Throughout 2024, we warned that President Trump would do, well, everything he’s thus far set out to do, because his top allies published an agenda called Project 2025 that so neatly outlined all of it. Trump and his supporters wrote off concerns as liberal fearmongering, but now, here we are. Republicans, led by top Trump ally Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), are trying to ban pornography at the national level.
Last week, Lee introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), a bill that would criminalize all pornography by establishing a new definition for “obscenity,” a category of speech that isn’t entirely protected under the First Amendment. Under Lee’s bill, “a picture, image, graphic image file, film, videotape, or other visual depiction,” or any media that “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion,” would be criminal. The bill largely focuses on the creators and distributors of such content, more so than people who might own and consume it, but it should be obvious why a bill like this still poses a huge threat to all of us.
“Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” Lee argued in a press release about the bill. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”
In Project 2025, written by numerous conservative activists like Russell Vought, who now holds a top position in the Trump administration, the document defines porn as “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” and argues that the “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Project 2025 calls for “telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread” to be “shuttered.”
Lee’s bill comes at roughly the same time that states like Texas are introducing and passing bills to further restrict porn, including via age verification and other requirements. All of this presents an overt threat to the livelihood of sex workers, for one thing—but as Project 2025’s anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ screed should make clear, restrictions on porn can also present a direct attack on queer and trans people, by expanding the definition of “obscenity” to include their very existence. The same could easily be applied to information and resources related to abortion and contraception access.
On a cultural level, the right has insidiously targeted porn for years, including through viral, seemingly apolitical trends like the “No Nut November” challenge aimed at boys and young men on Reddit, or conspiracy theories about declining sperm count among young men—a theory pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just last month.
Porn can, obviously, be a thorny topic. But it’s increasingly being weaponized by the right to prime us to accept an ever-widening range of state policing over our day-to-day lives. The growing public animus against porn, whether from lawmakers like Mike Lee or supposedly liberal pop artists like Gracie Abrams—who recently railed against porn—can contribute to the same well of right-wing cultural ideology that exists at the very core of Project 2025.
Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.
GET JEZEBEL RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
