Cracking Down on Adult Content

Written by Tara Tainton

Saturday, 25 June 2005 23:00

As of June 23rd, regulation 18 USC 2257 went into effect, drastically changing the way business is conducted on US-based adult websites. It was all the talk for most of the year, a big scare to webmasters running sites filled with adult and mature content and fearing that it'd be nearly impossible to bring their sites up to par in time and avoid being shut down completely...or even losing enough of their customer base to run them out of business entirely. Just like any other government ordinance, the very terminology is vague, confusing, and very much open to debate. All in all, everyone's scrambling to ensure their sites are compliant, mine included.

So, finally determining how the law affects even little old me, I sorted through every page of my site, including every blog entry and every banner image. You're looking at the new, fully compliant TaraTainton.com at this very moment. So, what's changed? Well, some images no longer appear, some images have been exchanged for others, and just one blog entry was deleted. So much for being In the Mood for Cock. It's a further effort in cracking down on child pornography, in protecting minors, and ensure no one under age is abused in any way, physically or electronically. So, how does it all affect your own viewing pleasure, your favorite sites, and TaraTainton.com in the future?

adult content warning

In incredibly basic terms, there are now record keeping requirements for publishers/producers of sexually explicit images. USC 2257 has been around since 1991 to keep models and actors/actresses under the age of 18 out of the adult industry. In 2004, the Dept. of Justice added a regulation determining that even secondary producers (e.g., publishers such as webmasters utilizing the explicit content created by others) are just as liable for illegal material as the primary and also required to keep these very specific records regarding each model used, filed in a certain way, and dating back to 1995.

So, us webmasters and webmistresses may not have taken the photograph of the model or filmed the porn movie, but we can be punished for publishing underage material as if we had. We're left to choose between obtaining all these records on every model in every image from the primary producers so we're able to turn them over to the govt. at the drop of a hat or avoid using applicable images in the first place. I chose the latter, with the exception of just a single web page I'm hosting on which now appears a compliance notice.

attorney general pornography

Which images are applicable? Any "visual depiction of an actual human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct." That sexually explicit conduct is defined in the United States Code 18 USC 2256 as "sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex, bestiality, masturbation, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person."

And that's where it gets even more fun. Lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area isn't really defined, but looking at other regulations, we can guess it means pretty much any focus on the genitals at all...all those nice close-ups, shots filled with nothing but cock, and even the genitals placed in the center of the photo, implying they're the focus. And for the government, genitals refers to an erect or flacid penis, clearly visible pubic lips, and even anuses.

So, there you have it. These images will either fade away from the internet slowly and surely or the sites you like to frequent or you can be sure the webmasters are collecting records for them behind the scenes. If they're not, they face imprisonment.

There's always the chance that this new regulation will be deemed unconstitutional in some form and secondary providers won't be held as responsible. In the mean time, I'm complying and cleaning up my oh-so-trashy site.