“Oppression by Orgasm”: Pornography and Antisemitism in Far-Right Discourses in the United States Since the 1970s

This article scrutinizes the far-right phantasm of a Jew-led “porn conspiracy” from the 1970s until today in the United States and, consequently, points to the significance of sexuality for the study of antisemitism. The idea that Jews threatened the patriarchal sexual order by spreading “obscene” cultural products and, thus, constituted a threat for white supremacy can be traced back, at least, into the last decades of the nineteenth century and was, of course, not limited to the United States. With the rise of so-called porno chic during the early 1970s, the fantasy of a “porn conspiracy,” embedded into the broader antisemitic notion of a Jew-led and anti-white regime of “minority racism,” increasingly gained ground in the far right in the United States. Nowadays, against the backdrop of intensifying masculinism in general and a growing masculinist anti-porn movement in particular, far-right antisemites try to make use of antipornography to spread antisemitic conspiracy narratives beyond the far right into the mainstream.