History of Smut: On Kelsy Burke’s “The Pornography Wars”
THE UNITED STATES’ most important smut-buster, Anthony Comstock, he of the muttonchop sideburns and perpetual scowl, was never at a loss for florid words. Describing the impact of pornography in 1883, he likened it to a cancer, one tending toward “poisoning the nature, enervating the system, destroying self-respect, fettering the will-power, defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life, and existence is scarcely endurable.”
A century and a half later, Utah Republicans still agreed with him. They passed a resolution declaring pornography a public health crisis in 2016. At the heart of the resolution lay concern over “deviant sexual arousal” and the “risky sexual behavior” it purportedly facilitated — broadly defined terms but essentially Comstock’s nightmare vision of masturbation and promiscuity unto death.
When it comes to the politics of porn, time can appear a flat line of performative piety: conservatives have been making the exact same arguments about moral rot, bodily debilitation, and lust-driven crime since the object of their ire was lithographs and imported “fancy books.” This is the challenge Kelsy Burke confronts in her new study The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession — how do you make an interesting story out of the same tired tropes?
She averts this numbness with compelling framing. While I have a few modest qualms, no other book has covered American battles over porn quite so extensively from the Gilded Age to the newer Gilded Age, and Burke seems to have taken the story all the way through the day the book was printed. She’s judicious, insightful, and generous — perhaps, in the latter case, to a fault — when it comes to the persistent bad-faith politics of antiporn conservatism.
Certainly, Burke knows evangelicalism. She’s an accomplished sociologist of the topic, and one can sense that she enjoys writing in a register different from the scholarly journal article with its rigid structures. In her introduction here, she reflects on a Wyoming upbringing that gave her insight into both sides of this polarized debate, first as a Christian teen and, at the same time, as a sexually curious adolescent whose sense of queerness coalesced partly around furtively excavating her father’s old Playboy issues from storage. Burke establishes herself as a reliable guide with firsthand knowledge of the allure emanating from countervailing social forces. This also undergirds her primary argument for the book: that the different camps in the porn wars “are not in fact opposites.”
The book breaks into three sections: first, a historical overview from the 1870s through the internet age; next, a sustained examination of 21st-century porn politics; and finally, an analysis of how those opposites might intersect.
Framing the Long 20th Century as pornography’s “Hundred Years’ War,” Burke moves briskly through a series of figures who serve as variations on a theme: Comstock, the fire-and-brimstone protestant; J. Edgar Hoover, FBI builder and devoted pursuer of obscenity; Charles Keating, Catholic founder of Citizens for Decent Literature and later Savings and Loan swindler of the elderly; and Richard Nixon, Jerry Falwell, and so on. These are largely stern white men, a function of the white-supremacist patriarchy that defined the century, but Burke skillfully interweaves more diverse stories too.
Comstock led the push for the 1873 federal law we remember as the Comstock Act, which punitively criminalized obscenity and remains the bedrock of today’s legal framework. He hunted pornographers, sex educators, abortionists (the law included both contraceptives and not the procedure itself but all materials related to abortion), and other sexual outlaws until his dying day in 1915. How to condense all of that into a chapter? Burke picks a few illustrative cases. One is the idiosyncratic freethinker George Francis Train, who managed to get himself arrested for erotic selections from the Bible in 1872. But the one that most lingers is the case of Ida Craddock, a spiritualist and sex reformer whose pamphlets, for married couples only, emphasized the need for foreplay and reciprocal pleasures between husbands and wives as antidotes to the wasteland of marital misery she saw everywhere around her. For that, Comstock relentlessly persecuted her from Chicago to New York until her suicide in 1902, as she faced imprisonment for her work. Her heartbreaking, infuriating public suicide note directly blamed him.
Much of this section will be familiar to scholars but less so to the general readership that Burke aims to reach. While breadth and depth are always in a zero-sum war of their own, she avoids superficiality and deploys data to pointed effect. That the FBI initiated three child porn prosecutions in 1983 but 249 in 1987, for instance, flags not so much a boom in production as a shift in enforcement priorities that coincided with resurgent Reagan-era moral panic over both pornography and “stranger danger.”
It’s my duty here to chide a few stray errors — it wasn’t Allen Ginsberg arrested for his graphic beat poem “Howl” but, rather, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookseller Shigeyoshi Murao. The intrepid archivists at Vinegar Syndrome who have been restoring early hardcore features for years would be dismayed to read that Deep Throat in 1972 was the “first feature-length porno film containing a plot” — but these are trifling flubs. Overall, Burke offers as rich a history as can be packed into 100 or so pages, and plenty of footnotes for those who want to dig further. The short version of this “Hundred Years’ War” is that sexual liberalization won, but the forces of reaction never surrendered.
It’s the turn to the 21st century where The Pornography Wars most shines. Burke astutely notes that while the underpinning values of antiporn conservatism don’t change, new tactics mark the era. This is where most historical accounts of the topic taper off, so her emphasis on public health measures and the ways the antiporn movement “has been rebranded as a broader antitrafficking movement” are particularly useful. From Los Angeles’s condom-mandating Measure B in 2012 to Utah’s aforementioned 2016 public health resolution (since considered in 29 states and passed in 16) and through the 2017 SESTA-FOSTA law that was ostensibly intended to protect sex workers but has in fact worsened their labor conditions, Burke shows how nimbly the antiporn right has adapted to the internet era, distancing itself from obsolete moralism by embracing secular discourses.
Turning toward the contemporary allows Burke to undertake firsthand observation, learning in the process that antiporn and sex-positive conferences share an affinity for dreary airport hotels. She masterfully profiles individuals involved in the porn wars, writing with empathy and nuance as she speaks with performers, conservative women, and a young “recovery coach” entrepreneur who parlayed his experience with porn addiction (a hotly contested concept, as Burke notes, with competing parties flinging lawsuits at one another constantly) into a career. None of these people collapses into caricature, and Burke allows ambivalence to hang productively in the air. A woman who produced material for Kink.com has come to accept that some of her audience was “rapists or aspiring rapists,” but she doesn’t renounce her work. One young woman who became a performer after majoring in women’s studies endured sexual harassment and career sabotage from her agent before a horrifying European shoot, in which she was pressured into a double anal scene despite never having had anal sex, leaving her in an urgent care facility with an infected rectum. As Burke unblinkingly narrates this, we prepare for the inevitable twist of her rebirth as an antiporn speaker; instead, she remains in the industry, jaded, critical, and now independent on OnlyFans, but still protective of sex work as a labor sector.
All of this complicates porn debates, as do some points of connection that Burke lists. Both sides agree on the “importance of talking to kids about sex and porn” and that “sex matters far beyond the private sphere in which it most often occurs.” Also carrying unanimous support: the “don’t watch free porn” argument and widespread antipathy for the behemoth MindGeek and its monopolistic effects. But Burke takes these intersections a step too far when she writes, “Both sides, in fact, care about the same sort of things: human rights, sexual consent, and living a fulfilling life.” The undeniable fact that antiporn conservatism is wholly aligned with the broader conservative movement against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights makes this an untenable equivalence, at least without serious qualification.
Burke finds stronger footing for more critical parallels. Porn-addiction recovery has become its own industry, bundled with other forms of extractive wellness capitalism. Its asymmetrical gender politics presume men to carry strong sex drives and women to lack them, such that porn recovery imagines “men as powerful victors over natural urges and women as victims of sexual trauma.” As she acidly notes, this “inadvertently re-creates some of the most damaging stereotypes of pornography itself.”
At their worst, these discourses manifest in Robert Aaron Long’s horrifying 2021 shooting spree of Atlanta massage parlors, which he undertook after seeking treatment for porn addiction at a Christian facility. Along similar lines, the convergence of movements like NoFap and No Nut November with the alt-right might appear to be a new formation of irony-driven 4Chan meme culture but might also represent the latest iteration of sexual self-control as a tool of fascist movements.
Among recent books on related themes, Heather Berg makes a stronger case for socialist feminism in Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (2021), and Lorna Bracewell against the decline of radical politics into tepid liberalism in Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (2021). Burke’s less polemical tone results in perhaps a less bracing analysis, but also a more inviting one for a broader readership. Even as a scholar of the subject, I learned a great deal from The Pornography Wars and recommend it to experts and beginners alike. The porn wars may never end — American sexual culture is caught within deep historical contradictions that may be irresolvable — but certainly, the first step is to dislodge the various arguments from their emotional force and examine them clinically and dispassionately. For that alone, Burke has made a contribution toward progress.
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