Already aware of the problem of childhood exposure to pornography due to her work, the Eilish interview inspired Schlegel to act. “That’s my specialty,” she told me, proudly. She compared him to a faceless mannequin in response. 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. 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. Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-verification bill was not the last nearly identical bills have passed in six other states. I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.” I started watching porn when I was like 11. Eilish told Stern, “I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. 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. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show. These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Weiler said his colleagues “think it’s hilarious” and have been “high-fiving” each other in boyish triumph. Todd Weiler, the chief sponsor of Utah’s bill, many of his colleagues are celebrating the improbable and unexpected retreat of the pornography behemoth. 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.Īs the video instructs, some angry porn users have called their legislators, but that has not dimmed the joy of lawmakers. 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. According to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub, traffic in Louisiana has dropped 80 percent. 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. In 2019, the last year Pornhub released its data, the site was visited 42 billion times, or 115 million times each day. Pornhub, the YouTube of pornography, gets more global users than Amazon or Netflix. And they are having real effects on how the massive online porn industry does business. Unlike past efforts to curb online porn that had simply declared the sites a danger to public health, these laws are not symbolic. 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. The laws were passed by overwhelming margins in legislatures controlled by both parties and signed into law by Democratic and Republican governors alike. In Utah and Arkansas, the bills passed unanimously. Nearly identical bills have passed in six other states - Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia and Texas - by similarly lopsided margins. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, has floated banning anyone under the age of 16 from social media.Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-verification bill was not the last. Other lawmakers have proposed going further. States such as Arkansas, Ohio and Utah have passed laws requiring age verification checks on social media sites like Instagram. The age verification laws are part of a greater crackdown on explicit content online in an effort to protect children. However, more states are seeking to enact age verification laws this year, with Texas and Montana expected to pass similar laws.ĭespite the restrictive nature of the laws, users can circumvent the bans by using a VPN. Pornhub says extensive parental controls already exist that should prevent children from accessing explicit content without risking the breach of private data. “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,” adult film actor Cherie DeVille says in the video.
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