Marc Novicoff has written a piece for Politico about how age-verification laws for online pornography are pushing the porn industry into retreat. Rather than seek to ban pornography entirely, which would be impossible to enforce and likely unconstitutional, seven states have passed laws requiring age verification for pornography users. Pornography websites have established age requirements, but they amount to little more than checking a box that says, “Yes, I’m over 18,” which anyone can do. These seven states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, Utah, and Virginia) have required users to show ID and prove they are 18 and over. That means adults can still use “adult entertainment,” and kids will have a more challenging time doing so.
Novicoff reports a few facts about the pornography industry that few people probably know. The first is the scale of the industry. It’s a $100 billion behemoth with a lobbying group, cynically called the “Free Speech Coalition,” and backing by organizations such as the ACLU. Novicoff writes, “Pornhub, the YouTube of pornography, gets more global users than Amazon or Netflix. In 2019, the last year Pornhub released its data, the site was visited 42 billion times, or 115 million times each day.” Many of those users are underage and should not be accessing it according to pornography websites’ policies. But pornography companies know that underage users are a significant portion of their users and oppose age-verification laws.
The second fact is that the personal experience of younger people with pornography is different than the experience that older people remember. Novicoff writes in the first person:
By the time we were 14 (and many of us younger), we had started watching porn on the internet. Regularly. We had favorite porn stars and we argued over their merits just the way we talked about professional football players we had on our fantasy football teams. To us, it didn’t seem weird that we had seen videos of strangers having rough sex before we had our first kiss. . . .
It’s hard not to question whether the sexualization of everything and the proliferation of internet porn were good for us. Visit any number of massively populated internet forums (combined members 1.4 million) if you don’t understand what I mean; bask in the endless tapestry of loneliness, broken marriages and 20-something-year-old men who can’t get it up for women they’re in love with, but have no trouble when they’re watching videos of strangers.
An important consensus seems to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of many things negatively affecting the minds of Gen Z. Anxiety is mounting around the country over the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis afflicting my generation. Some blame social media; others chime in to add oversensitivity, overdiagnosis and a therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw limitless internet porn into the blame basket.
As the Louisiana law posits, “Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.”
Writing about this issue, I’ve observed many of the same trends. (Judging by when Novicoff says he was in high school in the piece, we are roughly the same age.) There’s a growing number of people who don’t think pornography is all that fun anymore. Most don’t arrive there from moralistic reasoning but rather from a “too much of a good thing” mindset.
That’s not to endorse the view that pornography is a good thing. Pornhub, in particular, is guilty of hosting videos of rapes, and there are countless stories of pornography performers being abused or manipulated, not to mention the ill effects excessive viewing can have on the user. It’s only to say that even people who aren’t morally opposed to pornography per se are coming to see that some limits on it, such as age verification, are sensible.
To that end, Novicoff emphasizes that the states that have passed age-verification laws so far have done so on a bipartisan basis with overwhelming, in some cases unanimous, support in the legislature. In Louisiana, Democratic governor Jon Bel Edwards, who has vetoed plenty of other bills from the Republican majority in the legislature, signed the age-verification law soon after it was passed 96-1 by the house and 34-0 by the senate.
There’s a way around the age-verification requirements: use a VPN to trick your computer into thinking it is in a different jurisdiction. Novicoff records the reaction to that from Laurie Schlegel, the Louisiana legislator who championed that state’s law, and Mike Stabile, from the porn-industry lobbying group Free Speech Coalition:
To Schlegel, workarounds such as VPNs are like fake IDs. Sure, there are ways for under-21-year-olds to get their hands on liquor, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pass underage drinking laws. Stabile preferred a different analogy: “It’s creating sort of one bar that has all of these regulations and then there’s just alcohol everywhere else lying in the street.”
Stabile’s argument fails because he describes the status quo on alcohol laws. Right now, there are any number of unregulated ways for underage people to consume alcohol outside of regulated bars and restaurants. Age-verification supporters such as Schlegel want to use the same standards for pornography: You show an ID to prove you are as old as you say you are. Most people don’t go through the effort of getting a fake, and compliance improves.
Novicoff writes:
As Stabile explained, age-verification laws make traffic to porn sites drop precipitously. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that nobody wants to upload their driver’s license or passport before watching porn. And, as Stabile added, at a cost to the operators of around 65 cents per verification, age verification is effectively “business-killing.”
Pornhub has responded to four of these state laws by blocking its website in those states entirely. Many other industries do not have wide latitude to allow children to access their products for sensible reasons supported by the law. If “adult entertainment” companies can’t survive when their customers are actually proven to be adults, it’s on them to adjust their business strategy.