Sex is normal, and the fact that Americans are having less of it is troubling. Sex is bad for you, and not having it is the path to spiritual awakening. Sex shouldn’t be shown in TV and movies, because it makes some people uncomfortable. Sex is good for your health, and you should be having it at every opportunity. Sex is good for you but bad for children to know about, and you shouldn’t have it when they’re home.

These are just a few of the arguments that have circulated online in recent weeks, with warring factions relitigating the place of sex in our culture. The internet drama is, on a cursory level, funny—at least, until you view it in the context of a broader resurgence of sex-negative discourse online, with people often leveraging the safety of children as a reason to justify transphobic rhetoric, or an overzealous approach to sexual censorship. As Twitter used @szmarsupial puts it, this is part of a culture that’s “becoming increasingly hostile to sex and sexuality, and using the potential ‘threat to children’ to punish sex and gender deviance”—gradually moving the needle from sex is empowering to sex is traumatizing to sex is dangerous, one Twitter debate at a time.

First, there was Penn Badgley’s request to omit sex scenes in the latest season of You—allegedly in order to “remain faithful” to his wife—which spurred viral discourse about whether it’s unprofessional to avoid simulating intimacy as an actor, and whether sex scenes in TV and movies are even necessary to begin with. Some people argued that we should do away with them altogether, and revert to the Hays Code—the set of industry guidelines that prohibited profanity, nudity, and violence in motion pictures between 1934 and 1968 (but which also censored interracial relationships and gay characters, and contains no shortage of Catholic undertones.) A few days later, writer Magdalene J. Taylor further stoked the discourse with a New York Times op-ed, in which she argues that “a cultural apathy toward sex” evidences a decline in social ties, and that we should all be having sex as often as we can for the sake of our mental and physical health—to which the public overwhelmingly responded, How?

“The fact that today’s Twitter debates call long-accepted norms into question… illustrates the slippery slope of internet censorship, and how ‘harm to children’ is often weaponized to reinforce narrowing standards for normative sexual expression.”

It’s no secret that the conditions of modern life—our collective overwork and pandemic burnout, coupled with the responsibilities of child-rearing and the looming recession—make getting laid off feel more plausible than getting laid. The difficulty of prioritizing sex was further emphasized last week, when another debate broke out on Twitter around whether it’s morally permissible for parents to have sex in their homes while their children sleep—a subject raised after one TikToker, ironically called @part.time.milf, documented her daughter’s fear and confusion upon hearing her “scream” during sex. The video spurred extreme reactions, with some claiming that parents should hire babysitters and rent hotel rooms if they “want to have sex that bad,” and even that “having sex when your children are home is weird—full stop.” Others argued that “pretending sex doesn’t exist, or that sexual desire is inherently immoral,” does more to harm children than overhearing sex ever has—that discovering one’s parents having sex will likely be less traumatizing than having your distress broadcast for internet clout.

It’s far from the only viral media depicting sex as dangerous to children. Over the weekend, deepfake footage of drag queens performing sexually-explicit routines in front of elementary-school-aged children was circulated on Twitter. The fabricated footage, which was taken from an adult drag show and spliced into a classroom setting, fit neatly into the existing debate—in part, because the engine of Twitter discourse seems to run on sensationalist arguments, which often abstract the most inflammatory possible interpretation and pass it off as fact. As I sit in front of my laptop, watching a queen twerk in front of a classroom of children, I can’t help but think, How did it get this bad?—but for very different reasons from the person who posted it.

According to journalist and author Samantha Cole, the internet and sex have always been intertwined—with eroticism acting as a central force behind the invention of new technologies, and sex workers often being the first to adopt them. Yet, these days, companies are eager to expunge sex from their platforms, due in part to the passing of legislation like FOSTA-SESTA, a 2018 bill that argued Section 230—a law passed in 1996 to protect free speech online—was enabling sex trafficking. It repealed previous protections that prevented websites from being held liable for the content they host. Though marketed as a bid to safeguard children against exploitation, the real-life impact of the bill was to endanger the lives of sex workers, making it harder to advertise services and vet clients online.

“The internet drama is, on a cursory level, funny—at least, until you view it in the context of a broader resurgence of sex-negative discourse online.”

From banning provocative content to silencing sex educators, it’s clear that social media platforms are at war with sex—but they’re also the battlefield on which this debate plays out, and the ones who determine its rules. Even now, Section 230, the bedrock of free speech on the internet, is under debate in Congress—and, like FOSTA, the next round of anti-trafficking legislation is attempting to repeal prior protections in the name of child safety, further limiting the scope of Section 230 and making companies responsible for policing user speech. This sounds fine in theory, but sex workers and free speech advocates alike warn that this erasure of protections would result in greater censorship on online platforms as a whole, as companies move to protect themselves from potential legal trouble as a result of third-party content.

As things stand now, it’s already hard to post about sex. On Instagram, visual content pertaining to sex—or, of course, female nipples—is immediately flagged for removal. On TikTok, users have developed an elaborate series of codes to reference “seggs” without activating the censorship trip wire. (And, though not specifically aimed at sex, the SAFE Act’s goal to eliminate protections for companies is likely to render their already-trigger-happy content moderation algorithms even more overzealous.) Twitter is the last social media platform allowing users to post sexual content, though it’s more often used to debate the ethics of sex than seek it.

The fact that today’s Twitter discourse call into long-accepted norms into question—like whether we should be able to show sex on-screen, or whether it’s morally permissible for parents to have sex in their homes—illustrates the slippery slope of internet censorship, and how ‘harm to children’ is often weaponized to reinforce narrowing standards for normative sexual expression. While these arguments are not explicitly aimed toward queer and trans people today, further policing of expressions of gender and sexuality online has a downstream effect of normalizing censorship for the sake of individual comfort. And as we’ve seen with the Hays Code, limitations on sex often go hand-in-hand with all sorts of restrictions—including the mandate that authority figures must be treated with respect, religion couldn’t be made fun of, and the line between good and bad characters must always be clearly demarcated.