There's another aspect that perhaps should have been addressed in the timeline, particularly in the age cohorts. The means of accessing pornography has changed, something the older men would realize more than the younger ones. Within the timeline, it was not easy to access pornography. People as part of their fraternity hazing would be sent to a seedy part of town to get some to add to the frat house files, or men would go to red light districts to buy some, usually held in a wrapper of some type to prevent free reading. The internet has greatly changed that. The web sites that make this available are free to consumers and are often among the most frequently accessed sites anywhere in cyberspace. Not many people opt for unrestricted. Indeed the graphs show higher fractions of each population preferring Unrestricted when it was difficult to obtain than when it is readily available. I could say the same with access to minors. When shopkeepers controlled the supply they could chase out the high school kids and realize that the frat pledges where probably one time purchasers. They cannot do this anymore, short of having some means of age verification beyond just taking the person's word for it like the alcohol sites do. So when you analyze the timeline, people asked the question in the pre-internet era already knew that minors did not have access and no new laws were needed. Now they know that minors have the same access as anyone else, which might require legislation to change.
"The means of accessing pornography has changed, something the older men would realize more than the younger ones."
This is something I've observed too. In the context I was thinking of, though, the Supreme Court caselaw that made it effectively impossible to ban pornography for all were written by men born in early 1900s who didn't even have Playboy in their formative years. The current Court has 3 Gen Xers who likely started using the internet in their 20s and have a better intuition of the risk.
The solution for those who want a full ban (I personally wouldn't mind it) presents itself: bans for minors, designed with an enforcement mechanism that makes it massively inconvenient for adults to access. For example, a state could authorize public interest law firms (or parents of minor children) to sue distributors of pornography that don't make it sufficiently inaccessible to minors. Privatizing the enforcement would put it in the hands of enthusiastic anti-pornography zealots and trial lawyers rather than possibly apathetic state attorneys, and the result is almost certain to be that porn is no longer a few keystrokes and clicks away.
You can examine the case of Louisiana's porn law. I don't understand all the details, but my understanding is that although the law is only aimed at minors, PornHub responded to it by blocking all access in the state. Which makes sense on a practical level. If you're a global website, rather than try to comply with the idiosyncratic laws of one small state, you just remove yourself from that state. If there were a Federal law, they would be more likely to attempt to comply with it. But it's going to be much easier to pass these laws at the state level, in the South.
The fact that there actually ARE laws in some places now suggests that something is going on that isn't captured in Ryan's graphs. The idea of taking real action to ban minors' access to Internet porn has gone from a far-fetched idea to one that is actually well inside the Overton Window. Note that the otherwise socially liberal UK has also been talking about taking real action on limiting minors' access to porn.
Which makes sense -- porn has become far more accessible to minors, and its harms have become both more obvious and better-documented. Gen Z's dating and marriage cultures are broken, and it's hard to argue that porn doesn't deserve some of the blame.
One idea for adults: many states with gambling have a system whereby you can voluntarily opt to be put on a list that blocks one from being able to gain access to gambling venues or websites, in order to help people better manage their addictions. Perhaps consider such a system for porn sites? Whatever mechanism is being used to block minors' access would also require verifying that an adult is not on the voluntary "no porn list". It would be good if you could produce official documentation of this: churches would want to know that their pastor and his wife are on the no porn list, for example.
Virginia, where I live, has a similar law. It's worth noting that the law, though initiated when the Republicans controlled the state House, wasn't enacted on a narrow party-line vote. IIRC over 90% of each legislative chamber voted Yes.
PornHub (and the other MindGeek sites) now have all of their content behind an age verification portal for site visitors with a Virginia IP address, but a lot of smaller sites have not bothered, which I suspect is because they think they're below the radar. Private enforcement changes that.
Fascinating, as always. I am struck by this comment in the quote from Project 2025: "(Pornography) has no claim to First Amendment protections." That's not what the courts have held, of course. The 1st A test for porn wasn't very well articulated (the famous Potter Stewart line about "I know it when I see it" comes to mind), but at least some of what most people might classify as "pornography" does get 1st A protection. And since the 1st A also provides for religious freedom, I wonder to what extent the support for a total ban is related to feelings about the 1st A more generally. My hypothesis would be that religious people who feel 1st A protection for their faith is more important might also be more resistant to a total ban on porn as it undermines the 1st A (but probably it wouldn't affect their view of bans for minors). There's probably a GSS question on free speech that might be interesting to explore with this.
This is fantastic work! Thanks for all of your insight and thoughtfulness!
I know this speaks beyond the scope of what you're trying to do, which is show quantitative data about how individuals actually think about ____ and compare that to messaging from religious and political systems.
As a sex therapist, when we talk about opinions of pornography, it's important that we compare the actual function of pornography, entertainment, with the role that it's moved into, education, as a result of overt and covert practices of sex negativity, be that through abstinence-only education, which suggests that sex should only happen in one context, or just not talking about sexual health.
To the field of sex therapy research: I would love to see a study that asks folks to simultaneously assess their views of pornography and their expectations of sexual health, both in terms of how sex ed gets provided and realistic expectations of how sexuality gets practiced, especially among young people.
Good article, but it's weird how you word some of the statistics. At multiple points, you talk about support for a ban for minors going up, when you really mean that support for a ban for adults is going down (and thus, *only* banning it for minors goes up). It's obvious from the context what you mean, but still strange wording.
I wish all of you would read The Pornography Wars by Kelsey Burke, an excellently researched work that talks to ALL stakeholders, finds nuance that most people have no idea exists, and points out why proponents of total bans and proponents of total freedom (NO ONE WANTS PORN FOR MINORS BY THE WAY) are ignoring available data for their own agendas. As usual, anything on any extreme are often working from either (a) faulty assumptions, or (b) a deep-seated personal bias they want to impose on everyone else. The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession https://a.co/d/6tsMORY
I wish the questions in the survey were more specific considering this line from Project 2025 - “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Sounds to me like they’re including books in their definition of pornography here. So, romance books as well as LGBTQ books (the targets of many recent book bans) would presumably be illegal. I would guess that position is even less popular.
Andy in TX does well to quote Potter Stewart. One aspect, which the post doesn’t touch on, is the question of what is pornography. I would hazard a guess (risking the wrath of Ryan) that it has changed markedly over the last 50-60 years. There are things bon our streets now that could only have been depicted in magazines sold under cover of brown paper when I was young.
I saw that being White was a factor in being less supportive of a total ban, and I'm curious to see what this looks like graphed by race. Did you do it by any chance?
Since COVID, there has also been a sort of "trend" in the public health world to call everything a "public health crisis" (example: racism is a public health crisis). Some have argued that pornography is a public health crisis, and others have said that crisis is too severe of a label (https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2020/pornography-is-not-a-public-health-crisis/).
What I see is that the extremes such as project 2025 (and other key groups such as Exodus Cry) on one side and planned parenthood on the other side are the loudest, and on social media, it certainly FEELS like both movement are gaining traction by going viral, although I'm not entirely sure how this translates to actual voting behavior.
There's another aspect that perhaps should have been addressed in the timeline, particularly in the age cohorts. The means of accessing pornography has changed, something the older men would realize more than the younger ones. Within the timeline, it was not easy to access pornography. People as part of their fraternity hazing would be sent to a seedy part of town to get some to add to the frat house files, or men would go to red light districts to buy some, usually held in a wrapper of some type to prevent free reading. The internet has greatly changed that. The web sites that make this available are free to consumers and are often among the most frequently accessed sites anywhere in cyberspace. Not many people opt for unrestricted. Indeed the graphs show higher fractions of each population preferring Unrestricted when it was difficult to obtain than when it is readily available. I could say the same with access to minors. When shopkeepers controlled the supply they could chase out the high school kids and realize that the frat pledges where probably one time purchasers. They cannot do this anymore, short of having some means of age verification beyond just taking the person's word for it like the alcohol sites do. So when you analyze the timeline, people asked the question in the pre-internet era already knew that minors did not have access and no new laws were needed. Now they know that minors have the same access as anyone else, which might require legislation to change.
"The means of accessing pornography has changed, something the older men would realize more than the younger ones."
This is something I've observed too. In the context I was thinking of, though, the Supreme Court caselaw that made it effectively impossible to ban pornography for all were written by men born in early 1900s who didn't even have Playboy in their formative years. The current Court has 3 Gen Xers who likely started using the internet in their 20s and have a better intuition of the risk.
The solution for those who want a full ban (I personally wouldn't mind it) presents itself: bans for minors, designed with an enforcement mechanism that makes it massively inconvenient for adults to access. For example, a state could authorize public interest law firms (or parents of minor children) to sue distributors of pornography that don't make it sufficiently inaccessible to minors. Privatizing the enforcement would put it in the hands of enthusiastic anti-pornography zealots and trial lawyers rather than possibly apathetic state attorneys, and the result is almost certain to be that porn is no longer a few keystrokes and clicks away.
You can examine the case of Louisiana's porn law. I don't understand all the details, but my understanding is that although the law is only aimed at minors, PornHub responded to it by blocking all access in the state. Which makes sense on a practical level. If you're a global website, rather than try to comply with the idiosyncratic laws of one small state, you just remove yourself from that state. If there were a Federal law, they would be more likely to attempt to comply with it. But it's going to be much easier to pass these laws at the state level, in the South.
The fact that there actually ARE laws in some places now suggests that something is going on that isn't captured in Ryan's graphs. The idea of taking real action to ban minors' access to Internet porn has gone from a far-fetched idea to one that is actually well inside the Overton Window. Note that the otherwise socially liberal UK has also been talking about taking real action on limiting minors' access to porn.
Which makes sense -- porn has become far more accessible to minors, and its harms have become both more obvious and better-documented. Gen Z's dating and marriage cultures are broken, and it's hard to argue that porn doesn't deserve some of the blame.
One idea for adults: many states with gambling have a system whereby you can voluntarily opt to be put on a list that blocks one from being able to gain access to gambling venues or websites, in order to help people better manage their addictions. Perhaps consider such a system for porn sites? Whatever mechanism is being used to block minors' access would also require verifying that an adult is not on the voluntary "no porn list". It would be good if you could produce official documentation of this: churches would want to know that their pastor and his wife are on the no porn list, for example.
Virginia, where I live, has a similar law. It's worth noting that the law, though initiated when the Republicans controlled the state House, wasn't enacted on a narrow party-line vote. IIRC over 90% of each legislative chamber voted Yes.
PornHub (and the other MindGeek sites) now have all of their content behind an age verification portal for site visitors with a Virginia IP address, but a lot of smaller sites have not bothered, which I suspect is because they think they're below the radar. Private enforcement changes that.
This is a question where I think it would be great to have receipts in the form of search history, primarily for the “total ban” folks.
I'm sure my Institutional Review Board would easily approve a research design which include perusing the search history of survey respondents.
Not privacy issues there at all!
None! But it would be interesting to see who doth protest too much!
I don't think that it's protesting too much that the very people impacted by the absurd access to pornography would like it banned.
Fascinating, as always. I am struck by this comment in the quote from Project 2025: "(Pornography) has no claim to First Amendment protections." That's not what the courts have held, of course. The 1st A test for porn wasn't very well articulated (the famous Potter Stewart line about "I know it when I see it" comes to mind), but at least some of what most people might classify as "pornography" does get 1st A protection. And since the 1st A also provides for religious freedom, I wonder to what extent the support for a total ban is related to feelings about the 1st A more generally. My hypothesis would be that religious people who feel 1st A protection for their faith is more important might also be more resistant to a total ban on porn as it undermines the 1st A (but probably it wouldn't affect their view of bans for minors). There's probably a GSS question on free speech that might be interesting to explore with this.
This is fantastic work! Thanks for all of your insight and thoughtfulness!
I know this speaks beyond the scope of what you're trying to do, which is show quantitative data about how individuals actually think about ____ and compare that to messaging from religious and political systems.
As a sex therapist, when we talk about opinions of pornography, it's important that we compare the actual function of pornography, entertainment, with the role that it's moved into, education, as a result of overt and covert practices of sex negativity, be that through abstinence-only education, which suggests that sex should only happen in one context, or just not talking about sexual health.
To the field of sex therapy research: I would love to see a study that asks folks to simultaneously assess their views of pornography and their expectations of sexual health, both in terms of how sex ed gets provided and realistic expectations of how sexuality gets practiced, especially among young people.
Thank you
Good article, but it's weird how you word some of the statistics. At multiple points, you talk about support for a ban for minors going up, when you really mean that support for a ban for adults is going down (and thus, *only* banning it for minors goes up). It's obvious from the context what you mean, but still strange wording.
Maybe parents should understand the controls they have over how their children access the internet? These kids aren’t paying ISPs for internet access.
I wish all of you would read The Pornography Wars by Kelsey Burke, an excellently researched work that talks to ALL stakeholders, finds nuance that most people have no idea exists, and points out why proponents of total bans and proponents of total freedom (NO ONE WANTS PORN FOR MINORS BY THE WAY) are ignoring available data for their own agendas. As usual, anything on any extreme are often working from either (a) faulty assumptions, or (b) a deep-seated personal bias they want to impose on everyone else. The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession https://a.co/d/6tsMORY
I wish the questions in the survey were more specific considering this line from Project 2025 - “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Sounds to me like they’re including books in their definition of pornography here. So, romance books as well as LGBTQ books (the targets of many recent book bans) would presumably be illegal. I would guess that position is even less popular.
Andy in TX does well to quote Potter Stewart. One aspect, which the post doesn’t touch on, is the question of what is pornography. I would hazard a guess (risking the wrath of Ryan) that it has changed markedly over the last 50-60 years. There are things bon our streets now that could only have been depicted in magazines sold under cover of brown paper when I was young.
I saw that being White was a factor in being less supportive of a total ban, and I'm curious to see what this looks like graphed by race. Did you do it by any chance?
Since COVID, there has also been a sort of "trend" in the public health world to call everything a "public health crisis" (example: racism is a public health crisis). Some have argued that pornography is a public health crisis, and others have said that crisis is too severe of a label (https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2020/pornography-is-not-a-public-health-crisis/).
What I see is that the extremes such as project 2025 (and other key groups such as Exodus Cry) on one side and planned parenthood on the other side are the loudest, and on social media, it certainly FEELS like both movement are gaining traction by going viral, although I'm not entirely sure how this translates to actual voting behavior.
2018 gallup data indicates an interesting and dramatic difference between democrats and republicans on the topic of pornography.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235280/americans-say-pornography-morally-acceptable.aspx
What's the object here and what is it attempting to do? In our present environment is there any way to alter anything of this nature? Tell us how.