The departure of pornography giant Pornhub from the French market is revealing, not because of the timing of their decision but because of the reason for it: Pornhub would rather suspend all services to French viewers than take steps to prevent children from accessing its content.
As Politico reports:
“The owner of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn plans to stop serving adult content to French users as soon as Wednesday afternoon, in protest of government measures forcing it to verify the age of its visitors…..
….. The industry giant has fought French officials tooth and nail over the measures. The French audience is Pornhub’s second-largest in the world, after the United States and ahead of the Philippines, Mexico and the United Kingdom, its own internal 2024 statistics showed.”
To be fair to Pornhub, the company is not without a point on the issue of privacy, which is how it is choosing to couch its objections to age verification. It points out that in order to verify a person’s age, it would need to have some kind of official document from them. And that it would need to track their browsing. The company probably reasonably feels that its regular customers might be more… conservative in their browsing if they knew that the website in question had both access to their real identity and also kept data on exactly what people watched, and for how long.
It is also evidently true that when data exists and is stored, that data can be subpoenaed. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where the perfectly legal porn consumption of adults could be obtained and deployed against them in court in divorce, custody, or criminal cases. I confess that, in the normal course of events, my own ideological sympathies would generally lie strongly with those who oppose the recording of people’s personal data in that manner. It’s this vexxed Libertarian streak that Pornhub are attempting to appeal to, in all of us. We should ignore it.
Because of course, we come to the Helen Lovejoy point: Won’t somebody please, think of the children?
The question is simply what is more important to us as a society? Maintaining an adult person’s right to absolute anonymity in their porn-consumption habits, or keeping children away from the stuff entirely? Like most normal, well-balanced people, I would suggest that the latter goal is valuable enough to society to justify the relatively minor infringement on personal rights that the measure involves.
Besides, if you ask me, making adults a little bit more queasy and discerning about the kind of pornography that they watch wouldn’t be a bad thing, in and of itself. Shame and the fear of social consequences is a thing that has evolved in human society primarily as a mechanism for moderating and modulating socially undesirable behaviours like, in this instance, consuming violent and abusive pornography.
I have spoken before – on the podcast with Sarah – about how old I was when I first encountered pornography (by which I really mean, pictures of naked ladies). I was about seventeen. That I think is roughly true for most men in their forties or older. It is notably no longer true for the younger generation of boys and men, many of whom are now encountering it before they hit their teenage years. Because this is such a new development, the fact of the matter is that we simply do not know the impact it is having on young people, though a few disturbing trends are emerging, such as the dramatic increase in choking or strangling a sexual partner:
A majority of those surveyed (61.3%) had seen choking depicted in porn, although this included more men (71.4%) than women (51.5%). A third had also seen choking represented on social media. This includes memes, such as the “choke me daddy” memes, which sometimes depict men who don’t want to choke women as weak or “vanilla”.
There’s a strong case to be made that pornography and its ubiquity in the internet age constitutes the largest, least regulated, and arguably most dangerous experiment ever conducted on the human race. There is no evidence that I can find to back up my view, but I find it notable that the enormous rise in the availability of pornographic content is correlated with an enormous drop in the birth rate in almost every advanced country, along with notable falls in the amount of actual real-world sex young people are having with each other. It has also been temporally associated with an enormous increase in the number of young women with gender dysphoria, which many credible experts put down to a desire in young women to flee womanhood itself, linked to how women are depicted on screen.
Porn is also temporally associated – that is its rise in availability has been coupled with – a measurable and observable rise in young male anger and alienation, and political extremism amongst young people. There are other factors, economic and social, that may be playing a role in all of these issues, but to exclude pornography as a contributing factor would be ridiculous.
Pornhub and its associated companies are the behemoth at the top of that foodchain. They sit atop an industry littered with the suicide of young women, the addiction of thousands of men, the breakdown of marriages, and the rise of sexually violent – even if consensual – encounters amongst the young.
Asking adults to hand over their ID to continue watching is not unreasonable, in these circumstances. And if it made some of them re-consider their porn habit, that wouldn’t be a net negative either.
Finally, I’ll note the following: In Ireland, almost every addiction results in regulation. Gambling addiction results in scrutiny of the bookmakers. Tobacco addiction results in villainization of the tobacco companies. Alcohol addiction results in restrictions on the sale of alcohol.
In Ireland, of all addictions, only the big porn companies seem to get away with doing what they want.
Why on earth would, or should, that continue? The French – perhaps for the first time ever – are entirely correct.