Pornhub put up a firewall rather than comply. If nothing else, the move increased traffic to VPN virtual private network services, which provide users with unfettered access to Pornhub regardless of their location by securely connecting to a remote server. The given reason for requiring age verification — that pornography harms the minors who view it — is the latest salvo in a centuries-old American debate over erotica.
These state-level conflicts in the US emerged amid an international push for age verification on adult sites. In , Mexico enacted an age verification law. Pornhub is challenging the laws on multiple fronts. Supporters generally justify these laws as attempts to protect children from inappropriate content. Some of the laws such as the DSA in Europe contain provisions to protect minors from nonconsensual and exploitative participation in adult content.
By adding age-verification requirements to laws that seek to end child pornography, governments suggest that to look at explicit sex is to suffer abuse. Page from Traps for the Young by Anthony Comstock. Courtesy NYPL digital. Americans have been especially prone to arguing that looking at pornography is as harmful as being forced to participate in it or subjected to sexual violence. Young men, he warned, would read smut, then rape and murder young women:.
Comstock was a buffoon, and many of his contemporaries found him repellent. But he was also enormously influential. He convinced Congress to pass a vast anti-obscenity measure in that empowered him to seize all items he personally found vile, including anything related to contraception or abortion.
His contention that pornography could turn horny boys into murderers and good girls into prostitutes endured long after legal challenges overturned most of the law. Since the s, the idea of whom porn harms has varied — boys, young men, all women, or society at large. But this association between erotica and injury continued to inspire generations of policymakers and activists.
