Pornhub Is Now Blocked in Almost All of the U.S. South
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The only thing PH doesn't seem keen on is compromising their users' privacy and serving as age-enforcer.
So this legislation seems to make things worse, not better. Sure, you can always say "well PH could just comply with the age-verification laws," but I applaud them for taking a stand on privacy, and also them saying "fine, if you don't like us here we'll leave." It's really a loss for exactly the states that are passing these laws. They'll just end up with people going to shadier sites.
What worries me most though, is that this will lead to people using VPNs more (which is fine), but then states making VPNs themselves illegal (they'll use terms like "tools to circumvent...") which is super bad.
My guess is if the lawmakers are successful in making porn websites comply with age verification then all social media websites will have to next.
This is blatantly not true. I know because I've reported a clearly illegal video on every avenue I could find (the report button, emailing support, etc..) and the video was only taken down when PornHub removed all videos expect the verified ones some years ago.
Also, they may (I hope) be a better company now than in the past, as your example seems to show (you indicate that they started requiring verification for uploaded videos). Maybe they grew up, or maybe they just realized that their revenue (or entire business) would be compromised unless they took serious, ongoing action.
In any case - Aylo/PH must certainly be better than many of the alternatives that are based in very permissive jurisdictions and just don't care. Those are the sites people in these Southern states are going to end up on now.
I'm sorry that in your case they failed though.
I worked w/ a woman who used 1000s of sockpuppets of soldiers near military bases to try to wax out information about the aggression associated with their suggestion algorithms.
Pornhub is worse than YT when it comes to encouraging radicalism. She didn't even get to publish and she would receive dildos, fleshlights, and other horrific things. She left the country.
But whenever i've done so from alt accounts I get brigaded. I have literally paid people to edit comments to improve my tone and it makes no difference.
I'm just sharing a small, honest, account of lived experience. I come here for discussion. Not debate. certainly not argument. If i present myself incorrectly I try to act reflexively and openly.
Some people want to discount that and make everything fact based but sometimes sharing facts on the wrong forum just further reinforces injustice.
I do 20+ pushups, crunches, or burpees in between posts across the web. lol
You seem to be having some communication misalignments. What ticked me off is the combativeness you displayed. Insisting hard on your side with words like “blatantly” and “Yeah, no”. Also doing burpees and pushups sounds interesting - are you overstimulated? Is that a form of stimming? Are you in the spectrum?
(sorry for throwaway account)
IIRC, they only did anything because NYT op-ed writer basically went to war with them and shined a very bright light on all the shady stuff they were tolerating. That speaks to their true motivations.
Yes, the same as almost every other corporation: money. Today they make more money with less risk by self-policing their content.
If you disagree with your neighbor, the goal should be able to learn to live with them in disagreement or persuade them over to your viewpoint without coercion or manipulation. Right now there are several movements across the political spectrum as well as the corporate sector to use the government to suppress speech they perceive as threatening. This should be troubling for all of us even when used for things that we might nominally view as good (such as preventing children from accessing porn).
How would that work? "Hate speech" for example is very easy to define broadly enough to ban basically any opinion those in power deem undesirable. But how would you do that with porn? Is the government going to somehow start classifying news articles criticizing particular political candidates as pornography? That seems like such a ridiculous stretch that it couldn't possibly work.
If there's any danger here, I think it's more the potential for collateral damage on human freedoms, like the right to online anonymity. (E.g. Widespread deployment of age verification systems requiring users to provide a government-issued ID.)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-and-personal/2...
AASECT (the largest professional body of sex therapists in the United States) has a definition of Out of Control Sexual Behavior, and Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder is retained by the ICD. Most consumers of pornography do not meet either definition, but it’s important to recognize that some do.
There are definitely sex negative counselors out there. Absolutely do not go to them.
But there do exist people who can't control a habit for almost any pleasurable thing. There are counselors who can help, and will also make clear that if you don't have a problem then you don't need their services.
Finding the right counselor for you can be difficult. But they are not all the same, and while any negative stereotype will have exemplars, they won't be universal.
(Right wing anti porn legislators, on the other hand, are all bad.)
The amount of harm done by ignorant, twisted moralistic campaigns is measured in the decades.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2024/12/31/tennessee-a...
Good for Pornhub. They made the right call.
Especially in rural areas, some of those wingnuts would like to go back to the days where you can lynch people you do not like.
Other than the wingnut faction pushing this legislation, I think some hope for a deterrent effect for minors as well as adults. They are wrong to expect any kind of deterrent effect of course.
How does age verification break privacy? I have to show ID to get into an adult "bookstore," to enter a bar, or purchase alcohol. I have to show ID to check into my hotel, get through airport security, drive my car, buy Pseudo. Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations? No way at all to do a verification that's immediately tossed in a privacy preserving way?
If so, then it sounds like maybe things that require age verification shouldn't be allowed to operate on the internet.
There's ways yes but the bigger issue is that it's much harder to verify. When I show my ID to a cashier I can see whether they photocopy it or not. I can't verify websites and porn ones could be shady.
Not that I personally care that people know I watch porn. But maybe people do care.
These are two very different things.
This law is not only about Pornhub or porn, but about anything each state government consider "harmful". Porn is the excuse for blocking you from accessing, in a not-so-distant future, any topic your local government frames as harmful.
And even if the private sector innovated here, there's no approval from the government to accept math nerd solutions as legally valid.
Which means you basically have to scan and upload your photo ID to these websites, or use a payment card, or something else that will stand up in court.
https://zkdocs.com has some protocols described, if you're curious to learn more about this space.
I think you're severely underestimating the efficacy of traffic analysis and correlation efforts.
PrivacyPass is a better starting point, IMHO. The Cwtch developers (Open Privacy) even implemented PrivPass over Ristretto255, which is objectively awesome.
So the user would get a number of signed tokens from the gov to prove age, then a token could be shared with a site that verifies age without connecting to gov, assuming it's already aware of the gov's public key?
What prevents the same token from being used by more than one person?
How can the site prove compliance with the law? Will they need to store the tokens for each user? Can the gov tie a stored token back to a particular person that that verified?
> I think you're severely underestimating the efficacy of traffic analysis and correlation efforts.
The porn site would have the public key already stored/cached, so there isn't any traffic to correlate. There's still an issue with the first request, but like I said, this is a simple example that's easy to understand without getting into anything math-heavy.
And maybe it was, considering the history of porn regulation in the US. If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate. Porn producers were never actually intended to come into compliance, but rather presumed to be unable to (due to the ridiculous procedures and the supposed omnipresent use of underage, undocumented, and coerced performers).
There was and is a fairly coordinated program of shopping this around to various legislative bodies (not only US states). It started maybe two years ago, I think. It didn't just catch on organically.
Some of it seems to be driven/funded by the AV companies, who presumably actually want the verification to happen. But a lot of the legwork and political contacts are provided by organizations that would definitely love to drive every porn site out of business. I doubt they expect to get all of them, or even all the free ones, but, sure, somebody like NCOSE knows that it's a major burden, and absolutely thinks that any damage to adults' access to porn is a positive feature.
It's not obvious that most of the legislators who vote for these things understand the implications at all.
So some of the people you could blame for this legislation definitely have such intentions, but probably not all of them.
> If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate.
Hmm. I'm ready to believe you, but 2257 doesn't seem totally infeasible to comply with in a VHS world. Dangerous to the performers, yes, because it requires tons of people to keep records of who they are and where they live, and those records are pretty much guaranteed to leak and be abused. An expensive nuisance, also yes. A chance to hound anybody who messes up out of business, and threaten them with prison, OK. Obnoxious overreach, sure. But totally impossible to comply with? I'm not sure about that. It actually seems easier than user AV.
The thing that always really got me about 2257 was that the claim was it was supposed to prevent another Traci Lords. They checked Traci Lords' ID. She showed ID. She had a real driver's license (based on a fake birth certificate, but it was the state that was supposed to check that, and anyway it was presumably a good fake). As far as I know, 2257 wouldn't even have slowed Traci Lords down.
I'm not saying that it was supposed to be impossible to comply with per se, but rather that it was supposed to be impossible specifically for the porn industry as anti-porn crusaders imagined/alleged it to be at the time. There was a bunch of drug-war-like rhetoric about how porn had become more violent, exploitative, and outright criminal since 1970, when the previous government commission on the subject reported that porn wasn't an important social problem and should not be restricted for adults.
At least with all the porn bills I've read, it's illegal to retain the information.
By the way, Pornhub actually has a preferred technical solution involving "device attestation". It's only marginally better than the snake oil the AV industry wants to use, and I don't like it, but they have said they'd stop objecting if something along those lines were standardized.
They just don't want to have to deal with a patchwork of mutually incompatible stuff (a) that's totally ineffective, (b) that leaves them either handling everybody's ID or dealing with questionable contractors to hold it, and/or (c) that leaves them having to convince the users to trust them or those questionable contractors with those ID images.
It doesn't actually. Third party zero knowledge attestation works just fine. Think through the cryptosystem. It's possible for an authority to verify an ID for a given name and target site without revealing the former to the latter of the latter to the former
Not if you want to be able to pass any kind of audit, no. Not unless the authority issuing the ID participates in a complicated cryptographic protocol. Which none of them do and which is definitely not standardized.
One of the early states passing these, I think it was Louisiana, actually did at least try to step up and deal with the privacy issue. They came up with a trusted-third-party thing. The third parties, who are private entities, have to pinky promise not to leak the data or keep them beyond certain limits. They are not audited. There are no actual penalties if they screw up. That's not acceptable assurance. There are also no limits on what they can charge, come to think of it, and it's not exactly going to be a large fluid market.
None of the other states even went that far. Nor did any of them try to come up with a shared standard.
There's definitely nothing out there that the user can verify as working, or that's certified by anybody the user should trust.
There are also the facts that--
1. All of the "age verification" protocols that the various activists are pushing and the various vendors are hawking are ineffective, in that any halfway motivated kid can easily figure out how to circumvent them, and
2. Kids just seeing porn isn't actually a big problem, especially if they've sought it out.
It makes complete sense to resist this BS.
It seems to me that these bills aren't prescriptive (they say you can use a "commercially reasonable" method). Most states are also moving to adopt the ISO mDL standard[0].
[0] https://www.mdlconnection.com/implementation-tracker-map/
What? First, that has nothing to do with anything. Second, it's not true: most auditing has an in-person component, and many stings don't. Do you actually know what an audit is? Hint: a "pen test" isn't an audit and isn't much like an audit. Neither is a code review.
> Why does auditing always come up with this topic?
1. All security controls need to be audited.
2. There is a 100 percent chance that many of the organizations advocating for these laws, most of which would actually prefer for porn to be outlawed completely, will grab any chance they can to accuse sites of not complying. They'll either try to get sympathetic law enforcement agencies to take up those accusations, or, if they can find a legal avenue, they'll bring lawsuits themselves. They will undoubtedly find anecdotes of system failures, since any large-scale system will fail sometimes. They will claim that as evidence that the rules aren't being followed. Evidence, no matter how flimsy, has to be countered with other evidence, especially if you're in a "preponderance of the evidence" situation. It's pretty hard to show that what you're doing is reasonable or effective if you don't have at least a sample of records.
Like I said, I've seen no laws requiring any audits or record keeping, and actually every law I've seen explicitly makes such records illegal. I don't see why the evidence that sites aren't doing their job wouldn't be the same as in person: the police have someone access the site without valid id, and the site didn't have a commercially reasonable system in place as a defense. If they're not doing their job, it will be easy for police to demonstrate it, and the site will actually be in the wrong.
That's not an "anecdote", just like selling cigarettes to a 16 year old without an id is not an "anecdote". That is breaking the law. It's on companies to follow the law every time.
Given that, your argument seems to be that since we are on the slippery slope, we might as well go further.
For what it's worth, I don't have to show ID to get into an adult bookstore, or enter a bar, or purchase alcohol, because I live in a place which doesn't require ids for people who are obviously old enough.
I've also stopped flying in part because I think airport security is oppressive and a facade, and I don't drive because I managed to find a place where I'm not forced to have a car to live. I hate the pseudoephedrine id law because I think the state should have no business in that matter, and like airport security it's a case of the government seeming to Doing Something even though it does nothing.
Last time I needed pseudoephedrine, I got a friend to buy it for me.
> Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations?
Correct. I can buy wine without an id because the store clerk can physically verify that I am of age without checking a piece of plastic or otherwise establishing my identity.
Once purchased I could of course give it to a local 16 year old, which would be illegal, but an id check wouldn't change things.
You'll have to have a camera check the user before each porn site visit, or at random checks, and deal with the false positives of a 16-year-old which looks 19 (or false negatives of a 21 year old who looks 17), and strict laws preventing any recording of that information, and somehow assure people that the laws will never change to collect more information - which is hard to believe given the slippery slope shown at airports and elsewhere.
> maybe things that require age verification shouldn't be allowed to operate on the internet.
How do you propose we do that? Block off all IP addresses at the national level for porn site servers hosted in other countries? Block DNS lookups for them? Prevent VPN use? Nix their ability to charge via Visa and MasterCard, or take payments via SWIFT?
b. pornhub has no monopoly over the internet porn industry. insofar as those men did get so addicted, that would have happened regardless of pornhub existing.
Hmm... something is going on though: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/sexual-intelligence/...
Which in turn is going to likely lead to even further reductions in birth rate.
I think we need to be careful about all the things that factor into our sub-replacement birthrates.
And we're not going to go extinct. Plenty of people want kids and have them. Maybe we'll reduce the population a bit which would be great. Less pollution, less pressure on the overloaded housing situation.
Generally when one group shrinks in evolution, it doesn't reduce for long the total pressures on the environment. What usually happens is other groups grow into the new opportunities that have opened up.
Which is only a bad thing if you assume "other groups" are inherently worse. But if the current state is so bad people are openly cheering after a murder, perhaps there are more pressing issues - which likely also contribute to low birth rate.
Sure. But if I look at this objectively, I am not sure it is going to be solved from another angle by liberal societies any time soon. And religious societies, or at least those that are puritanical in this regards will get a significant and likely sustainable demographic advantage as a result. I think this speaks to the larger issues of why religion has persisted and why atheism has yet to be a sustainable endeavour, rather than a demographic sink. Truth doesn't actually matter, viability via demographic sustainability is how things are actually judged.
You are correct that this is the case.
> I don't think that means what you think it means.
I am not sure I follow you logically. You are making a completely separate argument. Many things influence birth rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_factor_(demography)
Can you explain further?
> and destroying their ability to form relationships?
There are many reasons young men today have trouble forming relationships, with pornography among the least concerning in my opinion.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/07/1174631536/a-new-utah-law-led...
Interesting. I decided to read one of the bills and picked the one it was easiest to find. Here's the section of the text I think is germane:
> A "reasonable age-verification method" under this bill means the following means of establishing the age of the person attempting to view content harmful to minors, implemented in a manner not easily bypassed: (1) The matching of a photograph of the active user taken between the attempt to view and the viewing of content harmful to minors, using the device by which the attempt to view content harmful to minors is being made, to the photograph on a valid form of identification issued by a state of the United States; or (2) A commercially reasonable method relying on public or private transactional data to verify that the age of the person attempting to access the information is at least 18 or older.
Some might believe this is an "I promise I'm 18" button, but I think it might not meet the standard unless either the button then takes a photo and matches it against photo ID or links the user to credit card information or so on.
I'd say the discrepancy is so large between the idea of a promise button and this that the comment I'm replying to could reasonably be called misinformation.
Read it yourself here: https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/default.aspx?BillN...
Pornhub is in compliance: they decided to not participate in the states with those regulations.
If a state makes a law that requires a site to track, log, and divulge their users for merely consuming content not even producing, that is thr state violating both the site, and the entirity of their own populace, and even indirectly everyone else in the world who would access that site, not the site violating anything or hurting themselves by "opting" to refuse to cooperate.
The state is the entity refusing to cooperate.
I continually fail to get why people pick the douchebag aggressor side of a problem to defend and excuse and rationalize.
The internet's history of anonymous-by-default and the taboo that people can still feel viewing pornography are both factors that make ID verification laws very touchy (also reasons free sites like PornHub are popular in the first place). Compound that with the perpetual security breaches that we've all been victims of in recent years, and you can see why these laws have strong opposition.
I wouldn't want to be responsible for the privacy risk that age verification documents impose on site operators.
Does that include the extremist-grooming neo-nazi hate factory which replaced Twitter?
(To be clear: I hate that this is even a realistic question.)
[1] "Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates." Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/sexual-intelligence/...
Legitimate porn has some semblance of testing, paperwork, and a script/shot list. If you force people to fuck via whatever means and record adult content that’s just a crime - not porn
Indeed, what stops kids from generating their own porn using these same tools? Do we need age verification on them too?
i am sure smarter people than me can come up with an even better solution. this honestly just feel more like imposing religious values than anything else
If you want to use the content and filter client-side, that's nothing to do with ISPs and there's lots of apps that already do it.
Real, vulnerable connection can provide meaning in a way that manufactured fast porn can never give, and I believe that connection can be an important aspect of self actualization towards a meaningful existence.
I'm not claiming that rare, conscious consumption of pornography can't be integrated into a healthy, fulfilled life, but that the way it's mindlessly consumed by so many is keeping us from that fulfilled life.
Ps: I see this got flagged but just wanted to clarify that I'm in Europe and this is legal where I live (unlike in most US states I believe).
I just think paying for it is a lot more fair than trying to get random girls in bed for a one night stand like a lot of guys do. I don't really court someone unless I have a serious interest in the person, not just their body.
But my point was that porn doesn't displace relationships and not even the need for real sex.
BTW PornHub is owned by an Ottawa, Canada-based company recently: https://www.ethicalcapitalpartners.com
Most of the anti-porn legislations that have passed only require distributors of "harmful" material (porn) to use age-verification technology via, amongst other methods, "commercially reasonable" identity providers.
"Commercially reasonable" isn't defined in these statutes.
Furthermore, there haven't been any follow-up legislations to implement state-level verification of these "commercially reasonable" identity providers.
Given this, what's to stop PornHub et. al. from doing something like what "social clubs" do/did in dry counties?
Social clubs check your ID (to comply with federal law) and then ask you to sign in. The signing in is notional; it doesn't mean anything.
In other words, something like:
- Porn site: "Sorry, $US_STATE requires you to verify your identity; go to this website to proceed"
- "Identity provider": "Enter name and age, then hit OK"
- "Identity provider" to porn site: "All clear; they hit OK"
- Porn site: "Thanks for verifying! Click the 'Remember, porn is bad, mmkay?' button to browse our collection"
If enough sites support said identity provider, then wouldn't they be the "commercially reasonable" choice?
(Of course, none of this matters if the majority-conservative US administration that gets sworn in this month decides to implement digital age verification for "harmful material" on a federal level. In that case, my earlier question of mini-"Great Firewall of China" in the US when that I posted here matters more.)
(Also, not every porn site complies with these laws, the oh-my-goodness-so-fucking-many porn sites out there aggregate from each other anyways, and I don't think this has been court-tested yet, so we don't know what actually happens to operators that tell these states to fuck off! Also, let's not forget that porn exists on social media and other commercial platforms, unless Texas wants to actually try blocking Microsoft Bing in the state)
(IANAL)
Note that some of these laws are only ostensibly about porn. For example, the Tennessee law blocks, in addition to what one might reasonably describe as porn, additionally blocks any material that:
> pander[s] to the prurient interest
(—[1], §1 (b)(5)(A)(i))
While a reasonable reader might find a normal level of intent under that phrasing, Tennessee has in the past has similar laws, using similar phraseology. For example, an east TN DA attempted to enforce similar language in the TN AEA[2], threatening enforcement of that act against a pride parade despite, a.) the parade stating they would comply with all applicable laws and b.) the law the DA was threatening to enforce had already been struck down as unconstitutional. (The DA admitted knowledge of this, as well, but claimed³ that the ruling on the unconsitutionality of the law didn't apply to him. The DA was later sued, and directly enjoined from interfering with the parade.)
(back to the "think of the children" act)
> When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors;
(—[1], §1 (b)(5)(B), and it is less than clear to me whether (b)(5)(A) is "and" or "or", but "or" seems the more logical conclusion, and in particular, in the ambiguity, TN is a state that I would expect to argue "or".)
The TN legislature's arguments while passing the AEA showed the legislatures true (discriminatory) intent. I would not be shocked to find similar here, given the similarity in the language. That is, the (purposefully) vague nature of the law as written is that the bible "has" "serious […] value for minors" but anything LGBTQ would "not" "have" such value, and would surely "pander" to the "prurient interest".
> At a minimum, anonymized age-verification data must include architectural diagrams illustrating the technological assets and logical processes by which the reasonable age-verification method is accomplished and data demonstrating a volume of reasonable age-verification method executions consistent with the overall volume of visits to the website;
[1]: https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/acts/113/pub/pc1021.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Adult_Entertainment_...
³The DA has some utterly braindead legal theory that the court's ruling that the law was unconstitutional doesn't apply to him — or most anyone — because the ruling's injunctive relief applied only to certain people. I'd quote it, but their argument is in a PDF that's a scan of a Word doc w/o OCRing[4] and I don't feel like re-typing it. The injunctive relief did, yes, but that was section II of the ruling, and section I, which struck the law down, is separate, and not restricted … "The Court therefore HOLDS and DECLARES that the Adult Entertainment Act is an UNCONSTITUTIONAL restriction on speech." … which is not restricted to just the parties, which would be utterly illogical.)
These types of laws (good enough even if we can get rid of 50% of the problem!), I think, don’t work well when there’s physiological element to it (arousal in this scenario). People will actively seek out pornography and consume it. It has been going on for decades in the internet.
Would you say alcohol is banned if a liquor store that was against carding customers would have to lock its doors to avoid violating laws about selling to minors?
I feel like young men retreat to porn because they can't find a partner. The percentage of men who would prefer porn over a partner is probably very minor.
I think the problem with men being single is that it's very hard to be in a space where it's acceptable to seek a partner. Due to various #metoo and similar actions most men have learned it's unacceptable to approach women in public spaces. Meanwhile the online dating websites are trying their hardest not to match people because people who find their match don't watch ads and pay for microtransactions (premium accounts, gifts, boosts).
I feel like the best solution to loneliness and to boost marriage (and thus birth) rates would be some form of non-commercial / government run dating website. Dating websites are slowly becoming a desert and most people who used them for a longer period of time will tell you how great they were before swiping era.
The other problem is that many advocates for a ban on pornography use this argument without actually caring about the issue they decry, otherwise they would have engaged in actual awareness or harm reduction campaigns. Instead, they choose to engage with this argument in bad faith because in actuality pornography just does not align with their morals.
Ah yes - a very well made statement of causation, complete with evidence.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/sexual-intelligence/...
Only way to fight glorification of violence would be to be treat violence same way as how sex is treated and over centuries we may end up with more peaceful societies.
Yeah, maybe seeing a boob never killed someone, but aggressive grabbing, intimidating a partner who doesn't seem "normal", and expecting rougher more extreme sex acts that women are not comfortable with are not harmless.
This is a straw-man attack. Porn produces a huge dopamine dump. Do some research on how dopamine works in the brain. Regular dopamine dumps can have a huge impact on quality of life leading to depression and building an addiction cycle.
We can certainly discuss 1980s vs 2020s and how the Overton window has shifted. Boobs weren't as big of a deal in our past.
80s were also quite violent in our movies/media as well. It seems like everything has been clamped down.
I was surprised to see the dick of the David Statue get messed up in the children's movie 'The Goonies' for example. Apparently dicks weren't a big deal either even into the 90s.
It's not something I'd really noticed before I had a similar conversation with someone regarding how movie ratings have changed over time vis a vis nudity.
That aside, it's a brilliant sci fi movie, and I'd recommend it to everyone here :)
If it is not obscene, it's afforded First Amendment protections and allowed.
If it is obscene, it can be regulated by various entities, should they choose to do so.
Since the mid-70s(?), the Miller test [0] has been used.
Parent is pointing out that the Internet effectively obliterated the technical ability of various government entities to impose restrictions of any sort on obscene material, and consequently there's been essentially no regulation of internationally-based pornographic content since the 90s.
I'm not that old and I remember the controversy when someone found a sex game in GTA: San Andreas _if you hacked the game_.
Nowadays a kid with a smartphone googles and there you are, AI generated hardcore porn with your classmate's face. Different world.
I find Pornography in specific, and sex in general, is something people have very strong basic opinions about. In particular, a lot of people intersect religious morals into the picture, which can make conversations difficult at best, disingenuous more commonly :-(.
For example, my own basic approach is "what do you mean 'obscenity regulations'? What kind of silly thing is that amongst adults?". It then tends to get complicated due to numbers - often people promoting such regulations and laws upon other adults are hugely vehement about government over reach and regulation in other areas, so it ends up feeling like hipocrisy or "I want government to ban things I don't like and allow things I do like".
But this is hacker news! Nothing stops are from trying to have that honest conversation :-).
My honest opinion is that I come from a prudeish culture, and thank goodness teenagers today can have their key questions answered more openly and have access to things I had to sneak and feel guilty about. Access to porn is not in top ten things I worry about for my kids, but I am willing to listen otherwise :-).
I'm more thinking about the downsides of the erotic material being available 24/7 to every person in their pocket and inducing addictive behaviors. The teenage boys that have seen explicit pornography before ever even kissing a girl, and how that influences their expectations and behaviors while dating. The incels that don't even attempt to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex but instead indulge in auto-erotic gratification from consuming digital content (hikikomori), soon to be augmented by AI. These people are chasing dopamine hits instead of genuine human connection, something formally driven by lust/sexual desire for better or worse and it's going to have major cultural impacts.
In the 1970s.
We did not have an Internet. No, the volume wasn't nearly as high, nor was the technical quality.
As for "expectations", non-porn media also have horrible expectations about gender and relationships. In fact, they have more of them and are able to convey them in more detail. And the fact is that today's teenaged boys are a lot more respectful toward their prospective-or-desired partners than my cohort was, porn or no porn.
An honest conversation, sure.
Porn is a hyperstimulus, unrealistic and so reality seems bad in comparison.
This may be why teens these days are having fewer accidental pregnancies.
Those missing accidental teen pregnancies, according to a comment I saw on Hacker News recently and never checked the veracity of, are a big part of why fertility rates are now below replacement levels.
The dichotomy that won't be believed: Ban the "adult" content to force the teens to grow up before they need to; or let them be "corrupted" so that they can keep their innocence. (Scare quotes because I remember being a teenager, even if it was the 90s).
We as a democratic society should want that everything legal is available.
It is up to parents to take care of what is available to their offspring. Much like any other potential risk behaviours.
And it is up to other democracies to curb the US's continued attempt at pushing their protestant obsession with sexuality onto everyone else.
Truly addictive things, e.g. dopamine hijacks, are hard to make widely available. Gambling, dopamine drugs (cocaine, meth, etc.), porn, etc.