The Free Press
American lawmakers are about to determine the future of pornography, or they’re trying, at least. In recent years, 19 states—most of them Republican-led—have passed legislation that requires any site with a significant amount of adult content to prove all its users are over 18. Most recently, on New Year’s Day, a new law called HB 3 took effect in my home state of Florida, where porn sites now face fines of up to $50,000 for every violation. But this week, such laws could be found unconstitutional.
This is all thanks to the Free Speech Coalition, a sort of NRA for pornographers, which has sued Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a religious hard-liner, over that state’s age verification law. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear FSC’s case, which argues that these porn laws undermine free speech, infringe on privacy, and hurt American companies, while doing nothing to block foreign and fringe sites that don’t comply with U.S. laws.
The rationale behind the laws is understandable: Studies have shown that pornography consumption by teenagers can lead to misogynistic attitudes and increased sexual aggression. It’s also linked to mental health problems and increased rates of unsafe sex. More to the point, most parents are uncomfortable with the idea of their children having access to terabytes’ worth of hardcore pornography at the touch of a button.
But these laws are fundamentally pointless. First etched into mammoth tusks 40,000 years ago, porn predates the written word. It is inevitable—and in the internet age, infinitely accessible—even in places where so-called “porn bans” have been enacted.
Here in Florida, where the law has been in effect for two weeks, some popular sites like Xhamster and Chaturbate have complied, now forcing users to confirm their age either by flipping on their webcams and having their age estimated by AI, or by uploading a picture of their government IDs. Other popular sites, such as Pornhub, have completely barred access to the site from Florida IP addresses—but not because “we don’t want to implement age verification,” said a spokesperson for Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo. “The problem is simply that the law is designed in a dangerous and haphazard way that puts in jeopardy user privacy.”
The company also argued that plenty of less responsible porn sites would ignore the law altogether, and likely see an influx of traffic because of it, at the expense of safer sites. Pornhub isn’t wrong. Numerous sketchy, mostly foreign porn websites are still accessible in Florida through a quick Google search.
At the same time, there’s been a boom in Floridians downloading virtual private networks, or VPNs, which allow users to change their IP addresses, effectively tricking the internet into thinking they are located in another state or country. (There’s no age requirement to get a VPN, and some sites offer them for free. ) One provider, ExpressVPN (which currently sponsors Honestly) told The Free Press that since Florida’s law was enacted on January 1, traffic increased 99.24 percent over the previous week—suggesting that either minors are using it to bypass the ban, or adults are using it to get access to sites like Pornhub. Or both. ExpressVPN has seen these spikes in traffic before: a 53 percent increase in Utah the week after its own law requiring age verification for porn sites went into effect on May 3, 2023, for instance, and a 43 percent jump in traffic after Mississippi enacted its law on July 1, 2023.
Like I said, porn is inevitable. Even a national ban—as proposed by the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 policy wish list—wouldn’t work without banning VPNs as well as effectively constructing a massive surveillance project akin to the Great Firewall of China. The day an American teenager with a normal IQ can’t access porn on an unfiltered internet connection is the day freedom no longer exists in the United States. If you want an open internet where even a nominal amount of privacy is possible, that is the cost.
Keeping porn from kids would also require a lot of social media censorship. Hardcore X-rated content of nearly every conceivable kind is widely available on X, formerly known as Twitter. Gay porn, straight porn, weird bisexual Japanese cartoon porn, niche sex acts left out of the Kama Sutra for safety reasons: Adult content constitutes around 13 percent of all X posts, according to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022. Yes, the site bans users under 18 from viewing adult content, but it doesn’t verify their ages. A 15-year-old can simply claim to have been born in 1935 when creating his profile: Nobody’s checking to see if he’s actually an octogenarian.
X is arguably more dangerous for teens than traditional porn sites because it actively encourages users to interact with one another, and even post content themselves. Unsurprisingly, the site has a massive problem with grooming. In 2023, to name but one example, a 13-year-old boy was kidnapped, driven across state lines, and repeatedly sexually assaulted by an adult furry fetishist who groomed him publicly on X.
One can’t help but suspect that these age verification laws, in their fruitlessness, serve as little more than a way for conservatives to assert a kind of cultural dominance. Now, every time a Florida man has to upload his government ID to a porn site or shamefully boot up the VPN, he hears “Meatball Ron” DeSantis tsk-tsking in his ear, reminding him that what he’s doing is a vice, like smoking a cigarette or buying a beer. It is, in practice, something like the conservative equivalent of putting a trigger warning at the beginning of Gone with the Wind. The message: We can’t stop you from watching, but you should feel bad about it.
The institution most capable of stopping children from viewing pornography is the family: If you don’t want your kid watching porn, don’t give them unlimited access to the internet. But politicians like Ron DeSantis can’t run on a message of individual responsibility. In this way, the age verification laws are reminiscent of other legislation, including so-called “drag bans” and “book bans.” If you don’t want your kid to read about gay penguins or watch a drag show, the simplest thing to do would be, as a parent, not to bring them to a drag show or let them read about gay penguins.
But quietly exercising one’s parental authority does not alleviate the sense of the cultural disempowerment and anxiety many conservatives feel raising kids in an increasingly secular and permissive society—hence, why politicians are promising they can save your kids from stumbling into a drag show, or checking out Larry Kramer’s Faggots from a public library. No matter what the Supreme Court rules, it won’t change the fact that the closeted 16-year-old can, in fact, still find gay porn on a sketchy European porn site—just as they can still watch RuPaul’s Drag Race on YouTube, and find a PDF of Faggots online. No one wants to accept it, but the government can’t stop your children from watching porn.
