The War on Sex
An old front with new digital artillery
Either at the crack of dawn, or before going to sleep, you probably have already loaded a video online, opened your sex toy drawer (or gone “cold turkey”) and pleasured yourself to the sound and sight of somebody else moaning on your screen. Or, well, maybe not exactly in that manner, if you consider yourself a member of the asexual community. But, nevertheless, online pornography is most likely one of the most common human wants (and can also be one of the strongest vices). According to German government regulations, however, porn has been liable to a societal ban, if displayed on websites where there is no age-verification system to stop minors from watching pornographic content.
Censorship of pornography is a tale old as time, but with the advent of artificial intelligence, it has become increasingly easier to flag online sexually explicit content via keywords, facial recognition, and data mining. For a few years now, the Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz (KFJ), Germany’s Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media, has been overlooking the controversial banning of websites and social media profiles that display freely accessible porn. The former director of the Media Council of the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority (MA HSH), Thomas Fuchs, for instance, has even publicly declared before that this unregulated business model is not permissible in the German territory.
Many Twitter accounts from Berlin’s adult content creators, in this direction, have been recently displaying the platform’s automated message, notifying that the user profile has been “withheld” in Germany “in response to a legal demand.” One friend of mine even reported receiving a hefty governmental fine for posting pornography on Twitter, a social media which has always been known for not censoring nudity or explicit content, unlike similar platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, or Snapchat. While this situation seems to be receiving a tighter grip by the hour, it is nothing new, as the first blocks in Germany directed at Twitter profiles and major websites distributing pornography date back to September 2019.
While online content moderation and regulation for minors is definitely necessary in the virtual world, the one-size-fits-all regulations put in place by surveillance teams in the real world are usually arbitrary and not transparent about their guidelines, as well as their political consequences. In fact, the crusade on online pornography currently being led in Germany has certainly been attracting both national and international negative press. Yet, this is a decades-long Western debate on free speech and child protection, spanning from Time magazine’s 1995 cover story on cyberporn to more recent academic studies on the efficacy and necessity of regulation of internet pornography, and its potential danger of becoming censorship. In addition, this type of governmental ban was recently scrapped in the United Kingdom, after its 2017 Digital Economy Act stipulated what became popularly knows as a "porn block" for underage internet users. In the UK, this conversation has despite of that not stopped, as evidenced by a report published by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) together with the research agency Revealing Reality in January 2020.
What might be surprising is that this current crackdown on porn is not being led in Germany by its far-right, or explicitly conservative politicians, but rather by a seemingly harmless bureaucrat: Dr. Tobias Schmid, a (heterosexual) married father of two, living in Cologne. Perhaps in an attempt to protect his own children, Herr Schmid has taken the goodwill action to use his power as a law-abiding citizen and state official in going after the scary monsters lurking in the corners of the internet. According to research conducted in German universities in 2017, 50% of the youngest subgroup investigated, the 14- and 15-year-olds, have been introduced to "hardcore pornography" with exposed genitals by chance and rather unintentionally. Even so, one finding from the same study, which might not have received widespread attention, is that the first contact those children had with pornography did not happen out in the big, scary world, but rather at home, and with their friends.
As a matter of fact, that is how I remember my very own first contact with porn: my voice had not deepened yet (well, it never really did), and back in the 1990s, when the internet was still referred to as The Internet, my friends told me they had found an incredible thing to show me. I was in a mixed group of girls and boys at that time, but I remember we watched straight porn for a few minutes, which caused some giggles and excitement. I wonder if that moment has caused me irreparable psychological damage, and if philistine supervision of erotic experiences might have saved me from a lifetime of despair caused by having watched porn as a child…
A few years later, before high school, I went back to searching for porn online, once a survey conducted by my very catholic school on sexual education made me realize I did not know what "masturbation” or even "to watch pornography regularly” really meant. I am not trying to paint myself as some fabricated version of naïveté, but sexually I was actually a late bloomer, and was not interested in kissing or even having sex until I was around 17. What would my life be like, then, if I had encountered the powerful protection of Herr Schmid, I wonder? Maybe I would have developed a better romantic attachment style.
My question on this whole ordeal is: if parents in Germany are so worried their children might access pornography freely on the Internet, then should not they be the ones controlling their minors’ unlimited entry in the virtual world, not the state? For someone who lives in Berlin, a city where nudity and sex are a commonality, it seems like quite an obtuse way to achieve widespread social regulation by curbing the freedom of many, in the face of the sexual miseducation of a few. In my view, this topic could even be explored in schools, and actually empower the German youth’s sexual education, before it becomes a real sex ban.
In the long run, the ones who suffer from these thwarted attempts at “protecting children” are the same people who have been historically affected by the bourgeoisie wreaking havoc in the name of morality, good customs and maintenance of the nuclear family: queer, BIPOC creators, as well as sex workers and independent adult content creators. Needless to say, I do not condone any criminal and harmful sexual activity involving minors, but there needs to be more nuanced conversations which recognize children as far more complex than the fragile and innocent cultural stereotypes they carry. Possibly then it will be possible not to shy away from discussions on how minors themselves have been proven responsible for curbing societal embargos to access the internet, either by bypassing WiFi bans or by successfully removing top level porn web filters to access taboo content.
Photo credit: © Stefan Gräf