Protect children, not porn

I’ve told all four of my children once they were old enough to understand, “You may not be looking for porn, but porn is looking for you.” They need to have a basic explanation of what porn is and why it’s harmful.

Like most mothers, I’m on guard against porn. We know that “soft” porn can be found in video games, action movies, and comic books. We know that harder forms are just a click away, so we install filtering software and require our children’s devices to be used only in common spaces. But in today’s porn-saturated world, even the most aware parents know it’s not a question of if our children will see porn but when.

Unlike most mothers, I run an organization that works to protect children’s lives, families, bodies, and minds. When it comes to safeguarding children’s minds, pornography is an archenemy. I know that pornography functions like a drug, especially on children’s developing brains. I know that pornography use is directly connected to violence within teen relationships. And I know that today’s pornography is not your grandfather’s Playboy.

That is what my nonprofit organization, Them Before Us, communicated to the Supreme Court in the amicus brief we filed in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which examines the constitutionality of a Texas law mandating age verification for those viewing online pornography.

We presume that the justices aren’t familiar with the utter obscenity and depravity of today’s porn industry and didn’t want any confusion about exactly what kind of “speech” would be protected should the law be struck down.

Our brief included a homepage screenshot of the globe’s most trafficked pornography website, Pornhub. By “included” I mean 80% of the thumbnail images are blacked out due to their graphic nature. Yet any 12-year-old, the average age of the first exposure to porn, can not only view the (nauseating) automatically generated previews, they can access the full content with one gateless click.

Violence against women is also a regular feature of today’s porn. Our brief mentions the 2 million views of the “Spit in My Mouth and Steal My Soul” video in which a woman is strangled during sex. She visibly and audibly gasps for air, her face turning red from lack of blood flow. As noted in our brief, one study found that “far from being represented as aberrant, sexual practices involving coercion, deception, non-consent and criminal activity are described in mainstream online pornography in ways that position them as permissible.”

Pornhub’s 2023 Year in Review reports that “gangbang,” the successive rape of one person by a group of people, saw a “substantial increase of +12 spots” in its rankings from the previous year.

It should come as no surprise that “both boys and girls viewing pornography, especially sexually violent pornography, were much more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviors.”

The petitioners have brought this case to the Supreme Court on the grounds that age verification laws violate First Amendment free speech protections. They portray sexual content online as “artistic, informative, or even essential to important parts of career and life.” But as is clear from just the porn slivers you’ve been subjected to in this column, the Texas law doesn’t regulate “artistic” or “informative” expression. Nor is the “I KNOW You Can’t Resist My Perfect Body Stepbro!” video “essential to important parts of career and life.”

No. This isn’t a case about freedom of speech. This is a case about child protection. It’s about the right children have to be kept safe from the kind of traumatic, innocence-stealing content that results when a 10-year-old stumbles upon “THIS [obscenity] LOVES [obscenity] AND [obscenity] HANDCUFF [obscenity].”

The solution is simple and effective—requiring online porn peddlers to verify users’ ages before they watch women get choked out during sex. The Texas law also mandates that these porn sites display health warnings about the potential effects of consuming pornography, which has been rightly declared a public health crisis in 16 states.

No “chilling of speech” results from age verification laws. Will it make some adults slightly more uncomfortable if they have to verify that they are 34 and not 14 when they click on that bondage video—a step that can be taken without even disclosing their identity? Perhaps. But that is a small price to pay for protecting our children from the pervasive and predatory porn industry.