This will only push underage users to more underground sites, that don’t care enough about the laws, and which have even more extreme content. Whoever thinks that teenagers will stop watching porn because of this is incredibly naive.
All of this is beyond sanity though. Porn is not evil. My dad grew up with Hustler, I grew up with The Pirate Bay, and my kids are growing up with 4K Pornhub (after they reached age 12 we disabled the content filters on the home DNS server, also using it as an opportunity to teach how DNS and basic networking functions).
Government (and let's be honest, on this topic it's almost entirely one party in particular) needs to mind its own business. Sex, and things related to sex, are a personal matter. Thinking that I have the right to dictate someone else's personal life in this manner is not something that ever cross my mind, much less thinking it consciousable, much less introducing and voting for it to be the law of the land.
It's not evil because there's no harm being inflicted. Adults who consent to have sex and doing it on camera are not engaging in evil. A person consenting to watch the video is not engaging in evil. There are tangential harms such as abuse and exploitation of the actors, but that's not inherent to porn (there is ethically produced porn) nor unique to it (actors in Hollywood are also exploited). The answer to those problems are breaking down existing power structures and zealously protecting worker rights, not banning Pornhub and AMC Theaters.
I would hazard a guess that the average worker in a large number of low-wage blue collar fields feels that their job is more degrading than the average porn SW.
Regardless of line of work the solution is robust worker's rights protections and social safety nets, so that workers can't be exploited or financially pressured into jobs they find degrading, not to forbid the line of work or portray it as taboo.
The UK abandoned their effort to do this precisely because of how pointless it is.
What the laws are really for is making voters in these states feel like their legislators are doing something, because proposing and voting on token nonsense like this is easy and negotiating effective change on meaningful policy is hard.
Voters are presumably striving to protect children and want their legislators to do something. These legislators are in no position to do anything. But they can play pretend and only make the problem a little worse as they do. In politics, that's a win.
But it's not a "concern for rising generations".
You're going to need to explain this more. All efforts start small. With support they grow and can accomplish things.
> But it's not a "concern for rising generations".
If "it" is referring to porn, then yes it is. Perhaps not in your view, or your social circles.
citation needed? why should a teenager not see pictures of a naked person? keep in mind that teenagers in africa are fighting and dying in wars.
Should we dismantle people's bodies and show it to those people's children? Should we show children their own detached arms while trapping them in a burning house with a company of their mom who is missing lower part of a body and crawling around screaming from pain while her intestines are falling out? And a mangled head of their dead cousin who's been decapitated by a sharp sheet of metal launched at him as the GRAD hit the building? Did I mention it's fucking dark and no you can't call 911. That kind of shit is happening right this second I lived in Donetsk until 2004 and the stories that I see from there are fucking brutal. Why don't you go focus on that?
I mean yeah I'm not saying we should show porn to kids. Why are you even thinking about that? What part of not wanting my fetishes end up on easily hackable government databases and known to the world is even remotely correlated to showing hardcore porn everywhere? I'm not an exhibitionist, man. I'm a prude actually. I'm easily embarrassed by my girlfriend bringing up anything about our sexual life in public. When we go to sexshop and she discusses our fetishes with employee I leave the store and puke from stress and anxiety. The thought of the entire world having access to my sexual identity is horrifying. What about people who are LGBT who's family will disown or kill them?
I probably shouldn't have gotten this heated and I honestly don't think you actually mean evil. Just think about broader implications, please.
I think a reasonable moderate start would be removing any restrictions on depictions of mere nudity. My city is already ahead of the game by legalizing public nudity (it is not necessary to wear clothing in public spaces - quite popular for sunbathing at city parks in the summer).
It would normalize sex and make the idea of being ashamed of how we look naked outdated.
At a minimum this seems like something that would result in some interesting science papers.