broken with the faith-based organizations, but we haven’t, even though we’re a different breed — progressive, lefty feminists,” says Gail Dines, a prominent anti-porn activist. “For us, this is still all about gender equality. You can’t pick and choose. You either believe that women and men have the right to the same political, social and cultural respect, or you don’t.”

Meanwhile, inside the other half of the anti-porn coalition, it seems for every new step taken toward combating obscenity, two steps are taken back. Evangelical leaders I spoke with cited instances of pastors shying away from the subject for fear of alienating their congregants. “It’s very pervasive even in the church,” Perkins says. “It’s not just men, it’s women, too. … Some pastors are afraid to hit the issue too hard.”

In this sense, it’s easy to understand why elected officials have backed off. If politics is downstream from culture, and culture has accepted porn, why wouldn’t politicians do the same? If pastors are afraid to alienate their constituents by condemning porn, what policymaker in his or her right mind would?

***

Todd Weiler went where no politician had gone before — an unwitting trailblazer in the latest chapter of the war on porn. In March 2016, the Utah state senator created national buzz when he introduced a resolution labeling pornography “a public health crisis.” It passed unanimously in the Legislature and was signed into law by the governor. The resolution is toothless; it simply states that porn causes “a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms,” and calls for “education, prevention, research and policy change at the community and societal level.” Still, the action in Utah seemed to snap the debate surrounding porn from its yearslong slumber. Four other states — South Dakota, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas — passed similar resolutions in 2017. Florida and Kansas passed resolutions in 2018, and a host of other states have begun debating similar measures.

Two things stand out about Weiler’s ploy.

“Let’s face it ... The fact that the president cheated on his wife with a porn star has been kind of a yawner" — Utah state senator Todd Weiler

The first is that Utah’s resolution, which served as the template for those in other states, is filled with controversial, scientifically unverified suggestions about links to addiction, violence and infidelity. This was the product of a partnership with Trueman’s group, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “They were looking for a ‘courageous’ — meaning dumb and gullible — legislator to introduce the first resolution,” Weiler says, laughing and recounting how he first stumbled into porn legislation because of dogged complaints from a constituent. The senator let Trueman’s group draft much of the language; the result was criticism from outside experts for asserting causalities and correlations that have never been proven.

The second is that Weiler believes those debates are peripheral to the task at hand, having championed the resolution as a means toward a more specific end. He says American culture is past the point of no return when it comes to porn, and explains that he sponsored the measure for one reason—to start a conversation about protecting minors. “People think I’m some kind of zealot,” he says, “but everything I’m doing is to protect children. I haven’t sponsored any legislation dealing with adults. I’m not trying to make pornography illegal. … People sell all kinds of things on the internet, but they don’t sell them to 15-year-olds because they would get in trouble—gun manufacturers, vaping companies, alcohol distributors. That’s not the case with porn websites.”

In this, at least, he has expert opinion on his side. The community of recognized authorities on pornography is small and secretive; most belong to a private listserv, “SEXNET,” hosted by Northwestern University. In conversations with a number of members, I heard diverging opinions about any number of issues—but a consensus of near-panic emerged when I asked about the science of adolescent porn use and its physiological ramifications. Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who has written more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books about pornography, says the debates regarding addiction and violence are “ideologically loaded, with some scholars bound and determined to find negative effects, and others bound and determined to say there’s nothing to see here.” When it comes to kids and porn, however, Perry says sociologists are generally and increasingly in agreement that we are facing a multifaceted crisis. Academics are unable to perform experiments that expose minors to explicit content, for obvious reasons, so they are left with third-party research that is often unreliable. Without their own data, academics have largely “remained silent” on the issue of adolescent porn consumption, at least publicly, Perry says, even as it’s “tremendously concerning for people across the spectrum, even the most sexually progressive people in my field, that young people are exposed to things they aren’t ready for and don’t know how to process.”

A possibility, given the meteoric growth of porn in America and the government’s inability to contain it, is that human brains might be changed by processing obscenity at earlier ages. Malamuth, the UCLA professor and godfather of the porn research community, says he has taught a course on sexuality and women’s studies for decades. His tradition was to show a disturbing, explicit clip as part of a lecture on pornography—prefaced with a long warning about what the students were about to watch, and urging those with sensitivities to leave the room. “When I first started showing it, you would have very strong reactions—women crying, people hugging each other, deeply affected by it,” Malamuth says. “But in the later years, after my warnings and after showing the film, the students would give me these strange looks. ‘What the hell was the warning all about?’”

Malamuth continues, “The anti-pornography people argued for years that once people saw enough of this stuff they would become desensitized in a way that’s dysfunctional and could affect their attitudes and behaviors related to violence and women. The pro-pornography people said that once we’re exposed to pornography we’re desensitized in a good way — we realize it’s not a very big deal.” He chuckles. “They’ve looked at the same data and drawn different conclusions.”

That debate will continue, no doubt, but it will take place on the outskirts of modern culture — miles from the ideological mainstream and light years from the political arena. In this sense, desensitization isn’t just an explanation; it’s a national phenomenon. So much so that millions of elementary schoolers have instant access to unlimited amounts of pornography. So much so that lawmakers consider themselves powerless to do anything about it. So much so that news of the president of the United States having a past romance with a hardcore adult actress has met with a collective shrug. “Let’s face it,” says Weiler, the Utah state senator. “The fact that the president cheated on his wife with a porn star has been kind of a yawner.”

Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent for POLITICO Magazine.