Picture a gang of prudes, in their Mary Jane shoes and prim expressions, seeking to choke porn by pulling the rope tighter and tighter about its neck.  They pull and pull, and zap!  There go the major credit card services.  They pull and pull some more, and zap! There goes OnlyFans.

All Sex Work May Become Illegal

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Missouri) has been leading this particular charge.  Just porn?  No, she declares all sex work “illegal” and calls upon Congress to act.  Prostitution is, of course, illegal, save in a couple of states.  But the laws are rarely enforced.  (Vibrators used to be illegal in Alabama.)  But sex work is broader than providing.  Publishing XBIZ is, in a sense, sex work.  Yoo-hoo, publisher Alec Helmy:  We’re coming for you!

But here is the icing on the cake.  What better club to batter OnlyFans with than the accusation of “childhood sexual abuse,” despite the tenuousness of the evidence.  We have seen this movie before.  The war against childhood sexual abuse is the equivalent of the war on juvenile delinquency in the 1950s.

The War Against Sex

In its war-against-sex, the religious right has become cunning.  They don’t want to drive OnlyFans out of business because Jesus would be against it.  No.  They hitch their anti-sex wagons to such indisputably worthy causes as opposing the sexual abuse of children.  In today’s media landscape, you have to find the right button and then keep punching it until the New York Times falls in line with The Voice of the True Cross.

I don’t have a dog in the OnlyFans race.  It is to me, personally, a matter of indifference whether OnlyFans goes under or not (although, during this pandemic, many providers have profited from the enormous uptick in demand for porn by posting on it; this has supplemented their collapsing revenues).

The Growing U.S. Theocracy

What I do protest is the growing imposition of theocracy on American politics by the religious right in the Southern states.  The war-on-sex is part of a theocratic agenda, and it makes me uneasy.  Many participated in the January 6 insurrection to abolish American democracy under the banner of god.