Wired Publishes Opinion Piece Stigmatizing Adult Content, Sex Work

SAN FRANCISCO — Wired Magazine published an online opinion piece today by Virgina Heffernan, who deployed a number of stigmatizing and stereotypical tropes about sex work and depictions of sex in order to advance her entirely conjectural notions about the future of adult content on Twitter.

The article, from its February print issue, is titled “Let Twitter Devolve Into Porn” and attacks the Elon Musk-owned social platform and its new management by appealing to a supposed “debasement” of purpose caused by “pornography.”

“Of all the threats posed by Twitter since it fell under sketchy new management in October, one of them doubles as a promise,” Heffernan claims in her intro. “Twitter will devolve into pornography.”

As of the writing and publication of the piece (Nov.-Dec., 2022), Musk has not revealed any of his thoughts or policy changes concerning adult content on Twitter.

Heffernan admits that “Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning.” This is followed by a barrage of stigmatizing and demonizing language about adult content and sex work that echoes the most damning fantasies of religious anti-porn crusaders and their SWERF and TERF allies.

Porn online, Heffernan believes, “behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.”

Heffernan also holds some peculiar notions about other wholesome platforms being contaminated by the depiction of human sexuality. She believes that Tumblr, “lost its allure when it was overrun by porn” five years after its start as “an artsy microblogging service in 2007.” She actually claims that Chatroulette was meant to be “a whimsical way to meet strangers” suddenly overrun by “dick pics and leering goons almost immediately.”

Most egregiously, Wired did not fact-check the blatant canard that OnlyFans, a platform that famously grew into a phenomenon, pretty much exclusively on the backs and labor of sex workers — and by all informed accounts, by design —  “began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos” and was later debased to the point that it now “consists mostly of porn created by sex workers.”

Heffernan’s language and choice of metaphors are aggressively, militantly anti-porn. OnlyFans, she states, “has surrendered” to porn. Chatroulette and Tumblr “appear to take a firmer stand than ever against it.” Heffernan’s deliriously militaristic fantasies keep escalating: “Facebook and YouTube conscript armies of algorithms and humans to banish porn in deference to advertisers who don’t want brands debased by unwholesome adjacencies.”

After side-swiping Musk’s erratic first month as Twitter owner, Heffernan returns to her obsession, likening any depictions of people having sex to images of hate and harassment. “Swaths of Twitter,” she imagines, “are now mangy empty lots crawling with vandals, lechers, con men, and swastikas. The time is perhaps right for porn, then. Porn abhors a vacuum. Especially where it can be ennobled as constitutional duty.”

The last line, of course, echoes the most rank accusations of religious groups and activists who want to ban all porn: that protecting sexual expression as a matter of free speech is not a legitimate course, but a subterfuge to “ennoble” a perverse cause.

In Heffernan’s imagination, Twitter’s inevitable takeover by porn — something that would be a surprise to the Republican-endorsing Musk, or his hard-right backers and allies like Peter Thiel and his protege J.D. “Outlaw all porn” Vance — is “good news” because “not only will it make Twitter easily quittable, but it’s pleasing to see things become what they deep down are. Twitter has slouched toward porn for years.”

Continuing her “not my cup of tea” obsessive fantasizing about what other people are doing on social media, Heffernan states that “‘Slipping into DMs’ is only one salacious meme in what long ago became an orgy of hyperstimulation, with people baring their souls, posting thirst traps, coyly subtweeting, and of course negging and prodding and simultaneously secreting dopamine and cortisol and God knows what other precious bodily fluids.”

The article, which can be read on Wired’s site and will be in print soon, continues in the exact same vein for several more paragraphs.