Partly because of the things he said, partly because of how he said them (he repeatedly shut us up), and partly because we were 16 and 17 year old boys, neither I nor any of my friends took Dines that seriously. . He seemed completely out of touch.
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 argued about their merits the same way we discussed the professional football players we had on our fantasy football teams. It didn’t seem strange to us that we watched videos of strangers having rough sex before we had our first kiss. But it was precisely our blasphemous attitude that alarmed Dines and others who have detailed the many evils of children’s exposure to pornography. may have doneincluded a record number of young men with erectile dysfunction. Others disagreedquestioning the causal link to porn, without questioning the absurd rise of sexually dysfunctional young men.
Six years later, though, while I still find Dines overzealous (the porn-to-rape argument seems like a stretch), it’s hard not to question whether the sexualization of everything and the proliferation of Internet porn are be good for us. Visit any number of massively populated Internet forums (combined partners 1.4 million) if you don’t understand what I mean; Enjoy the endless tapestry of loneliness, broken marriages, and men in their 20s who can’t make it for the women they’re in love with, but have no problem watching videos of strangers.
A major consensus appears to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of the many things negatively affecting the minds of Generation Z. Anxiety is rising across the country about the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis affecting my generation Some blame social media; others intervene to add hypersensitivity, overdiagnosis and therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw unlimited internet porn into the guilt basket.
As Louisiana law states, “pornography can also affect brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illness, shape deviant sexual arousal, and cause difficulties in forming or maintaining positive intimate relationships, as well as promote problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction”.
This language, while no doubt refined over weeks, was decisively influenced by the events of January 24, 2022, when Dines, at Schlegel’s behest, spoke on a Zoom call to dozens of Schlegel’s legislative colleagues. “She got, I think, 30 additional cosponsors for the bill after I spoke,” Dines boasted.
Maybe this he was a young employee with a sense of humor. On June 30, L. Louise Lucas, the 79-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate, wrote to X (the website formerly known as Twitter): “Anyone else’s Pornhub not working?”
The Democratic state senator, who voted in favor of the age-verification bill, seemed to lament the fact that Pornhub had just stopped operating in her state. Was it a joke or a sincere question? Lucas’ office did not clarify. But in a later tweetLucas said he was upset that the state hadn’t found a way to implement the law in a way that wouldn’t have caused Pornhub’s exit.
Lucas’ question could soon be on the lips of residents in the two states (Texas and Montana) where laws have been passed but not yet taken effect.
To be clear, Pornhub does age-verify the half-million people who upload content to its site, a policy it implemented after a Piece by Nicholas Kristof at the News from New York exposing how the website repeatedly hosted videos of minors being raped, prompting Visa and MasterCard to stop processing payments on the site. But the site does not verify the ages of the billions of people using the site and, with the exception of Louisiana, has no plans to start. Instead of asking users to upload their government-issued ID, Pornhub simply chooses not to offer any service at all, citing issues of unconstitutionality, ineffectiveness and privacy risks.
The Free Speech Coalition, the trade group for the adult industry, has already sued Louisiana and Utah, and other states could be next. “I can’t stress enough that this is speech protected by the First Amendment,” warned Mike Stabile, director of public affairs for the Free Speech Coalition. As Stabile theorizes, “lawmakers, you know, have chosen this as a way to start being able to police the open Internet and start cutting it off.”
Furthermore, the adult industry argues, age restrictions are ineffective because people can still use virtual private networks, which mask the actual location of a computer or smartphone, or users can only access non-compliant websites. In fact, after Pornhub pulled out of Virginia, you search for VPN increased in the state. Pornhub also claims traffic spiked for its non-compliant competitors, but did not respond to repeated requests to see the data.
Whether or not there are legitimate First Amendment issues at stake will be a matter for the courts, but there is no arguing with the effectiveness of the laws. As Stabile explained, age verification laws cause traffic to porn sites to drop precipitously. Turns out, unsurprisingly, no one wants to load up their driver’s license or passport before watching porn. And, as Stabile added, at a cost to carriers of about 65 cents per verification, age verification is effectively a “business killer.”
For Schlegel, workarounds like VPNs are like fake IDs. Of course, there are ways for under-21s to obtain alcoholic beverages, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pass underage drinking laws. Stabile preferred a different analogy: “It’s creating a kind of bar that has all these regulations and then there’s just alcohol everywhere on the street.”
At least for state legislatures, Schlegel seems to have the more compelling argument. Not only have six states passed copycat legislation, but 16 more have been submitted similar or nearly identical invoices.
The public is also on his side. “You poll this, it’s like an 85-15 issue,” explained Jon Schweppe, the policy director of the socially conservative think tank American Principles Project. Age verification for porn is not his think tank’s only priority, however when they survey it against other priorities in swing states, age verification blows the rest out of the water, with 77 percent in favor and 15 percent against. Because the popularity is there, Schweppe told me he’s “bullish, we can get similar legislation passed in like 10 more states by the end of next year’s session.” They are also working to get Republican presidential candidates to talk about age verification.
While state lawmakers and the public appear supportive, the laws do face at least one powerful and experienced foe: the ACLU, which has so far said nothing publicly about the laws. Vera Eidelman, the ACLU’s senior staff attorney on its Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told me she thinks the laws are patently unconstitutional. She believes that the judgments of the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002 and 2004) have made it very clear “that what adults can access cannot be reduced to the level of what is appropriate in a children’s sandbox”.
“The idea is this [these laws] will burden adults’ access to protected speech that they have every right to participate in and access,” Eidelman said. Even laws mandating device-level age verification (i.e. you’d just put your ID or SSN on your phone and block adult sites if you were a minor), which Pornhub representatives told me they would be in favor of would be clearly unconstitutional in Eidelman’s view.
So while the ACLU and the $100 billion porn industry are against the laws, they appear to be largely alone in their stance. On January 1, 2024 (when Montana’s law takes effect), about 54 million Americans will live in states where they must upload their ID to access pornography websites, if those websites pornography decide to operate there.
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