Our Porn, Ourselves Facebook Ban Update: PornHarms Taunts…And How #Proporn Can Fight Back

Since we reported yesterday about Facebook pulling the Our Porn, Ourselves page without warning,some developments have ensued.

First off, the opposing main antiporn organization PornHarms.org has been publically high-fiving themselves over the banishment of OPO, with resounding hosananas and Hallelujahs to FB for laying waste to a group of over 3,000 people. At her personal Posterous page, as an addedum to her original post, Violet added these screenshots from PornHarms’s Twitter and Facebook pages displaying their smack-running habits.

You will notice the trend here: according to the Porn Harms folk, the mere existence of a discussion page where adult women get together and defend their constitutional right to access, view, and consume adult sexually explicit media for their own personal pleasure….would allow CHILDREN access to porn.

Never mind that there was no porn or even no nudity (hell, not even bare cleavage or midriff), or any explicit dirty sex talk; never mind that Violet took great steps to banish anyone attempting to exploit the page for the usual porn spam; and never even mind that any linkage that did take place went solely to either discussion sites or to blogs with clear adult disclaimers and restirctions. Merely breaching the subject of women liking porn and resisting the Dines/Lubben/Trueman monopoly was more than enough to warrant this blatant act of censorship.

Of course, going after their critics with a nuclear bomb mentality has been the essence of the antiporn folks for forever, and it’s no surprise that they would seek to maintain their monopoly on the porn debate…mostly because allowing intellegent, sexy women a forum to defend themselves from countless slander would make PornHarms look like the right-wing sex-hating bigots they really are. (Yes, I said it…sex-hating bigots. Please send all complaints to HostGator.com or WordPress.org, or sue me directly.)

But…what does that say for Facebook, who seems to have gotten infected with the MySpace bug of policing thought of late??

After all, Facebook has several, if not hundreds, of pages dedicated to porn performers, and host a well of other pages and groups that tend ot promote sexual expression indirectly (such as Nina Hartley’s SexWise group). If FB is going to become now the newest arm of the Online Puritan Police, then why not be consistent and banish ALL of these pages, not just OPO?? I mean, it’s not as if “children” can’t simply google “Nina Hartley” and locate plenty of her video clips…or that Amazon.com’s link to her Nina Hartley’s Guide to Great Sex book isn’t easily accessible, too….right???

A couple of commentators over at Violet’s Posterous blog have noted the contrarian view that it is Facebook’s space to do as it pleases, and perhaps it was more of an algorithm slipup that prompted the pulling, rather than the protests of PornHarms. Well, it is their space, and they did have rules and a TOS…but if you bend yourself backwards to follow them to the letter, and you still get banished, that’s a BIG problem.

But, by far the most frustrating thing about this is that while OPO tried to be as open a forum as humanly possible, the Porn Harms page, in comparison, was as closed and restricted as usual, with membership firewalled and commenting moderated to filter out any view other than the “official” party line. And, they probably contained just as many links to their propaganda (which, BTW, includes images far more graphic and explicit than anything linked by OPO…remember The Price of Pleasure pilfering scenes from porn vids and fracturing them out of context to sell their position??). So..why isn’t FB challenging THEM for “obscenity”??

So..what does this mean for sex-positive discussion online and social media?? Simply put, it is a shot across the bow that the other side is more than willing and able to use whatever means necessary, fair or unfair, to monopolize the debate and eliminate their critics. Like the Teabaggers, the antiporn folk don’t respect the notion of civilized and equal debate, and they respect #proporn’s existence even less…they simply seek to dominate and destroy. There is NO acceptable middle ground for negotiation with them; only our total destruction will do.

Even worse, it seems that their viewpoint is slowly becoming the default view for most dominant social media sites, whose dependency on advertisers and political power gravitates them to accept the dominant cultural biases against sexual expression as well as the neoliberal/neoconservative/Far Right paradigm/political spectrum of acceptable debate. They can far too easily supress oppositional debate using the old “Think of the CHILDREN!! You’re a SLUT!!!! You’re a TOOL OF THE PATRIARCHY!!!!! You’re pushing SEX to CHILDREN!!! PEDOPHILE!!!!!!!!1111ONETHOUSANDONEHUNDREDELEVEN11!!!!!!” memes to intimidate social media into throttling free expression of sexual issues. The fear of the boycott or federal intervention to impose the usual restrictions only help to reinforce such sexual policing online as well.

The best solution for those of us who are #sexpositive and #proporn remains to be vigilant of the antiporn censorship attempts and organize to protect our free speech spaces, and to use our own power to counteract the myths, the smears, and the outright lies they promote. Forming and aggressively defending our own independent free spaces, as well as challenging online sites like Facebook to maintain their stated beliefs and mission of open and free discusion in the face of such efforts is wipe sexual communities off the face of the earth and online, is a minimal requirement as well.

Above everything else, though, those of us who are #sexpositive and #proporn absolutely need to come out of our scared closets and openly, aggressively, and enthusiastically defend our right to be thoughtful, normal, and capable sexual beings, and resist to the fullest the attemps by the likes of PornHarms to reduce our lives, our professions, and our basic beings, to mere objects to be stepped on, crushed, and thrown aside for their “glory”. There are still more of US than there are of them, and if we unite and (pardon the pun) come together against this nonsense, we will prevail in the end.

Or, to put in in the form of a memo to Porn Harms:

We’re still here. We’re not going anywhere. And, in the end, we will WIN.  Deal with it, folks.

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