SpacePupSilver

United States obscenity law deals with the regulation or suppression of what is considered obscenity and therefore not protected speech or expression under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the United States, discussion of obscenity typically relates to defining what pornography is obscene.

It's important to understand that key idea, that "obscene" is a legal classification that marks something as not protected by Freedom of Speech, The Press, and Free Expression, which is the First Amendment.

There are several ethical problems with having a way to exempt something from protection, and therefore censor it. It encourages people who want to censor things to try and get them legally classed as exceptions to any Freedom of Speech laws on the books. Now, with art, there are exemptions that should exist--art that harms people in the making of it, for example, which is what Child Sexual Abuse Material is, and why we call it that. We also classify filmed evidence of murder done for the film's sake as an exception. But the way people define the word "obscenity" is extremely different depending on who you ask, and because definitions in this country are set by precedent, i.e. judges ruling on court cases, the definition of things like "obscenity" keeps changing.

In 1873, for example, the Comstock Act said that birth-control information and condoms were "obscene" and banned sending them through the mail, which meant a lot of people were cut off from being able to learn about birth control (because nobody was learning about it in school--most people at the time didn't go to school after learning basic reading skills, if that; children worked, just like their adult relatives, to support their families). Do you think a book like this one that educates about puberty and sex, including birth-control, is obscene and pornography? Well it was, at one time, and BANNED. And I don't tell you this so you can go, "Well people were backwards then, we're Enlightened now, we'd only ban the RIGHT things" People have always been people, just as wise AND just as foolish as we are now, and progress has never been a straight line.

Our point is that pornography is an important thing to make, and to fight for, and to CALL "pornography". It's important to hold the line and not let people begin to call WRITTEN and DRAWN things the same as PHOTOGRAPHED and FILMED things. For MANY DECADES, people have been trying to ban and censor pornography that has involved no one but the author or artist in the making, and is therefore HARMING no actual human beings. A photograph involves real, live, breathing human beings; a drawing involves a piece of paper and a pen and the artist.

Whatever you think is "just erotica" or even "not erotica at all" is going to be called porn and obscene by a malicious and controlling person like say Warriors For Innocence, who successfully scared LiveJournal into banning a whole lot of writing and drawing and also queer and survivor support communities and users in 2006. These same folks are behind the Purity/Anti culture on Tumblr, and members successfully lobbied to pass FOSTA-SESTA and the subsequent "Titty Ban" on any website that relies on an app. FOSTA-SESTA, btw, has made human trafficking and harm to sex workers WORSE, not better.

So you need to start fighting WITH pornographers who are fighting censorship, because the people you think are on your side about only banning and censoring "the REAL bad stuff" are going to turn around and call YOUR stuff just as bad. They're already calling queer people obscene just for existing. They are calling us child abusers again, just for breathing. I don't think you want to be on the side of that rhetoric, because it will come for you and call YOU obscene and worthy of arrest, in the end.