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Porn Is Becoming Taboo Again
Increasingly, porn is being pushed back into the shadows
Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr was generally considered one of the most porn-friendly social media platforms. It was a place where users could form communities around their shared love of hardcore GIFs and soft-core photos, where porn performers could set up their own mini-websites without fear of being kicked off the service for posting obscene content.
Earlier this month, all that came to an end. After over eleven years of tacitly — and sometimes actively — supporting the porn fans and porn creators using their platform, on December 17, 2018, Tumblr’s leadership announced that pornography would no longer be allowed on the platform.
For many, the move came as a shock; a betrayal of the anything-goes attitude that’s long been assumed to underpin the infrastructure of the internet. But Tumblr isn’t alone in its newfound aversion to adult content. The week before the company’s porn ban announcement, Starbucks announced plans to debut a porn filter on its in-store WiFi, and the United Kingdom has spent over a year working out the details of an age verification system that would require all would-be porn viewers to register with a database before accessing adult content.
The recent crackdowns on pornography, Stabile says, are the culmination of a mounting anti-porn panic.
After decades of helping to define the internet, porn seems to be on the verge of becoming taboo again, pushed out of the public eye and segregated into the dark, seedy corners of the internet. For those who’ve long been accustomed to adult content having free reign of the internet, it’s a shift that feels dramatic and sudden. And yet the truth is that these changes are the result of a slowly building backlash, one that’s been gaining ground for years.
There’s always anxiety about sex,” says Michael Stabile, Communication Director for the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s national trade association. “But there are points at which the fever builds more.” Stabile says that anxiety about porn comes in waves, with major cultural events like the debut of the birth control pill, the explosion of the AIDS crisis, and…
