Everybody watches porn but nobody thinks it’s important enough to defend
by Noelle Perdue
Siri Dahl is not an agriculturalist, but she is an expert on corn.
Or at least, according to search engine optimizing keywords she is. In October of 2024, Siri hosted a 12 hour “Corn Telethon,” interviewing 30+ comedians, performers, and journalists, all in the name of corn.
Sorry, not corn – porn!
The corn telethon was for porn, employing a commonly used “algospeak” workaround to avoid censorship.
“The event should have been called Porn Telethon, but having the word “porn” in the title would’ve gotten us kicked off of YouTube and Twitch, the streaming sites we used on to broadcast the show,” explained Dahl. “So, Corn Telethon it was.”
The Corn Telethon had two primary goals: raise money for sex worker-led mutual aid organizations (for which they successfully rallied $8000) and raise awareness around Project 2025, a political initiative based on the (over 900-page) document Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, published in April 2023. It’s referred to colloquially as a “wishlist” for how conservative politicians (many of whom make up Donald Trump’s cabinet) want to reshape the federal government.
Screeds against the “evils of pornography” are predictably woven throughout Project 2025, with the adult industry positioned as the root cause of nearly every conservative bogeyman imagined by the over 400 contributors. On page five of the foreword, Kevin D. Roberts writes that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” wrapping fearmongering in a familiar bow of transphobia.
Later, he says that porn producers are “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” the irony of which isn’t lost on Dahl, who called the statement “ridiculous coming from anybody who’s a fan of Trump, a man found civilly liable for rape by a unanimous jury of nine, and who once told a ten-year-old girl he’d date her when she’s older.”
But such is the classic “women and children” narrative used by politicians, one that conveniently only applies to certain women and certain children. Not the trans kids kicked off their little league teams, or the women supporting themselves – and their families – doing sex work.
In the case of Dahl, Roberts wants her – along with everyone else producing and distributing pornography – “imprisoned.”
“Since January 21st, most mornings I wake up in a mild panic,” said Dahl, “worried that I’ll check the news to find that Trump just signed a new Executive Order declaring porn illegal. I’ll have to move out of my house that just became unaffordable overnight, and tell my cats mommy can’t care for them anymore while I look for a job that will pay anything near a living wage when my resume is 12 years of experience in the adult film industry.”
She described the frustration of turning to her audience – ostensibly a group of people who would care if she and her medium of choice – were outlawed, only to be met with what felt like overwhelming indifference.
“It seems like although everybody watches porn, nobody thinks it’s important enough to defend.”
Maybe to porn consumers, it feels like threats to the adult industry don’t necessarily apply, or that surely, the bombastic sexuality of the United States will persist even at the behest of its own government.
Yet, I caution against getting comfortable, even if you feel unaffected. The adage “canary in a coal mine” is often applied to the adult industry, referencing the belief that criminalization and censorships affect the adult industry first, before inevitably trickling down onto other communities. While this isn’t untrue, it misses some key nuance on how obscenity law operates.
Threats against the adult industry don’t act as a warning of loss of liberties, but as a conduit. “Obscenity” is poorly defined and frequently applied to arts and entertainment beyond the adult industry; in fact, two of the three most significant obscenity law cases over the last hundred years were catalyzed by arts media, not pornography. More recently, Texas lawmakers successfully used obscenity law to greenlight a bill intended to ban drag, after its initial attempts were deemed unconstitutional.
If you are invested in the arts, in freedom of speech, in liberty of expression, you are invested in the fight adult industry professionals like myself and Dahl have been frontlining for years.
For everyone rightfully concerned, the next Corn Telethon is planned for June 2025, hosting dozens of guests throughout the 12-hour stream (because if there’s one thing the adult industry does well, it’s a house party under threat of demolition).
In the meantime, Dahl walked the January 2025 XBIZ Media Awards Show red carpet in a Scarlet Letter-inspired Puritan dress and bonnet. “Hey,” she quipped, “I’m just giving America what it apparently wants!”
Noelle Perdue is a writer, porn historian, and semi-reformed Internet anarchist. Having written everything from Food Network porn parodies to legally binding terms and conditions, much of her current work explores how pornography’s history can influence our digital and political futures. You can find her writing in publications like Wired, Washington Post, Slate, them, etc- or her newsletter, Porn World.