We were more comfortable with porn, it seems, when its production felt further removed from us as consumers, when it seemed like the performers couldn’t talk back, make their own rules, or set their own prices. Perhaps we preferred the days when it was less plausible that an ex-girlfriend, sister, or daughter might dabble in cam work or sell nudes between jobs. “Sentiment towards online nudie girls went from fond-neutral to outright hostile” in recent years, the sex worker, data scientist, and Substacker who goes by Aella has written. She says that apps and websites have cracked down on creator profiles; her account on OkCupid was deleted after 10 years, even though she never used it to sell anything. Most sex workers have a story like this. “The mood behind the scenes is grim,” says Chloe Corrupt, an AVN-nominated adult performer and director. “Social media posts are getting half the engagement and twice the hateful replies.”
With a two-front war on porn underway, adult industry workers find themselves asking: Who will defend porn? It’s something most people consume in private while condemning in public. Siri Dahl suspects that “a lot of guys would be genuinely upset if porn was made illegal, but they wouldn’t ever stand up to say that, because they don’t want to be called a simp.” Free speech warriors have plenty of other fights to take on. And Democrats routinely vote for legislation that curtails sexual expression. While Chloe Corrupt acknowledges “a coordinated effort from the far right” behind the pressures on adult content, she also blames the industry “for largely fighting these battles in court, without engaging with the broader court of public opinion.”
All of the adult industry professionals I spoke with agreed that minors shouldn’t have unfettered access to porn, but none of them think blocking the more above-ground sites will help. “In Florida, you can’t go to Pornhub. But I just went on Google image search and saw a wide, gaping asshole,” jokes Cheri DeVille, a performer who brands herself as “the internet’s stepmom.” Her tone turns serious. In sending users away from “legal, compliant, ethical sites with paperwork and enthusiastic consent from the models,” she says, these laws might drive traffic to platforms that don’t “play ball with American law,” which are more likely to contain content produced without model releases or labor protections for performers—like revenge porn, pirated footage, deepfakes, and child sexual abuse material.
“We agree with the spirit of the law,” says Alex Kekesi, head of community and brand for Aylo, Porhhub’s parent company, “but people who want to consume porn aren’t just going to stop looking at it overnight because one site that they like isn’t available in their area. They’re going to go to another platform.” New research on the impact of age-gating supports these claims. In the states that have mandated it, traffic to compliant websites—those requiring IDs—decreased by 51%, but searches for VPNs increased by 23.6%, and traffic to noncompliant websites increased by 48.1%.
