A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It's Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat.
Pornhub has pulled out of multiple states rather than comply with age-verification laws.
www.politico.com
)n June 15, 2022, a freshman legislator in Louisiana’s House of Representatives accomplished something no other lawmaker or activist in the country could claim: She passed a law that is changing the online porn industry.
If you think this was the result of a bitter culture war battle, think again.
“Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors,” asserts the bill that state Rep. Laurie Schlegel introduced. Almost no one in the capitol in Baton Rouge disputes the statement; the bill sailed through the Louisiana House 96-1 and the State Senate 34-0. The bill holds pornography websites liable unless the websites “perform reasonable age verification methods” — in short, requiring users to show government ID to prove they are 18 or older. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, no fan of the legislature’s Republican super-majority, signed the bill about a week after it arrived on his desk.
“I promise you he has no qualms about vetoing our bills,” Schlegel told me. In fact, earlier this summer, the governor had unsuccessfully vetoed a bill banning puberty blockers, hormone therapy and elective surgery for minors, calling it “so blatantly defective on so many levels.”
These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show.
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. Eilish told Stern, “I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. ... I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”
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. 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. She compared him to a faceless mannequin in response.
Schlegel isn’t a social worker. She’s a sex addiction therapist. “That’s my specialty,” she told me, proudly. It’s even in her X bio. Already aware of the problem of childhood exposure to pornography due to her work, the Eilish interview inspired Schlegel to act. “I just thought how courageous it was. … It just sort of re-emphasized to me what a problem this is, especially for our children.”
But how would Schlegel, a freshman representative, convince her colleagues to take on an industry that seemed too big to curtail? She needed an expert to persuade the legislature, she figured, and she had just the person in mind: Gail Dines, whose anti-porn research and activism had been on Schlegel’s radar for years. Schlegel first discovered her work through a 2015 TEDx talk entitled “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture.”
Dines is a self-described radical feminist, sociologist and anti-porn crusader from Manchester, England who has lived in the United States for 37 years. It’s a strange coupling, between an anti-abortion Louisiana Republican and a professor who says her radical feminism “encompasses many socialist feminist principles.” But they know that.
“It’s not a marriage. Let’s be very clear on this,” Dines told me. Though they share the same goal of diverting kids from porn, they don’t necessarily see it as part of the same larger project. For Dines, “This is about doing the right thing when it comes to controlling capitalism that’s out of control.”
Dines is not subtle about the ills of pornography and hypersexualization. When her speaking tour stopped at my high school in 2017, she told my junior class, “I bet you, every woman here, all of you female students, could come up here right now, and you could do the ‘fuck me’ look,” referring to the Victoria’s Secret model displayed on the projector behind her. About a minute later, she told us, somewhat forlornly, “Men who rape are not deviants. They are over-conformists.”
