Protestant Protectionism: UK's Porn and VPN Bans

The United Kingdom’s new Online Safety Act, championed by Labour front-benchers, now forces every adult site to run hard age checks.

My first time visiting Sweden was for Christmas in 2017. It seemed like the perfect place to experience a white christmas and imagined it as a socialist socially progressive utopian. To my dismay, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to buy any alcohol for my AirBnB because “alcohol is only sold at state run stores and they’re closed for Christmas.”

Well, why is alcohol only run at state-run stores? Until the mid 20th century, The Swedish government did not trust it’s adult citizens’ abilities to manage their own alcohol consumption so they rationed it. These state-run stores and their monopoly on alcohol distribution gave me a peak into North Western European Protestant paternalistic longhouse adjacent protectionist policies.

Gorski’s The Disciplinary Revolution talks extensively about the protestant(specifically Calvinist) history of state intervention into private life.

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The United Kingdom’s new Online Safety Act, championed by Labour front-benchers, now forces every adult site to run hard age checks and quietly urges ISPs to throttle or block VPN traffic that helps users dodge them. In the first week of enforcement, Ofcom launched probes into 34 porn platforms, while VPN downloads in Britain spiked more than 300 percent.

Be warned: if you begin to hear lawmakers scream “Won’t someone please think of the children!” a civil liberty is next on the chopping block.

Labour ministers lean on classic Protestant shame tactics. Tech Secretary Peter Kyle smeared Nigel Farage’s opposition to the bill by invoking Jimmy Savile, distorting or ignoring the fact that Savile was protected for decades by the BBC, Parliament, and even Margaret Thatcher, and was exposed only because anonymous users on the very internet Labour now wants to muzzle shared evidence outside establishment channels!

Labor party’s Jess Phillips who is a supporter of the bill also likened Farage to Savile, who was protected for decades by the British establishment and exposed due to anonymous internet users. Odd.

This recent crackdown falls squarely in the tradition of northern European protestant protectionism. The same reflex outlawed “face-sitting” and most BDSM in UK porn in 2014, and arrested British citizens for posting offensive memes on social media.

According to The Times, as of 2023, British police arrest more than 30 citizens per day for offensive social media posts.

This protectionism also birthed Sweden’s 1999 Nordic Model, which is a law that criminalizes buying sex while claiming to protect women(yet routinely sweeps migrant sex workers into police custody or deports them).

I saw the fallout of this policy firsthand at a 2019 Stockholm conference marking the model’s twentieth anniversary. One activist friend described an Eastern-European woman who learned, only after surgery, that Sweden’s health service had performed a hysterectomy on her. Such a nice, kind, ✨feminist✨ society.

Underneath the welfare-state lies the same paternalism: the state knows best, pleasure is suspect, and “protection” justifies coercion.

Where activists messed up

A huge misstep from all of this was the culture created by activists from the past few decades or so. Although well-meaning, they often frame porn crackdowns as sex-negativity versus sexual liberation fight. Huge mistake. This was always a matter of civil liberties and when you add sex/sexuality it hijacks people’s brains beyond rationality.

Larry Flynt won Hustler’s First Amendment case by appealing not to erotic freedom but to broad speech rights an argument ordinary voters understand. Britain lacks a U.S.-style free-speech clause, yet the principle still matters: bad actors want to police the internet because free information is a stronger weapon than any army. It has been that way since the inception of the internet and decade by decade bad actors have been eroding that freedom. We must resist.

Yes, hyper-stimulating porn can harm developing brains. We should still oppose age-verification dragnets that harvest IDs and blacklist privacy tools. Sex symbolizes (and is) creation itself. Therefore, ceding control of that to the state hands it a veto over art, dissent, and ultimately over thought.

If Western democracies intend to survive, they must defend the widest possible zone of expression, including smut, while punishing only actual coercion or abuse. Anything less repeats the old Protestant cycle of moral panic and state mandated paternalism.

Supplementary content

From a film that I love called The People vs. Larry Flynt, an account of the life and trial of Hustler magazine’s founder.