Pornhub, the world’s most-visited adult site, announced that it will no longer be available in France because of the country’s age verification laws. The news arrives amidst concerns about the site’s lack of willingness to protect children. Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, claims that an age requirement impinges on user privacy. Age verification laws, however, are designed to protect minors from the harms of adult content. Aylo is giving more than enough indication that it isn’t interested in protecting children.

France isn’t alone in implementing these protective measures. Several legislatures in the United States are also taking action. Anna Cooban reports in CNN:

In the United States, 19 states – home to more than a third of Americans – have in recent years passed laws requiring pornographic sites to confirm a user’s age by checking a government-issued ID or scanning their face, among other methods.

The laws have led some of the largest adult sites, including Pornhub, to block users from those states, rather than paying millions for ID-checking services.

In 2020, Pornhub removed all of its unverified videos, which amounted to a baffling two-thirds of its overall content, following a piece in The New York Times reporting that the site was hosting footage of nonconsensual sexual acts, rape, and child abuse. Pornhub has also, in the past, demonstrated complicity in sex trafficking.

It’s Everywhere

The scrutiny is on adult websites right now, but it should extend to social media sites like X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which house near-infinite footage of pornographic content. People are likely to encounter online pornography even if they don’t actively seek it out. That’s how pervasively adult content inundates the internet. It’s everywhere — in our advertisements, our movies and TV shows, our popular literature, and of course, on our social media platforms, which young people are on multiple hours every single day. The algorithm pays no mind to age verification. It arranges the most addictive feed possible. Social media is sadly often the gateway drug to pornography.

In a powerful, sobering, but hopeful new essay in After Babel, culture writer Freya India laments pornography’s devastating impact on an entire generation. In a world in which sexual content is normalized, India reminds readers how pornography wounds, distorts, and hardens the human psyche. Young people are now trained to see each other as commodities, and to regard themselves as subhuman, as mere machines reduced to their physical urges. In addition, the coming tide of AI sex bots is merely an extension of the online pornography problem. She writes,

People laugh at AI girlfriends and how dystopian that seems but online porn, oh that’s natural, normal, healthy. We forget that dystopia has already arrived. Yes, AI girlfriends and sexbots are terrifying but my generation is already primed for those. We are already addicted to simulations, the nightmare has already begun, this is just what they sell after they have successfully numbed a generation and drained their drive to connect with other human beings. 

Now is the Time to Push Back

Age verification laws are a promising start, but people like Freya are calling attention to the damage already done and the deep need for healing. Pornography has captured millions in its grip, but many people are waking up, pushing back, and advocating for restoration. Protecting minors (and adults) from pornography addiction involves policy, but there also is a need for a cultural revival, a collective rejection of what this material has done to us.

India uses the word “trauma” to illustrate the depth of the problem. I agree with her diagnosis. Digital access to sexual content is unprecedented in human history. We don’t have anything in our collective past to truly compare it to and are just now beginning to grapple with pornography’s widespread social cost. But, as India notes, people are speaking up. Clare Morell, author of the new book Tech Exit, offers a practical guide for parents to protect their children from the digital wasteland. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation documents smartphones’ role in the decline of mental health among members of Gen Z. And countless men and women, formerly mired in addiction, are rejecting pornography and seeking healing and true connection.

With France’s decision to institute age verification laws, perhaps more countries will follow suit. Could the United States, the world’s foremost pornography consumer, be next?