A group of self-declared "fighters" campaigning under the banners "Porn Kills Love" and "Fight The New Drug" are spreading the word in San Francisco through their sleek website, billboards, and sidewalk chalk that Porn Is Bad, You Guys.
To those with mixed feelings about porn — a group who might also have mixed feelings about Hollywood and television and the power of the image in general — sure, they might seem to have a point. (Basically they say that watching porn changes people's ideas about sex for the worse, and makes people less able find love or intimacy.)
But, in fact, this particular group of hipster posers are expressing not just anti-porn, but anti-sex rhetoric, spreading misleading and debunked information, hiding their religious affiliation (its founders are Mormon though they claim the group is not religious), and basically wasting their time and ours.
“Our goal is not to pass legislation or even attack the industry directly. Our goal is to spark a conversation around the subject using science, facts, and personal accounts,” said Clay Olson, CEO of Fight the New Drug, as SFGate reports.“Our campaign has been alive and growing since 2008, and we have a huge online presence. This is the first time we have used billboards to spread the message.”
Our campaign in the Bay Area is still going strong! These billboards are sparking a huge conversation!
#PornKillsLove pic.twitter.com/I2Fhtwdi2F
— FIGHTERS (@FightTheNewDrug) September 25, 2015
"If you're like me," writes the Bay Area sex and porn blogger Violet Blue, "you're tired of people trying to control our sexuality by telling us what we should or shouldn't enjoy sexually, based on what someone else thinks is best for us. Prevailing conservative attitudes — be they feminist, religious, or other — seem determined to keep us in a perpetual state of being children about sex."
On her NSFW website, which is a valuable resource in this debate — and for those looking to find sex-positive, empowering porn of all stripes — she dismantles pretty much every argument against porn that these people have.
For example, she writes, "Watching pornography does not give you some unquenchable thirst to find something harder, more extreme — you already have this urge before you turn on the computer or TV. It’s true that when you grow comfortable you will crave variation — but always only within the bounds of what is sexually comfortable for you."
"Every time there is a moral panic around porn you hear the same fears about how it’s changing how we interact and it’s changing the family. It just hasn’t happened,” Kink.com spokesperson Mike Stabile, another friend of SFist, said in drawing a comparison with anti-masturbation rhetoric. “They use the same debunked studies over and over again the science is just not there.”
Fight the New Drug's methods are also disingenuous. One of their tactics involves spreading a video interview with a former male pornstar that paints a dark and dramatic portrait of the porn world. When, however, the actor saw the cut they used, he told the Adult Video Network that "I was appalled and surprised that they were that good editors, because they really left out a lot of stuff that I was talking about, and they made it look very anti-porn."
Anyway, look, porn really doesn't need defending, because Jesus, images depicting sex have been around forever, and aren't going to stop, and wanting to see them is totally normal and healthy. So, basically, these guys can go jerk off, or not, but sex-negative proselytizing in the Bay Area is never going to work.
Tell it to Salt Lake City, fools.