It seems as if this year has forced America to question how we stigmatize and discriminate against workers in the sex industry. First there was the “coming out” of a porn star attending Duke University, and now there is Operation Choke Point, a targeted effort to shut down the bank accounts of known porn stars. In an article on Vice News, porn star Teagan Presley states that after arriving home from a strip club appearance tour, she received a message from her bank informing her that her account was about to be closed because she was “high risk.”
What does high risk mean, though? In 2011, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, listed 30 “merchant categories that have been associated with high-risk activity.” On this list, alongside racist materials, Ponzi schemes, and sales of fireworks and tobacco, was porn. The discrimination that workers in the sex industry face is often overlooked.
To be clear, “workers in the sex industry” refers to consenting adults of legal age who are not coerced into doing anything they are against. One may argue that porn is a detriment to society; however we still allow tobacco and cigarette companies to advertise and sell their product, despite being responsible for over 5 million deaths per year, according to the Center for Disease Control. Even former chairman of the FDIC, William Isaac, wrote to the American Banker magazine that Operation Choke Point is not helping the banks themselves, and is in fact “driving business into the ground.”
Therefore, whom does this operation really advocate for? It affects nobody directly but the porn stars and banks, who have both strongly protested it. When one looks at the facts and realizes that no good results can come about from this, what is preventing our Congressmen from shutting it down? One answer might lie in the numbers of Christian and anti-pornography groups that have been leaning heavily on Congress. In 2012, the anti- pornography group Morality in Media released the news that the Republican Party had changed its platform to include a commitment to fighting “obscene” adult pornography.
The problem is that no hard definition was made clear as to what they defined as obscene. It is estimated by a CBS news article from 2003 that adults spend more than $10 million a year on pornography. Adults as a whole clearly buy into and enjoy the product, so why are we still pretending that we are a “wholesome” and “clean” society?