’ve wanted to write this blog post for months, but every time I’ve even let myself start drafting it in my mind I get overwhelmed. My body tenses subconsciously, I start to hold my breath, and everything in me screams to just stop thinking about it. I know, though, that that’s not good enough. Even if it makes no impact at all, I need to let my voice be heard on this issue. I can’t stay quiet out of fear, so here goes. One of the top priorities of Project 2025 (the roadmap written for Donald Trump’s potential next term) is making pornography illegal. I don’t know about you, but that idea absolutely terrifies me. One of the most surreal parts of watching this news come out was how little anyone outside of the Adult industry seemed to notice, or worse, care.
The moment that really sticks in my mind was a few months ago when I settled down to watch an episode of my favorite late‐night talk show.
The live audience sat in disturbed silence through a long list of upsetting policy goals that the 2025 plan outlines…that was, until the host explained how it states that “pornography should be outlawed and the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” That statement provoked a jovial smattering of laughter from the crowd, as painful as it was predictable. I didn’t know what felt more chilling, the active political threat towards sexual expression and work or the knowledge that even like minded people still find the mass imprisonment of sexworkers funny. Funny on the face of it. A punchline in itself.
Of course, I don’t blame that live studio audience. The show is generally meant to be comedic, and even if it weren’t…sex workers are so often the butts of jokes that it makes sense that the general public would have an almost pavlovian reaction to hearing them mentioned. You laugh when someone says penis, you laugh when someone says “hooker,” and, of course, you laugh when someone says “pornography should be outlawed and the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
With so many threats to freedom and basic rights being thrown at our faces nowadays, it makes sense that those with few ties to the Adult industry would see this aspect of Project 2025 as not particularly important. After all, with propositions as frightening and absurd as banning/removing any use of the term “gender equality” from “all laws and federal regulations,” eliminating visas for human trafficking victims, and “requir[ing] states and private actors to discriminate against transgender people,” who really has time or emotional energy to fight for porn? To most people, porn is just something they watch in the dark alone to help them orgasm faster before moving on with their day. Sure, it would stink to not see boobs as easily anymore, but it’s not really a serious issue, right?
I can’t tell you that freedom of erotic expression is *more* important than access to reproductive healthcare, LGBTQ rights, or the existence of the Department Of Education itself. I can’t tell you that the scariest potential political change in 2025 is a lack of access to Brazzers.com, or even the imprisonment of your favorite people who work in porn. Honestly, I wish I could. What I can say, though, is that this really, really fucking matters. Yes, even though “pornography” is a funny word.
If you still don’t care about this issue after being a fan of the Holly Randall Unfiltered podcast, I don’t know how to convince you.
I could appeal to convictions you might have about other issues. I could mention how bans on sexually “obscene” material have historically been used to make sex education and contraceptives illegal (for example, in the Comstock Act Of 1873, which many warn is likely to be enforced again in the near future, taking away even more abortion rights broadly). Or I could remind you that attacks on the natural, beautiful part of life that is sexuality are deeply tied to the demonization of gay people and fear mongering attacks on people just for being transgender. If you’re understandably accustomed to being politically tuned out, though, I doubt that would change much.
Maybe it would help to make this a bit more personal. For example, I can ask you to imagine how it would feel to look for your favorite scene online and find out that it, like every other easily accessible video of sex, had been wiped away permanently. To suddenly find out that any downloaded pictures or videos of naked adults you happen to have saved had suddenly become incriminating evidence, making you as much of a criminal as people possessing child porn are now. To look up the girl you pay a few bucks to on OnlyFans every month and realize that she had not only stopped making content but had been arrested for creating the very same material that you’ve loved for years. It’s easy, especially for people like me who were never adults in a time before 24/7 access to the internet, to think all of this is impossible. Porn feels as inescapable a part of life as death and taxes. The thing is, it’s not.
I’ll leave you with a long quote directly from page five of the Project 2025 PDF.
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no
claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product 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.”
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