A group of performers and activists are giving voters a clear message: Under a Trump administration, not even your porn is safe.
Siri Dahl attends the Los Angeles premiere party for Netflix’s “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story” at Grandmaster Recorders on March 13, 2023, in Los Angeles, California.(Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images)
In 2023, the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation published its “ 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” a 922-page document outlining, in painstaking detail, how the conservative movement intended to shape the policies, personnel, and power dynamics in the next Republican administration. It initially flew under the radar, but over this past summer its rabidly autocratic vision for the country attracted a significant amount of attention—and a snappier name.
Now, despite his strenuous efforts to distance himself from the deeply controversial document, Project 2025 has become synonymous with former president Donald Trump’s campaign. If Trump were to win the election, his supporters, advisers, and enablers would have free rein to inflict their draconian Christian nationalist policies upon the public, from banning abortion pills and brutalizing protesters to decimating trans rights, eliminating the Department of Education, and enacting mass deportations. The authors of Project 2025 seek to sink their claws into nearly every single aspect of American life—including peoples’ most private moments. That’s right: Under a Trump administration, not even your porn is safe.
That’s the message that a group of adult performers and activists for sex workers’ rights are trying to hammer home in the days leading up to the election. “In my experience, the best way to fight back against the stigmatization and devaluation of our labor is to speak out consistently about things that affect our health, livelihoods, and working conditions,” Siri Dahl, an adult performer and sex workers’ rights activist, told The Nation, “whether that’s shitty talent agents committing labor violations, pirates stealing from us, online censorship, or the threat of government overreach, as in the case of Project 2025’s proposal to ban porn.”
Dahl isn’t exaggerating. In the foreword to Project 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts writes:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
“The goal seems to be to cripple the legitimate companies in the adult industry by passing and enforcing burdensome, draconian laws—so that inevitably when the legitimate, legally compliant adult sites lose the majority of their traffic to noncompliant, overseas-based sites that are willing to host any content (even illegal, abusive content), then it will just add more fuel to the conservative argument that all porn is exploitative,” Dahl said. “In my view, they’re doing more to enable sexual exploitation than anybody in the modern porn industry has.”
Roberts also characterizes those who consume porn as “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” which Dahl finds especially rich. “This kind of language is 100 percent coming from the religious fundamentalist anti-porn playbook,” she said. “The ‘child predator’ rhetoric is really rich, considering that this is the same political ideology whose followers would happily force an underage rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term. For the record, I want to say that porn must be produced consensually, and only by adults. Otherwise, it’s not porn, it’s evidence of a crime. And in the adult industry, when we produce a film, there is an incredible amount of effort and paperwork that goes into documenting consent and establishing boundaries at every stage of the production.”
In the document, Roberts (a man who has proven that he cannot even be trusted to care for dogs, let alone humans) also makes confusing claims about porn’s alleged connections to two other conservative obsessions. “Pornography is manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” he writes, while providing no sourcing whatsoever for his claim. That wording is very intentional, as Kim Fuentes, the director of research and services for Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA), breaks down. “Project 2025 explicitly refers to any efforts that support gender equality, gender equity, abortion, reproductive rights, and federal welfare programs as direct threats to American well-being that need to be exterminated,” she told The Nation. ”It exacerbates existing inequalities that are literally killing the most marginalized groups within the sex work industry, including queer and transgender workers, low-income workers, undocumented folks, and Black and brown folks.”
As journalist Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The New Republic, “Project 2025 is not targeting ‘pornography’ as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography.” Meanwhile, data procured by Mashable has shown that the vast majority of adult-content creators are worried about conservative attacks on their industry, with trans performers (93 percent), creators of color (94 percent), and gay and lesbian creators (100 percent) expressing the most concern.
Roberts also writes that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection,” despite the multiple Supreme Court rulings to that effect. As a US district court said when it struck down two provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), “The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation.”
Yet Roberts and his cronies want to stop that conversation entirely. That’s why Siri Dahl got involved with the Hands Off My Porn campaign. The $500,000 effort featured Dahl and nearly 20 other performers appearing in ads run on adult-content websites in swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada to warn viewers about the dangers of Project 2025. The campaign’s website includes a helpful rundown of conservatives’ long-running efforts to ban pornography and punish its creators and consumers, warning potential voters, “While there are a lot of jerk-offs in Washington DC, the ones you should worry about are the right wing conservatives working to end the porn industry.”
Dahl isn’t alone in her concern, and as the election crept closer, she decided to get some friends and allies together to share their message in a bigger way. On October 15, she and her two cohosts, fellow adult performers Gwen Adora and Ana Foxxx, launched the Corn Telethon, a 12-hour variety show that was streamed live on her Twitch and YouTube channels. The playful, safe-for-work production was inspired by classic 1970s telethons, and the vibe was “somewhere between USA’s Up All Night, an episode of Hee Haw, and an Elvira special.” A madcap lineup of podcasters, performers, musicians, writers, and comedians, including Ify Nwadiwe, Molly Lambert, Jamie Loftus, Open Mike Eagle, and Zoë Ligon joined the trio live. By the end of the night, the event had raised over $8,000 for two sex workers’ mutual aid organizations, SWOP LA and the SW Mutual Aid Collective.
“This event took an incredible amount of work to put together, and there were only three of us (myself, my coproducer Alex Steed, and our one-person production support team, Madelynn Britt) planning the whole thing, so I’ll be honest: Our main criteria for selecting guests was, like, who is either a sex worker or an ally to sex workers, who is also available on this one specific day, and also willing to travel to the San Fernando Valley?” Dahl said. “And every single guest we brought on knocked it out of the park!”
Going forward, Dahl and her compatriots are already drawing up plans for the next telethon. The first event had to come together quickly due to the looming election, Dahl says, but she and her co-organizers want to continue to raise money for sex worker mutual funds, as well as establish a grant fund to support new and existing journalism initiatives to better communicate sex worker issues.
“We invited journalists on the telethon, specifically to ask them questions about why and how sex work rarely receives the kind of unbiased, accurate coverage it deserves,” Dahl said. “One thing people really need to understand about sex workers is that our labor is valid, and valuable. You don’t have to like watching porn, or care about the porn industry at all, to respect me as a human being who must work to make a living. But for the record, according to the IRS, my job is very real! I pay my taxes just like the rest of you.”
Fuentes emphasized that her primary hope is to see sex worker organizers and their allies continue to focus on building collective power, no matter who wins on Tuesday. “With an increased focus on criminalizing sex work (because as it’s framed we’re a ‘threat to the nuclear family’), there will be even more heightened surveillance and policing in areas where sex work is prevalent,” she said. “Advocacy for harm reduction, decriminalization, and the insistence of sex work’s right to existence is crucial to mitigate these risks and promote a safer, more equitable environment for all involved in the industry.”
Neither Dahl nor Fuentes are exactly thrilled with the choices before them on Tuesday. Dahl was quick to mention that, in her view, Vice President Kamala Harris has never been an ally to sex workers, pointing towards Harris’s active role in passing legislation like SESTA/FOSTA that has had a disastrous impact on the sex worker community. “It’s made consensual sex work less safe, and in many cases made it harder for law enforcement to identify and prosecute actual criminal sex traffickers,” she said.
But ultimately, like so many other workers in and outside of the adult entertainment industry, Dahl sees voting for the Harris/Walz ticket as an act of damage control.
“Politicians are not pop stars, and I don’t need to be a fan of a particular politician to cast my vote for their administration,” she said. “In this election, the Harris/Walz ticket is the obvious better choice, not just for sex workers but for all marginalized people. I very strongly believe that there will come a day when politicians and regular folks alike will come to regret underestimating and overlooking sex workers, because we really are everywhere, especially now with the advent of creator platforms like OnlyFans, and we are tired of the bullshit, My hope is that Harris will win the election, thus effectively quashing the immediate threat of Project 2025—and then all of us sex worker activists can get back to work demanding that the government, including the Democratic Party, stop making laws for us and about us without ever consulting us about it.”
Kim KellyTwitterKim Kelly is a writer and labor activist based in Philadelphia. She is the author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor.