‘Your industry’s days are numbered.’ When Ronald Reagan delivered this ultimatum to pornographers at a 1985 press conference, he was announcing more than just another government commission. The Presidential Commission on Pornography, helmed by Attorney General Edwin Meese, represented an attempt to reassert a particular vision of American moral authority. Reagan’s accompanying rhetoric aimed to raise what he perceived as civilisational stakes: pornography was ‘polluting’ ‘young minds and spirits.’ As he had previously commented, referencing a well worn political statement: ‘We can’t make America great again without remembering that America was great because America was good; and when we cease being good, we cease to be great.’

Nearly four decades later, Reagan’s threat proved empty. Rather than withering away, pornography has exploded into a global industry worth hundreds of billions. Technology has made a difference. Smartphones have enabled anyone to produce content from their bedrooms, shifting production away from backstreet studios. But until recently, such innovations had made pornography consumption more private, not less.

For centuries, sexual content remained hidden from public view. Victorians consumed graphic photographs discreetly behind closed doors. Mid-20th-century film houses screened pornography in venues separate from mainstream cinemas, often in red-light districts. ‘Private shops’ sold adult material, or it was kept on newsagents’ ‘top shelves’. Mail-order pornography arrived in brown paper packages, and video technology further enabled private home consumption.

Something fundamental has shifted. Besides, it wasn’t Pornhub that aired 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, the documentary about adult content creator Tia Billinger attempting to break world records by sleeping with 1,057 men in 12 hours, but Channel 4, a public service broadcaster. This same network had already abandoned critically acclaimed dramas such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and plunged into reality television with Big Brother, where intimate behaviour is surveilled by mass audiences around the clock, including when Jade Goody and PJ Ellis appeared to have sex under the bedcovers in 2002.

The 2000s was the era of sex tapes – not streaming, but videos like Paris Hilton’s, which was released with the title ‘1 Night in Paris’, at least hinting at romance, even if ironically. This contrasts with Bonnie Blue’s mechanised sexual marathon, which eschews any pretence of narrative. No storyline, however threadbare, no fantasy of plumbers arriving in tight shorts, however absurd. Just her body parts, a line of often faceless men, and a numerical target.

The mainstreaming and industrialisation of pornography represent a fundamental shift in societal attitudes and cultural norms surrounding sex and human relationships, not merely a change in distribution methods. By the time Reagan attempted to reverse course, these transformative influences were already well underway.

Among the factors in the migration of sex into the public realm was the 1949 publication of the Kinsey Report, in which an entomologist applied scientific methodology to sexuality and shattered public silence. Moralists were shocked, but so too was Mae West, the blonde bombshell who in 1927 had been arrested for ‘corrupting the nation’s youth’ with her controversial Broadway play Sex and sentenced to ten days in prison for ‘obscenity’. She challenged Kinsey’s biological perspective, pointedly asking: ‘Is man, then, to weigh all his emotions in test tubes and note down some kind of formula?’ Man, in her view, was more than an animal, more than cells. Subsequently, bans on previously prohibited erotic novels were lifted. In 1953, Playboy was launched.

With the Commission on Pornography, Reagan was appealing to the rising religious right, which was gaining significant political power through grassroots organising across America. Partly responding to President Carter’s controversial 1976 Playboy interview, where he admitted to committing ‘adultery in his heart’, and what they perceived as dangerous feminism, Jerry Falwell, a Virginia preacher with a large Baptist congregation, had declared war on magazines such as Hustler and Penthouse.

Catharine MacKinnon, alongside Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller, co-founders of Women Against Pornography in 1979, aligned themselves with Reagan’s crusade. While the campaign initially focused on moral questions and making America ‘good’ again, these feminists shifted the language from morality to harm. They asserted that pornography degraded women and contributed to sexual violence. Dworkin and MacKinnon contended that pornographic material causes tangible damage and suggested that victims should be able to sue publishers. Sex in their view was often abusive and needed scrutiny rather than privacy. One of MacKinnon’s most quoted positions: ‘this right of privacy is a right of men “to be let alone” to oppress women one at a time.’

In the New York Times, Betty Friedan, who had kickstarted second-wave feminism with The Feminine Mystique, defended free expression against the alliance that had formed around the Meese Commission: ‘Pictures and words about violent acts are not acts themselves,’ she argued, cleaving to the First Amendment. ‘Without free speech we can have no feminist movement. And if the anti-porn censorship is enacted, it is the right-wing-packed courts… who will decide what materials are printable in the United States.’

A third faction emerged in these ‘Porn Wars.’ Organisations like the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) emerged to oppose the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinances, while activists like Susie Bright launched feminist sex magazines like On Our Backs in 1984, which featured lesbian pornography. (It was still called ‘erotica” then, hinting at something more mysterious and human than the contemporary ‘adult content’.)

The intellectual foundation for this movement came from writers such as Ellen Willis, whose 1981 essay ‘Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?’ coined the term ‘pro-sex feminism’, and anthropologist Gayle Rubin, whose 1984 work ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ challenged feminists to develop separate theories of sexuality beyond anti-pornography discourse. They were also of a generation where the imperative of being out and proud taught them that keeping something private was suspicious. Rubin’s essay, originally presented at the controversial 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, argued that sexuality deserved its own field of study independent of feminism and became foundational to queer theory. Sex and pornography could be political and progressive.

These cultural strands proved just as influential as technology in pornography’s domination of public discourse. In the response to Bonnie Blue’s pursuit of notoriety, we witness the exhaustion of moral frameworks. There is little condemnation – few voices raised about ‘good’ or what is right or wrong. Multiple columnists, sensing something troubling about her project, scramble instead to identify harm and desperately seek to assign her victim status, but she refuses that narrative. Others search for feminist meaning, but she denies them that interpretation, too.

What remains is sex as pure spectacle – a performance stripped of the privacy that once made it intimate, the relationship that once made it meaningful, and the mystery that once made it erotic. We have arrived at Reagan’s nightmare, but through a path he never anticipated: through the complete triumph of publicity culture itself. The bedroom has become a broadcast studio, and what was once private has transformed into the ultimate public performance.