The Digital Closet, page 5
The primary focus of the book, however, is not on sex work but instead on the broader infrastructure of the internet—from misogynist and heteronormative discourses to the coding labor, algorithms, and content moderation policies that govern what is visible and invisible online to the impact that this infrastructure has on both sex workers and the broader LGBTQIA+ community online. Much of the book focuses on advocating that internet service providers (ISPs) and social media platforms stop censoring LGBTQIA+ speech online that few would consider pornographic. However, in places—particularly chapter 4—that do look at pornography, I try to strike a balance between the seemingly contradictory advocacy for more porn and less porn. This position is rooted in the assumption that porn is not going anywhere; it is here to stay. As such, I’m advocating for more varieties of pornography, rather than more total content, so that the porn that exists and is readily available to people might be more diverse, representative, and imaginative, allowing people more freedom to explore their erotic desires. On the other hand, I’m advocating for fewer people to face the negative ramifications of the mainstream heteroporn industry and online sex work, whether this is achieved by democratizing the ownership, profits, and production of porn or by providing a social welfare and social justice framework robust enough that online sex work is truly optional. This broader focus on LGBTQIA+ censorship online tends to highlight the former of these commitments, often tempting me to celebrate attempts to democratize and diversify pornography online. That said, I remain equally committed to the latter position and hope to highlight the material conditions of online sex work as well and some of the steps we might take to make it more just, equitable, and optional.
The overbroad censorship of sexual speech online has amplified consequences for people that face intersectional forms of marginalization—in the United States, the most predominant of these is race. In this book, race primarily makes an appearance through intersectional analyses of who bears the weight of overzealous censorship most heavily. In the many, many posts about and reports of sexual speech being censored online that I came across, race was rarely mentioned as a factor and was difficult to disentangle in the case studies I performed. While I did find evidence of racial bias in some of the datasets I looked at, I had trouble making a direct and empirical connection to the censorship of sexual speech—and LGBTQIA+ content in particular—that I was tracing for the book.56 Instead, I mostly found race at the margins in my account, as an intersectional factor that, along with class, nationality, ability, and transgender identity, caused certain people to be inordinately impacted by LGBTQIA+ censorship online. This censorship is not a weight born equally across the LGBTQIA+ community and is connected to a much longer history of policing the sexuality of working-class, racialized, and otherwise marginalized populations, as I’ve shown above.
While I will try to gesture toward these intersectional concerns throughout the book, the extent of the new ground that needs to be covered and the intent to make a convincing argument that heteronormativity is getting embedded in the infrastructure of the internet will inevitably at points occlude these intersectional concerns and prevent me from doing them full justice. As such, it is my hope that I can refer readers to scholars who highlight these other perspectives in their work and that readers might look at their work alongside this book and find ways to correct and expand my analyses. Scholars like Charlton D. McIlwain and André Brock have shown that BIPOC communities, and African Americans in particular, have been early and influential adopters of internet and computer technologies.57 Their work stands in contrast to dominant narratives about the “digital divide,” the lack of technological literacy in BIPOC communities, and assumptions that the internet is a predominantly white space. Scholars like Janet Abbate, Mar Hicks, and Nathan Ensmenger have produced similar work in regard to gender.58 I’ve found little similar scholarship problematizing these narratives when it comes to class and nationality but imagine similar work could be done productively on these topics.
Scholars like Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, Ruha Benjamin, and Safiya Noble have worked to show how the logic of racialization is at the center of many algorithms, datasets, interfaces, and platforms that make up the internet and our everyday computational environment. Buolamwini and Gebru have most notably demonstrated empirically that racial and gender bias are deeply embedded in many of our most prominent facial recognition algorithms.59 Ruha Benjamin coined the term “the new Jim Code” to describe the ways in which computer and internet technologies are producing a new form of scientific racism, reflecting and reproducing existing inequities under the veneer of seemingly more objective and progressive technological apparatuses—specifically machine learning and predictive analytics.60 Safiya Noble has coined the term “technological redlining” to similarly describe the ways in which algorithms “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling.”61 She demonstrates how Google Search engages in technological redlining, shaping the experience and representation of race online in ways that reinforce the oppression of Black people. Scholars like Elizabeth Ellcessor have made similar arguments about disability, demonstrating the ways in which internet technologies reinforce the ableist architecture of everyday life by not adequately addressing accessibility concerns and connected this to disabled representation online.62 Again, to my knowledge, there is less robust scholarly discourse on similar issues vis-à-vis class and nationality online. Throughout this book, I will make similar arguments about the ways in which gender norms and heteronormativity are reinforced by algorithms and datasets online. By reading my work alongside these, and many other, important contributions from critical race scholars, my hope is that we might lay the foundation for a more fully intersectional analysis of normativity, marginalization, and power as it operates in our digitally networked world.
1
Unlikely Bedfellows
The Moral Majority and Anti-Porn Feminists
The Moral Majority, largely organized by American Southern Baptist pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. and composed mostly of evangelical Christians, emerged in the 1970s to combat the spread of pornography in the United States. The movement had little to fear with Richard Nixon holding the presidency. Nixon dedicated himself to maintaining the federal government’s efforts to “control and eliminate smut from our national life.”1 However, the election of populist Democrat Jimmy Carter to the presidency provided a new opening for the movement to leverage anti-pornography sentiment to gain national attention. The Moral Majority was catapulted onto the national stage in 1976 when Carter gave an interview in Playboy magazine, acknowledging that he had “lusted in his heart,” an attempt to humanize himself and acknowledge that despite his dedication to Christianity, he, too, struggled with sin.2 For many, this was a convenient line of attack against a populist Democratic president, but others were horror-struck in earnest. As one reporter wrote, “For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade.”3 Further, mobilizing these communities against pornography was the proving grounds for the rhetoric of “family values,” the same rhetoric that would later be used to mobilize conservative Christians in opposition to feminism, gay rights, and abortion access.4
By the 1980s, the Moral Majority had leveraged popular anti-pornography sentiment to build a powerful movement, as demonstrated by their impact on Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan’s reelection campaign of 1984 saw anti-pornography rhetoric added to the Republican Party platform for the first time, and shortly thereafter, he appointed Edwin Meese, his extremely conservative attorney general, to spearhead a new presidential commission on pornography. The nearly 2,000-page Meese Report was inflammatory, unilaterally condemning “smut” as a threat to American culture and morality.5 Reagan quickly leveraged the report to institute a new “obscenity strike force” meant to crack down on the proliferation of pornography made possible by VCRs, camcorders, and cable television. For the following five years, the federal government was able to leverage the community standards of small, conservative areas of the country to prosecute pornographers distributing mail-order tapes, films, and magazines, slowing the growth of the pornography industry.
While none of this is particularly surprising to anyone glancingly familiar with the history of conservative Christian politics in the United States, what is surprising is the unlikely bedfellows that the Moral Majority found in their war on porn: anti-porn feminists. None are more emblematic of this strand of feminism than Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. In 1987, MacKinnon defined pornography as
the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.6
For MacKinnon, this definition naturally led to the feminist insight that all pornography is a form of rape that reinforces gender inequality and status quo sexual politics, most notably normalizing and encouraging violence and discrimination against women.7 Andrea Dworkin largely shared this perspective and worked with MacKinnon to push anti-porn feminist activism to new heights in her attempts to get the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance (ACRO) passed. The ACRO would’ve legally treated pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and allowed them to sue for damages in courts of law in the United States.8 Dworkin also testified against pornography before the Meese Commission and went so far as to pen a book on the potential alliance to be struck between anti-porn feminists and right-wing women.9
As many critics were quick to point out, this strand of anti-porn feminism failed to substantially distinguish itself from the conservative anti-porn positions it was allying itself with.10 In fact, anti-porn feminism opened a rift that has continued to fracture any attempts to produce a unified feminist front since the 1980s.11 Anti-porn feminism also precludes feminism from cleanly allying itself with LGBTQIA+ studies and activism because it places heteronormativity at the foundation of feminist critique. As Gayle Rubin has argued, the ideology of anti-porn feminism contains an implied, if not explicit, condemnation of sadomasochism. It argues that sadomasochism is the bedrock of all pornography, and through this association, tethers BDSM practices to the objectification, exploitation, and rape of women.12 Further, as Jay Daniel Thompson has shown at length, anti-porn feminism to this day continues to silently position heterosexuality as the archetype of all pornography, denying the very possibility of LGBTQIA+ pornographies and instead interpreting them as mere variations on the heteroporn genre. Thompson argues that without an explicit analysis of heterosexuality in our critiques of pornography, we will never get an accurate critique. Instead, we will simply reproduce heteronormative anti-porn assumptions.13
While I wouldn’t go so far as to dismiss MacKinnon and Dworkin’s work, which certainly was responding to legitimate and important feminist concerns about the material impacts of sex work, objectification, misogyny, and rape culture, I do think it’s important to keep in mind how the turn to the criminal justice system and the alliance with other anti-pornography crusaders frequently undermined their attempts to achieve their more laudable goals of improving the material lives of women.
Popular anxiety around sex, sexuality, and pornography produces unlikely bedfellows—in this instance, between anti-porn feminists and arch-conservatives. Whatever their differences, these anti-porn allies tend to share a common commitment, whether they openly espouse it or are not quite conscious of it, to the reinforcement of heteronormativity. This chapter will work to trace the emergence of a new set of unlikely bedfellows in the war on pornography: the alt-right and pseudoscientific conservative Christian nonprofit organizations. We will see in great detail how the popular “Pandora’s box of porn” narrative has concealed a large amount of anti-porn activism and organizing. By tracing the new set of cultural and political forces that have formed a strategic coalition to battle the scourge of pornography today, we will see just how central this issue is to contemporary American politics and culture. The first section of the chapter will examine the manosphere, a portion of the internet in which men’s rights activists articulate new forms of masculinity, and particularly look at the digital footprints of the pickup artist Roosh V, the NoFap movement, Proud Boys, and incels. The second section will turn to Morality in Media—also known as the National Council on Sex Exploitation (NCOSE)—as emblematic of a revitalized Christian conservative anti-porn movement in the United States that leverages pseudoscience and nonprofit think tank strategies to advance its cause.
It is worth noting that I struggled with deciding how much of this discourse to include in the book for fear of perpetuating it or representing it as being the common and openly held beliefs of the majority of Americans. The discourse is certainly not omnipresent or potent enough to warrant such conclusions. In the end, I decided to include this information because, while these may be fringe extremist movements on the internet, they also are constituted by men who have the time and technical savvy to hold an oversized influence online.14 These groups are the breeding ground of many internet trolls, and their message boards have been used to organize systematic campaigns to target sex workers and adult entertainers, as we’ll see in chapter 4, with a particularly detrimental effect on LGBTQIA+ sexual speech online. They exert direct power over internet discourse through campaigns of harassment and exploit internet platforms’ community guidelines, terms of service agreements, and community flagging features to censor feminist and LGBTQIA+ content. They also exert indirect power over internet discourse because their extremist ideas are often translated into a less toxic version by intermediaries who help them achieve greater public visibility. As we’ll see in chapter 2, many men in Silicon Valley from low-level coders to executives profess a similar ideology. While it is important to understand the manosphere and the targeted ways in which it exerts power over sexual speech online, my hope is that readers will be able to take their claims to universality and cultural and political agency with a grain of salt. They are not and should not be taken as representative of what most Americans think, feel, say, or do.
Enter the Manosphere
In an interview for New York Magazine, Sarah Diefendorf, a sociologist and Scholars Strategy Network postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah, has argued that the manosphere can be understood as sharing some basic beliefs and ideological commitments, including gender essentialism, biologically determined gender roles, an objectification of and sense of ownership over women’s bodies, and an urgent feeling that they are “losing power or control.”15 Sarah Banet-Weiser similarly argues that the manosphere has emerged in relation to a crisis in masculinity and a felt sense of loss of power to feminists. She describes the manosphere as ranging “from the more moderate, such as support for father’s rights and custody rights, doubts over the prevalence of domestic violence, and reflexive support of the military, to the more extreme, such as normalizing rape and sexual violence, manipulating and controlling women into sex, and making death threats against a vast number of people (mostly women) who disagree with these views.”16 While misogyny and heteronormativity are nothing new, they have been catalyzed by social media and internet forums like 4chan and Reddit.17
These online communities are diverse, individually fragmented across different forums and media, with participants crossing boundaries between them frequently, and their discourse is often loaded with irony and proliferating neologisms. It can thus be difficult to pin down what exactly different groups of men’s rights activists actually believe. That said, recent research has demonstrated that these communities are growing, that members tend to migrate from less extreme peripheral groups toward more hateful, toxic, and potentially violent groups, and that by our best approximation, participants’ online expression becomes more toxic and hateful as they make this migration.18 The manosphere has helped to manifest what Jack Bratich has called a “cultural will-to-humiliation,” which operates as a form of power to reinforce white patriarchy and heteronormativity.19 Shame and humiliation are essential to the power of the manosphere.20 The manosphere’s internet trolls wield shame and humiliation to destroy relationships, ruin careers, and force their targets for harassment to leave online social spaces. Their vitriol is borne primarily by women and disproportionately by women of color.21
While there have been several recent academic studies that work to make sense of the heterogeneous discourse of the manosphere, they largely stick to examining it in terms of misogyny and thus analyze it in terms of gender.22 The analysis in this chapter looks to build on that discourse by examining the manosphere in terms of heteronormativity, including the complicated ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated together in digital misogynist discourse. The manosphere is also an interesting conjuncture to explore because men’s rights activists frequently have deep concerns over the role that pornography is playing in contemporary American life. The manosphere thus frequently joins the traditional alliance between anti-porn feminists and Christian conservatives, itself alive and well in the work of Gail Dines, for instance.23 Who would’ve thought those two groups would get into bed with men’s rights activists?
