How Utah’s Anti-Porn Resolution Is Screwing Us All
Tasha Reign is a porn star — a sex worker who wears that title proudly. In her weekly column, she’s here to educate Galore readers on the topics that most people are too shy to broach. This week: Utah’s BS new anti-porn resolution.
Utah Governor Gary R. Hubert passed a really scary resolution this month and we should all care.
The resolution states porn creates “a sexually toxic environment,” and labels it as “a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms.” The resolution itself isn’t a porn ban, but it does call for future legislation to curb the “pornography epidemic” facing citizens of Utah and the rest of the country, with an emphasis on keeping porn out of the hands of children.
As if sex workers didn’t face enough stigma as it is, and as if people were not fearful and disgusted by the conversation of smut in most places in the U.S. already.
Porn’s purpose is to entertain the adult consumer — not to educate youth. And the porn industry understands that. The real issue here is sexual education. Utah is an abstinence-only state. This type of education has a direct correlation to violence against women, as CNN has reported. This resolution is implying that pornographers are the ones who are somehow responsible for educating children. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, it’s called the ADULT business for a reason. It’s the role of the government and public educators to enact sexual education policies, it’s also the parents’ role to watch their children and even more in depth, the technological inventors’ job to make sure there is safeguard software readily available for everyone.
I do not believe it’s healthy for children to be illegally consuming my videos. But creating a resolution like this is not the answer to the problem. We need to be more conscious about what our youth is watching and make sure that when they see sex on film or learn about the topic, that adult content is not their teacher.
The adult industry does try to ensure that our sites are seen by adults only. We do our part, and it’s time for sex education and parents to do theirs.
The other issue: this resolution pulls in references to child pornography, which is already a federal crime that NO working adult performer, no citizen, no sane person would condone. The resolution mentions legal pornographers, like myself, alongside criminals. It is not only insulting but disgusting, it makes my stomach turn.
As sex therapist Ian Kerner told USA Today in reference to this resolution, the anti-porn movement is largely rooted in a desire to shame people for their sexuality, not a way to protect children.
“So much of the anti-porn movement is based on a sense of alarmism,” he told USA Today, adding that the anti-pornography movement has blurred the line between child and adult access to pornography. “In this country, we really bundle together children and teens with consenting adults, and the issues are not the same for children and teens as they are for consenting adults.”
The adult industry needed this stereotype perpetuated like a hole in the head. To make matters worse, he clumped in a line about illegal “child pornography”, painting a brush over both legal adult content and illegal child porn as one big happy family.
In my five and half years within the industry, I have strived to normalize the word pornography by facilitating discussion around it and speaking at large institutions to my peers. I’ve been lucky enough to witness evolution while I have been in the industry, due in large part to many other performers, women, men, feminists and progressive thinkers alike. We can all agree, a lot of work needs to be done to continue the fight for this long term goal, but I believe its a real and achievable, which is the first step in any battle.
At UCLA I studied women’s studies and took various anti-porn classes, specifically dedicated to the subject so I could further my understanding in the deeply misunderstood genre I chose as my career early on in life. Not enough studies have been funded to focus in on porn and its role in the world as a whole, that goes for sexuality, sex education and anything to do with the field in general. It would be very beneficial for everyone if we could separate our personal emotions and unease.
Luckily, there has been some research, unfortunately much of it has been done by religious, anti-porn “scientists” or people with an agenda. The only way to get sociologically scientific results is to put in government funding, or objective people to do experimentation on sexuality and keep reporting back with correlations and facts.
The lack of sexual education in places like Utah leads to actual cause effect cases of violence against women, rape, and a sexually toxic environment, but this is being blamed on pornography. When a state has a healthy and well versed perspective on sexuality, the state itself has a lower statistic of rape crimes and assaults. Just look at California, being the leader in the consent law, and having a sex positive attitude correlating with they low stats in sex crime, according to Bustle.
It’s also true that when people are allowed to watch pornography and express their inner most fantasies in the privacy and sanctity of their own homes, not literally on people in the public sphere, that they are much less likely to commit violent sex crimes according to Scientific America. That would make sense right? When we are told we are not allowed to eat fattening food, all we want is that basket of cheesy fries and cheeseburger (or in my case veggie burger), but when I allow myself the choice to express my desire with a dessert here and there, I am much more stable.
When you are told you can’t have something, you just want it that much more, and when you are not legally allowed to view pornography as a nation (historically Japan and many other countries) and then all of a sudden it is easy to access online, studies show that crime goes down. In this case, Utah citizens have one of the top rates of sex crimes in all of America, holding 2015’s top ranking in regard to sexual violence.
They also have the least extensive sex education as well! Fascinating.
By condoning a resolution that encourages all people in the state to stop viewing pornography as an entertainment medium, Utah is shaming them from sexual expression and in turn sending out a message loud and clear that porn is wrong and therefore you shouldn’t support such a filthy industry. This perpetuates the stigma that sex workers, adult actresses specifically, carry on their shoulders to be reinforced, in a political way. It villainizes pornography and anyone that would dare to have sex outside of marriage, quoted directly from the governor himself.
The message is loud and clear: “Sex is dirty and bad, if you partake in it in any other capacity than procreation, you are disgusting. Sex education is unnecessary and Christianity reigns supreme, porn is the reason our society is fucked up.” Let us be the generation that dismantles these thoughts and stands up for what we believe in by speaking out, by protesting, by keeping open eyes on what our very own government passes because my dear friends.
The next thing you know the law will state “You can not watch porn, you can not have premarital sex and you won’t have access to Planned Parenthood.” Oh, wait, that last part’s already real in some parts of the country. Consent and sex education are what should be the pillars of our curriculum, not the topics we are hiding from youth. I want to live in a world where women are empowered and men respect that.
XOXOXO
LOVE, TASHA
