The War on SEX
Malcolm Bolivar
12/30/2022
There’s a war on. And sex is losing. That’s really bad for all of us.
Recently, both Instagram and TikTok announced both changes to their acceptable use policies and increased enforcement of content that is of a sexual nature.
Let’s actually be clearer about this. The word is that Facebook is cracking down on “sexual solicitation” (see Facebook’s Community Standards here) but this seems to have a profound impact on posts not intended to solicit sex. Artists, educators, people focused primarily on women’s sexual health and well-being are all being targeted. Facebook has been steadily decreasing the amount of content that is related to sex, sexuality, sexual pleasure, and sexual health over a period of years.
In the case of TikTok, there appears to be something more nefarious, with people who may be involved in sex work being targeted by the platform despite posting nothing on their accounts related to sex, sexuality, or containing any nudity (see the Rolling Stone article about this here). My read of that article is that TikTok is actually policing the personal lives of the people on the platform (which is easy to do in this day and age) and making judgments about them personally.
If you have NOT been paying attention, let’s hit a few of the highlights of the past few years.
In early 2018, congress passed FOSTA-SESTA, a bill, which became law, was supposedly intended to stop sex-trafficking. But, in reality, it became a tool to curb “sex work” and not “sex trafficking.” It also removed some of the safe harbor protections for internet companies so that they could be held liable for ads posted for prostitution. Read all about it here.
Tumblr banned all sexual content and nudity in December of 2018. This had a chilling impact on many communities and content that people were using to explore sexuality. Read more about that here. Not surprisingly, over 30% of the users stopped using it.
Instagram and Facebook, arguably one of the largest controllers of internet and online traffic, have been slowly marching towards complete abolition of sex, sexuality, sexual pleasure, and sexual health across all of its platforms. Including one notable instance of a book entitled, The Vagina Bible, having ads blocked because of the use of the word “vagina” in the title.
Only 24 states (and the District of Columbia) have mandated sex education programs for teens and adolescents. And none of those programs talk about pleasure and/or sexual health and wellbeing.
There are currently 15 states that have sodomy laws on the books and haven’t been repealed. Despite the fact that in 2003—17 years ago—the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws prohibiting private homosexual activity, sodomy (anal sex), and oral sex between consenting adults was unconstitutional.
These highlights are just a very small fraction of the things that have been happening while you, and me, have been asleep at the wheel. We haven’t cared, nor have we done all that much to understand, much less question, the slow erosion of sexual freedom. This erosion has not only had a profound impact on the safety of sex-work—something we should all be concerned about—it also has had an even more profound impact on access to information about sex, sexuality, sexual health, and—MOST IMPORTANTLY—sexual pleasure.
Why are these things important? Well here are just a few reasons:
Sexual health education for adolescent women showed dramatic decreases in adverse sexual outcomes, such as unintended pregnancy and STI’s (Sexually Transmitted Infections).
Young people who discuss sex and relationships with their parents are significantly more likely to use contraception.
Abstinence only education is a failed method of preventing adolescents from engaging in sex and only leads to more undesirable outcomes, such as sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and sexual abuse.
We are left with PornHub which is rapidly become the only source for people to access sexuality in all its forms. PornHub is a money-driven enterprise that only serves to present inaccurate representations of human sexuality which only does further damage to our perceptions of sex and sexuality. Particularly that of young people.
So let me simplify all this. Here are the highlights:
Technology companies are taking advantage of the rich amounts of data to censor and, perhaps, do worse things to people based on the choices they make about their sex and sexuality.
People who feel they have a right to pass laws about how we express our sexuality, are using legal means and regulation of the internet to shut down free expression of sexuality. It is hard to know their intentions, but it is being done under more sensible ideas that most people agree with, namely the desire to stop sex-trafficking and abuse. However, in practice, that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening. Meaning that what is happening is that mostly positive expression of sexuality is the thing that is being shut down.
Companies like Facebook and TikTok are doing a poor job of what they should be focusing on (hate speech, spreading of lies) and instead opting for the low-hanging fruit of banning expressions of sexuality and nudity.
This is a nuanced and complicated problem that requires smart people to discuss the problem in a rational and reasonable way, so that potential solutions can be identified. In fact, this is actually a collection of issues (Sex trafficking, sex-work legality, sex-worker protection, sexual expression, human connection, etc.) that all need to be looked at closely. Solutions will be complicated and take time to play out. We may need to try some things and course correct.
All of this results in young people developing very dysfunctional perceptions of healthy sexual expression and having a poor understanding of what healthy sexuality is. This is demonstrated in the reality that the CDC calls teenagers engaging in sexual exploration as a “risk behavior.” In America today we don’t talk about sex with our teenagers, we don’t teach them about sex, and we don’t even allow healthcare practitioners to discuss it with our teenagers. Less teenagers are having sex, and even worse, are feeling bad about sex and sexuality. In comparison to other countries that have a much more proactive approach and don’t stigmatize sex—such as the Netherlands—the United States has much higher rates of the “bad outcomes” related to sexual exploration. This a recipe for disaster.
That’s why I make the case that war against sex is going badly.
Sex is Vital
I started this section with “Sex is Important,” but decided to change it to what I have above. The World Health Organization states (I took the liberty of highlighting a few important points):
Sexual health is FUNDAMENTAL to the overall health and well-being of individuals, couples and families, and to the social and economic development of communities and countries. Sexual health, when viewed affirmatively, REQUIRES A POSITIVE AND RESPECTFUL APPROACH TO SEXUALITY and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having PLEASURABLE and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.
Sex is the reason why we still exist as a species and why we have been able to progress from the primitive lifestyle of our earliest ancestors. The advancement of society, the world in which we live today, was built by people who believed that sex and sexuality were a core part of who they were. Despite our best efforts to use religion and government to stifle our own impulses and drives, we have endured. If you are a member of the LGBTQ community, your identity as being part of the community would not exist without sex and sexuality. Even if you choose to define yourself as ASEXUAL, you are defined by your lack of a desire and/or interest in engaging in sexual expression.
More importantly, the part I think that gets lost in these discussions, is that our sex and sexuality is a core part of how we engage in human connection. It pains me to read that young women are being introduced to exploring their sexuality through the example of PornHub. That they don’t enjoy sexual exploration and they simply feel pressure to “perform” for their partners. It should be a wake-up call for all of us.
What You Should Do
I am going to be direct and to the point here. Because people don’t like nuance and don’t like to read very much.
Remove the power for all corporations involved in technology platforms to regulate, censor, and or control what people see.
Repeal FOSTA-SESTA and acknowledge that having a group of old people try to develop laws on sex and the internet is complete madness. The average age of the 115th Congress was 57.8 years old for Representatives and 61.8 years old for Senators.
If we are truly committed to stopping sex-trafficking (the purported reason for FOSTA-SESTA, we need to understand it better). Once we understand the sources of sex-trafficking (organized crime, exploitation of immigration, etc.) we can begin to build solutions and programs to stop it. Assuming that passing laws to deal with complex criminal networks and activity that overlap with social issues is a way to solve the problem is a failed model. Case in point: prohibition.
Legalize and build protections for sex work. Sex-work encompasses everything from making adult-oriented films to prostitution to exotic dancing to cam girls. Each of these will require different programs, laws, and regulations.
Hold technology companies accountable for making the barrier for entry higher for all members. Facebook has over a billion users. We can probably agree that a significant portion of those users includes inactive accounts and duplicate accounts for users. The inherent anonymity makes it easy to exploit accounts and Facebook has financial incentive to not keep membership down—mainly because their primary source of revenue is based on them charging businesses for ads that get shown to those billion users. It’s a shell game at best.
Apply administrative rules and controls on internet companies to prevent the type of behavior that’s out of bounds. Nude images, discussions about vaginal health, and information about sexual health should not be in any way, out of bounds. But you can segregate content in areas that are only available for adults. And yes, it’s very easy for these same technology companies to build tools to make those areas only available to adults. It just isn’t as profitable. Technology companies are lazy, profit driven, and bureaucracies in their own right. In my experience they are often more dysfunctional than government agencies. They just make a ton of money and can cover up their failings more easily.
Identify those crimes—most of which are already on the books—that we should vigorously prosecute and stop. A few that come to mind involve any sexual activity where consent is not legally or freely given. This includes sex acts with animals, sex acts with children under the age of 18, sex acts with individuals with diminished capacity, sex acts with individuals who are under the influence of drugs and alcohol, etc.
If you have children, begin having conversations about healthy sex and sexuality at an early age. I have two children, now in their late teens, and by the time they were both in 6th grade, they had witnessed more sex acts on the internet than I had before the age of 25. This includes bestiality. And I was strict about their internet access and they did not have phones until many years later than most of their peers. Surprisingly—or not—both had been exposed to the most extreme sexual depictions by the children of the most religious and conservative parents who gave their children phones and internet access. I am lucky, my children talked about it with me and we were able to have good conversations about healthy expressions of sexuality and the stuff their peers had shared with them. If you don’t know how to talk to them about it, look it up. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has information about it and, guess what, they tell you to talk early and often. Get over yourself and your outdate religious beliefs, you are only harming your own children if you don’t.
Give them access to education so that they can learn about sex and sexuality in a safe and comprehensive way. An educational program that includes healthy perspectives about pleasure.
We all need to do something about this. For the health of our children. To help secure a more positive future for them. I truly believe that a society that has a healthy perspective on sex and sexuality functions better.
Don’t let the war be lost because you didn’t have the time to care. Don’t let the war be lost because of your own issues with sex and sexuality.
Be a part of the solution. Be better for the sake of future generations to come.
- M
Copyright © 2020 - Malcolm Bolivar. All Rights Reserved.
Image courtesy of the Femme Project.
