The “Sex Bureaucracy” Targeting Adult Entertainment

Or the lengths that website owners go to ensure that they have robust trust and safety protocols to prevent minors from accessing otherwise age-restricted content. I’ve been privy to witnessing mergers and acquisitions of major adult companies and seeing these types of transactions completely upend the industry, for better or worse. We also have to recognize the proud citizen lobbyists who serve as adult professionals and performers who simply want to make their livings to support themselves and their loved ones, unhindered and openly.

I have long studied the history of “bureaucratic sex creep.” Bureaucratic sex creep is a term used to define the enlargement of bureaucratic regulation of an individual’s sexual conduct that is voluntary, non-harassing, nonviolent, and ultimately causes no harm to other individuals. Right-wing critics of Title IX protections on college campuses have co-opted this term to criticize the teaching of affirmative consent among young people and to essentially lump a law that simply bolsters basic human decency among sexual partners in a flashpoint in culture wars.

But, the terminology actually deals with the efforts to leverage sexual assault and harassment prevention efforts with consensual sexual activity, such as sex work among adults and adult entertainment, including pornography, stripping, other forms of erotic dancing, sexual and erotica writing, and literature that is controversial but shouldn’t be (e.g., the presence of award-winning young adult queer literature in mainstream culture or the teaching of comprehensive sex ed that covers the LGBTQ concepts, and gender identity theories).

“At a moment when it is politically difficult to criticize any undertaking against sexual assault, we are writing about the bureaucratic leveraging of sexual violence and harassment policy to regulate ordinary sex,” lawyers Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen, a married couple, wrote in an article for The California Law Review in 2016. Before you scoff at this position, it is important to understand the context.

Jeannine Suk Gersen and her husband are both professors of law at Harvard. Suk is also a contributing writer to The New Yorker. Entitled “The Sex Bureaucracy,” their article argues that while intentions to engage in the prevention of sexual violence are necessary and proper, the unintended consequence of aggressive communication is potentially damaging consensual sex as an intimate endeavor for a couple or pluralistic relationship.

Additionally, they argue that public regulation of sexual behavior is relying on the “mini-bureaucracy” at the level of the universities and other higher educational institutions. This includes adjusting sexual education programming for undergraduates to discourage pornography consumption or, at least, pornography that is viewed as grandiose and unrealistic. There is much truth to that. But it should be noted that pornography is a fantasy, a product for entertainment and consumption in the privacy of one’s bedroom.

This activity, they argue, is potentially negative because it places the consensual exploration of fetishes in a light that could be viewed as problematic in accordance with the policies on consent maintained by some universities. But, that is not the central position.

While universities certainly have a crucial role in preventing sexual violence and harassment within educational institutions, the Gersens argue that there is a slight demonization of otherwise consensual sexual behavior. Both posit in their essay that “an object of our critique is the bureaucratic tendency to merge sexual violence and sexual harassment with ordinary sex, and thus to trivialize a very serious problem.”

“We worry that the sex bureaucracy is counterproductive to the goal of actually addressing the harms of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment,” they add.

I mention this work because there is a bureaucratic sex creep in civil society and the general public at large. By no means do I diminish the importance of Title IX in higher education, and nor do I fully agree with the Gersens’ position. But, the concept of a “sex bureaucracy” is applicable.

There are lawmakers, and elected officials all over the United States developing laws and regulations that would advance the concept of a sex bureaucracy on constitutionally-protected free speech, including consensual pornography that is produced throughout the entire world.

Whether it is an age-verification mandate on pornography websites that are located outside of the mandating jurisdiction or an attempt to completely redefine obscenity statutes at the state and federal level, the scope of laws carries with them government-sponsored censorship that is enforced by government-sponsored entities.

It is not that adult industry companies shouldn’t be regulated; that is not my argument. They should be, and they currently are in the context of federal and state law. But, there is a line between the sex bureaucracy being a “regulator” to a “censor.” Adult entertainment professionals have a responsibility to teach our elected officials the difference.

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