After its passage last year, Louisiana’s age verification law for online pornography seems to be having a big effect by placing limits on the ability of young people to access explicit porn for free on their devices.
Louisiana House Bill 142, championed by Republican State Rep. Laurie Schlegel, requires that porn sites “perform reasonable age verification methods” for visitors to be allowed to gain access.
The age verification bill was made a state law in June 2022, and since that time, mega porn website PornHub has lost 80 percent of its traffic in the Pelican State, according to Politico.
The bill has been so successful and popular that bipartisan coalitions have passed similar bills in six states, including Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas.
A loss of traffic that big has serious, real-world impact on pornography sites. PornHub recently claimed it has 115 million unique visitors every single day. An 80 percent cut in that number would equal a massive loss of business.
Porn website operators are suing several states over their age verification laws, of course. But in the meantime, they have been forced to implement the screening system that is cutting their number of visitors and their revenue.
PornHub in particular was forced to initiate an age verification system for users to upload pornographic videos to its YouTube-styled sections. The policy was instituted after the site was criticized for having allowed too many videos of minors being raped, accusations that caused Visa and MasterCard to stop processing the site’s payments. While the system was put in place for its content creators, the site did not want to institute the same system for its billions of visitors.
Ultimately, instead of continuing to host an age verification feature, PornHub has simply blocked all Internet users in states that have passed laws like Louisiana’s.
PornHub’s parent company, MindGeek, has blocked its site from being accessed by the citizens of Arkansas, Virginia, Utah, Mississippi, and others since those states passed their age verification laws.
In May, in a missive directed at Utah’s voters, PornHub spokesperson Sharita Bell claimed that the age verification laws put people’s privacy “at risk.”
“As you may know, your elected officials have required us to verify your age before granting you access to our website,” Bell exclaimed in a company statement. “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.”
“As we’ve seen in other states, this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place,” Bell added. “Very few sites are able to compare to the robust trust and safety measures we currently have in place.”
All this is a nice discussion of theory, of course. But one teenager recently wrote an essay for The Free Press that brings up the real-world experiences that young people are suffering as a result of the ravages of porn.
Isabel Hogben, a 16-year-old from Redwood City, California, says that porn is a serious problem for kids and that it is fostering an addiction that is creating a false impression in the minds of kids about what human sexuality is like in real life.
“Today I’m 16, and my peers are suffering from an addiction to what many call ‘the new drug.’ Porn is the disastrous replacement for intimacy among my sexless, anxiety-ridden generation,” Hogben wrote in her August 29 essay.
Hogben added that she and her peers are exposed to a steady diet of porn starting as early as ten years of age and it is not the staid porn of the 1950s with sultry naked women sprawled on couches in magazines such as Playboy.
“This is not what I stumbled upon back in fourth grade,” Hogben warned readers. “I saw simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence. The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog.”
Hogben went on to note that these highly explicit videos create a “supernormal stimulus” in teens that eventually makes them unable to physically engage in normal sexual relations — especially for teen boys — much less leaving them able to understand what a normal sexual relationship is supposed to be like.
“This process is especially detrimental to the still-growing, sex-obsessed adolescent brain. Artificial stimuli can saturate and warp a young mind before it ever encounters a real-life sexual experience,” this teenaged essayist wrote.
Hogben also warns that girls are being put at risk of physical abuse thanks to their exposure to porn.
“An Indiana University study shows,” Hogben wrote, “that the earlier a girl is exposed to porn, the more she will accept behaviors like choking, facial ejaculation, and ‘aggressive fellatio’ from a sexual partner.”
“In short, most of my friends think this stuff is normal,” Hogben laments.
In the end, Hogben says that because of the chemical changes that occur in the brain as a result of exposure to porn, she thinks porn should be treated like a “substance abuse” problem, not a free speech issue.
“If a child ordered three shots of vodka at a bar, the bartender would object. If a child asked for cigarettes at a gas station, the attendant would laugh. But with a quick Google search, a child has access to millions of hours of a dangerous substance,” Hogben explained.
Hogben concluded her article praising the efforts of states such as Louisiana to try to put roadblocks in front of the all-too easy access to free porn online.
Like many others, young Miss Hogben thinks it is long past time to take the evils of pornography seriously and to begin to take measures to curb the serious mental issues the skin industry is creating in our youth.
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