The Walmart of online pornography, Pornhub, is currently inaccessible to Utahns (the awkward apparent term for people of Utah, which I was previously unaware of).
Pornhub, one of the largest adult content websites on the internet, has blocked Utahns from viewing the site in an apparent protest of a new law forcing stricter age-verification measures.
Website visitors from Utah started noticing the block on Monday morning. At first, Pornhub posted “403 | This state is not whitelisted.” 403 is a computer code for a forbidden site. Later in the day, the site was changed to a lengthy message to users notifying them of why they were blocked.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Utah are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” the site’s message read.
My initial libertine inclination to heavy-handed government regulation of the porn industry — a reaction that would have been more reflexively hardline a few years ago — is to decry the overreach as an apparent attempt to use the legal system for illegitimate social engineering purposes.
As a general rule, if social norms and culture can’t be organically adopted by the population to constrain immoral, harmful behavior at the societal level, then it’s probably a lost cause to use the legal system to enforce them.
However, there are important considerations that merit further inquiry.
Porn apologists will frequently claim that the art form, if that’s what it can be called, has existed in some form since the dawn of recorded history — in magazines, cave art, etc. — and therefore should be permitted.
The main problem with this kind of argument is that the porn of today is only about a thousand times more potent than the porn of yesterday. The intensity with which online pornography platforms facilitate dopamine release, and therefore addiction and other negative neurological consequences, is about 1,000x what porn used to do. Viewers can watch video after video after video, each genre more extreme than the last as the novelty wears off.
If Playboy is a dopamine musket, Pornhub is a fully auto .50-caliber rifle.
Another angle to consider is the potential weaponization of pornography for LGBTQ+++™ social engineering purposes. I have previously reported on the extremely peculiar porn genre/online subculture called “sissy hypnosis.”
Sissy hypno has blossomed into a thriving online subculture. (If you are so inclined, visit the Sissy Hypno Reddit page for confirmation, but be forewarned that it is graphic and potentially disturbing.) It attempts to persuade male viewers that they should assume the identity of “sissy” — meaning to adopt exaggerated, hyper-feminine social and sexual roles in the pursuit of sexual gratification.
All that to say: this is not your grandfather’s porn industry. Perhaps Utah’s efforts to shield children from it, even if it requires draconian legislation, may not be as misguided as many libertarians would claim.
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