from the ncose-is-a-threat-to-free-speech dept

In totally sane and not-crazy anti-pornography activism news, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) considers online pornography a national security threat. This may be the stupidest thing NCOSE has ever claimed in its decades’ long fascistic fight against sexuality. 

The group’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, wrote for the Washington Times about cases of sexual exploitation that could potentially harm individuals who are a part of the military-industrial complex. However, he offers no clear example of such cases and simply relies on the organization’s standard talking points that all sexual expression is bad. 

He writes:

Adults are often an underreported victim group because of shame and fear of social repercussions, yet they are deemed high-value targets by exploiters because of their financial resources.

This claim is meant to apply to military and government employees with security clearances who could be subject to coercion, extortion, and other legitimate forms of exploitation if they post nudes consensually or if they were legitimately victimized by criminals. All of these are real issues, but, in true NCOSE form, van der Watt falsely conflates activities that are illegal with those that are lawful. Van der Watt likens this exploitation as a “symptom” of pornography’s ubiquity in national culture, despite the resurgence of white Christian nationalism.

The argument can be summed up that military personnel have private lives, and sometimes those private lives involve pornography, and because of that, they may be coerced into sharing nudes, which means that the government must outlaw porn as a national security threat.

There are a few logical leaps in there.

He calls for the U.S. Justice Department to stand up its long-dormant obscenity task force that once went after legal pornography producers who released hardcore content. Van der Watt’s calls echo a recent attempt by Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana urging acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to reinstate the task force while singling out the $3.15 billion-valued OnlyFans.com. 

And it’s clear that the real threat here is just… van der Watt doesn’t like the idea that some people enjoy pornography:

Yet the national security threat posed by pornography is incubated on a far more granular level.

Pornography corrodes the exact social foundation that supports national strength. It normalizes sexual objectification and fosters impersonal, consumeristic attitudes toward sex. Over time, its use may lead to habituation, where users require increasingly extreme content to achieve the same level of sexual arousal.

Such rhetoric is part of the far-right’s project to eliminate legal and consensual pornography. This has long been a core tenant of NCOSE’s mission. This is the organization that used to be called “Morality in Media.” Remember, this is the same organization that called for the magazine Cosmopolitan to be removed from Walmart checkout lines because the publication was “pornographic.” NCOSE once went after academic database provider EBSCO for not blocking students from accessing anatomically correct sexual education materials. NCOSE is also one of the central groups to argue the pseudo-scientific claim that pornography is addictive like a drug and serves as a public health crisis. NCOSE persists in these claims, despite no evidence of such. And now it wants you to believe its a “national security” threat?

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Filed Under: marcel van der watt, national security, pornography
Companies: ncose