Alabama lawmakers have already decided that the online adult-content industry is profitable enough to tax.
Beginning Sept. 1, 2025, Alabama imposed a 10% tax on the gross receipts of commercial entities operating adult websites.
The tax covers sales, memberships, subscriptions, performances and other qualifying content produced, sold, filmed or generated in Alabama.
The Alabama Department of Revenue also says the tax applies when the purchaser is located in Alabama.
The law does not specifically name OnlyFans or impose a separate tax directly on every individual creator. However, it plainly reaches the same online adult-content economy in which creators sell subscriptions, performances and recorded material.
That raises a question Alabama lawmakers appear to have avoided:
What exactly is the state taxing?
Act 2024-97 declares pornography a public health crisis. It says pornography treats people as commodities and increases the demand for prostitution, sex trafficking and child exploitation. Alabama then turned around and created a revenue stream from the same industry it described in those terms.
The existence of a tax does not grant a license, immunity or declaration that every taxable transaction is lawful. Paying Alabama 10% does not erase the criminal code.
But that is precisely why lawmakers must address the contradiction they created. Alabama is collecting revenue from an industry while leaving obscenity and prostitution statutes on the books that may reach some of the conduct occurring within it.
Not every adult image or video is legally obscene. Sexually explicit expression does not become criminal merely because someone considers it immoral or offensive.
Alabama uses a three-part obscenity test. The material, taken as a whole, must appeal to the prurient interest under contemporary community standards, depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
That is a demanding legal standard, as it should be.
Yet Alabama’s definitions are much broader than many people may realize.
“Material” includes videos, electronic reproductions, broadcasts, transmissions, telephone communications and live performances. “Sexual conduct” expressly includes sexual intercourse, masturbation and lewd exhibition of the genitals. Producing material includes creating, filming, directing or staging it.
Alabama law prohibits knowingly producing, offering to produce or agreeing to produce obscene material for something of pecuniary value. Its instructions also say material that might not otherwise be obscene may qualify when its commercial distribution amounts to exploitation of erotica solely for prurient appeal.
That language deserves examination in the age of custom adult content.
There is an understandable legal distinction between purchasing an existing video and paying someone to perform a sexual act at the buyer’s direction.
A general subscription may provide access to a collection of previously created material. That resembles the traditional sale of adult entertainment.
A private commission is different.
In that transaction, a customer may select the sexual act, dictate what the performer should wear, instruct the performer what to say and direct how the act should be performed. The performer then creates the video specifically for that customer in exchange for money.
The presence of a camera should not end the legal analysis.
When the sole apparent purpose is for one paying customer to direct another person’s sexual conduct for personal gratification, lawmakers should explain why that is categorically different from a commercial sexual service.
It may still be treated as protected content. It may instead satisfy Alabama’s obscenity statute in a particular case. The answer depends on the actual material and the complete constitutional test, not merely the platform’s name.
The prostitution question is related but distinct.
Alabama law prohibits soliciting another person to engage in sexual intercourse, a sexual act or sexual contact for monetary consideration or something else of marketable value. It also prohibits agreements to engage in intercourse or sexual contact with another person for compensation.
A remotely produced solo video may remain outside the traditional definition because the purchaser does not physically participate in the sexual contact. That is the principal line separating adult content from prostitution.
But online conduct can cross that line.
Consider a performer who sells paid raffle tickets offering prizes such as used underwear, sexual devices used in videos or an opportunity to have sex with the performer while the encounter is recorded as content.
A paid drawing immediately raises gambling concerns. Alabama’s Constitution prohibits lotteries, and Alabama authorities generally recognize the essential elements as consideration, chance and a prize. Selling entries, drawing a winner and awarding that winner something of value appear to satisfy those elements.
A raffle offering intercourse as the prize presents an even clearer problem.
The participants pay money. Chance determines which paying participant is selected. The advertised reward is sexual intercourse with the performer.
Calling the resulting encounter “content” does not necessarily change the substance of the transaction. A camera does not automatically transform sex offered for monetary consideration into something unrelated to prostitution.
The same concern applies when customers purchase private performances in real time, direct the performer’s sexual conduct and pay according to what the performer agrees to do. At some point, the word “content” becomes less a legal category than a convenient label placed over a commercial sexual transaction.
That does not mean every OnlyFans creator is violating Alabama law. It does not mean every explicit video is obscene or every custom request constitutes prostitution.
It means Alabama’s laws were written for a world in which pornography was purchased from a store and prostitution occurred in a room. Technology has collapsed the distance between the two.
Today, a customer can negotiate the price, select the performer, direct the sexual conduct, watch it live, commission a private recording or purchase a chance to engage in the act personally. Alabama’s criminal laws have not clearly addressed where protected expression ends and commercial sexual activity begins.
Lawmakers cannot credibly describe pornography as a public health crisis, connect it to prostitution, tax its subscriptions and performances, then refuse to define which transactions remain lawful.
They should either explain why these activities are protected content, update the obscenity and prostitution statutes to address digital transactions or acknowledge that existing laws may already prohibit conduct the state is taxing but not enforcing.
Alabama should not govern with one hand extended for tax revenue and the other covering its eyes.
The final question belongs to the Legislature:
Why remain double-minded, condemning an industry in one law, taxing it in another and leaving Alabamians to guess whether the underlying conduct is expression, obscenity or prostitution?
