Note: I originally wrote this on 5th May 2024. Then I got dejected and didn’t publish it. I’m just gonna put it up now so it’s out there.
As usual it’s been a long time between posts. The last 9 months or so have been difficult; the future of Bright Desire was uncertain so I’ve been pretty quiet online. I can now say that one of the big problems has been solved (won’t go into details). So I’m back on deck and paying attention. Meanwhile, the pile of shit that is censorship, age verification and anti-porn / anti sex rhetoric has just gotten worse in the interim.
In the last 24 hours two things have happened:
1. The Australian government has announced they want to trial age verification again. This is despite abandoning it last August as impractical and “immature”. I guess I should have known that reason and evidence is no match for ongoing moral outrage.
2. I’ve been contacted by the UK Independent Pornography Review asking for a meeting to “have a conversation about your platform and seek your views on the Review as a leader in the feminist, sex positive online porn space.” I’m not sure if I should even reply to these people (edit – I didn’t).
I figured maybe a blog post might calm my scattered thoughts a little, although just now I’ve can feel the same sinking feeling that has set in every single time these topics come up: What’s the point? They never listen. Why should I waste my time on this again? I mean, this blog is 20 fucking years old in 2024 and I’ve been ranting against censorship my whole career and it’s worse now than it’s ever been.
Then again… I’m 24 years in making porn and nobody has succeeded in killing porn just yet, so maybe I should just sit back and let it all play out as it usually does.
Why Age Verification Is A Bad Idea
In any case, here’s a quick rundown of the arguments as to why age verification is a bad idea:
It’s a privacy and information security nightmare. Want to look at porn, something that society says should be a private and shameful activity? Well OK, hand over your government documentation first! Or let us scan your face! It will be fine, trust us. As we know from experience, companies love to compile databases about their customers habits and sell them on. A porn age verification database is yet another way companies can trade data but it’s also a massive honeypot that could be used for blackmail or – worse – to prosecute people.
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Lack of trust. And even if you somehow make this data absolutely sure, is anybody going to trust that? We’ve been through enough data breaches lately to know that this shit is NEVER secure. Just two days ago a million Australians were told to replace their driver’s licenses because a club age verification database was hacked. How do you get the average joe to hand over ID just to get off? It won’t happen, they’ll hit the back button or they’ll get a VPN.
“The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” The web is a global thing and websites are based all over the world. A VPN means you can bypass your location and any restrictions that are imposed on that location. Age verification laws are geographically based. People will route around them. See SBS story from today here.
Age verification is not free or easy to install and it will kill small porn companies. Current age verification technology is offered by commercial companies who are in this to make a profit. Mandating it might not be a problem for large companies like PornHub but it will effectively kill off smaller, feminist, queer porn companies who are doing their best to produce ethical porn. If nobody is joining the site because they don’t want to provide ID and a site is paying through the nose for someone else’s age verification software, where’s the money to pay your performers? Easier to shut down. There’ll be less diverse, body positive, sex positive porn in the world.
It won’t actually stop people from looking at porn. Porn will still be available. Even if the UK, the US and Australia succeed, there’s still porn coming from the rest of the world where there are no age verification rules. And there’ll still be people making porn in the UK, US and Australia and not complying. How do you police every single website on the internet?
“Harms” and “Safety”
The other point I want to make is that all the age verification stuff has been pushed by religious or anti-porn / anti-sex-work groups who are not actually interested in protecting children. They want to stop everyone from looking at porn. They also want everyone to stop looking at LGBTI content, at sex education and women’s health information. They want to criminalize sex work. These people have a profoundly conservative, anti sex agenda but it’s couched in terms of “harms” and “safety”
What exactly are the “harms” that are assumed here? Because there’s not a lot of actual peer-reviewed evidence behind these assumptions. Instead, we get lots of “panicdotal evidence” and anecdotes. Porn leads to domestic violence. Porn is making boys choke girls when they have sex for the first time. Porn is leading to anal tearing in young women. Porn is “addictive”.
Whenever anyone digs down into the issue of porn and “harms”, they see that it’s actually a complicated subject (here’s a piece I wrote way back in 2010 – Defining the “harms” of porn). Actual research into this topic goes along the lines of “we don’t know”, “it depends” and “most people are fine”. I am too tired to start linking to all the usual studies here but this article in The Conversation is a good start. And of course there’s the book by Prof Alan McKee What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research? (Spoiler: Not much). There’s also his previous work on porn and the work by Dr Kath Albury on how young people watch and deal with sexual media.
My point is that too often age verification laws are the result of a moral panic that starts with the blanket assumption that all porn is bad and that all porn is sexist / violent / exploitative. There’s also the assumption that all porn consumers are male, all porn consumers have no media literacy and all porn consumers will act out what they see on a screen.
These assumptions then find their way into laws and reviews of laws (Australia, UK) and we end up with broad, undefined terms like “extreme pornography” “online harms”, “harmful impact of pornography” but no examination as to whether these things are even a real problem.
What Are The Actual Concerns?
So let’s suspend our need for evidence and just go with these previous assumptions. Let’s clutch our pearls and just roll with it. At the heart of all this are these questions:
- How do you stop teen boys and men from being sexist?
- How do you make sure women aren’t raped or hurt in bed?
- How do you stop sex trafficking?
- How can people have beautiful, consensual, mutually beneficial sex?
and of course:
- How do you stop children from looking at porn?
If your answer to all these questions is “ban porn” then you’re not really giving it a lot of thought.
How do you stop teen boys and men from being sexist? I too am worried that misogyny seems to be getting worse. Social media influencers like Andrew Tate could well be to blame. Maybe it’s the lyrics in hip hop songs. But then again, it might be better to go wider and look at a persistent patriarchal culture combined with late stage capitalism tightening the noose, making men and boys unhappy with their lot so that women become a handy scapegoat. How do you fix that?
I’m not going to argue that a lot of porn isn’t sexist. It reflects the sexist patriarchal society we live in. Does it cause or reinforce sexist behaviour? Again, the answer is we don’t know (see above). I’d love if it porn was less sexist because it’s so offputting. It’s why I started making my own porn. But how do you stop all porn from being sexist? Seems impossible. When everyone has a smart phone and can make their own porn, it’s gonna reflect their attitudes. So while sexism exists, sexist porn will exist. Just as sexism is reflected in ALL media.
How do you make sure women aren’t raped or hurt in bed? A question feminism has asked for years. See point 1, sexism is persistent and I don’t know how to solve it. Obviously it would help if we had a better justice system that actually punished rapists.
As for trafficking – there’s a whole other blog post about the way that consensual sex work (including porn) is constantly conflated with sex trafficking and how sex trafficking is used as an excuse to ban porn and sex work. But let’s set that aside. If you want to put a dent in sex trafficking, the answer is to decriminalize sex work. Sex workers have been saying this for years so I won’t repeat their solid arguments here. (Although I want to say: YAY, Queensland decriminalized sex work the other day!).
So how can people have beautiful, consensual, mutually beneficial sex? Firstly can we talk about the influence of the patriarchy and religion on how people have sex? Because I gotta say that’s getting in the way and it’s gonna be hard to remove that from the equation. But if we set that aside, we end up at the answer that everyone has been suggesting for years. Education
Education
Sex education. Consent education. Media literacy education that includes discussions of pornography. Discussions about relationships, sexism and gender. And I’m not just talking about sex ed in schools. I’m talking about age-approriate sex and consent education that starts from a very early age provided by parents.
(Because that’s the question that isn’t asked often enough. Where are the parents in this? Why is the government doing the job of parenting when it comes to sex and porn?)
If you know that porn is entertainment, that it’s a construct, that it’s not sex ed, that it’s flawed and it’s not a guide on how to have sex or treat other people… then what’s the problem, exactly? We watch true crime murder shows, car chase scenes and horror films without assuming it’s an instruction manual. Why can’t we treat porn the same way?
If sex, consent and relationships education were common and porn were discussed as media / entertainment, you’d probably see people having better sex.
Two Solutions
So finally, the big question: how do you stop under 18s from looking at porn? There are two solutions.
One is parenting. Simple as that. You monitor what devices your child uses, if any. You pay attention to what they’re watching. You install Net Nanny style software and apps. You don’t allow them to use a phone in their bedroom or anywhere that you aren’t. You don’t let them take phones to school. And… you educate them.
Because let’s admit that children and teenagers are curious about sex and that teens especially will probably seek out porn of their own accord. And some will be very determined to look at it and will find a way around any blocks they may encounter. How they deal with it when they see it depends on how educated they are about sex and relationships and how media / porn literate they are. So it’s up to parents to ensure that if they do encounter porn, accidentally or deliberately, they are able to talk about it and think clearly about what porn is and what it means.
What’s that you say? Too hard? Nobody has time to parent their children these days! I want the government to do it for me!
OK so now we’re back at age verification. And it sucks and governments shouldn’t mandate it. But if it’s going to happen anyway, this is where we get to the second solution.
Device-level age verification. Ensure that any phone, PC or other internet-accessible device has voluntary age verification built in to using that device. Make the user verify their age on the device just once and create a snippet of code for websites and apps to check in with that device-level ID.
This way you make the huge companies – Apple, Microsoft and Google – responsible for who is using the device. It’s simple, it doesn’t cost anything and it’s easy. If you give a kid a phone, it will restrict them to age-appropriate sites and apps.
It’s not perfect and people will still do their best to get around it. There are still questions of privacy. You’re still giving your data to a massive corporation who will misuse it. But it’s a hell of a lot easier and simpler than demanding individual websites use expensive software to create a honeypot that will also drive their customers away.
As much as I dislike Pornhub, they are pushing for this and I think it makes sense.
Oh God, I’m Tired
(This is the point where I stopped writing and didn’t publish this post.)
I’m so over this. I’m so tired of fighting and worrying and advocating for the right to make my feminist, ethical porn. I’m kinda ready to chuck it in. I hope the rest of you can keep up the fight.