Here are some of the groups who really pushed for its demise.
There are a lot of people out there who wish pornography would just pack up her dirty ass and kick rocks. But you can’t police the sexual imagination. You can’t police art, erotic and otherwise. Porn will always be a contentious topic in America. Are its makers evil, misogynist bastards who exploit women? Or are they liberated, pro-sex creatives who want to celebrate pleasure, sexual complexity, and the human body?
Like the issue of abortion, I doubt we will ever come to a public consensus regarding pornography. It’s just one big gray area dripping with sweat and saliva. Here are some of the crusaders who wish that Penthouse never existed.
1979: Women Against Pornography March
In October 1979, 5,000 women showed up in New York’s Times Square to protest the big, bad evil of pornography. Led by Women Against Pornography (WAP) and feminist figureheads Susan Brownmiller, Bella Abzug, and the queen bee herself, Gloria Steinem, the rally stomped for blocks, with women plastering small, Day-Glo stickers outside sex shops and porn theaters, chanting “Two, four, six, eight, pornography is woman hate” until they ended up in Bryant Park.
Steinem marched with a “Porn Hurts Women” poster, while infamous male-hating activist Andrea Dworkin’s sign read, “Porn is the Art of the Male Death Culture.”
WAP’s whole M.O. was that porn was a form of violence against women, no ifs, ands, or buts. According to the New York Times, WAP founder Lynn Campbell urged women to “take action — form consciousness-raising and education campaigns against pornography.” Campbell encouraged women to boycott supermarkets and other stores selling soft-porn mags.
Fine, things were different in 1979. All most people knew of porn was Deep Throat, a damaged Linda Lovelace, and rumors that her husband (aka pimp) had forced her into a bestiality film for some extra cash. However, this anti-sex, anti-porn perspective has reared its ugly head again in today’s feminism, turning the movement back to a stuck-up, regressive philosophy that views women as perpetual victims.
Thanks for the help, ladies, but I’m not a victim of my gender and neither is any other woman.
1985: Reagan Orders the Meese Commission
Early in his second term, President Reagan assigned an investigation into the world of pornography overseen by Attorney General Edwin Meese. Critics thought Reagan was just rubbing his nose between the ass cheeks of the Christian Right, while supporters of the order, like anti-porn feminist troglodytes Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, were behind it 120 percent.
The Meese Commission was big shit, tapping 11 panelists, social scientists, children’s welfare advocates, researchers, activists, and reverends, most of them of the mind that porn is for sickos. (The release of their report in 1986 coincided with a much-publicized study by anti-porn activist Judith Reisman, who’d received a grant of $734,000 to analyze cartoons in Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse to assess their toxic effects.)
What resulted from this deep dive between the thighs of Lady Pornography? A five-part, 35-chapter hunk of paper that sided, for the most part, with the crusaders: Porn was bad for men’s souls, for women, for the family, and for the nation. Fortunately, for smut lovers and peddlers like those at Penthouse, the distribution of so-called “obscene material” is protected under the First and Fifth Amendments. But that didn’t stop 7-Eleven from booting Penthouse from its shelves.
2001: The Birth of XXXchurch
Founded by California pastor Craig Gross, XXXchurch is a non-profit organization that lends a hand to performers when they want to leave the industry and enter the arms of God. Gross’s whole thing is that sex is sacred, virginity is holy, and porn throws that pure, perfect pussy to the wolves. XXXchurch argues that addictions to sex and porn are real and that most people who work in the porn industry don’t actually want to be there.
I know this because that’s exactly what Gross told me when I interviewed him for a report I did on the AVN Awards for VICE in 2013. With catchy slogans like “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” and its wholesome, loving message, this group can feel like a hug from God when things aren’t going so hot. I’m the first to admit that the adult industry has corrupt, crooked deviants — just like finance, law, and government — but every time I think of XXXchurch, I’m reminded of Gross waving his hand toward a group of adult stars and scoffing with disgust, “They don’t want to be here.”
2009: The Formation of Fight the New Drug
It’s easy to be lured in by Fight the New Drug’s colorful, engaging website. The online face of this anti-pornography organization (“porn kills love,” they preach) is filled with “scientific facts,” crisply animated videos, and a slick interface. The group contends pornography is bad for the heart, mind, and family.
Fight the New Drug (FTND) insists they are just a group of regular guys who got together and realized that porn had affected them all in the same way. Just like Alex Jones, they created the resistance. Except their resistance isn’t an iron fist and spitting red face, but a chill, bro-next-door approach to patrolling the sexual imagination. Though they insist that they are not ideologically motivated or associated with any one religious group, a quick Google search reveals that FTND is backed by the Mormon Church.
In 2016, FTND rolled out the most famous Mormon in America, Elizabeth Smart, to talk about how pornography was to blame for her sexual abuse and kidnapping by psychotics Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee. Referring to Mitchell, Smart said, “It just led to him raping me more, more than he already did — which was a lot.” She added, “I can’t say that he would not have gone out and kidnapped me had he not looked at pornography. All I know is that pornography made my living hell worse.”
