LOS ANGELES—As 2020 came to an end, after a year filled with proposed legislation designed to crack down on adult content online, a bill appeared in the United States Senate that took the most draconian approach to date, when it comes to controlling sexually explicit material online. Titled the “Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act,” or SISEA, the proposed law — sponsored on a bipartisan basis by Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkely and Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse — threatened to shut down the whole online adult industry, with its broad language aimed at any “online platform that hosts and makes available to the general public pornographic images.”
The bill also could have, according to Adult Performance Artists Guild President Alana Evans, effectively handed control of the online porn industry over to religious, anti-pornography activist groups.
But SISEA was introduced on December 17, meaning that it had only until the end of the 116th Congress on January 3 to receive a vote in the Senate, or simply expire. And that’s what happened. SISEA was referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, where it sat without a vote until the Congressional session ended.
So, is the bill dead? For now, yes. But nothing prevents Merkely and Sasse from reintroducing SISEA at any time in the new, 117th Congress, which is why APAG's Evans says that her organization’s efforts to stop the bill continue unabated.
“We’re treating it just as we would any other type of legislation,” Evans told AVN. “We want to make sure it’s gone and it’s not coming back.”
The legislation appeared in the wake of an inflammatory New York Times story by columnist Nicholas Kristof published on December 4 titled, “The Children of Pornhub.” Claiming that the Mindgeek-owned site “monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content,” Kristof’s piece ignited an immediate public panic. Within a week, both major credit card issuers, MasterCard and Visa, banned Pornhub from using their cards to take payments, and Pornhub itself took the step of taking down any video uploaded from an unverified account.
Kristof’s article was problematic, to say the least, and seemed based at least in part on the work of right-wing Christian anti-porn group Exodus Cry. He name-checked the group’s “Director of Abolition” Laila Mickelwaite in the article, without noting her affiliation with Exodus Cry. And in an essay about the “Holy War on Pornhub” published by The New Republic, journalist and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant decsribed Kristof as “exactly the kind of gatekeeper a group like Exodus Cry—seeking to establish its credentials, elevate its name, and attract liberals to its cause—wants on its side.”
Nonetheless, Kristof’s article elicited a strong and prompt response, in the form of Merkely and Sasse’s SISEA bill. On Merkley’s official Senate website, his announcement of the bill in his December 18 hyperlinked directly to Kristof’s story online, and cited “disturbing reports of how videos and photos are uploaded to websites like Pornhub without the consent of individuals who appear in them—haunting and traumatizing victims,” as a reason for introducing the bill with less than three weeks left in the legislative session.
The involvement of anti-porn activists with the Kristof article and, as a result, with SISEA, was no accident, according to Evans. Section 4 of the bill created a database of “individuals who have indicated that they do not consent to the uploading to any covered platform of any pornographic images in which the individuals appear.”
While a government database of individuals who have been, or suspect they may be victims of non-consensual porn presents its own privacy problems, Evans noted that the SISEA bill went even farther, allowing not only the U.S. Department of Justice, but an unspecified “nonprofit organization” to access and oversee the database.
“We know that Exodus Cry and NCSE [National Center on Sexual Exploitation, another anti-porn activist group] have been doing what they can to move in as if they want to be in a controlling position,” Evans told AVN. “I say this because the language in this bill included consent lists, and we watched Laila Mickelwaite from Exodus Cry actually post to her little bit of followers on Twitter, ‘Hey, what do you guys think should be in a consent list? I’m open to ideas.’”
Evans said that she replied to Mickelwaite, telling her that compiling a consent list is the job of the performer’s union.
“We’ve had a consent list for three years,” she told AVN. “It’s like a plumbers union — and then you’ve got someone who works in a church telling plumbers how to do their job. We’re looking at these religious people who have the idea that they know how the porn industry should run. This bill gave them that possibility. It’s actually in there. It was shocking.”
She said that “Exodus Cry clearly thought they were in line to do so,” as evidenced by Mickelwaite’s asking her Twitter followers “about what should be in a consent list. They actually thought this gave them carte blanche access to run our performers.”
The consent list as defined by the bill, according to Evans, would not only include “the sex acts, and who you would work with, and the dos and don’ts, if you will. It also would state where you were okay with your content being released. As a standard porn performer that goes to set, that’s not something we’ve ever had control over.”
The bill, she said, would require all porn uploaded to the internet to come with a consent list indicating that level of control, and “people don’t do that.” The bill would also have a retroactive effect, meaning that anyone who has uploaded a video already online would have a timeframe of between two weeks and 90 days to supply the consent list paperwork.
“It would make content that we’ve already filmed obsolete, because we don’t have these jurisdictional consent lists,” Evans said. “The bill was a mess. You could see it was drafted by people who really aren’t sure how our industry functions.”
Evans said that she does not expect SISEA to be reintroduced in its current form, but “even though the bill is dead, and we’re thankful, we are absolutely aware that it is likely going to be rewritten, with all the crazy stuff taken out and re-presented as something that they think will pass. It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t.”
To prevent a new SISEA from re-emerging, Evans said that her union remains in continued contact with staff members to senators on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee, including Merkely, and will continue to explain the industry’s point of view to them. She commended the committee staffers for “taking the time to hear us. The biggest thing we have to express is kindness.”
“Everyone is frustrated, everyone is angry. And of course, we all have the right to be because we’re under attack,” Evans said. “But the way that we’re supposed to deal with people is with kindness and love — exactly what we would want ourselves.”
Photo By Baldwin Saintilus / Wikimedia Commons
