From Stormy to SESTA: 2018’s Most Important Porn News Stories

Porn made headlines in 2018, as did a series of issues that could have a direct impact on the adult industry, including net neutrality repeal and the FOSTA/SESTA legislation. STORMY DANIELS VS. DONALD TRUMP AVN Award Winner Stormy Daniels was already a big star in adult entertainment when she filed a lawsuit in March against Donald Trump and Trump’s “fixer,” Michael Cohen, to be let out of a hush-money deal over a sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006. The lawsuit and the blizzard of dramatic events that followed over the next 10 months made Daniels (pictured above, left) one of the most famous people in the country. The covert hush-money payment of $130,000 that Cohen sent to Daniels just weeks before the 2016 election ultimately led to Cohen’s guilty pleas on various charges, including a felony campaign finance violation for the Daniels payment. In court, Cohen revealed that Trump himself ordered the payment to silence Daniels, directly implicating him in a federal crime. Along the way, Daniels herself was arrested in Columbus, Ohio, during a performance at a strip club, allegedly for touching a customer—who was an undercover police officer. But the charges were quickly dropped and subsequent revelations appeared to show that the police had targeted Daniels for arrest, possibly for political reasons.   NET NEUTRALITY IS HISTORY On June 11, following a vote by the Federal Communications Commission board chaired by Trump appointee Ajit Pai (above, right), the FCC ended net neutrality—the regulations that guarantee equal treatment for all internet traffic, and prevent big telecom companies such as Comcast,  Spectrum, AT&T or Verizon from charging extra for access to certain sites while slowing or blocking traffic to and from others. The potential impact on internet porn sites is immense. Not only could internet service providers force consumers to pay extra for access to porn sites, they could simply censor porn altogether, as a way of currying favor with conservative state governments—such as the ones that have already passed resolutions declaring porn “a public health hazard.”    FEDS SHUT DOWN BACKPAGE The online classified ad site Backpage.com had become a safe space for sex workers to advertise their services, allowing them more control over their own businesses, freeing them from pimps, and allowing them to screen customers before any face-to-face meetings. But on April 6, the FBI in conjunction with other federal agencies shut down the site and seized its assets. A few days later, the government unsealed a 93-count indictment against seven Backpage executives, including the site’s founders, weekly newspaper impresarios Michael Lacey and James Larkin. The indictment alleged that the site’s execs were aware that children as young as 14 were being offered for prostitution on the site, and that the company had a policy of rewriting ads to conceal the ages of minors offered for sex via Backpage. Lacey and Larkin are set to face trial in 2020, while the site’s CEO, Carl Ferrer, entered guilty pleas to conspiracy and money laundering charges, and agreed to cooperate with the feds.    FOSTA/SESTA LAW PASSES As if the shutdown of Backpage wasn’t enough, sex workers—and internet freedom—suffered another hit when congress overwhelmingly passed the FOSTA/SESTA law, supposedly designed to curb “sex trafficking online.” The law makes online platforms responsible for illegal content—such as prostitution ads—posted by users.  As with the Backpage closure, sex workers warned that the law would accomplish little except to force them out from behind the privacy and safety of their internet accounts and back onto the hazardous streets.  In July, Republican House Judiciary Committee members released a slickly produced video in which they claimed that in the space of just three months, the FOSTA/SESTA law had “shut down nearly 90 percent of the online sex trafficking business and ads." But fact-checking by AVN.com and other outlets could find no basis for the Republicans’ claim. At the same time, law enforcement agencies complained that the new law left them “running blind”  as they tried to track actual, criminal sex traffickers, whose online ads previously left a digital paper trail that gave police an advantage in hunting and arresting serious offenders.   ANTI-PORN CRACKDOWN 2018 was also a year that saw an alarming trend of cracking down on porn by foreign governments. A court in India ordered the government  there to block user access to 857 online porn sites, after a case in which four high school boys accused of a gang rape supposedly told police that they viewed porn prior to the attack. The country of Nepal responded to a rise in rape cases there by slapping a ban on online porn, reportedly blocking access to 25,000 porn sites by mid-October.  The government imposed the porn ban despite a public outcry saying that banning online porn was nothing but a way for the government to avoid dealing with the sexual assault crisis directly. In the United Kingdom, a repeatedly delayed law requiring porn sites to adopt age-verification technology led to protests from privacy advocates who said that the new system would effectively create a government database of porn fans,  and in Australia, the 130,000-population city of Toowoomba continues to push a local ban on porn. Domestically, students at Notre Dame University have started a movement to ban porn on campus, a movement that has reportedly now spread to other schools as well, while four states have now adopted resolutions labeling porn a “public health crisis,” a possible first step toward regulating or even banning porn.   DENNIS HOF WINS ELECTION DESPITE OWN DEATH Dennis Hof, the self-described “pimp” who owned a half-dozen legal brothels in Nevada, the only state where prostitution is legal, albeit under heavily regulated conditions, and who starred in the HBO reality series Cathouse, was never one to shy away from publicity.  In 2018, Hof attempted to turn his love of the limelight into a political career. After openly backing the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Hof (pictured above, second from left) rebranded himself as a born-again Trump supporter—even nicknaming himself “The Trump of Pahrump” (referencing the small city in Nevada where he resided) and entered the Republican primary in the state’s Assembly District 36. And in an upset that likely came as a shock to everyone but Hof, he ousted the incumbent in relatively comfortable fashion, winning the June primary by 6.3 percentage points. But even though the district is heavily Republican—so heavily that no Democrat had even bothered to run in the previous two elections—Hof’s final victory over his Democratic opponent on November 6 was more shocking than his primary upset win. Why? Because by the time the general election rolled around, Hof was dead. Just two days after his 72nd birthday, and following a night of partying at his Love Ranch South brothel in Crystal, Nevada, Hof fell asleep and never woke up, passing away of uncertain causes, though authorities said they did not suspect foul play. In fact, according to local media reports, Hof’s death about three weeks before the election actually made some of the rural district’s conservative Republicans—who may have disapproved of his profession and lifestyle, and doubted his commitment to the conservative cause—more likely to vote for him.   TUMBLR BANS PORN Of all the social media platforms available online, Tumblr was the most welcoming to porn and sexually oriented content in general, providing a safe internet haven for sexual self-expression across a broad spectrum of sexual preferences, orientations, and identities. But that all ended on December 2, when Tumblr announced that all “adult content” would no longer be permitted on Tumblr. The ban took effect on December 17 and covered "photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts,” according to a statement by the Tumblr management. The loss of one of the few, large-scale platforms where people of non-mainstream—or for that matter, mainstream—sexual tastes could find and communicate with like-minded others came after the Apple iTunes store deleted the Tumblr app, reportedly because a small number of illegal images of children had slipped through the site’s content filters.  But no sooner had the ban taken effect than, perhaps predictably, reports began surfacing of Tumblr’s haywire bot blocking images of Jesus, Wonder Woman, and other content that could not remotely be considered porn.    NINA HARTLEY TALK SPARKS BACKLASH In November, AVN Hall of Famer Nina Hartley (above, second from right)—who is also a trained nurse with a career as a sex educator—gave a campus lecture at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, which was not an unusual event for Hartley, who frequently speaks on campuses about sex-related issues. But in Wisconsin, in 2018’s growing anti-porn climate, Hartley’s mere appearance, giving a talk titled "Fantasy vs. Reality: Viewing Adult Media With a Critical Eye,” rebounded on the state school’s chancellor, Joe Gow, who had ended up paying Hartley’s $5,000 speaking fee out of his own pocket. The state university system denied Gow his annual performance-based raise, and the system’s president, Ray Cross, handed Gow a written reprimand for simply inviting Hartley, stating his own “underlying moral concerns” and expressing his deep disappointment in “your decision to actively recruit, advocate for, and pay for a porn star to come to the UW-La Crosse campus to lecture students about sex and the adult entertainment industry.”   SEX WORKERS FIGHT FOR THEIR RIGHTS As a direct result of the burgeoning crackdown on the sex industry in the United States and abroad—the passage of FOSTA/SESTA in particular (see above)—2018 saw sex workers become politically active at level not seen in recent years, even exercising their clout as a voting bloc in congressional elections. “I’ve never seen sex workers begin organizing in the way they did following SESTA-FOSTA,” sex worker activist Siouxsie Q told Rolling Stone magazine. “Enough was enough.” Sex worker groups came out in support of candidates who opposed FOSTA/SESTA—including Julia Salazar, who won a seat in the New York State Senate—and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose surprise upset over a longtime Democratic incumbent sent her to the U.S. House of Representatives. Sex workers also continued to organize protests and demonstrations in favor of decriminalizing sex work. And some politicians are joining their cause, with even the mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, publicly stating support for new measures protecting sex workers, saying, “Stigma and shame put lives at risk. The City of New Orleans will work to secure and uphold the human rights of all individuals, especially those most at risk of abuse and neglect. All of our residents matter and deserve equal protection under the law.”    RISE OF THE SEX ROBOTS While the very concept of “sex robots” sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie, 2018 saw an new trend toward sexual experiences powered by artificial intelligence that is sure to raise questions not only about the meaning of sex itself. As machines grow more “intelligent” in their ability to replicate human actions and even human emotions—for example, one next-generation sex robot is reportedly imbued with the ability to withhold sexual consent—will the line between sexual interactions with other humans and sex with robots become permanently blurred? Or will sex with robots never become more than a sophisticated form or masturbation—pleasurable, but always a solo, rather than interactive, experience? Those philosophical questions will likely take years to answer, or even address, but 2018 saw several potentially significant developments in the sex robotics field—including the attempted opening of the the United States first sex robot “brothel” in Houston, Texas—a potentially landmark event that went bust when the city hurriedly revised its zoning laws to block the “rent before you buy” sex robot spa from opening for business.  Porn also tested the sex robot waters, with a porn film shot in Barcelona, starring Belarussian-born performer Sofia Curly who engages in a 28-minute male-female-robot three-way scene with her male co-star Dorian del Isla and a lifelike “female” sex robot, inside the LumiDolls sex robot brothel in the Spanish city. Also in 2018, xHamster announced plans to use AI in project to create the first robot porn star. But while the phrase “sex robot” generally applies to full-size, human-appearing sex dolls, robotics and AI also apply to the new generation of sex toys. In November, computer scientists published a paper detailing how an AI analysis of 1,145 filmed porn fellatio scenes went into programming the AutoBlow 2 machine, which reportedly provides an extremely lifelike robotically powered blowjob. Photos By Jeff Koga / Daniel Dacumos / Mcbane700  / Gage Skidmore