By Jericho Slade, WPS News, Ad-Hoc Historian

The conservative movement in America has always had a porn problem. Not just the “we hate it” kind — the “we profit from it while condemning it” kind. Since the 1950s, the same forces pushing prayer in schools and anti-sodomy laws have also quietly bankrolled, consumed, and profited off the very content they denounce from the pulpit.

Start with the facts: by the 1970s, the biggest consumers of adult content in America were conservative, white, middle-aged men — the exact demographic preaching traditional family values (Juffer, 1996). Adult bookstores thrived in red-state towns. Strip clubs flourished just off military bases. Evangelical suburbs didn’t kill porn; they funded its expansion.

Meanwhile, the political right weaponized sex. From McCarthyism’s “perverts and communists” scare to Reagan’s “Just Say No” culture war, porn became a stand-in for every societal anxiety conservatives couldn’t say out loud: women’s independence, queer liberation, racial integration, trauma. Blame it all on sex. Then cash in behind the curtain.

Here’s the kicker: many of the postwar publishers of adult material were staunch anti-communists and capitalist to the core. They saw the “moral majority” for what it was: a perfect distraction. While the public was arguing about whether Playboy was corrupting youth, entire corporate empires were built on mail-order nudie mags, hotel porn, and eventually cable TV and VHS.

Even into the internet era, it was right-leaning telecom companies and red-state legislatures that laid the digital infrastructure porn now thrives on. The same lawmakers condemning drag shows were raking in campaign cash from industries with deep ties to adult entertainment platforms (Paasonen et al., 2020).

This isn’t hypocrisy. This is design. The moral panic makes money. The outrage is the business model. And while parents were clutching pearls and banning books, their pastors, governors, and donors were buying up domain names and studio shares.

By the 1980s, porn wasn’t fringe — it was mainstream capitalism. The conservative establishment just made sure someone else took the blame.

Next up: Part 6 — From Centerfolds to Clickbait: How It All Got Digitized.

This image is provided for historical and cultural study purposes only, illustrating the intersection of adult media and political hypocrisy. It is not intended as endorsement or exploitation.

References

Juffer, J. (1996). At home with porn: Women, sex, and everyday life. NYU Press.
Paasonen, S., Jarrett, K., & McKee, A. (2020). Pornification: Sex and sexuality in media culture. Routledge.

Baldwin Saintilus, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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