The dramatic penetration of the Internet into every aspect of life provides an opportunity to see social history unfold in our own lifetime: What happens when a brand-new technology is introduced into (and takes over) Western culture?
With regard to sexuality and the Internet, the result is frustratingly familiar and predictable. For millions of Americans, the Internet is just the latest blunt instrument with which to terrify themselves and others about sex. And so the most profound communications tool in the history of the human race has been transformed into a battleground in the War on Sex.
Having an existing War on Sex did hasten this destiny (although as described later, history predicts it would have happened anyway). Because the War on Sex had a sophisticated infrastructure already in place, powerful individuals and groups were able to fit the Internet right into their existing SexPanic. They skillfully used the same vocabulary, psychological paradigm, and political machine they had used in prior battles (such as those over broadcast TV and VCRs).
The breathtakingly futuristic innovation didn’t impress them. There was nothing modern about the fear they whipped up around it; we might as well have been witnessing the mystery of fire terrifying our pre-caveman ancestors.
The way the Internet became pervasive in America followed a well-known historical pattern, one that tells us a great deal about human nature and sexuality. This 10,000-year-old pattern demonstrates that new technologies do not shove erotic imagery, words, and themes at a naïve public that hasn’t invited it, wants to resist it, but simply can’t. No, what has consistently happened for 100 centuries is that new technologies are used for sexual purposes very early in their development. And that’s true regardless of a society’s economy, religion, political system, or level of literacy.1These sexual uses ultimately make the technology available to the general public for more general, non-sexual uses.
One reason for this pattern is that sex is central to so many human endeavors. Humans have an unlimited thirst for sexual expression, health, and comfort. Consider2:
Whether a technological innovation involves transportation, communication, or new materials, the pattern looks like this:
It doesn’t matter which people, which technology, or the format of the sexuality involved, the pattern is almost always the same. People upset about sexual adaptations of technology may blame it on the lasciviousness of a particular group (atheists, immigrants, homosexuals, liberals, perverts); or on the modernity or soullessness of a particular innovation (crocodile dung [for contraception], the printing press, latex rubber); or on the temptations of a particular sexuality (kiddie porn, swinging, sodomy). All are missing the point: Humans are hungry for sexual imagery. They fantasize about sexual opportunity. And they’ll do so any way they can.
As people adopt technologies for enhancing nutrition, improving their health, and keeping warm and dry, so too they adopt them for making sex easier, more exciting, more varied, less expensive, more self-expressive, and safer. The Internet is only the latest chapter in this timeless story. And while most humans want privacy around their own sexual expression, most humans are dying to know what their neighbors do.
People will always respond this way to technology. You and I will live to see dire predictions, efforts at control, and moral hysteria about other technologies that haven’t been invented yet. Because those yet-to-be-invented technologies will be adapted for sexual purposes. Of course.
Understanding this historical pattern enables us to look beyond the specifics of the attacks on the Internet, seeing today’s battle over the Internet as part of a long series of battles about sex and technology. More or less unregulated until the mid-1990s, when use of the Internet expanded beyond the initial technology-oriented, younger group of early adapters, the demand for legislation to control it predictably grew. It’s not about the Internet—it’s about social control of sexuality.
Consider the Internet’s structure. To a degree unknown in the non-virtual (“real”) world, the virtual world:
For those who wish to control others’ sexuality, thinking, or family structure, the Internet is a nightmare come true.
Not coincidentally, the Internet—in its purest form—also represents the fulfillment of America’s loftiest ideals:
These are two different ways of describing the same phenomenon. Many people hate or fear the Internet precisely because it fulfills these lofty American ideals.
The Internet started out as part of a multi-nation physics research project, CERN. Computers had been around since the end of World War II. By the 1950s, deep in the Cold War, the U.S. government wondered how to keep its chain of command intact in the event of a nuclear war. The desired solution was to have a decentralized system that didn’t physically exist anywhere. That system became the Internet. It won’t, of course, survive a nuclear war, and today’s typical Internet user rarely thinks about its military uses.
At first, participating in the Internet required technical skill and equipment that few people had or could acquire. The early participants were an esoteric group, members of a mostly invisible subculture that developed its own language, etiquette, and priorities.
During the 1980s, a long series of technical achievements was making the Internet more practical for more people. Things we take for granted today had to be, and were, invented: HTML, URLs. The World Wide Web project was announced in 1991. Three years later, Netscape released the first browser.
And the thing that drove the whole development was … sex. Pornography to look at. To read. To buy. Chat rooms in which to discuss sex or have “virtual” sexual experiences. Fetish sites that proved you weren’t the only one who enjoyed your unusual fantasy. E-mail with which people could flirt, discuss sex, and masturbate together. People took pictures of themselves nude or having sex and posted them for others to enjoy (today when teens do that, it’s called sexting). Online pornography was the first consistently successful e-commerce product.
With the Internet becoming more easily usable, people started going to it for a wide range of non-sexual activities: shopping (made possible because of porn-for-pay systems), research (via the high-resolution, compressed images needed for porn), education (via the CD-ROMs developed to deliver porn), and e-mail for worldwide communication (a network financed by people using it for sexual purposes).
And so the whole country started finding out about this cool way to interact with others. And some people started freaking out about the way it could be used to interact sexually with others. Which brings us to the predictable thing that happened next: People brought the War on Sex to the Internet. The frontline moved online.
It wasn’t long before the public was being told there was “too much” sex on the Internet, and that it posed a danger to many people, particularly children. There was already a powerful civic-political alliance battling against sexual rights relating to videotape, TV, radio, telephone sex, library books, and adult entertainment. Thus, there was an infrastructure of fear/danger already in place to claim that:
The supposedly out-of-control reader of nasty comics and graphic novels was simply transformed into the out-of-control reader of Internet porn. The supposedly ever-present playground predator was easily transformed into the ever-present chat-room predator.
Since the special technology of the Internet makes an enormous range of words and images widely available, people who worried about uncontrolled access and experience were easily frightened. Sexual imagery formed an easy target on which to focus the anxiety of this group; for anyone who believes that access to the “wrong” material frees people’s dangerous “latent tendencies,” the Internet is the most treacherous thing ever invented.
Many institutions—churches, “morality” groups, think tanks, parent groups—devoted themselves to controlling online sexuality, while many more came into being with this specific mission. It was the focus of enormously successful fundraising efforts; indeed, it helped make some groups, like Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family, the big players they are today. Like Jenna Jameson and then-Senator, now Governor Sam Brownback, they can proudly say they owe their success to Internet porn.
Since the constituents of these crusading groups were (and often still are) technologically unsophisticated, they were easily misled about the magnitude of the dangers the Internet posed. Those already participating in other moral panics (regarding, for example, homosexuality, child abduction, satanic abuse, feminism, or contraception) found it easy to believe almost any assertion about destructive sex on the Web.
If they heard sensational claims about it, they rarely checked them out and certainly weren’t having experiences that contradicted these lies. If their pastor told them that kids can access millions of Web sites showing women having sex with horses, they didn’t surf the Web to discover it isn’t true. If they heard that there are perverts molesting young girls in every chat room in cyberspace, they didn’t go to chat rooms with their nieces and share benign experiences there.
The moral panic was fed by stories citing the explosive availability of, and interest in, sexual material on the Internet. It became commonplace to cite how sex was the most-searched-for word on the Internet, a fact that has continued to this day. Of course.
Naturally, tens of millions of people, from every walk of American life, were eager to look at, think about, or discuss sex via the Internet. But anti-sex forces didn’t consider the meaning of this very typical interest. Instead, the moral panic quickly grew to the point where some people demanded that the government take steps to control what others could see, read, and hear on the Internet. Congress responded with a series of measures in 1995 and 1996, claiming to protect children from “computer pornography,” material “harmful to minors,” and the use of morphing technology to create simulated child porn.
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was struck down the following year for being unconstitutionally vague. But people were still fearful (or were pandering to those who were), and yearned for more control over the Internet. In 1998, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation “to ensure that pervasive, obscene, and violent material is screened out [of schools and libraries] and that our children are protected.”7 The government ultimately passed the outlandishly comprehensive Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which criminalized the sending of anything “harmful to minors” (which has no precise legal meaning, and is generally protected by the First Amendment) over the Internet.
So the government joined in the Big Lie about (1) the Internet being a dangerous environment that (2) needed to be controlled. That Big Lie is now about predators and “trafficking.” Same nonsense.
The moral panic around the Internet needed villains, of course. Not surprisingly, the category of “dangerous people” has grown bigger and bigger. It now includes couples who post nude photos of themselves; college students who complain bitterly about school, teachers, or each other; adult women who dress in fantasy teenager costumes; impolite bloggers; and people who publish information about sexual health, homosexuality, and non-monogamy.
Anti-sex forces continually expressed outrage that so-called pornographers were allowed to do what they wanted on the Internet—as if the rights of people to consume what pornographers were producing was of no importance. So pornographers were a handy villain. And the people who protected Americans’ rights to consume their online products—such as the American Civil Liberties Union, National Coalition Against Censorship, and People for the American Way—were branded as protecting pornographers’ rights to poison America.
That strategy has continued to this very day—ignoring the rights of consumers of sexually oriented materials when discussing possible harm and possible solutions.
As the panic spread, the Internet was increasingly looked upon as an enormous pipeline pumping toxic sewage into innocent homes, giving psychotic predators access to innocent lives. This fantasy persists in the way porn is described by anti-porn activists today—that it’s being pumped into homes where it isn’t wanted.
Individual states began passing laws attempting to prevent this monstrous technology from harming its citizens.Pennsylvania’s law is typical. Passed in 2002, it required all Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to sites accused of containing child pornography. The state attorney general, or any county district attorney, could ask a local judge to declare that a certain Web site might be child pornography, thus requiring any ISP serving Pennsylvania citizens to block it. This would occur with no prior notice to the ISP or Web site owner, with no option of appeal.
The law imposed potential liability on ISPs, even if they had no relationship with the publishers of the allegedly offensive content. Any ISP doing business in Pennsylvania was therefore potentially liable for content anywhere on the Internet.
Not satisfied, Pennsylvania’s attorney general started issuing orders directly to ISPs—over 300—demanding they block certain content. But he refused to disclose the content of these secret orders. So for a year, providing Internet service in Pennsylvania was a dangerous business. Residents never knew which sites they couldn’t access due to mere suspicion, or worse, because an innocent Web site was technically entangled with a site that was suspected. Finally, the law was overturned in court in 2004. Nevertheless, other states (including Arizona, New York, and Michigan) eventually passed similar laws, all of which were struck down. A new Massachusetts law was challenged in 2010, and was only settled in 2011.
Pennsylvania’s law was technologically impossible and constitutionally unacceptable. But it did make a statement: We are so afraid of child porn that we’re willing to shut down the Internet in Pennsylvania.8
Just as fear of alcohol (particularly of how immigrants, poor people, and minors were using it) 80 years ago led to Prohibition, fear of the Internet (particularly of how perverts, liberals, and minors were using it) led to demands for “filtering” technology.
This was the impetus for developing Internet filtering software, which many private companies made commercially available starting in the mid-1990s. Installed on a computer, it would prevent the user from accessing Web sites whose address or content were considered “inappropriate”—that is, connected with sexuality. Vendors claimed that their products “protected children” by eliminating “pornographic” content, but the range of sexual references they eliminated was extraordinarily wide. This included sites about breast cancer, psychology, political debate, art, and even people (Dick Armey) and communities (Middlesex) whose names included certain magic letters.9 MapleSoccer.org was blacklisted by CyberPatrol because it listed teams as “boys under 12,” “boys under 10,” and so on. And in the ultimate irony, FilteringFacts.org (a pro-censorship site) was blocked by SurfWatch, one of the most popular blocking programs in the country.
These companies did what any profit-making venture does: they encouraged a demand for their product. Logically, they did so by “alerting” people to the terrible dangers cyberspace posed—mostly for their children, but even for themselves. Note, for example, the description on this site selling a variety of filtering products:
Today’s high-tech porn pushers are more aggressive than ever before, making it almost impossible to protect our families from unwanted pornography. Thankfully, with tools like Internet filtering software, it’s possible to fight back.10
Note the language: “porn-pushers” are “aggressive,” we need to “protect our families,” and now we can “fight back.” This site sells fear, need, and a solution in just two sentences.
Thus, these companies were in collusion with people and groups whose agenda is to frighten the public about the sexual uses of the Internet. That has continued to this day, primarily because they have a common goal—to raise alarm about the sexual aspects of the Internet—and also because the institutions of the Right purchase and encourage the use of these products. For example, religious and other conservative groups increasingly urge the use of filtering software as part of the treatment of “porn addiction” and “cybersex addiction.” CYBERsitter was once distributed by the anti-porn group Focus on the Family. The site FilteringFacts.org, purporting to explain the facts supporting filtering, was partly funded by the group Enough Is Enough, whose stated mission is protecting children and families from Internet porn.11
In selling security products such as burglar alarms and motion detectors, the key to success is persuading potential customers that they are vulnerable. People, of course, are more easily frightened by appeals to emotion than by fact. And so filtering companies, like their anti-sex collaborators, recklessly repeat new wives’ tales, such as “The average age a child is first exposed to pornography online is 11 years old,” and, “Nearly all (90 percent) kids aged 8 to 16 have viewed porn online, mostly while doing homework.”12
These numbers are created via categories so broad that they show almost everyone experiencing almost everything. For example, according to ProtectYourKids.info, “More than half of teenagers have visited Internet sites containing pornography, offensive music lyrics, gambling or messages of violence or hate.” Only half? With a category that diverse, 99 percent is probably more like it. Looking at scary data just a bit clarifies it a great deal. A 2000 “online victimization” study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (www.ncmec.org) reveals that 96 percent of those who solicit teens are under 25, and nearly half are themselves children under the age of 18.
Having succeeded in persuading the public that their product is desperately needed, filtering companies sold it, while refusing to tell people exactly what they were buying. What were their algorithms? What words, sites, concepts were blocked? How did they add or delete a site? Every filtering company had the same response: That’s proprietary information, and we’re not telling.
There’s nothing wrong with the manufacturer of Coca-Cola saying that, because no one is forced to buy their product, and Coke isn’t needed in order to do your job, get proper health care, acquire an education, or be an effective citizen. But when your employer, library, hospital, city planner, or university is required to use a filtering company’s product as part of using their computer, or consumers of these institutions are subject to the limitations of filtering products (a doctor can’t find out about the health issues involved in anal sex, a library can’t provide information about the longevity of non-monogamous couples, a city planner can’t find out about zoning and prostitution, a judge isn’t allowed to read about sadomasochism being discussed in a case),13 “we won’t discuss our product” is outrageous and inappropriate.
Private companies enjoying the huge advantages of being used as quasi-public utilities should be required to disclose substantial product information. But presumably, any government that required this transparency wouldn’t be requiring Internet filtering in the first place.
Was there really a problem? Morality groups cried yes, although no one could really point to much actual harm. In congressional testimony on November 10, 1998, they told satanic stories of an 11-year-old boy “hooked on pornography” who “left semen samples in his favorite teacher’s cup,” and a babysitter showing porn to a four-year-old who then wrote “sexually explicit notes to a little girl in his first grade class.”14 And unfortunately, their fear drove public policy decisions in Congress. How is it that being frightened is its own credential to discuss sexuality and behavioral science?
Filtering was a solution looking for a problem, according to the federal District Court that overruled the Loudon County (Virginia) library’s use of filtering that very year (1998):
No reasonable trier of fact could conclude that three isolated incidents nationally, one very minor isolated incident in Virginia, no evidence whatsoever of problems in Loudon County, and not a single employee complaint from anywhere in the country establish that the [filtering] policy is necessary to prevent sexual harassment or access to obscenity or child pornography.15
Nevertheless, by 1997 the group Family Friendly Libraries identified its top priority as “protecting children from age-inappropriate materials.” Chaired by Phil Burress—who went on to promote laws prohibiting same-gender marriage, adult entertainment establishments, and any advertising that “exploits” sexuality—they demanded the installation of filtering systems in public libraries.16 And did the corporate rationale of “proprietary information” justify the compromise of library patrons’ rights? Not according to the federal court that overturned the Loudon County library’s filtering policy: “A defendant cannot avoid its constitutional obligation by contracting out its decision-making to a private entity.”17
The collusion between filtering companies, the Right, and the government reached its zenith in 2000 with the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), passed after federal courts overturned two congressional attempts to censor the Internet.18 CIPA required libraries to install Internet filtering—even for adults—if they wanted to receive federal funds. Undereducated in the meaning of American democracy, ignoring the critical mandate of public schools to encourage curiosity, most city councils and county supervisors thought the funding was more important than whatever material would be excluded. Besides, no elected official wanted to be in the position of sacrificing desperately needed funds so that patrons could “look at porn all day long.”
Some libraries didn’t even wait for the federal demand to install filters. The Kern County, California, library had to be threatened with legal action in January 1998 if they didn’t remove the filtering software. Less than a year later, a federal judge ruled that a library in Loudon County, Virginia, had to reverse its policy of installing filters on its computers.19
CIPA exposed any pretense of so-called conservatives of simply wanting to raise their families and live their lives free from government intrusion. Any parent concerned about library computers can take their kids to the library and supervise them, or forbid their kids from going to a library alone. Instead, these “conservatives” brought a system to every town in America in which the government—implementing their personal values—controlled what everyone could see and hear.
They had done it before with adult bookstores, strip clubs, and video shops. But this was the most naked attack on democracy yet—bringing censorship to public libraries. You might as well melt down the Statue of Liberty and use the metal to fashion jail bars, or chastity belts for the mind. To these people, Americans don’t deserve their basic rights if they use them in the context of sexuality.
But exactly what criteria these blocking systems would use, or what they would block, no one knew—no librarian, no senator, no parent. All anyone knew is that these filtering systems promised to protect children and adults from material unsuitable for minors. In reality, there was no category of non-objectionable sexual references. No health, educational, legal, political, historical, or even religious reference to sexuality could get through the electronic censor. Filtering products attempt to create an Internet in which sexuality doesn’t exist, as if there’s no such thing as a legitimate or non-dangerous interest in sexuality. That was, and still is, an explicit goal of the War on Sex.
Even the court upholding CIPA recognized that “a filter set to block pornography may sometimes block other sites that present neither obscene nor pornographic material”—in other words, legal material.20 The Court just didn’t think that adults losing access to legal material (called “censorship” when done in countries we don’t like) was as important as “protecting” young people from certain words or pictures.
In dissenting, Justice Stevens took the loss of access to legal material seriously—properly ignoring the fact that much of it was about sexuality: “The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) operates as a blunt nationwide restraint on adult access to an enormous amount of valuable information that individual librarians cannot possibly review … Most of that information is constitutionally protected speech. In my view, this restraint is unconstitutional.”21
So what do filters filter out? As filtering became more popular, thousands of examples of what filtering actually did quickly accumulated. Here’s a sample of what some popular programs blocked access to:
These are programs being used in public libraries across the United States. They are ammunition in the War on Sex.25
According to their study, says Will Doherty, Executive Director of the Online Policy Group, “For every web page blocked as advertised, there was collateral damage of at least one other page improperly blocked.”26
It is important to understand that this “collateral damage” is not an anomaly—it is the way filtering software works. The question is, is this acceptable? Exactly how much is America willing to pay to protect young eyes from something whose damage hasn’t really been studied, and has certainly never been proven? What this tool unintentionally deletes isn’t porn or danger or sex, it’s information, and it’s the freedom to acquire information. This is what the War on Sex is about.
This would be bad enough if that were the extent of it. But it isn’t. For starters, you can’t know something is filtered out if you don’t look for it. You may not realize there’s another side to a medical or political story. In 2011, for example, there were major news stories questioning the necessity for the current prostate cancer screening test; two years before that, the value of routine mammograms was questioned. Next year, as this year, the legal penalties for teen sexting will be debated in various state legislatures. None of these news stories would make it through certain Internet blocking software—and the user wouldn’t know they’d been censored.
And there are a lot of sites that get filtered out for purely political reasons: sites of gay sports clubs, for example, which don’t discuss homosexuality; sites involving nuclear disarmament. When filtering company CyberPatrol was confronted with why right-wing hate sites weren’t listed as such, they had no good answer. When Peacefire publicized this, CyberPatrol went after them. In fact, when Peacefire started posting essays on its Web site critical of filtering software, some software companies such as CYBERsitter reacted by blocking Peacefire’s Web site—which contained neither pornography nor sexual words. And when Time magazine criticized CYBERsitter for blocking its critics’ sites, CYBER-sitter blocked Time’s site. There will always be a political agenda with blocking software.27 If these private companies are living off the quasi-public teat, this is unacceptable.
Perhaps worst of all is when computer users use filters unwillingly, or even unknowingly. One common way this happens is when blocking software is placed on the computer you use by the person or institution that controls it. This can be your employer, city council, hospital, school, or whomever sets policy where you use it. Sites may not come up when you search a topic, or, more generally, they come up but you can’t access them. Similarly, if you type in a URL that’s blocked by a decision beyond your control, you get an error message, or are told the site is unavailable, when it actually is available—just not to you. This is exactly how Internet cafes operate in China today.
In late 2005, while my own computer was being repaired, I discovered that both my Web sites (www.SexualIntelligence.org, www.SexEd.org) were blocked on the computers that customers rent at FedEx Kinko’s—all 1,200 locations. How many tens of thousands of people across the United States (and the world) had searched for words or ideas they could have found on one of my sites—if they hadn’t been blocked?
When I inquired about this, I was directed to the company Kinko’s had hired to do the blocking. They were very nice, and offered to review my sites. They eventually said my sites had been blocked by “an oversight”—the same thing all producers of non-porn sites are told when they discover their work has been blocked. The vaunted technical capacity and “human review” of filtering products simply cannot do what the companies promise. And since their financial incentive is to overblock rather than underblock, this fundamental inadequacy will not change.
You’re probably also a consumer of blocking software through your ISP. AOL, Yahoo!, and most others have “user guidelines” or “user agreements” (you did read the miles of fine print, right?) that basically say they’ll filter out anything they don’t like, and that they’re not obligated to tell you what, why, or when. And so AOL has booted the Triangle News gay newspaper site. Yahoo! closed a variety of sexuality and gender support groups, such as SF Queer Longhairs.28
Similarly, Microsoft’s blogging tool MSN Spaces censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or URL. In Xeni Jardin’s 2004 experiment, blog titles refused include “Corporate Whore,” “Pornography & the Law,” and most anything with the traditional “seven dirty words” the Federal Communications Commission won’t let you say on network TV.29 On the other hand, the software allowed “World of Poop” and “Butt Sex is Awesome.” It didn’t allow “Anal Health for People who Think Buttsex is Awesome,” however. All of which shows that filtering software doesn’t make kids safer, it just gives them more reasons to disrespect efforts to censor what they read. Which is, ultimately, the effect of all censorship. And as America learned during the drug wars of the 1960s, any government policy whose main effect is creating disrespect for the government is a bad policy.
But here’s something cheery—circumvention technology, distributed by groups like Peacefire.org and activists like Bennett Haselton. These are programs used by people to get around the blocking software that’s been installed in their schools or workplaces, and by users in countries where the Internet is censored. “In a nice twist,” reports technology access expert Haselton, “the ad revenue that comes from users in countries like the U.S. helps to fund the services that provide circumvention to people in countries like Iran and China.”
From the moment the Internet became a popular medium, local and federal government attempted to limit Americans’ access to it—and they’ve kept at it to this very day. The three most popular charges have been “child pornography” (the definition of which keeps expanding), “obscenity” (a subjective category that can only be defined by a jury that determines the “community standards” allegedly violated), and “harmful to minors” (an arbitrary category that has never actually been defined).
Pressured by conservative, religious, and feminist groups, the government has continuously assumed there is harm posed by the Internet, and has consistently attempted to limit this alleged harm by limiting both adults’ and minors’ access to it. Not only has the alleged harm never been proven, the effectiveness of censoring the Internet in limiting this alleged harm has never been demonstrated. Instead, the “common sense” of one part of the community has substituted for the science they don’t have and the calmness they don’t want.
Here are some of the ways government, backed by selected civic groups, has used massive resources in attempting to limit the way Americans can use the Internet to enhance their sexual expression, education, or health:
By 2008, two new “crimes” had been added to the menu of Internet treachery—(1) sexting by minors and (2) responding to government-sponsored chatroom stings. They both involved the use of imagination to create unauthorized sexual arousal.
Sexting started spontaneously between owners of the powerful new generation of mobile phones, who suddenly had high-quality cameras with them every day—which needed no film, and therefore no film processing by nosy strangers. Like adults, minors started taking sexy pictures of themselves or each other, sending them to boyfriends, girlfriends, or groups of people. Law enforcement officials across the country immediately labeled this activity as distribution of child porn, and threatened that those who were caught would be arrested and even jailed—which is exactly what happened.
Despite predictions that sexting will invite sexual assault and ruin lives, no one has proven that sexting does any real harm. Ten years from now, everyone applying to Harvard Medical School or Stanford Law School will have nude pictures of themselves on the Internet, and perspective employers of these young people will just shrug. It’s similar to tattoos 15 years ago—people predicted that those getting inked would regret their indelible choice as they lost out on jobs (and quality mates). Now you can’t find a gynecologist or CPA without one.
The real issue with sexting is the regulation of teen sexuality. The War on Sex—already withholding medical and contraceptive information and supplies from teens, already criminalizing a wide range of teen sexual behavior—has now organized this latest attempt to colonize the bodies of America’s teens.
The only danger of sexting is the criminal prosecution by authorities attempting to discourage what they claim is a dangerous activity. Phillip Alpert, for example, was 18 in 2009 when he sent a naked photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend (which she had taken and sent him) to dozens of her friends and family after an argument. He was arrested, charged with sending child pornography, sentenced to five years probation, and required to register as a sex offender. As a registered offender, he was thrown out of college, and can’t get a job. He’s forced to live with his parents—but if they live too close to a school or park, he won’t even be able to live with them. His life is completely ruined—a casualty of the War on Sex.35
“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these kids on the sex registration lists across the U.S.,” defense attorney Larry Walters says, shaking his head.
The second new Internet “crime” involves going to an adult chatroom, being approached by someone pretending to be a teen, and playing along—until the purported teen is revealed as a police detective, and the unsuspecting “criminal” is charged with being interested in sex with a minor. If the chatroom is reserved for adults, and the detective is an adult, one wonders exactly how this can be anything other than a thought crime. The police reasoning seems to be “Yes, you were texting with an adult cop, but you thought it was a kid, and were planning to do something with her that would be illegal.” Claims of “I knew it was an adult, but I was enjoying the game” typically fall on deaf ears—because no busted guy can prove he believed he was talking with an adult.
There’s a terribly corrupt angle to this that most Americans don’t appreciate. First, federal money (along with paid trips to training seminars) is driving local police departments to set up these stings. The more guys they can entice into communicating with a cop posing as a teen, the more money their department is awarded—a motivational system that’s been rejected regarding traffic violations (speed traps, red-light cameras, etc.) and other parts of police work.
Second, the private Internet-monitoring group Perverted Justice has been getting $100,000 per body that they can lure onto NBC’s To Catch a Predator, the popular “reality” TV program that shows unsuspecting losers walking into stings and collapsing with guilt and shame. As attorney Steve Turer describes, “It’s a media-run police action,” where the police have subcontracted their authority to a vigilante group that isn’t constrained by the same ethics or policies of the police themselves.
Turer’s client Joseph Roisman, a young sailor entrapped and busted on national TV in 2006—and acquitted in 2011—is a good example of this repulsive new system that prowls the Internet for men who seem capable of having sex with minors. The judge in his Northern California case was so disgusted he threw the case out without even letting a jury vote on it.36
Rather than deal with their fear, rather than recognize the radical potential of the Internet to help fulfill the American promise, those who fear sex have gone the other way—demonizing the Internet, attempting to limit its growth and availability. And they have done this even as they use that same Internet as a tool to undermine the American promises of fact-based public policy, free access to information, and the cherished right to be left alone.
The sad thing is that Americans today must look to the courts to decide that such restrictions are unconstitutional, rather than expecting our elected representatives to say, “No, revoking Americans’ freedoms for any reason is just not a wise idea—and it is simply not acceptable.”
Because the Internet is pure information, it confronts us with a choice that has become far too common, and is even more stark than usual: Which is more dangerous—information, or the consequences of restricting it?
Online predators do pose a threat to a very small number of minors. But revoking even a part of the freedom of 200 million Americans, young and old, is a tangible, meaningful threat that should be preceded by a serious, complex social dialogue. That dialogue must include the voices of scientists, sexologists, and those who realize that protecting every single child from every potential harm is simply impossible. And it must respect the stubborn, experienced voices of those who know that without real freedom, safety is an illusion.