Florida and Texas Wage War on Porn, Demand Identification From Users
Texas and Florida can now demand the identification of porn viewers
It’s official: once their respective laws take effect, Florida1 and Texas will be keeping tabs on everyone who watches porn within state lines. In order to access adult websites, users will be required to submit state-issued identification. To be clear, a lot of places around the world have legally-mandated warnings that crop up when you try to access an adult site. These warnings tell you that you must be 18 years old to proceed. That’s not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about having to take a photo of your identification and submit it to the porn sites directly so the sites can prove that the users of its site are all adults over 18 years old if the state decided to ask. PornHub has already said it would suspend services in states that pass these sorts of laws and has already suspended service in several states with such laws. Now, they’ve suspended their service in Texas as well.
This upending of traditional law has the potential for widespread ramifications for the internet as a whole. Currently, elsewhere around the world, it’s the users themselves who are responsible for proving that only adults see 18+ content. The website’s Terms of Service says they must be 18 and by using the site, they acknowledge that much.
Before you say that it seems crazy that Texas’ anti-porn law could spill over to other websites, understand that Florida’s law not only demands age verification to access porn sites but also social media sites (or any site with infinite scrolling, so even blogs).
This provides websites of all stripes legal cover. If a website explicitly states that it’s only intended for adults, in the case of porn, or people over 16 in the case of some social media sites, they’ve told the public the intended use of the site. Now, it’s on the public to abide by that. YouTube’s age limit is 13 years old and if a kid younger than 13 sneaks on and gets into trouble or sees something they shouldn’t, YouTube warned the kid and parents that the site is for anyone 13+ but not younger. Parents could set up parental controls on YouTube, or the browser, or the computer generally.
Again, the responsibility historically lied with the user—not the company to keep track of its millions (or billions) of visitors and their identification. Of course, users can just get around the law by using a VPN and making it seem like they’re accessing the site from another state (doing so would be technically illegal, FYI, but I doubt they can police it).
The Texas bill, H.B. 1181, was originally struck down by the Supreme Court in the lower courts. When the law was originally struck down, Judge David Ezra, a Ronald Reagan-appointed district judge, found multiple problems with HB 1181 that could potentially limit internet users and adult content creators’ First Amendment rights. He noted that the law would deter adults from accessing legal sexually explicit material, far beyond the intended purpose of protecting minors. The ruling drew on previous decisions that blocked similar laws, such as the Child Online Protection Act and the Communications Decency Act.
But now, that ruling has been reversed by the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit Court and it’s the law of the land in Texas. On one level, all of this tracks with the long, overarching trajectory of back-and-forth pendulum swinging that is the slow battle for sexual progress. If sexual rights were innate and universally respected, we wouldn’t have to fight for them at every turn and every few generations.
Over the last few years, a war has been waged over our sex lives in America. Nearly two years ago, I warned we would head down this path. In the wake of the Dobbs V. Jackson decision, where the U.S. Supreme Court took the stunning step of overturning Roe V. Wade, the 1973 decision that granted some abortion protections, you and I were already wise to the fact that they weren’t going to stop with overturning abortion.
The fact is, it’s not about abortion — it’s about sex and the whole point is to stifle sex wherever they can. Why else would they want to undo marriage equality? Why else would they want to ban birth control along with abortions? Birth control prevents abortions. Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Arizona, Blake Masters, said he’d only vote for Supreme Court Justices willing to overturn cases that protect the right to contraceptives. Sitting Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn has said she thinks contraceptives should only be available to married couples (to prevent premarital sex). The fact that banning IUDs is even being discussed speaks volumes.
Whether that means reaching into our bedrooms or bodies matters less than making sure that people face the most severe consequences for engaging in sexual behavior possible. Remember, in the Victorian Era, anti-masturbation devices were common; and, in case you’re thinking this kind of anti-sex fanaticism stops with women, an entire industry of anti-erection devices cropped up.
These devices look like something you’d find in a torture museum, not a sex museum, which makes sense—when the point is to punish sex, the purpose is inflicting pain for non-compliance. When you can’t shame people into having the kind of sex you want them to have, you need to threaten them. Fear and intimidation are the points.
Today, fear and intimidation looks much less like the tools of a torture dungeon—they’re high tech, sophisticated, and clean. The watchful eye of the State has replaced wrought iron. People are naturally afraid of giving up their ID to the government and would probably feel uncomfortable even if the website they were being asked to do so for was Facebook. But porn is much more intimate than your run-of-the-mill social site or search engine. Porn is where we allow our deepest secrets and fantasies room to breathe. The idea that the State could be watching you while you watch it certainly won’t sit well with most people.
Pornhub is a multinational corporation that’s profit-minded before anything else. If there was a way to make this work, continuing to serve porn in America’s third most populous state, I’m sure they and an army of corporate lawyers would figure it out. The fact that they’re just pulling the plug is telling of just how hard of a punch Republicans are throwing at porn and, by extension, sex. These things tend to travel together, and free sexual speech is almost always a sign of free sexuality period.
I’ve detailed the history of religious anti-sex laws throughout America’s history. The overturning of Roe V. Wade and the banning of pornography in the half-dozen Republican states that have done so are just one more stepping stone along the long path to either sexual liberty or something resembling the Handmaiden’s Tale.
This happened before. America banned condoms, sex education, erotica, and contraception for a century before Roe V Wade. The sentence was five years of hard labor in prison. And why else would they want to ban porn? Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance said that pornography should be outright banned and that it’s a “public health crisis” (there is no credible scientific reason to believe this).
This brings me to the next portion of the law, which states that porn websites must attach a disclaimer to their sites saying that pornography is addictive and harmful to mental health. Neither of these claims have been backed up by scientific research and an abundance of scientific research says the exact opposite.
This is actually low-key terrifying. The court has said that the states can compel companies’s speech. It’s like when the government forced tobacco companies to disclose that tobacco causes cancer, only tobacco actually does cause cancer and porn is neither addictive nor harmful to mental health.
It has a very 1984 feel to it, with a radical conservative minority forcing companies to say things that are untrue in a kneel-and-kiss-the-ring style power move. Trust me, it won’t stop here. This is the next battle in the long-running war on sexuality.
Signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday, House Bill 3 (HB 3) requires online platforms that distribute pornographic material to verify that its users are aged 18 or older. The bill is set to come into effect on January 1st of next year, with hefty fines of up to $50,000 per violation for those who fail to comply. The law also requires age verification for social media sites as well.
I suppose I'll just have to go out of my way to have casual gay sex the next time I'm in either of those states to catch up the perversion quotient.
This is truly horrifying. Indiana is trying to pass a similar law…feel like a lot of the conservative states are going to try to do this 😔