Porn Panics

This chapter expands upon the existing scholarship on media, moral, and sex panics to suggest that pornography is all three at once. Using the incendiary editorial “The Children of Pornhub,” by anti-porn crusader and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, it outlines the myriad ways that porn panic is induced by assembling facts, sort-of-facts, and total fabrications into the discourse with the intent to cause widespread panic. Porn panics rely heavily on a discriminatory concept of “the public,” meaning a normative public whose actual risk of any social danger is remote but whose sense of panic is so high that they are willing to place non-normative sexual citizens in danger. Importantly, the targeted scapegoat—or folk devil—of porn panics is not so much the consumer as the performer, compounding the queerphobia and misogyny that informs so much of sexual stigma. In this chapter, I return to the frameworks developed in my book Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (with Alan McKee, Polity Press, 2015) to untangle the myriad forms of porn panic. They are renamed here as porn profits panic; porn technopanic; porn/violence panic; pornification panic; and porn citizenship panic. I then offer a possible pathway to ethical porn futures through a final framework: labor and performance.