In that case there are verified adults providing porn to children, so age verification law would do nothing to change this. Search engines and browsers already have built-in parental controls, and there are even 3rd party programs you can buy and install if you are that worried about young kids googling porn.
This is like the book banning thing, you see? It’s not enough for them to pull their kids out of classes that offend them or revoke their kids’ school library privileges to prevent them from reading two lines of narrative that obliquely reference breasts. They have to control everyone’s access at all times. Because they are not “concerned parents,” they are authoritarians.
I don’t think anyone here is saying parents should stop monitoring what their kids have access to. I have complicated feelings about porn, because that is a complicated subject, but to the extent it’s problematic, it’s likely an issue of taking it to excess, and yes, at some point teenagers have to be taught that pornography use shouldn’t come at the expense of literally anything else. I think that’s a significant difference between then and now. It’s easier now for (excessive) porn to replace more important things. Just as social media and other tech algorithms can take over your life.
With my son, when he was about 4, I had to gently explain why “that chicken is jumping on the other chicken”… well… “when a chicken loves another chicken…”
No! I just straight out told him what they were doing and why, and what the expected result would be. And that was the start of his education in reproduction.
I consider myself asexual these days and don’t really look at porn much anymore, but I largely agree with this POV. If I were giving advice to a young person, I’d tell them that porn is to sex as WWE is to street fighting - it looks cool, but most of it either wouldn’t work, would be extremely painful or dangerous, or both.
There’s definitely a lot wrong with the porn industry. The women who work in it aren’t paid what they deserve. It draws in women who have an unhealthy relationship with sex in the first place, whether because of past abuse or other psychological issues, and it can exacerbate those problems. (Kagney Linn Karter didn’t blow her head off with a shotgun at age 36 because she was happy and well-adjusted and living the life she wanted to live.) In these days where the San Fernando Valley is no longer the center of the industry and they no longer have to try hard to show their work and prove they’re on the up-and-up, there are plenty of unscrupulous producers out there who flat out take advantage of women. James Deen literally raped women on-camera and sold the videos online. Girls Do Porn lured women under false pretenses, got them high, made them sign illegal contracts, then forced them to perform on camera (occasionally at gunpoint). I recently read an interview with Lana Rhoades in which she described being forced to do a scene so disgusting that it actually caused her to dissociate while she was doing it. (She doesn’t mention the company in the interview. By the way she describes it, I know what company it is. The video can easily be found online to this day. I haven’t watched it to make sure, because just her description of it triggers my gag reflex.)
This ID scheme isn’t going to fix the problem, it’s just going to drive it further underground where there’s even less incentive to do right by the performers and follow the law. If you want to protect women, I say the best approach would be to let sex workers unionize and have more control over their likeness and the rights to the films they appear in. I’ve read interviews with women who have gone from working exclusively with the major studios to making content exclusively on OnlyFans, where they control what they do and who they do it with and how it’s released, and it seems like it’s much healthier (and profitable) for them and for the consumer.
As an aside, speaking as the Time Being, I just want to make clear that people shouldn’t be watching porn on my behalf. They should be doing it for themselves.
Arkansas requires proof of age to access adult sites.
It’s up to the web site to enforce it. I don’t know if any have been taken to court.
Unfortunately this seems to be spreading. I think several states besides Texas and Arkansas have passed similar laws.
This isn’t anything new. I remember when adult magazines were hidden behind the counter. That was in the 70’s.
Hard core magazines and vhs were even harder to find. Stores could be raided by the cops. I remember seeing raids reported on my local tv news. That was in the early 90’s. The store clark was arrested. Bail must have been difficult for someone earning minimum wage.
I never knew that hiding adult magazines behind the counter was ever a legal thing.
But even if you can sorta defend that, just hiding them a bit, it lacks the problem here which is the huge security issue. Adults who do not wish to risk having their identity stolen are locked out.
Not just stolen, but outed for whatever reason. If the government decides to start persecuting people who watch gay porn, it won’t be very hard to find them.
Yes, as others have said, the issue is not the goal, which is making it hard for teens to buy porn. The issue is that there aren’t any good ways to enforce that online that don’t create significant hazard for legitimate adult purchasers.