Am I a Pornographer?

Warning: Explicit Content Inside

For more than a decade, I worked as a full-time photographer, taking photos of families, high school seniors, college graduates, professionals, babies, brides and grooms, etc.

And sometimes I would take sexy photos of women.

Boudoir (boo*dwar) is the french word for woman’s bedroom. Boudoir photography is the art of photographing women in the bedroom. The photos usually feature women in sensual or erotic poses — not fully nude or sexual but suggestive. I liked to tell my clients that boudoir was more about an attitude than an appearance. Fishnet stockings can be sexy, but so can eyeglasses.

Shooting boudoir photos was a highlight of my photography career. Every. Single. Session was transformative. When they came to my studio, these women would always be timid. They’d arrive with their hair curled and their makeup professionally done, but the crimson on their cheeks would be from embarrassment, not from blush. They’d be apologetic.

“I’m not very photogenic,” they would say, covering their face with their hands.

“I’m sorry, I don’t really know how to be sexy,” they would say as they pulled a mock sexy face to show me how unsexy they were.

“I’m not sure I’ll actually work my way up to this one,” they would say as they pulled what was clearly their skimpiest piece of lingerie from a bag.

So we would start slow. We would start with the outfit that they found the most comfortable. Sometimes, it wasn’t even lingerie, but a sweater, some underwear, and knee-high socks. I would pose them in a way that avoided direct eye contact with the camera. I would take a few images, asking them to move into various poses, so I could learn the most flattering angles for their body. Then, when I was satisfied I’d created photos they could be truly proud of, I showed them the back of my camera.

“Wow, I didn’t know I could look like that!”

“I can’t believe that’s me!”

“You’re a genius!”

By the end of the session, my clients were usually naked — or close to it. The walls had come down and they had learned to fully love and appreciate their bodies. The time we’d spent together helped them see themselves in a new way.

The thing was, it was never about me. It was always about them. The only thing I was doing was understanding the person in front of my camera and helping them see their best features. Each pose, each movement, each click of my shutter was individualized to the woman I was photographing in that moment. As women, we can’t see the beautiful qualities in ourselves the way we can see them in others. We’re too beat down by airbrushed societal expectations to understand that we are a constellation of artistry. Our freckles are an entire Rembrandt painting. The curve of our hips, a Rodin sculpture. We don’t see the way our eyelashes curl on our cheek when we look down or the radiant curtain of hair falling across our own shoulders. I wanted to capture the details of women’s beauty that they never knew existed.

Women would hire me to celebrate their accomplishments — weight loss or a bold new haircut or a graduate degree or breaking up with that asshole who never deserved them.

They hired me because they turned 40 or because they were done breastfeeding or because Valentine’s Day was coming up or because they wanted to raise one giant middle finger to religious indoctrination and purity culture. Hear me talk about my own experience with purity culture on Micah Larsen’s podcast Modern Hysteria. First episode. Second episode.

Sometimes brides would hire me, so I could take sensual photos of them when they got engaged. They would have the photos turned into a book they could present to their husbands on their wedding day.

The most common way for me to advertise my services was to share my work (with permission, of course). Like most other industries, boudoir photographers post photos on social media to attract new clients. Which helps explain why there’s been a ripple of anxiety through boudoir photography forums since Trump was elected.

“Hey photogs, get those clients while you still can,” one photographer friend wrote. “Pretty soon they’re going to shut us all down.”

Hard to imagine that the same man who indiscriminately cheated on every one of his wives AND married a nude model AND THEN cheated on her with a porn star would have a problem with pornography. But that would simply be one of Trump’s many ironies and inconsistencies.

Project 2025 has a HUGE problem with pornography. And it’s about to be our problem.

Despite his protestations, we know Trump is closely linked with the authors of Project 2025. He took campaign contributions from them, enlisted them as advisors, and is trying to fill his cabinet with them.

Project 2025 has a lot to say about pornography:

“It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. 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.”

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Bafflingly, it gives no other definition of pornography or how it will be defined. And this reference to pornography is preceded by hatred of queer Americans (as is much of Project 2025). So what does it mean, who does it apply to, and who will be making the decisions?

Instead of calling it pornography, legal minds often choose the broader word “obscenity.” The Supreme Court has struggled to define what rights are protected under the First Amendment. For almost 100 years, our country used the Hicklin Test to define obscenity, originating from the British case Regina v. Hicklin (1868), a rigid standard that said any lewd or explicit part of any publication tainted the whole thing.

That changed in the 1950s, when Samuel Roth was indicted for violating federal obscenity laws by sending obscene materials through the mail. The Supreme Court rejected the Hicklin test, writing that to be considered obscene the material had to appeal to the “prurient interest” of the viewer and lack any other redeeming social value.

I guess now we know why Hustler included articles between the high-gloss pages of their nudie magazine.

The Roth Test was still insufficient, so over time the Supreme Court refined their criteria of obscenity to a three-part test that still stands today.

Obscenity is:

• Prurient interest

• Patently offensive content

• Lacking any serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Still, obscenity is hard to define. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said to describe his threshold for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Critics have pointed out that the point of Stewart’s standard is objectivity. In other words, obscenity is in the eye of the beholder.

This simple phrase, embedded in a plurality opinion, carries with it many of the conflicts and inconsistencies that continue to plague American obscenity law. In effect, "I know it when I see it" can still be paraphrased and unpacked as: "I know it when I see it, and someone else will know it when they see it, but what they see and what they know may or may not be what I see and what I know, and that's okay."

— William T. Goldberg

How do we apply these standards in today’s PornHub, sex toy, Only Fans world? Is boudoir photography the same thing as pornography? Are images of women celebrating and enjoying their bodies “destructive?” Are photographers who showcase them online producers and distributors of pornography?

That really depends on who you ask.

In order to understand where conservatives are coming from — and where they might go with outlawing pornography, we have to examine what is happening in governments across the U.S. Tomorrow I’m sharing an analysis of laws in red states regarding obscenity and what might be next for the country under a Trump presidency.

Onward, Democracy Defenders!