Between artistic depictions of neutral nudity to intentional pornographic work, for as long as humans have been creating visual art, there has been content that anyone in 2025 would rather not have their boss seeing. NSFW — an acronym standing for “Not Safe For Work” — is a term coined by the internet in the early 2000s. It covers everything from sexual content to extreme violence, but in this specific moment on the internet, it is generally used as a stand-in for porn. 

Pornography, as a concept, is famously tricky to define. The same can be said as to what classifies as fetish content. What can be said is that both are sexual in nature and generally depict some manner of the human form.

On most mainstream social media platforms, to be an NSFW artist is taboo. A “gooner art style” is a common insult given to people who share their art online, regardless of whether or not they draw NSFW content at all.

To be clear, people can (and should be allowed to) draw whatever they want. While it would be incorrect to say that fiction has no effect on reality, the act of drawing something is not the same as causing a real-world person to be harmed. Most everyone has fetishes or kinks, specific things outside of the mainstream that they’re into. It’s not a crime to depict.

When I say that one should be allowed to draw what they want, I am not saying they should be free from criticism or consequence. However, our current internet culture is a punitive and puritanical one. 

It is seen as a moral failing to express sexual desire at all, let alone sexual desire outside of the mainstream. For the past decade or so, for instance, there has been a long-running debate on sites like Tumblr and X (formerly known as Twitter) about the ethics of kink. 

A kink is a specific sexual taste outside of typical “vanilla” desire. These tastes can span from fixations on specific objects to kinds of roleplay in the bedroom to specific sexual acts done. When done correctly, kinks are performed between two consenting adults. 

When consent is abused, then the issue is no longer a problem of kink, but rather that the consent has been violated.

In the argument online, however, the issue is one inherent to the sexual acts performed, no matter how consensual. In this argument, all kink is categorically unethical, 100% of the time. 

Part of this supposed unethicality is in the act itself, in the sexual deviance. The other part is that, potentially, a child might somehow gain access to information about kink.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is a bill that was brought up to the Senate earlier this year. Nominally, it sounds great. Personally, I am all about kids being safe online, I think it’s great when kids are safe. KOSA isn’t the way to do that. The Kids Online Safety Act doesn’t actually care about kids, and neither do the teenagers on Tumblr arguing the ethics of explicit art. Under KOSA, queer rights in the United States are in genuine jeopardy.

Kink isn’t the only thing viewed as sexual deviancy. 

The act of queer people existing, for much of recent history, is seen as a sexual one. There are PSAs from throughout the modern era warning about the dangers of homosexuals corrupting children, and one of the most commonly regurgitated conservative talking points these days is about “drag queens grooming children.”

To be queer is to be inherently sexual in a fundamentally “wrong” way.

I am an artist and a queer person. My parents are both artists, and I grew up in a community of artists, many of whom were queer themselves. 

Sex and sexuality deserve to be respected in art because they are human experiences. Just as joy and pain and anger deserve to be catalogued, deserve to be explored, so too does desire. 

The urge to depict sexuality is a neutral one. There should not be an inherent moral judgment attached.