The Porn Industry Is Worried That a Republican Senator Wants to Ban Porn

Some members of the adult industry are worried that a prorposed federal bill that’s going after content that aims to “arouse, titillate, or gratify” sexual desires has the potential to outlaw porn nationwide.

This week, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, from Utah, introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which seeks to “establish a national definition of obscenity that would apply to obscene content that is transmitted via interstate or foreign communications,” according to a statement from Lee’s office. 

Technically, a federal standard that defines obscenity already exists. Under the decades-old Miller Test, content is obscene if it hits certain conditions, including that the content in question depicts sexual conduct “in a patently offensive way.” At the moment, producing and distributing sexual content is legal in the U.S. 

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for workers in the adult industry, and its members are watching Lee’s bill closely because they believe it represents yet another attempt by conservatives to censor speech and expression about sex. 

Lee “introduced a bill that would remove porn's First Amendment protections and effectively prohibit distribution of adult material in the US,” Free Speech Coalition (FSC) tweeted. “FSC is monitoring the bill, and will continue to do so in the new Congress.”

“This bill, among our members, has gotten a huge amount of attention,” the director of public affairs with the Free Speech Coalition, Mike Stabile, told VICE News. “Our members understand this for what it is: It's a threat to their business, to their livelihood. It's a threat to their community.”

Lee's office did not immediately respond to request for comment when asked whether he intends to ban porn as a whole. You can read the full bill here. 

Obscenity isn’t constitutionally protected as free speech or expression, and violations of federal obscenity laws are considered criminal offenses. According to Lee, the current standard makes it difficult to define obscenity, let alone prosecute it, especially on the internet. 

For one, content classified as obscene fits into a relatively narrow category. According to the statement from Lee’s office, the act intends to remove long-standing federal communications standards that qualify “obscenity” as content that’s spread with the intent to abuse, threaten, or harass a person. Instead, his proposed federal bill, if passed, would define obscenity in part as content that “as a whole appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion” and depicts or represents sexual acts with the intent to “arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person.”

According to Stabile, it’s unlikely Congress will pass the bill, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

“We are in a very reactionary cultural moment,” Stabile said.

”I spend a lot of time in anti-porn and anti-sex work forums, monitoring what’s going on in terms of those conversations, and there is obviously a rise in panic around things like pornography and sex education in schools,” Stabile added. “I think we have to see this as part of a broader push to really censor speech about sex.”

In addition to the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, Lee also introduced the Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net, or SCREEN Act, which would require porn sites to implement age verification technology. The idea is to prevent children from accessing explicit content. 

Even if they don’t pass, bills like the ones introduced by Lee ultimately act as signals to voters—and not just to evangelical conservatives but socially progressive voters—who have "anxiety about porn,” Stabile said. 

“He’s signaling and saying, ‘Look, give us power and we will bring stuff like this,” Stabile said. “It’s a way of rallying the troops and, whether or not this bill moves forward, we need to realize and make as clear as possible what they intend to do with the internet, with schools:   they want to shut down conversations about sex and sexuality in the public square.”

Unrelatedly, Lee’s namesake is a popular gay porn star.

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