When we look to long-established liberties to which we can appeal in order to vindicate people’s right to create, share, and distribute erotic representations, it’s most normal to appeal to something like freedom of speech or (more rarely) that of the press. That’s all well and good: erotic representations are a kind of speech and are often reproduced or distributed through some contemporary analogue of a printing press. What I want to show here is that creating and sharing erotic representations is covered by another ancient liberty, that of freedom of association. Add that to freedom of speech and of the press, and we have suspenders and a belt for our right to porn.

Freedom of association is guaranteed both by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (as “the right of the people to peaceably assemble”) and Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m not exactly how far back we can trace the right in Anglo-American law. It doesn’t seem to appear as such in the great 1689 Bill of Rights, although the closely-related right to petition for redress of grievances very clearly does appear therein, a fact duly noted by Sir William Blackstone in the opening chapter his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765).

Now while it’s sure fun to get together with your fellow human beings, there’s a serious and deeper purpose behind freedom of assembly. Like freedom of speech and of the press it’s a core political right for any society that wishes to claim to be anything other than a despotism. No power on earth is great and benign enough to guarantee to you that you will never find yourself living under laws or within a culture you find hateful or oppressive. But any society that any other than a fool (or perhaps a lesser herd animal) would want to live in will concede you the right to seek out others like yourself who might be similarly aggrieved, with whom you might band together in hopes of finding peaceable means — such as electing sympathetic people to office, or persuading others to change their minds about what kind of person you and people like you are — of changing laws and culture. Though it is an ancient liberty, freedom of association is not an inherently conservative cause, and though it holds open the possibility of cultural change it is not a liberal cause. It’s the cause of any society that does not wish to be a tyranny. Or, for that matter, any society that values elementary stability. People denied the outlet of organizing and persuading others have a way of retreating into alienation and anomie. Or taking up arms against the world.

So freedom of association really matters. But here’s an important thing about human sociability: expressive and political association frequently begins with something humbler than itself. People don’t (normally) just wander into some open public space and begin clumping up to debate the latest Senate Bill, or whatever. Rather, they get out and meet each other in more specific social spaces, often with rather non-political purposes. They get together down at the local tavern to drink beer and watch the game. Or in a league to go bowling. Or at a quilting bee, or book group, or house of worship. It is in a great constellation of humble-yet-important outposts of civil society like this that people actually do most of their meeting one another.

Let us now make two observations:

(1) There are goods of association involved in most ordinary forms of association. Association isn’t just four bare walls and some people inside of them. There are specific, often shared, goods that people want to enjoy, either jointly or at least in the company of other: the beer and game on the T.V. down at the neighbourhood tavern, or bowling, or quilting, or books, or whatever collective observances are actually going on in that local house of worship. For lack of a better name, let us call these the Soil of Sociability, because it is in this loam that people’s associations with one another grow.

(2) People talk to each other when they associate, and this leads to the discovery of common ground, common concerns, and common consciousness. When you meet enough people, you often discover that what for you alone was just a vague uneasiness, a Problem That Has No Name, or an eccentricity that set you at odds with the world might not have been so idiosyncratic as you thought. Others may share it. And perhaps if others may share it, it may be time to start organizing to better your own situation. Call this consciousness-raising the Fruits of Sociability, because they come out of meeting people.

We get the Fruits of Sociability from the Soil of Sociability, at least often. I’ll maintain that if you take away the Soil of Sociability you really are interfering with freedom of assembly, even if you leave some bare, formal right to associate intact. Consider:

“You veterans can get together in a hotel meeting room and talk about your gripes with the government. But no beer and pretzels. No bingo night either.”

“You Catholics can get together in a church and talk about God or something if you really want, but we’re prohibiting using wine to celebrate Mass.”

“You homosexuals can meet in a hall and talk about gay stuff if you really must. But no cocktails. And no dancing.”

Take away the fun of meeting, and people will stay isolated from one another, this taking away the Soil of Sociability, and impairs freedom of association in an unacceptable way. And that won’t wash. To see why not, consider by analogy how much free speech you think you would have if someone told you that would could say anything you want, but only if you say it in (proper, grammatical) Latin, anything else being subject to strict censorship. Even if you yourself are the equal of Cicero, you’d have to admit you wouldn’t be able to communicate very effectively in the contemporary world. Those who prevent the Fruits of Sociability from coming into being would do well wash away the Soil of Sociability. Taking the joys out of getting together is a tool of tyrants.

So what does all this have to do with our right to porn?

It’s pretty clear that a there a lot of us out there who are members or either actual or potential sexual outgroups in this world. Some among the readers might have full-fledged identities as outgroup members (for example, by being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered). Others might just have unusual kinks that consume a lot of their energy and attention, and as someone who runs a site of his own devoted to one such I pretty much fall into the latter. And just like veterans or Catholics or just the guys down at the tavern, we’d like to get together with other people who might be like ourselves. If we do, our consciousnesses might indeed get some raising about a culture and set of laws which we might indeed find oppressive — if you’re kinky, you’re likely to find a lot of people out there who want you suppressed, if not by the force of law then by that of public opinion. Many of us would like to change that.

But what are our social spaces? Some of us are thick enough on the ground, at least in sophisticated urban areas, that we can find literal places in which to congregate and enjoy the Soil of Sociability. LGBT people, for all the stigma and persecution they’ve had to endure from the larger society in past years, have at least had this advantage in places. (Readers should recall the existence of a Greenwich Village watering hole called the Stonewall Inn.)

Others of us are more thinly scattered than LGBT people, but at least since the Internet there have been virtual places of association: the BBS, the Usenet group, the blog with its comments section, the online forum, social networking sites. A lot of people meet in these spaces. And what is our Soil of Sociability? Well, unfortunately you can’t serve drinks over the Internet (I’m sure many of us wish that were a feasible technology). But there are very important things you can share, things that bring people into the spaces for purposes of enjoyment: stories, artwork, personal reflections, fantasies, and anecdotes, all of which in a sexual context are likely to involve erotic representations. That’s what people come in for.

Back in February (with, I must add, considerable encouragement and support from Bacchus) I launched a site called Erotic Mad Science, a place of stories (my own) and images (mostly borrowed, but some created by my commission) devoted to a certain kind of kink. Since then, I’ve received in comments and e-mail a certain sentiment that always gives me joy when I see it, the substance of which is something like:

Thanks for this: before I saw it I thought I was the only person who thought like this.

No, my friend. You are not the only one. And you and I together are not the only two. You might have come in to look at naughty pictures, but now you’ve come away with a new friend and perhaps a spark of awareness. Both of us are less isolated than before. Whatever we are, there are others like us, and sites like this are there to help us get together.

But suppress those erotic representations — all those naughty pictures and sites — and you’re suppressing the existence of the space. And thus our freedom of association. Work the chain back the other way, and you get to a right to those representations.

Want freedom of association? Then you need to let people share their porn in peace. ‘Nuff said.