Background and Literature Review
As someone who was born in the late nineties and grew up alongside the internet, I am all too familiar with the way that social anxieties associated with the digital age are projected onto children and teens. I was raised in a household where sex and sexuality felt like off-limits conversations, not to be breached by parents who were under the impression that that was something I would learn from teachers and health professionals when the time came. The time came and went and I completed the mandatory one-semester health class where the course’s two-week unit on sex education consisted of watching a white cis-gender, British woman give birth, and an activity where we (the 14 to 18-year-old students) used transparent cups or water and food coloring to visually represent that the more times you poured water into someone else’s cup (a metaphor for a “hook-up” or having sex), the darker and dirtier your water would get. Despite attending a California public high school known to have a very liberal campus culture, the sum of my sexuality and relationship education consisted of scare tactics that implied that all sexual encounters meant giving a part of you up and receiving something dirtier or less-than in return, a decidedly sex-negative approach to educating teens and young adults in 9th through 12th grade. This activity continued the work of facilitating the myth that sexual innocence is moral purity and to deviate from that would mean agreeing that I was a sexual object that deserved to be disrespected rather than someone growing into a sexually mature and autonomous person.
Without receiving sex education at home or school, my Google search history got… interesting. I remember turning to the anonymity of the nefarious “Incognito” mode for answers and a sense of validity, asking things like “How do I know if I’m bisexual?” “Where do I put a tampon?” “Where is my vagina?” and other questions of the like. Among the many educational search results that appeared, there was also pornography mixed in. Despite my curiosity, I had what some may call “a strong moral compass,” and although I did not exactly know what pornography was, I knew it was taboo and certainly something my parents would not want me to see. Therefore, I self-censored and attempted to keep the links I clicked on PG-13, to the best of my ability. Nevertheless, the fluid boundary between educational content and pornography was readily apparent in everyday searches. What I interpreted as my own teenage moral superiority I have come to see as an example of the sense of sexual innocence as morality that is used to curtail sex-positive messages for the imagined “innocent youth.” However, the moral compass I inherited was not completely successful at preventing my sexual and non-sexual bodily curiosity from prevailing.
When I was a little older, I grew fond of Tumblr, a once-popular American microblogging and social networking website founded in 2007. From my sophomore through senior years of high school, one of my late night/early morning activities was lying in bed curating personal blogs where I was able to anonymously reblog things that I found funny, beautiful, relatable, or ‘aesthetic’ outside of the perception of my parents and peers. This was my space to navigate what it meant to be a teenager on the internet, and in retrospect one of my many blogs dedicated to re-sharing artwork would likely be considered a lesbian softcore blog to an outsider, but to me, as a sheltered teenager, it was an innocent curiosity in art depicting women and other feminine people nude or kissing, or otherwise visibly expressing their queerness. I was fascinated by seeing other women’s breasts as mine were developing into something unfamiliar to me. As someone who was in the closet and lacked mainstream representation, the online communities that facilitated digital queer kinship were essential to my becoming. Contrary to cis-heteropatriarchal standards of valid relationships, what Gayle Rubin terms the “charmed circle” in her influential 1984 essay, Thinking Sex, Tumblr and YouTube were the vessels for the casual peer educators who unbeknownst to them, taught me who I was. Since Tumblr has removed its NSFW content, the site rapidly decreased in popularity as Peter Alilunas traces in his piece Contemporaneous mundanity and pornography regulation by indifference (2021). In this piece, Alilunas traces the history of porn technologies and the regulation of pornography from the opening of the first Blockbuster in October of 1985, to Social Media terms and conditions in 2020. He points to content monitoring and restrictions on pornography as the cause of the rise and fall of Tumblr. “Tumblr maintained an unabashedly friendly home for sexually explicit depictions and descriptions, with more than 10% of the site’s domains in 2013 focused on adult-oriented content.” Alilunas describes that the changing ownership of the website led to “safe modes” and full-on content bans that hit queer and trans users of the platform particularly hard. “A thriving and robust queer space vanished and, as Jacob Engelberg and Gary Needham note, the decision ‘put queer sexuality and expression under digital chastity and [threw] away the key’” (Alilunas 11, 2021). The forms of censorship Alilunas illuminates in Contemporaneous mundanity and pornography regulation by indifference, including aspects of social media’s 2020 terms and conditions regarding ‘nudity’ and other ‘sexually explicit’ content, is relevant to exploring rising forces of change in pop culture. I want to note TikTok’s terms which in a familiar vein state: “We do not allow sexually explicit or gratifying content on TikTok, including animated content of this nature.” As Alilunas explains, To see the consequences of the kinds of action being taken by popular media platforms to regulate pornographic content one must only look at the rise and fall of the blog site Tumblr (Alilunas 11, 2021).
As my own personal experience demonstrates, discussions around pornography, sex ed, and censorship are incomplete without addressing the adult content ban that led to the collapse of Tumblr. In Pornography, Trans Visibility, and the Demise of Tumblr (2018), Carolyn Bronstein details the history of Tumblr CEO Jeff D'Onofrio's attempt at creating a “‘better, more positive Tumblr,’ that would prioritize ‘the most welcoming environment possible’ and ensure ‘a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community.’” This was enacted by a ban that targeted content with images of “real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs, and illustrations—that depicts sex acts,” (D’Onofrio 241, 2018) despite the fact that adult content was instrumental to the development of its large user base in the first place. Bronstein uncovers that the removal of NSFW content from Tumblr was in the interest of increasing advertising revenue, with no regard for the sex workers and allies who used the networking website for community building and safe business.
During the covid-19 pandemic, as many of us have been isolated from most means of connecting with others and forming community, social media undeniably has a hold on culture, and the platform that has dominated 2020 is TikTok. Given its popularity and relevance to my research, I foreground the TikTok platform in this thesis as a case study for hegemonic discourses of safe/ty online. As the main social media platform currently utilized by teens and young adults, I am interested in the ways the growing community of users are being challenged or are already challenging how the app reinforces hegemonic notions of morality by identifying non-explicit content as pornographic or obscene material.
Below I chart the conversations that inform this broad topic, conversations in porn studies, feminist debates about sex-work and criminalization, and technofeminist discussions around digital violence and design justice. The field of porn studies helps me contextualize my argument for sex work’s relationship to sex education through media literacy by providing a context of how pornography and sex work has been discussed within academic institutions. Within the discipline of film and media studies, scholars have worked to de-exceptionalize pornography (and sex work), by categorizing pornography as a “Body Genre,” like horror, romance, and comedy. Next, I navigate arguments for and against the legality and morality of porn production and consumption from groups of feminists to demonstrate some of the ways pornography and sex work have been categorized as a threat to safety. I am interested in sex-work debates such as the sex-wars and sex-work neo-abolitionist arguments that conflate sex work and sex trafficking that influence discourses of safety related to sex and sexuality. Then, I look to current conversations about technofeminist recognitions of digital forms violence taking place and calls for design justice. Through feminist calls for design justice and coalition building among feminists and the tech industry I begin to conceptualize what it would take to create a more liberated digital future.
