This hasn’t gotten a lot of press because, frankly, it shouldn’t matter. But, every political issue – big or small – is contentious.

Someone’s ox is always getting gored, since the time when Hammurabi promulgated his body of law. So I’d like to talk to you, bro, heart to heart. This is a topic that would have been very important to me around 1999, when I was still strongly concerned about the 1st amendment and pornography. Let me be frank: I was quite the fan from the mid 1970s, until about 4 years ago when some unfortunate brain damage killed my ability to do sex stuff. So, technically, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but if you do enjoy the occasional screaming hard wank you might want to vote against MAGA and project 2025. I know that sounds nuts, right? The women are all up in arms about abortion, which is an issue if you knock one of them up, but did you know MAGA also wants to put pornography on the table?

I remember the 80s, when I’d sneak out to get porn, and had to bicycle down to Calvert St and go into the creepy store with the creepy guy and the sign on the door that “this store sells educational materials for adults, you must be 18 to enter.” And there were my female ideals: Traci Lords, Desiree Cousteau, and Veronica Hart. In the early 80s, you didn’t even buy VHS tapes because a VHS player was $500, but eventually the price came down and the document box in the back of the closet got pretty crowded. Todays bros, like you, don’t have to worry about that, yet, right? You grew up with search engines and pornhub, and as long as you’re not searching for stuff that gets flagged as kid porn, you’re OK. You can search for “spanish biker nuns giving enemas to batman” and the internet will probably find it for you. Because you’re used to living in a fairly permissive environment – one which has not slowly and coldly had the screws tightened on it, the way abortion did until that was outlawed in many states. But, see, MAGA nuts want to do that to your porns. I don’t know if you’re aware, but MAGA Mike Johnson, the creepy little shitweasel speaker of the house, has some kind of deal with his son where they monitor eachother’s porn use [rs] like guys on a diet who pledge to slap cheeseburgers out of eachother’s hands if they see them buying one. Most of us have dealt with that kind of thing – some friend who says “if you see me trying to snort coke, stop me” and you find your evening ruined because you’ve got to decide if you’re your brothers’ keeper or, fuck it, he’s an adult – let him go.

To me, of course, the issue has been whether you’re an adult or are violating a commitment. If I were in a relationship and part of the rules of order were a pledge that I’d not consume porn, I’d keep it (but there’d have to be some heckin’ counter-pledge for me to sign up to that) and there are sound Marxist economic critiques of the pornography industry (see notes). Maga Mike is admitting a lot of things when he says he has manipulated his son into agreeing to that pledge, because – his son may not realize – there is a tremendous difference in the sap-producing capacity of a healthy young man, and a creepy political sociopath. I don’t know about MAGA Mike’s boy but, bro, if you’re like I was, you’d be able to use your output to make sculptures, like some kind of clam-smelling 3d printer…  But, not if MAGA win.

Let’s talk about Project 2025. Item 6.

You need to understand that these guys are nutbag religious ideologues, who are are operating under some Leviticus-like interpretation of god’s will – they are trying to stomp out onanism [ai overview]

Onan’s story is told in Genesis 38:4-10. After his older brother Er died, Onan was expected to marry Er’s widow, Tamar, and produce an offspring in Er’s name. This was required by the Law of Moses, and was known as the Levirate law. However, Onan acted selfishly and prevented Tamar from conceiving by spilling his semen on the ground. God punished Onan with death for this wicked act.

See, MAGA Mike accepts as given that god doesn’t want your sperm to go to waste, per Monty Python, “every sperm is wonderful, every sperm is great, if you waste just one of them – god gets quite irate.” As I mentioned earlier, there are good critiques of pornography (see Notes) but bronze age jizz management is not one of them. But MAGA Mike and his ilk are upset on god’s behalf about what you are leaving in your gym socks. They are worried that god will fuck you up, for doing that thing that happens pretty naturally when you touch yourself and are thinking pretty normal thoughts.

Think about how upset and worried MAGA Mike and company are about abortion, which is not mentioned in the bible – and poor old Onan is. They have concerns about your consumption of pornography and, believe me, it’s a moral issue for them, not a matter of Marxist economics. If you enjoy porn, by definition, you are a bad person to them.

And, bien sûr, if they come to power, they have plans for how to keep you out of winding up in Hell in some burning pit next to Henry Kissinger. In terms of the MAGA crowd, a genocidal nutbar like Kissinger is probably not as bad as a harmless bro who bangs off a quick one into a kleenex. That’s you.

The Project 2025 documents [2025] say:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender
ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot
inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its
purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product
is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

See? If you like to spatter wallpaper paste around your dorm room, they are putting you in the same political category as child pornographers and misogynists. They want to ruin your 15 minutes of free time stress relief and make you into one of the Bad People. These are crazy fucknuts batshit christian ideologues and do you think they’re going to stop there, if they succeed? Hell no. They’ll keep tightening the screws until you’re back to the 1980s, when you have to sneak home with a suspicious-sized brown paper bag under your arm, if all you want is a harmless wank to a Trump pee tape.

I will specifically not get into commenting on the mental spirography that was necessary for the evangelical right, represented by MAGA Mike and others, to adopt Donald Trump as their moral leader; that man has had sex with more porn actresses than most of us. [Note I am careful not to use the term “star” to describe Stormy Daniels. She was never close to a star. Karen McDougal was close. But it’s not like Trump was frolicking with Traci Lords in her heyday or anything] But you need to understand that the basic christian evangelical push behind MAGA means they will not be happy until they have created a theocracy that will be more controlling than Saudi Arabia – like The Handmaid’s Tale only really fucking stupid.

Think about this, bro. If you vote for Trump next week, you’re going to see MAGA Mike’s face:

This asshole has invited himself into your sex life. Think about that, then multiply that by about 102,000 and you’ll have a vague idea how women are angry that he has invited himself into their medical choices.

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

“Pornography should be outlawed” – in order to do that, an objective criterion for “pornography” that does not include all of the great art in the world, will need to be developed. Or, alternatively, the definition of “pornography” will be islamic. I spent some time in Saudi Arabia and chose not to watch the thieves hands being cut off, but it was an entertainment option. Naturally, as a skeptico-nihilist, I see this as nothing but a mechanism for political control, but I don’t want that mechanism being applied to you, or me. They are calling for imprisoning all of the people who make their living showing off their god-given stuff on Instagram, to promote their onlyfans, i.e.:

Ok, that young entrepreneur there, a marketing genius who noticed that guys will click on any picture with bouncing breasts in it, who has done a good job of hacking right up to the terms of service of Instagram – she deserves prison for that? She’s not leading men’s souls far astray, she’s just leading them over to her onlyfans. But MAGA won’t stop there. They’ll be trying to bring back the Comstock Act days and having police raid magazine stands to see if they have any printouts of jpegs from onlyfans before it was taken down, still for sale.

You get the point, bro. This is a freeze peach issue. They are, in fact, intruding on your rights. Grab your AR-15 and go fucking protest somewhere far away from me. The entire MAGA movement is not just about Donald Trump and his free speech, it’s the spearpoint of an attack against modernism in general. What’s depressing is that a lot of bros have been attracted to the MAGA pro-gun stance and are ignoring the MAGA anti-porn stance. And which do you use more often, bro?

Notes:

Marxist critiques of the porn industry: This is fairly simple. The means of production (the women) are largely being controlled by men (capitalists) who skim off the bulk of the profit from their enterprise, while paying them a minumum. In fact, Marx would look at today’s environment and probably point out that onlyfans has done a tremendous amount to allow the workers to control the results of their production, and it is therefore less exploitive than many other industries. I do not wish to go into an entire discourse on the topic, but if you look at Brownmiller’s original writings about pornography, she was making a sound economic critique that women were subjected to huge inequality in labor in the porn industry. She was writing to the late 1970s, when a “star” actress might be filmed for a hit movie, and get paid a $1000 non-recurring fee. The male actors seldom did much better, but some of the bigger hit movies such as Debbie Does Dallas are still more popular and probably sell better than a Ben Affleck movie. Brownmiller’s point (and Dworkin’s too) was that there was massive inequality built into the pornography industry and that should be addressed or the industry should be regulated as exploitative of its labor. I actually agree with that position. What happened in the last decade was that the workers took control of the means of production – people of both genders started doing their own erotic material catering to wide or narrow audiences, and some did quite well. Some have done quite well. Some of the early onlyfans workers were in a position to choose and control their own content, not have to share the profits with an industry or producer, and there were some notable pornographers who retired extremely wealthy in a year or two [$50 mil plus]. This has, to me, largely satisfied the Marxist critique: it is no longer a controlled market in which the profits are skimmed by capitalist parasites, the content creators are making the bulk of the profits.

I will also note, with great pleasure, that Belle Delphine’s onlyfans is has not only a larger viewership than Fox News, it is far more profitable. No, please, that does not mean I will subscribe to Alina Habba’s onlyfans – but I predict she will open one in less than a decade.

As a side note, any country that has a “right to life” movement that does not take into account “right to go to school without getting shot by a right wing freak drone” is clearly missing the point on rights and probably needs to study Rousseau’s treatise on inequality. [Again: not a total Rousseau fanboy but he really lays out the problems with a great clarity]