Should We Ban Smut?

Examining the changing laws around mature content

On May 1st, Utah joined Louisiana in enacting a law which requires pornography sites to age verify users before accessing the site. In response to the new law PornHub has geoblocked all users from the state, rather than implementing ID verification. If you try to access the website you’re apparently met with a plea from pornstar Cherie DeVille urging you to contact your local legislator to express your displeasure with the new rules.

It’s kind of surprising it’s taken this long for these sort of bans and legal battles to playout. U.S. federal law on obscenity already prohibits transmitting or selling obscene material to minors. The online porn industry has operated in a gray area where they argue they are simply open platforms and not intentionally engaged in wrongdoing.

How have the locals in Utah been dealing with the new regulation? It appears, as in most cases, the power of law is limited to the degree of its enforcement. Queries for setting up a VPN surged in response. The internet remains incredibly resilient in subverting the state.

Putting up some guardrails and increasing the friction for minors to access porn doesn’t seem like a bad idea though. Porn can have powerful effects on some people, it’s probably not great for middle schoolers in their formative years to be consuming it regularly. The horned up youth might even learn some valuable tech skills and things about online privacy in their quest to skirt regulation and see nude tits.

But should we ban online porn outright altogether though? There’s a growing wave of radicals trying to push that idea. I think it’s unwise. Such a strict policy would have a lot of challenges and downstream effects

Feasibility & Enforcement

There is a staggering amount of pornographic material floating around in the online ether. Many stats conflict on the subject, but it’s been estimated that about 1/3 of all data downloads are porn related. Only in 2020 did Netflix surpass online porn in terms of bandwidth consumption. You could stop all new porn production today, won’t really matter much, there’s already lifetimes worth of it circulating around. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, it’s difficult to get it back in.

It’s a bit like when someone floats the silly idea of banning all civilian guns in the USA. There’s hundreds of millions of guns floating about, it’s not a feasible course of action to round up all the weapons.

Enforcing an online porn ban would be a mess. A simple VPN can dodge geo-blocking, BitTorrent can be used to download files, the stuff is still going to get around. Under an outlaw regime the porn addicts would also be potentially be breaking the law. You’d have to start raiding the goon caves, clogging up the courts throwing criminal charges at coomers.

Spillover Effect

Nearly 80 percent of young men are watching porn once a month, 63% engaging once a week. Over 200,000 people self-identify as “porn addicts”. There’s this idealist thinking that if you remove the cursed stimulus of porn these folks will all of a sudden become renaissance men, take up the bible, seek fulfilling relationships, cure cancer etc.

In reality, the demand for porn simply goes underground, and spills over into other adjacent arenas. We’ve seen this playout during the Temperance Movement of the 1920s. If you ban a widely consumed vice it doesn’t cease to exist, it just gets trafficked differently. Some offshore Romanian running a camgirl shop in his basement is going to be the big winner from a U.S. porn prohibition.

Personal Liberty

You can walk into any gas station in America and buy a pack of cigarettes. These are objectively addictive and have negative health consequences but we as a society allow adults to indulge in these things.

A lot of the arguments against porn could be made for processed cookies you find in every grocery store. Widely available, can be addictive, if you’re eating a lot of them everyday your health will suffer, you’ll probably get depressed, become undesirable, struggle dating. Should we eradicate Chips Ahoy! from the food supply and jail the executives of Nabisco? Seems a bit extreme.

A true free society is filled chaotic elements. Man has the right to self-destruct if he chooses. To cut his face, to act against his so-called “self-interest”. People can opt for pleasure over purpose, they’ll likely pay the price in time, but they’re free to do so.

I think much of the moral panic surrounding online porn has to do with the technology element. It’s a struggle to deal with the rapid pace of social changes tech is inflicting and using streaming adult video as a bit of a scapegoat. Anyone in the 25-50 year old range has been caught up in the switch between the ages. From the industrial era to the information era. They look around and see the tides turning, things are clearly getting different than how they remember they once were, and they’re grasping for answers.

There’s so many competing factors shaping the world. To point to porn as the root cause of changes in behavior is very simplistic. Most people check it once in awhile, for a few minutes, jerkoff, and go about their day. Outside of the edge-cases, it is about as harmful for the consumer as a sugary snack

Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. - Herman Hesse