The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Sometimes, when I read about legal and technological efforts ostensibly designed to protect people (usually minors) from various forms of harmful online content (usually porn), I’m reminded of a meeting I sat in almost 30 years ago.
The purpose of the meeting, as the executive from the company I worked for at the time put it once we’d all gathered in the conference room, was to “figure out how to completely secure the web servers” against potential hacking, denial of service attacks and the like.
A fellow named Randy, who led the company’s IT department, looked right at me after the boss said this. We both began to laugh, uproariously. The boss wasn’t amused, but he knew that if his lead tech and lead marketing guy both thought it was funny, there likely was something out of line about what he’d just said.
“You want a web server to be totally secure?” Randy asked. “The good news is that’s easy. All we have to do is power it down, unplug the network cable from the back and never turn it on again. Of course, that will make the server somewhat less useful than it is now, but it will be entirely hack proof, that much I can promise.”
Lately, Randy’s point has been swimming around in my brain as I read about the state of Utah’s efforts to put the internet porn genie back in the bottle. His point, as I saw it anyway, was that if you want to be online, if you want to be part of that great big global network called the internet, then you’re going to shoulder some risk in the process.
Occasionally, even people who actively lobby the government to restrict and regulate things on the internet, be it porn, social media, misinformation or some other type of content they find problematic, show some recognition of the fact the government can’t truly solve some of their online problems, because some of their problems are endemic to the internet, for lack of a better way to put it.
Take this recent article from the Deseret News, for example. The article’s primary purpose appears to be to laud the Utah government for its new laws mandating that (some) adult websites must perform age verification checks on their users before displaying anything explicit to those users, as well as putting the onus on adult sites to do something about people use Virtual Private Networks to circumvent the state’s law.
Among other things, the piece introduces readers to a young anti-porn activist named Smith Alley, who talks about his own early exposure to online porn, the problems he says that exposure caused, his evolution into a full-fledged anti-porn activist – and why he thinks Utah’s new law is both great and overdue.
But a funny thing happens along the way. We learn from Alley that, even though he believes parents need the help of the state and of technology companies to solve the problem of minors being exposed to porn, some of the things his own parents did to help him kick his habit involved neither the state nor Big Tech.
“With the help of his parents, Alley decided to jump ‘20 years into the past,’ to a time before unlimited porn was just a click away, replacing his iPod Touch with a flip phone, and screen time with the outdoors,” the article informs us.
So far as I’m aware, there’s no law that incentivizes parents to take smartphones away from their kids and replace them with flip phones, nor is there a company out there encouraging people to do so. And yet, Smith Alley’s parents managed to do it anyway. Imagine that!
Near the end of the article, after learning that Alley is “ecstatic” about the law Utah has passed and is now enforcing and that he’s “proud to live in a state that is family-focused,” he starts to sound less like an anti-porn activist and more like… well, like me.
“(Alley says) these policy shifts must be accompanied by a cohort of parents who are willing to reverse the normalization of ‘iPad kids,’” the article informs us.
“Parents across the country need to really reduce the amount of technology they have in their house,” Alley said. “I just don’t think kids should have that technology in their life. I think we’d be better off without it.”
So, even with age verification laws on the books, even with a means to sue companies who fail to comply with the law and even with a porn tax in place to help offset the alleged harms of internet porn, the bottom line is that parents need to be more involved in the lives of their children – and technology needs to be less central to those same lives.
Just as there’s no way to live a risk-free life (and who would want to, really?), there’s no such thing as a risk-free way to raise your kids. And there’s sure as hell no way to let kids loose on a global computer network and have their journey therein be safe, respectful of their innocence and age appropriate.
When I was a kid, there were TV shows broadcast later than I was allowed to stay up. My parents didn’t want me watching those shows, so they forbade me from doing so. On the occasions when I’d get caught violating their rule, you know what they didn’t do?
They didn’t write to the FCC demanding that those programs be taken off the air. They didn’t get angry at Zenith and RCA and demand that television manufacturers put parental controls on every model they sold. Instead, my parents imposed consequences on me – and let the rest of the damn world live its life.
Yes, the world has changed since I was a kid. But what hasn’t changed – and likely won’t change, even when AI nannies inevitably become all the rage – is the need for parents to be involved in their children’s lives.
And no law, be it one that governs Utah, Texas, or that reaches across the entire country, is going to change that.
