Texas’ H.B. 1181, an online-age-verification law, might not sound like such a terrible idea. According to its proponents, it’s designed to keep those who are underage from looking at pornography. On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the law, arguing that using age verification “to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content” is within a state’s authority. Yet as reasonable as that statement might sound, I worry that these laws could mean the beginning of the end of something truly precious: the internet as an uncensored place to explore human desire in a way that’s allowed for safe and private information, titillation and education.
Texas is not unique in mandating that porn sites employ online age verification. In early 2023, Louisiana was the first state to pass such a law, requiring consumers to upload a government ID before getting access to adult content. Now a third of the states have passed laws so onerous that PornHub opted to block incoming traffic from said states, rather than collect identification. Most of the time, these bills have passed easily, drawing broad bipartisan consensus. And why wouldn’t they? There’s a dark side to the internet, and children, in particular, are especially vulnerable to the worst of it. With troves of deepfakes and revenge porn and child sex abuse material just a click away, we all want to do something.
But the world of online sex is far more than just a depraved cesspool of the most abusive content. Vague, sweeping laws to rein in online sexual content could end up censoring those who want to share information about sexual pleasure and health, talk about L.G.B.T.Q. issues, celebrate kink or even distribute woman-friendly, consent-focused erotica.
Overzealous application of these bans, enforced by people with sexual mores and tastes that might be more censorious, uptight or even bigoted than your own, will almost certainly curtail opportunities to explore sex online that should be preserved. Easy access to information about contraception, sex toys and safer sex are an essential component of safe, pleasurable intimacy. Online spaces can provide L.G.B.T.Q. people with queer and trans peers they might never encounter in real life, and information on queer sex — something that’s rarely taught outside L.G.B.T.Q. spaces. Even explicit sexual media — sometimes, yes, hardcore pornographic photos and videos, but also written stories and audio content — can give many people a way to safely explore and learn about their turn-ons and desires.
Despite the general belief that terms like “pornography” and “obscenity” have fixed meanings, history has demonstrated time and again that it’s far from true. There have been several attempts to draw hard lines between what is “acceptable” and what is “obscene,” few of which have withstood the test of time. The Victorian Era’s Comstock Act was used to bring charges against Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, for using the postal service to distribute her feminist magazine, “The Woman Rebel.” Hollywood’s Hays Code barred filmmakers from depicting queer and interracial relationships. America’s current gold standard, the Miller Test, relies on “community standards” to define what is obscene — but in the fractal age of the internet, it’s often difficult to say which “community” it is whose standards should be given priority.
So who gets to decide what is obscene, anyway?
While it may be tempting to assume that age-verification laws will remain limited to PornHub and the like, there’s ample evidence to suggest that may not be the case. In recent years, the stated goal of protecting young people from potentially harmful material has often become a pretext for conservative attempts at censorship.
Depending on your personal beliefs, a book like Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s “Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human” is either a well-reviewed sex education manual for teenagers or a pornographic horror show that’s warping children’s minds and indoctrinating them with sexual perversion. A drag queen story hour might be an educational event for kids, or — as the right-wing provocateur Chris Rufo once claimed — a “trans stripper” putting on an obscene show.
For many of the most vocal culture warriors, anything remotely related to sex is inherently obscene, all the more so if it diverges from supposedly “normal” sexuality (that which occurs exclusively between married, white, straight, Christian people). It seems almost inevitable that the same ideology will come for the internet, should the law allow for it.
Online, it’s already apparent what happens when easily offended voices police everyone else’s content. On apps like TikTok and Instagram, there’s minimal risk of running into anything too hardcore. Even suggestive nudity can get an account suspended, probably because of the platforms’ parent companies’ desire to remain advertiser friendly. Yet despite creating a seemingly porn-free community, the censorship goes further: words like “lesbians,” “sex” and “porn” are routinely bowdlerized, rendered in videos as “le$beans,” “seggs” and “corn” by users who fear that using the actual words they mean to say will leave their content deprioritized or banned by the platform. Even accounts that are explicitly focused on sexual health are often forced to wink and nudge lest they be flagged as pornographic, despite broad community agreement that sex education is a good and important resource.
In recent months, the stakes have grown even higher. In Washington, Senator Mike Lee of Utah is attempting to redefine “obscenity” to more specifically target sexual content; in Mississippi, a recently passed law has created an opportunity for anyone so inclined to sue pornographers for simply distributing pornography online, even when their customer base is made of adults with a right to view the material. Their message is clear: Online pornography, and online sex generally, must be put on notice. Now that the Supreme Court has given the all-clear to age-verification laws, the door is open for even more opportunities to harass and censor anyone who wants to talk about sex on the internet.
It’s hard (and frankly, unnecessary) to muster up much sympathy for the likes of PornHub, a company that over the years has profited off nonconsensually shared videos and even recordings of rape. And in the darker corners of the internet, there is an endless slew of harmful online sexual content, from deepfakes to child sex abuse material. But as these broad laws take greater effect, people fearing government recrimination might opt to stop creating any sex-related online content — not just porn, but also queer content, sex education and all manner of other media as well. Quite frankly, it should be something we all consider a nightmare scenario.
Because sex, in all its messy complexity, is one of the most central parts of the human experience. And an internet without it is one that offers a pale shadow of human potential and possibility.
Lux Alptraum was the editor in chief of Fleshbot, a blog about sex and adult entertainment, and is the author of “Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — and the Truths They Reveal.”
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