When I see a story that includes an intersection between porn and fundamentalist Christianity, it usually involves a heaping helping of hypocrisy–a gay-bashing preacher who’s secretly gay; a family-values politician who’s arrested for soliciting a cop in a public restroom–but not this time. This time the argument is over whether or not ICANN, the authority who handles domain names, should go forward with plans to permit adult sites to register .xxx domain names.
I have to admit, I don’t understand the opposition from the religious right. I’m guessing it’s just knee-jerk opposition to anything porn, as though that position has done them much good in the time they’ve pushed it.
The concern from the adult industry has a stronger foundation, though. It’s not difficult to see a move from politicians which would take what would now be a voluntary move to use the .xxx domain and make it a requirement for any site offering what the Congress defined as adult content.
That would, under most definitions I can imagine, include The Rumpus, since we’ve been known to talk pretty frankly about sex and have included images with nudity in them. And if you force all adult content into a .xxx domain, then it’s easy to sell users on a filter which makes that content inaccessible, and those filters won’t be selective. They’ll slam out anything with a .xxx domain name, which means that users would be “protected” from content ranging from our Recession Sex Workers series (which we often label as NSFW) to, oh, Poetic Lives Online.
I wish I had a call to action to give you–someone to call to express your opposition to this plan, something–but I don’t. I’m open to suggestions.
