Did you send a sexy photo to your beau before going to bed last night? Under a proposed Oklahoma law regulating sexual material, exchanging sexual images would be a crime unless you’re married.
Oklahoma Senate Bill 1976 filed by freshman Oklahoma state legislator Sen. Dusty Deevers (R-Elgin), would prohibit consuming or producing sexual content that “lacks serious literary, artistic, educational, political, or scientific purposes or value” in any medium.
This bill is one of a growing number of bills filed in the last few years that target access to sexually explicit material. While Oklahoma is one of a number of states to file bills related to the regulation of pornography, the Oklahoma bill has been called one of the most extreme porn ban bills filed in the 2024 legislative session and a threat to the First Amendment by net neutrality activists.
Bills like these are often filed with the intention of protecting children from being exposed to pornography, but the reality is that such regulations’ effectiveness in achieving this is dubious, explained Kelsy Burke, a sociology professor at the University of Nebraska and author of “The Pornography Wars.”
Creating laws to try to “right” our sexual wrongs or “return to a more innocent time” before sexual images were saved for marriage just isn’t practical, said Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, professor of history who teaches on the history of sexuality at the University of Alabama.
Here’s how the Oklahoma bill could change the legality of pornography consumption:
1. Steeper legal consequences for child pornography
Child pornography is illegal in every state, but the bill would create steeper legal consequences for possessing, distributing or producing child pornography, which is any content that depicts a minor engaged in sexual activity or images of a minor intended for sexual gratification, as Oklahoma defines it.
For possession of a single image of child pornography, a person is subject to 5 years in prison and…
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