Health resources, non-sexual imagery, written erotica, trans expression, and more would be illegal

If passed, Michigan’s House Bill 4938, the Anticorruption of Public Morals act, effectively criminalizes anything on the internet that is “deemed to corrupt public morals.” For Joshua Shriver, the bill’s author, and his co-sponsors, Republican representatives Joseph G. Pavlov and Matt Maddock, such material includes “various forms of pornographic content and other depictions that violate the act’s standards.”

Penalties for violating HB 4938 include felony charges for anyone convicted of willingly distributing any material the state government says will be corrupting to adults, carrying a fine of up to $125,000, and/or imprisonment for up to 25 years.

Sex equals jail

Introduced in September of this year, HB 4938 still has a long way to go before landing on Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer’s, desk—who, despite recently supporting her state’s new anti-deepfake legislation—is unlikely to sign it into law.

And if Whitmer should, for some reason, decide to sign it, there’s a high probability it’ll be subsequently thrown out due to its obvious Free Speech violations.

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However, the fact that HB 4938 was introduced to the Michigan House or representatives proves there’s a serious, organized, and ongoing threat to suppress not just adult content but potentially everything related to reproduction, sexual education, invaluable health-related resources, gender and trans expression—and anything people like Representative Schriver don’t like.

If you think that’s hyperbole, HB 4938 specifically targets:

Depiction, description, or simulation, whether real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory, that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of a combination of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual’s biological sex.

If that’s not blatant transphobia, then I don’t know what is.  Then there’s it having such vague terms, how could anyone differentiate between explicit materials from important sexual information sites?  In short, if it has to do with sex, then, innocuous or not, it—and you—could end up in the bill’s crosshairs.

They know it when they see it

Sharing what might prove to be devastating ambiguity with many other anti-porn legislations, Michigan is also specific when it comes to sex or barely sensual depictions, including anything made “to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”

Reading that—while you still can, that is—should send an extremely unarousing shiver down your spine.  Spicy audiobooks?  Illegal.  Music with provocative lyrics? Illegal.  Love poetry?  Illegal.  Video games with sex scenes?  Illegal. Caught purring sweet nothings in your partner’s ear?  Both of you, as well as anyone with whom either of you might have shared it, could be looking at a quarter-century in a Federal prison.

Sex equals hope

It would be easy—not to mention dangerously foolish—to dismiss HB 4938 as yet another attention-seeking, yet pointless attempt, by anti-sex zealots to appeal to their intolerant and ignorant base.  

Much as we hate to admit it, we urgently need to wake up to the fact that there are a number of people in the United States and in many other countries who’d like nothing better than locking up or even executing you, me, or anyone  “deemed to corrupt public morals.”

If there’s going to be a future where these sorts of misguided beliefs are relegated to the history books, we need to fight back.  Case in point, let’s embrace the undeniable truth that consensual sex—and depicting it in movies, books, songs, stories, et al.— is fun and more than anything else makes us totally, absolutely, wonderfully human.

Starting with nonjudgmental, comprehensive sex education.  As the World Health Organization (WHO) states, citing a three-year study on the subject, “Evidence consistently shows that high-quality sexuality education delivers positive health outcomes with lifelong impacts. Young people are more likely to delay the onset of sexual activity – and when they do have sex, to practice safer sex—when they are better informed about their sexuality, sexual health and their rights.”

Whether you’re offended by HB 4938’s assault on our inalienable rights, rightfully scared that you or those you care about could be arrested and imprisoned because of it, or just wanted to keep Representative Schriver’s hands off your dirty books, join us in condemning these and other attempts by similarly misguided bigots who keep trying to make sexual pleasure a criminal offense.

We can have a bright, beautiful, inclusive, accepting, and sexually knowledgeable tomorrow—but only if we do everything we can to make it a certainty and not a tragically remote possibility.

Image Sources: Depositphotos

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Four run afoul of the country’s strict anti-adult content laws

In a fascinating intersection between the do-it-yourself, AI-generated explicit materials boom and their country’s staunch ban on anything depicting realistic genitalia, last month, four Japanese citizens were arrested not for creating erotic imagery but for failing to specify the results of their “spread leg” prompts should be obscured.

Soranews24 reports this is a national first as many have and will likely continue to be cited for accurately depicting sexualized nudity and sexual activity, but Japanese authorities haven’t yet extended their reach to AI image-generating software services.

Described by Soranews24 as “four men and women with ages ranging from their 20s to 50s,” the Tokyo Metropolitan Police has specifically accused them of distributing obscene imagery by selling posters of their AI prompts for several thousand yen each—netting one of the four at least seventy thousand US dollars or approximately ten million Yen.

Old laws, new world

Differing from many of Japan’s rules and regulations, Article 175 precedes its constitution, which was predominantly imposed by the Allied Occupation forces in accordance with Japan’s World War II surrender terms.

Part of its 1907 penal code, Article 175 sets out a punishment of two years imprisonment and/or a two million, five hundred thousand Yen, nearly $20,000 fine.  

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But since its original inception more than a century ago, it and other Japanese obscenity laws have varied widely in how they’ve been enforced—particularly as legal authorities struggle to deal with technological advancements from clandestine video rental services to the Internet.

Maebari, pixelation—or else

In an early attempt to avoid persecution, a number of adult entertainment producers began fitting their performers with adhesive-backed pubic hair shields called maebari. 

Ironically, the term and practice faded into obscurity when shaving became all the rage as Japanese obscenity laws tend to zero in on pubic hair depictions.

With the advent of digital photography came genital pixelation, the lack of which got the “four men and women” in trouble.

More questions than answers

In the Soranews24 article, one person said of the Japanese AI-generated adult content prosecution, “There are only a few countries that criminalize uncensored nudity.” Then continued, “Anyone can find it on the Internet anyway, so these laws are useless. I think people struggle to contemplate if it’s really a problem to enjoy parts of the human body.”

Another said it was an example of Japan’s anti-obscenity laws falling behind the times, “There are people who upload uncensored images to social media. Does that not count as distribution?”

What’s especially troubling about this case is its selective enforcement; Authorities not going after a particularly egregious purveyor of adult materials or someone using AI to create underage imagery, instead prosecuting  four people who—as far as we’re aware—did what thousands have already done.  They simply had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the worst time.

More frustratingly, it’s unlikely their arrest will hinder others from doing the same. If anything, it’ll force similar AI adult content creators to be extra clever in getting their products into the hands of others.

Such content might not even be preventable. Why should anyone pay for AI-generated adult content when they can make their own by simply prompting for it?

Technology finds a way

Japan’s not alone in attempting to stuff the genie back in the bottle. The United States and other countries are increasingly being steadily bombarded by proposed and actually enacted laws against the creation, sale, or distribution of adult materials.

Often hidden behind the self-righteous camouflage and well-known logical facility of “thinking of the children,” similar laws either seek to criminalize the exchange of consensually created explicit content, or will set up as many digital or monetary roadblocks as necessary to financially strangle the industry.

If there’s a ray of sunshine in all of this, it’s just as Japanese obscenity laws—or more precisely, their erratic enforcement—can’t stem the adult technology wave, so too other repressive ordinances won’t be able to either.

Not that legal systems won’t stop trying by making examples of people whose only crime was getting caught doing what a majority of people on this planet have always done: making and ejoying images of other, consensually naked adults.

Image Sources: Depositphotos

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