The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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For those under a certain age, it might be tempting to believe the War on Porn is something new. After all, if you were born in the aughts and are currently in your early to mid-twenties, you came up during a period of minimal regulation of online adult entertainment – and you might not even be aware of the extent to which brick and mortar adult businesses have restricted by the likes of zoning regulations and the threat of being prosecuted under state-level obscenity laws.
For those of us who were already plying our trade in the adult business when the commercial internet was in its infancy, our memories are filled with historical examples of governments seeking to restrict or eradicate the distribution of sexually explicit materials.
Even attempts to rein in online porn specifically are not new. The “Communications Decency ACT” (CDA) was passed in 1996, 30 years ago. The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) passed two years later. Neither accomplished their goals, as both were at least partially enjoined by the courts.
Now, 30 years on, proponents of the CDA and COPA have prevailed, at least to an extent, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in FSC v. Paxton – and age verification is now a fact of life for the online adult industry.
It would be foolish to believe that with the upholding of age verification laws, anti-porn crusaders will be satisfied and turn their attention elsewhere. The goal for some of these folks, including those who composed the infamous “Project 2025” policy framework, is nothing less than a full ban on porn and strictly enforced criminalization of its mere possession, let alone its distribution.
While the technology employed to restrict access to online porn has ‘improved’ (for lack of a better word), the core questions underlying the effort to restrict access to – or indeed, ban – online porn have not changed.
Back in 2004, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh framed the issue quite effectively in an article he wrote for the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. The effort to crack down on porn – at the time something envisioned as an undertaking led by the U.S. Department of Justice under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft – had “three possible outcomes” Volokh wrote.
“(1) The crackdown on porn is doomed to be utterly ineffective at preventing the supposedly harmful effects of porn on its viewers, and on the viewers’ neighbors.
(2) The crackdown on porn will be made effective — by implementing a comprehensive government-mandated filtering system run by some administrative agency that constantly monitors the Net and requires private service providers to block any sites that the agency says are obscene.
(3) The crackdown on porn will turn into a full-fledged War on Smut that will be made effective by prosecuting, imprisoning, and seizing the assets of porn buyers.”
While the primary mode of ‘attack’ has shifted from greatly expanded obscenity prosecutions to mandated age verification, Volokh’s three predicted outcomes still loom as a potential end state. Given the porn prohibitionist maximalism that courses through the veins of Project 2025, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and other similar groups, they will likely never give up on the ultimate goal of banning and criminalizing porn.
As such, it’s worth asking: What if the governments, think tanks and activists who favor the idea of an outright porn ban get what they want? What if instead of merely mandating age verification, governments go further and begin prosecuting ‘users’ of porn in furtherance of the War on Porn, much as they have done for decades in the War on Drugs?
I’ll tell you what won’t happen; people won’t magically lose their interest in watching porn, making porn, or selling porn. Just as the War on Drugs has made prisoners out of many junkies, while making things lucrative (albeit high risk) for those willing to shoulder the perils of drug running and drug dealing, porn will simply become a black market good, as it was for many decades back before the rise of the modern adult industry.
I hate to break it to the anti-porn crusader crowd, but the simple fact is you can’t legislate desire out of existence, and you can’t prosecute people into purity. If the failed experiment of the Prohibition Era wasn’t enough to teach us that lesson, the decades-long, ongoing failure of the War on Drugs surely ought to have done it. But here we are, in 2026, blithely marching ourselves toward another failed deployment of government resources, in vain pursuit of protecting people from themselves.
So, the truth is, the hypothetical question that headlines this article, what if anti-porn forces win the War on Porn, isn’t the right question. The right question is: How much damage will be done in the quixotic pursuit of the unachievable outcome of a porn-free society?
Unfortunately, if history is any guide, the answer is “too much.”
