A Bad Election for Sex and for Tech
It’s going to be a bad election for sex and for tech. I don’t need some sort of 2024 election-results crystal ball to make that prediction confidently. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both have a history of bad moves in these realms, and they both have a stable of supporters itching for them to make even worse moves going forward.
Who would be worse, from a libertarian perspective? Well…
Trump Would Be Worse on Sex PolicyÂ
Let’s start with sex.
Harris has a history of cracking down on sex work and opposing its decriminalization. She was a big advocate for weakening Section 230—the federal communications law that, among other things, helps protect web platforms from some liability for user content—in order to go after platforms that allow sex-work ads. She routinely spread falsehoods about the sex-work-friendly classifieds platform Backpage and, as attorney general of California, she twice arrested its founders on absurd pimping charges that a federal judge twice rejected. Later, as a senator, she was one of the co-sponsors of the law that would become FOSTA, which made life more difficult for sex workers and seriously chilled all sorts of sexuality-related content online. Harris also has a history of spreading sex trafficking panic, including passing off a fake sex-trafficking story as reality.
Trump signed FOSTA into law. He represents a party for which an influential core wants to outlaw pornography, and members of that party have a scheme to do so through the “back door” route of age-verification laws. He has repeatedly spread falsehoods about sex trafficking at the Southern border and sex trafficking by undocumented immigrants, and his supporters have promulgated some absolutely nuts sex-trafficking conspiracy theories, such as QAnon. Trump also represents a party that’s full of people trying to define all sorts of LGBTQ content as “harmful” to minors and restrict access to it on those grounds.
All of that being said, neither Harris nor Trump seems personally animated by broad hostility to sex work, LGBTQ people, sex workers, or sexuality generally. For both, any attacks on these things have seemed more opportunistic than ideological. Harris used what was then a hot-button issue of sex work ads and Backpage to get national attention. Trump uses an alleged epidemic of sex trafficking across the border to further his anti-immigration agenda. And so on.
This is not great, by any means; indeed, I would call it pretty despicable. But it is qualitatively different—and bodes slightly better for sex policy—than situations in which politicians seem driven by deep personal or ideological revulsion toward sex in the public sphere.
If I had to speculate, I’d say Trump probably has less dangerous personal convictions on this front, since Harris does seem to truly harbor some paternalistic attitudes toward sex workers.
But Trump is almost certainly more of a threat to sane sex policy than is Harris, simply owing to the fact that he represents the Republican Party. Hysteria surrounding sex is definitely a bipartisan phenomenon, but conservatives are still leaps and bounds worse on this front. And Trump, while politically idiosyncratic on some things, has a tendency to fall prey to some of the weird fixations of people around him. In any event, I find it unlikely that he would, say, veto an attempt at federal age verification for porn platforms or restricting books about sex in libraries should a GOP-controlled Congress send it his way.
And if we broaden our focus here to include things like contraception and abortion in the realm of sex policy, a Trump presidency looks even worse. Harris has some bad ideas about who should pay for condoms and other forms of contraception, and that could drive up costs. But o
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