A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It's Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat.

On June 15, 2022, a freshman legislator in Louisiana’s House of Representatives accomplished something no other lawmaker or activist in the country could claim: She passed a law that is changing the online porn industry.

If you think this was the result of a bitter culture war battle, think again.

“Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors,” asserts the bill that state Rep. Laurie Schlegel introduced. Almost no one in the capitol in Baton Rouge disputes the statement; the bill sailed through the Louisiana House 96-1 and the State Senate 34-0. The bill holds pornography websites liable unless the websites “perform reasonable age verification methods” — in short, requiring users to show government ID to prove they are 18 or older. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, no fan of the legislature’s Republican super-majority, signed the bill about a week after it arrived on his desk.

“I promise you he has no qualms about vetoing our bills,” Schlegel told me. In fact, earlier this summer, the governor had unsuccessfully vetoed a bill banning puberty blockers, hormone therapy and elective surgery for minors, calling it “so blatantly defective on so many levels.”

Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-verification bill was not the last. Nearly identical bills have passed in six other states — Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia and Texas — by similarly lopsided margins. In Utah and Arkansas, the bills passed unanimously. The laws were passed by overwhelming margins in legislatures controlled by both parties and signed into law by Democratic and Republican governors alike. In just over a year, age-verification laws have become perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country, and they are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate.

Unlike past efforts to curb online porn that had simply declared the sites a danger to public health, these laws are not symbolic. And they are having real effects on how the massive online porn industry does business. Pornhub, the YouTube of pornography, gets more global users than Amazon or Netflix. In 2019, the last year Pornhub released its data, the site was visited 42 billion times, or 115 million times each day.

Lawsuits have been filed by the porn industry’s trade association, the Free Speech Coalition, against Utah and Louisiana, but in the meantime, porn companies have had no choice but to comply with the laws. According to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub, traffic in Louisiana has dropped 80 percent.

In the other three states where the laws have been in effect for months — Utah, Mississippi, and Virginia — Pornhub did something even more unprecedented: It simply stopped operating. Users in these states who attempt to visit the site are greeted with a safe-for-work video of Cherie DeVille (a porn star), clothed, explaining the site’s decision to pull out of the state.

As the video instructs, some angry porn users have called their legislators, but that has not dimmed the joy of lawmakers. According to Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler, the chief sponsor of Utah’s bill, many of his colleagues are celebrating the improbable and unexpected retreat of the pornography behemoth. Weiler said his colleagues “think it’s hilarious” and have been “high-fiving” each other in boyish triumph.

These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show.

It was December 2021 and Schlegel was on her “daily news scroll” through Apple News when she saw an article describing popstar Billie Eilish’s appearance on the infamous shock jock’s show. Eilish told Stern, “I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. ... I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

Schlegel, 46, had only been sworn in as a state representative six months earlier, after winning a bitter, low-turnout special election by 217 votes against an opponent with a famous name in New Orleans politics. He sent out a mailer saying that sending a social worker like Schlegel to the state house would be like pouring money down the drain. She compared him to a faceless mannequin in response.

Schlegel isn’t a social worker. She’s a sex addiction therapist. “That’s my specialty,” she told me, proudly. It’s even in her X bio. Already aware of the problem of childhood exposure to pornography due to her work, the Eilish interview inspired Schlegel to act. “I just thought how courageous it was. … It just sort of re-emphasized to me what a problem this is, especially for our children.”

But how would Schlegel, a freshman representative, convince her colleagues to take on an industry that seemed too big to curtail? She needed an expert to persuade the legislature, she figured, and she had just the person in mind: Gail Dines, whose anti-porn research and activism had been on Schlegel’s radar for years. Schlegel first discovered her work through a 2015 TEDx talk entitled “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture.”

Dines is a self-described radical feminist, sociologist and anti-porn crusader from Manchester, England who has lived in the United States for 37 years. It’s a strange coupling, between an anti-abortion Louisiana Republican and a professor who says her radical feminism “encompasses many socialist feminist principles.” But they know that.

“It’s not a marriage. Let’s be very clear on this,” Dines told me. Though they share the same goal of diverting kids from porn, they don’t necessarily see it as part of the same larger project. For Dines, “This is about doing the right thing when it comes to controlling capitalism that’s out of control.”

Dines is not subtle about the ills of pornography and hypersexualization. When her speaking tour stopped at my high school in 2017, she told my junior class, “I bet you, every woman here, all of you female students, could come up here right now, and you could do the ‘fuck me’ look,” referring to the Victoria’s Secret model displayed on the projector behind her. About a minute later, she told us, somewhat forlornly, “Men who rape are not deviants. They are over-conformists.”

Partly because of the things she said, partly because of how she was saying them (she shushed us repeatedly), and partly because we were 16- and 17-year-old boys, neither I nor any of my friends took Dines all that seriously. She seemed completely out of touch.

By the time we were 14 (and many of us younger), we had started watching porn on the internet. Regularly. We had favorite porn stars and we argued over their merits just the way we talked about professional football players we had on our fantasy football teams. To us, it didn’t seem weird that we had seen videos of strangers having rough sex before we had our first kiss. But it was precisely our blasé attitude that alarmed Dines and others who have detailed the many ills that childhood exposure to porn may have wrought, including record numbers of young men having erectile dysfunction. Others have disagreed, disputing the causal link to porn, while not disputing the absurd rise in sexually dysfunctional young men.

Six years later though, while I still find Dines to be overzealous (the porn-to-rape argument feels like a stretch), it’s hard not to question whether the sexualization of everything and the proliferation of internet porn were good for us. Visit any number of massively populated internet forums (combined members 1.4 million) if you don’t understand what I mean; bask in the endless tapestry of loneliness, broken marriages and 20-something-year-old men who can’t get it up for women they’re in love with, but have no trouble when they’re watching videos of strangers.

An important consensus seems to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of many things negatively affecting the minds of Gen Z. Anxiety is mounting around the country over the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis afflicting my generation. Some blame social media; others chime in to add oversensitivity, overdiagnosis and a therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw limitless internet porn into the blame basket.

As the Louisiana law posits, “Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.” 

That language, though no doubt perfected over weeks, was influenced decisively by the events of Jan. 24, 2022, when Dines, at the behest of Schlegel, spoke on a Zoom call to dozens of Schlegel’s legislative colleagues. “She got, I think, an extra 30 sponsors for the bill after I’d spoken,” Dines bragged.

Maybe it was some young staffer with a sense of humor. On June 30, L. Louise Lucas, the 79-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate, wrote on X (the website formerly known as Twitter): “Is anyone else’s Pornhub not working?”

The Democratic state senator, who voted for the age-verification bill, seemed to lament the fact that Pornhub had just ceased to operate in her state. Was it a joke or a sincere question? Lucas’ office wouldn’t clarify. But in a subsequent tweet, Lucas said she was miffed that the state hadn’t found a way to implement the law in a way that wouldn’t have caused Pornhub’s exit.

Lucas’ question could soon be on the lips of residents in the two states (Texas and Montana) in which laws have passed but not gone into effect yet.

To be clear, Pornhub verifies the age of the half a million people who upload content on its site, a policy it implemented following a Nicholas Kristof piece in the New York Times exposing how the website was repeatedly hosting videos of minors being raped, which inspired Visa and MasterCard to stop processing payments on the site. But the site does not verify the ages of the billions of people who use the site and with the exception of Louisiana, it doesn’t plan to start. Rather than ask users to upload their government-issued identification, Pornhub is simply choosing not to offer service at all, citing issues of unconstitutionality, ineffectiveness and privacy risks.

The Free Speech Coalition, the trade group for the adult industry, has already sued Louisiana and Utah, and the rest of the states might be next. “I can’t stress enough that this is First Amendment protected speech,” warned Mike Stabile, director of public affairs for the Free Speech Coalition. As Stabile theorizes, “the legislators have, you know, chosen this as a way to start being able to police the open internet and start to wall it off.”

Plus, the adult industry argues, the age restrictions aren’t effective because people can still use virtual private networks, which mask a computer or smartphone’s true location, or the users can just access non-compliant websites. Indeed, after Pornhub pulled out of Virginia, searches for VPNs spiked in the state. Pornhub also claims that traffic soared for its noncompliant competitors, but it did not respond to repeated requests to see the data.

Whether or not there are legitimate First Amendment issues at play will be a matter for the courts, but there’s no arguing with the effectiveness of the laws. As Stabile explained, age-verification laws make traffic to porn sites drop precipitously. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that nobody wants to upload their driver’s license or passport before watching porn. And, as Stabile added, at a cost to the operators of around 65 cents per verification, age verification is effectively “business-killing.”

To Schlegel, workarounds such as VPNs are like fake IDs. Sure, there are ways for under-21-year-olds to get their hands on liquor, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pass underage drinking laws. Stabile preferred a different analogy: “It’s creating sort of one bar that has all of these regulations and then there’s just alcohol everywhere else lying in the street.”

To state legislatures at least, Schlegel seems to have the more convincing argument. Not only have six states passed copycat legislation, but 16 more have introduced similar or nearly identical bills.

The public is also on her side. “You poll this, it’s like an 85-15 issue,” explained Jon Schweppe, the policy director for the socially conservative think tank American Principles Project. Age-verification for porn is not his think tank’s only priority, but when they poll it against other priorities in swing states, age-verification blows the rest out of the water, with 77 percent in support and 15 percent opposed. Since the popularity is there, Schweppe told me he’s “bullish we can get similar legislation passed in like 10 more states by the end of next year’s session.” They’re also working on getting the Republican presidential candidates to talk about age-verification.

While state legislators and the public seem to be in support, the laws do face at least one powerful, experienced enemy: the ACLU, which has so far said nothing publicly about the laws. Vera Eidelman, ACLU’s senior staff attorney on its Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told me she thinks the laws are obviously unconstitutional. She believes that the Supreme Court’s rulings in Reno v. ACLU (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002 and 2004) have made it very clear “that what adults can access can’t be diminished to the level of what’s appropriate in a sandbox for kids.”

“The idea is that [these laws] will burden adults’ access to speech that is protected and they have every right to engage with and to access,” said Eidelman. Even laws that mandate age-verification at the device level (meaning you would just upload your ID or SSN into your phone and it would block adult sites if you were a minor), which Pornhub’s representatives told me they would be in favor of, would be clearly unconstitutional in Eidelman’s view.

So though the ACLU and the $100 billion porn industry are against the laws, they seem to be largely alone in that position. By Jan. 1, 2024 (when the Montana law goes into effect), around 54 million Americans will live in states where they are required to upload their identification to access pornography websites, if those pornography websites choose to operate there at all.

What will that mean for the internet, for porn and for kids?

According to Utah state Sen. Weiler, “I understand that, if kids want to see porn, they’re going to see porn,” but, he added, it’s going to be a lot harder “for younger kids who don’t necessarily have access to a VPN.”

Weiler gets at an inescapable truth, one that can only be found far away from both Dines’ stump speeches on one end and pornographers’ grave warnings about authoritarianism on the other: There is no going back to the era when high school boys huddled around a Playboy magazine given to one of them by their divorced father. For the foreseeable future, there will be plenty of videos of hardcore porn on the internet and there will be teenage boys horny enough to find them. But must it be so effortless that most 12-year-olds have seen them?

In the meantime, there’s less porn on the internet in Arkansas. Days before the state’s age verification law went into effect Aug. 1, Pornhub withdrew from the state, making it the fourth state where would-be porn users are finding Cherie DeVille with her clothes on. (While searches for VPNs spiked in Arkansas on Aug 1, they have since returned to July levels.) The news got a little worse for the porn industry that same day when a federal judge in Utah dismissed the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit against the state.