LOS ANGELES — Jessica Stoya has penned an essay for Reason magazine about how online adult content can be an important source of community and information regarding human sexuality.
Stoya’s article for the libertarian publication, published Tuesday and titled “Talking About Sex Online Shouldn’t Be Illegal,” shares stories from adult industry figures the former performer and author has worked with, like Vixen Media Group’s Kayden Kross and Digital Playground’s Ali Joone.
Kross told Stoya she had noticed a community of straight men gather on Deeper message boards “to discuss their sexual preferences, turn-ons, and other various tastes.
“The ‘don’t yuck my yum’ thing,” Kross told Stoya, is prevalent on the Deeper forums. “It’s agreed upon that so long as you are not saying something that is a political minefield, it is not OK to dog on someone else’s expression of what they’re there for. And when people do, even if it’s something where you can’t imagine anyone would be into that, you’ll see people rush to that person’s defense. There’s very much this understanding that in order for this to work, everyone has to agree not to add shame to the pile.”
Stoya interviewed mental health counselor Lucie Fielding, who confirmed there are few spaces for straight men to have these kind of conversations in a mutually supportive environment.
Joone, who developing a pioneering virtual sex video game CD-ROM in 1999, said the trend of fans using porn to communicate goes back to the early days of the commercial internet.
“To me, it’s all about how do you make connections,” Jonne said. “We’re wired to connect, to communicate with each other and people.”
Stoya explained that although sexuality is an important part of human life, “conversations about it are often silenced” and are currently “at risk of being censored out of existence.”
“New state laws requiring verification of consumers’ ages threaten to wipe out small producers and scare off subscribers concerned about threats to their own reputations in the event of a data breach,” Stoya wrote. “Laws like SESTA/FOSTA have made promotion of adult entertainment—already an uphill battle—even more starkly difficult, reaching as far as those Reddit communities Fielding mentioned and causing many subreddits about sexuality to shutter. And payment processors and banks have been denying adult workers access to financial infrastructure for decades.”
To read “Talking About Sex Online Shouldn’t Be Illegal,” visit Reason.com.