Utah passed a common-sense law that would require websites hosting pornographic content to verify the age of their users.

Pornhub isn’t happy about it, so they are no longer serving their smut to Utahans.

Pornhub is blocking all users in Utah after the state enacted a new age-verification law aimed at protecting minors from explicit content https://t.co/XJuDBc7thK

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 3, 2023

Pornhub is the 4th ranking site by user visits in the United States, ranking lower than only Google, YouTube, and Facebook. No doubt they can survive the loss of Utah’s 3.2 million residents without going under. That’s less than 1% of the US population.

More than a few Utah residents use the site, and no doubt more than a few will be unhappy that it will no longer be available for their viewing pleasure.

Despite that, it’s not exactly easy to argue that the state’s requirement that adult-oriented sites ensure that their customers are not children is oppressive. Pornhub offers paid content, but the vast majority is actually freely available and it is quite explicit.

And, far from the claims of many that restrictions on pornography are driven mainly by puritanical schoolmarms, it is well established that viewing pornography regularly is highly damaging to people’s mental health, relationships, and sexual development.

Moreover, recent research indicates a pretty dramatic decline in sexual activity among Americans. This is rather shocking, given how obsessively our society talks about sex and how sexual liberation is now considered the ultimate in good. But the data is pretty clear: people are having less sex. And what sex younger people do have is highly influenced by the more extreme forms of pornography that are common online.

Kids get exposed to pornography at younger and younger ages, and we aren’t talking about looking at dad’s Playboy. The sex can be rough, is always impersonal, and models behavior that undermines intimacy and life satisfaction.

Pornography can shift sexual interests, behaviours and relationships. It shapes “sexual scripts”, providing models of behaviour and guiding sexual expectations, with studies finding links between watching pornography and heterosexual anal intercourse, unsafe sex and more.

Watching pornography can lower men’s relationship satisfaction. And for women, male partners’ pornography use can reduce intimacy, feed self-objectification and body shame, or involve coercion into sexual acts.

Porn addiction is a very real phenomenon. When I go to confession the one pamphlet that is right there in the confessional is about how to escape porn addiction. This suggests that porn use must be one of the most common things in the world and priests have almost given up counseling on the matter in the confessional, and they direct you to resources needed to help with the problem.

That’s not a shock.

What is a shock is how difficult it is to convince people to take action about it regarding children. We are long past the time when we could put the genie back in the bottle regarding adult porn use, but the resistance to any measures to defend children is immense.

Louisiana passed a similar law using a different verification method, and Pornhub is complying with that law. The results for the company aren’t good:

Louisiana passed an age-verification law for porn sites that went into effect this year.

Pornhub is complying with the Louisiana law, said Sarah Bain, a founding partner of Ethical Capital Partners, the private-equity firm that acquired Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek earlier this year.

She said Louisiana has a digital-identification system in place that has been widely adopted and can be used online.

Pornhub’s traffic has dropped 80% since the age-verification system went into effect in Louisiana, suggesting users are leaving Pornhub for other sites that aren’t complying with the state law, she said.

I suspect that a large part of that drop in traffic is due to under-18s going elsewhere, not just a reluctance on users’ part to give out their ID. Yet how would we know, without actual age verification?

It is no coincidence that the spread of pornography videos has coincided with the vast increase in “queerness” throughout society. Pornography expands the Overton window, normalizing things that would have seemed (and still in fact are) perverted. If you see something repeated over and over, it becomes the new normal.

All of this is very sad. My repulsion to pornography isn’t due to any particular squeamishness on my part, and I am all for bawdiness among friends. But we have normalized the selling of our bodies, cheapened human connection, and are training our children to live cheapened lives.

I suspect that Utah will survive the pornhubpocalypse. Certainly, the leaders of the state aren’t crying about the site’s decision to pull out. But the problem remains: how do we actually protect children’s innocence in a world determined to strip it from them?