Is porn the new normal?

Among the many surprises awaiting viewers of the Republican National Convention two weeks ago, perhaps none was quite so jarring as the appearance of porn star Amber Rose on stage. Declaring her newfound realization that “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight; it’s all love,” Rose alarmed and outraged many religious conservatives who hesitated to take lessons on the meaning of “love” from an OnlyFans influencer. But should we have been surprised? Perhaps pornography is, to borrow the cliché, simply the new normal.

In the early 2000s, broadband internet became widely available, abolishing the barriers of time and space that have been humanity’s greatest ally in controlling access to pornography and other fuel for sinful desires. But a sense of shame and decency still limited porn consumption—especially for children—in an era when you needed a desktop or laptop computer to view it online. From 2007 onward, however, you could carry a device with access to the internet in your pocket, and many parents lost little time in putting these portable porn delivery systems in their kids’ Christmas stockings. Today, almost everyone under 30 has come of age in a context that takes on-demand porn access for granted. By some estimates, more than 90 percent of men and 60 percent of women now regularly consume pornography in some form.

Of course, in moral terms, “normal” doesn’t mean “normative”—there are plenty of things we do that we admit we shouldn’t. However, as the etymological connection between the words suggests, it can be hard to separate our moral norms from what we’ve come to consider normal. If “Everybody does it,” we’re liable to shrug our shoulders. Unsurprisingly, then, recent studies indicate that only 14 percent of Americans still consider pornography “morally wrong,” with such apathy disproportionately concentrated among young adults. From this standpoint, Trump’s campaign was just being logical: It wants to reach young people, and for young people, Amber Rose, with 3.7 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and 24.3 million on Instagram, is just another big-name celebrity.

There’s another reason, though, why conservatives were so willing to go along with this transvaluation of values. For years, if not decades, some who think themselves conservative have poured their political energies into the ideal of “free speech,” understood no longer as rational public deliberation about the good (the Founding Fathers’ meaning) but as a vague, open-ended “right to express yourself.” Since for the majority of moderns, the most meaningful form of self-expression is sexual, it should hardly surprise us that pornography has been the biggest beneficiary of free-speech absolutism.

Consider some conservatives’ enthusiastic embrace of Elon Musk after he promised to “remove censorship” from Twitter and return “free speech” to the platform. To be sure, under the previous regime, it had tended to police conservative viewpoints with a heavy hand, making dubious use of the misinformation label and blocking some users for views deemed offensive to progressive values. But it should have been obvious that no public square can function without some kind of censorship—speech, like everything else, can only be free within boundaries. Without such boundaries, the social media platform has descended into a chaos of anon trolls, pimps, and pundits vying for attention.

When Musk announced he would rebrand Twitter as X, some men joked that their wives might wonder what they were doing on such a site. It turns out it was no joke. For years, Twitter has served as a gateway to hardcore porn websites, with many models using it as free advertising for paid content hosted elsewhere. But in a policy update in May, X announced it was going officially X-rated, with explicit pornography welcome so long as it was hidden behind a “click to view adult content” warning. To be sure, under-18s weren’t officially allowed to click through the warnings, but since X never bothers to verify the age of its users, the restriction is all but meaningless.

Thankfully, most Americans still seem to intuit that even if porn isn’t bad for them, it might be bad for their kids, which is why a recent spate of state laws seeking to enforce age verification for adult websites have passed with overwhelming majorities. In the current climate, however, these laws will only withstand constitutional scrutiny if they can be found not to “burden” the free speech rights of adults. With more and more adults coming to think of accessing Pornhub as no more noteworthy than streaming Netflix, it may not be long before we lose even the lingering cultural reflex in favor of protecting kids from such content. The Supreme Court’s hearing this fall on an age verification law in Texas will likely be a moment of truth for social conservatives: Does our society, “conservative” or “liberal,” still care about anything more than “free expression?” And are we really ready to concede defeat when it comes to pornography?