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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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"Oi, Bruv, Can I See Your Porn Loisence"

I've made this joke a lot in relation to the serially-delayed and maybe abandoned UK age verification mandate, so it's probably worth talking about Louisiana doing it for real:

Act 440 took effect on Jan. 1 to create a cause of civil action for Louisiana parents whose children access pornographic websites that do not utilize an age verification process. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Jefferson, passed both chambers of the Republican-controlled Legislature in June with little debate and only a single nay vote — from Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans...

Last week, Schlegel took to Twitter to defend the law, which has faced criticism for restricting personal freedoms, as well as questions about legality and enforcement.

"This law had bipartisan support and passed almost unanimously in both the House & Senate with close to 50 co-authors, including Democrats and Republicans. It was not a Republican win but a win for children in Louisiana. This bill is about protecting children not limiting adults," she posted. "And thankfully, the technology today allows us to not only protect children from the dangers of online pornography but also protect the privacy of those adults who want to view this material."

Text of law here: it requires porn sites -- or at least most sites with more than 33% of their content matching the law's definition of 'harmful to minors', based around a modified Miller obscenity test -- to use 'reasonable age verification methods', or be liable for unspecified damages and court costs.

In its defense, the law does prohibit age verification companies from retaining "identifying information" (with again unspecified civil damages) after allowing access. For a variety of technical reasons such enforcement would be incredibly impractical, though: it's not clear how a person would find out, would find out who actually did it, and then show damages, without getting any complaint dismissed to early for meaningful discovery, or even with enough certainty to justify starting a lawsuit.

There's a pretty clear and wide potential for harm. Yes, yes, getting your porn tastes revealed to the general world isn't as embarrassing as it might once have been, even as the potential for Implications remains. And while I might trust the average incredibly-sketchy-porn-site or age verification company to secure my personal data that they're totally not supposed to be storing better than, say, Home Depot or EquiFax, that's kinda damning with faint praise. For someone that wants to host material -- increasingly, a necessity to speak in any meaningful sense -- this is a pretty tremendous landmine: not only do I get to wager what a Louisiana court might consider prurient or how it might do math, or what the risks of a teenager even finding my material might be, but also such fun imponderables such as "what impact might an unsuccessful lawsuit have on my job or position in the community".

It's... also not clear how this is going to work, at a pretty fundamental level. There are some deep constitutional questions regarding compelled and anonymous speech, and some annoying legalistic ones like the dormant commerce clause, and this is the sort of thing that's had SCOTUS involved before. And then there's annoying problems like grammar issues, whether the exceptions meant for exclude CDNs or avoid supremacy clause problems with CDA230 would also exclude booru or tube-style sites that do not create content, or how ads get handled period. Nevermind how much of a clusterfuck that "33%" threshold is going to be for all but the most overtly and specifically porn-focused sites: do courts have the infrastructure to handle this when even specialty sites can have millions of files in content? What happens if it changes, and how quickly does a site need to track changes? If a site decides to host a million pages of lorem ipsum or an old copy of wikipedia to pad their SFW side?

((Example: e621 has 3.3 million uploaded images, with 26% of them "Safe" and 20% "Questionable" ratings, though this goes by different definitions than what the law here would involve, or even what non-furries would necessarily define them to be. Do I want to make bets on how the law would go there? No, because the answer is 'don't get in an incredibly humiliating interstate civil suit if you can avoid it'.))

Some is just that none of the authors of the law nor the people promoting it can agree on what, exactly, the harms or scales of damages are. Peter Gheil points to Aella as the prototype of the 'who-cares' side of the progressive and libertarian perspective, and there's a lot of Culture War in that position existing, but there's a lot of positions outside of it (sfw meme). At the other end, there's people who want the extremely unsexy nudity excised from Maus, or object to Gender Queer over one comic panel out of hundreds of pages having portraying someone performing 'oral sex' on a dildo. Presumably Heinlein's later works fall somewhere in this spectrum, or outside of it.

But there's a slightly awkward situation where, in addition to the Baptist-and-Bootlegger coalitions, there's a separate compromise where this sort of law (Utah is considering a similar one, and California's regulatory apparatus might accidentally invent it by parallel means) is vague enough to marry people who simply don't want their ten-year-olds stumbling across the weirdest porn possible after typoing a web search, those who think a seventeen-year-old seeing a nipple will immediately and irrevocably twist his or her sexual orientation, the TradCaths who think showing ankles can lead someone down the path of temptation, the feminists that think showing PIV or bondage will push men to rape or domestic violence, and the feminists that think maybe sadomasochism should start in the late teens, along with every possible or plausible position in-between. Actual policy implementations are going to get a little rougher when practice comes about.

On that bootlegger side, some sites have voluntarily complied: MindGeek-related sites (such as PornHub) have begun requesting Louisiana clients to provide driver's licenses to the third-party LAWallet (which is its own weird mess). MindGeek had been an early adopter for that currently-mothballed UK version and has done some technology work on the verification side, along with being a pretty high-profile target, so it's not a huge surprise, though in turn it's far from clear how many other companies would want to work with them. Or comply at all.

In turn, though, it's hard to not think about where this might go down the road. Many of the objections to porn here generalize beyond it, even if a number of the advocates of restrictions don't (currently) want to expand them. China has recently pushed 'video game addiction' as a concept to the point of restricting gameplay hours, and a general 'social media addiction' is a pretty common political talking point (and tbf, may not even be wrong), and there's been an increasing (and tbf, not even wrong) push to talk about how the human brain doesn't really finish maturing until whatever age the immature-brained speaker wants a matter to add restrictions to.

And a tool to bring identity to a wide swath of internet activity is a pretty nice weapon to leave around waiting for someone to be tempted by it.

A big can of worms. This is why we should have stuck with properly interpreted obscenity laws (no, Japan's farcical censorship code does not count) and nipped this stuff in the bud. There would be no Mindgeek, no status quo where this stuff is part of popular culture and freely accessible. Nixon said it best I think:

The Commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting harmful effect on a man's character. If that were true, it must also be true that great books, great paintings, and great plays have no ennobling effect on a man's conduct. Centuries of civilization and 10 minutes of common sense tell us otherwise.

The Commission calls for the repeal of laws controlling smut for adults, while recommending continued restrictions on smut for children. In an open society, this proposal is untenable. If the level of filth rises in the adult community, the young people in our society cannot help but also be inundated by the flood.

Pornography can corrupt a society and a civilization. The people's elected representatives have the right and obligation to prevent that corruption.

The warped and brutal portrayal of sex in books, plays, magazines, and movies, if not halted and reversed, could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization.

I'm fairly sure if Nixon were alive today, he would fully agree that the wellsprings of Western culture have been poisoned, in part by Mindgeek and co. Nobody wants to reproduce anymore, which in itself is enough to end civilization (not accounting for AI or life extension).

Do you think that "nobody wants to reproduce anymore" because of porn?

Rather than, say, easily available contraception, increasing costs of raising a family, declining mental health, extended childhoods, any of the other bogeymen of the day? There are plenty of reasons why total fertility is down. I don't see why pornography would break the camel's back.

Not a sole causative factor but certainly a contributing factor. That's why I said 'in part'. Porn doesn't help. It glamorizes casual sex, makes it more normal. That probably helps reduce fertility.

And there are many subtleties about culture we don't understand. There are certain high-fertility cultures that remain, usually concentrated among religious groups. Nearly all of these intensely religious groups have strong obscenity prohibitions - radical Islam, radical Jewish factions, radical Christian sects like the Mormons. China tries to suppress obscenity but has low fertility - it's not a panacea. But anti-obscenity is part of some mysterious essence of stable, sustainable civilization/culture that we lack. I think we should've preserved it since it's not exactly easy to reimpose. Plus there are all the other harms in exploitation and creating unrealistic expectations that feminists talk about.

radical Islam, radical Jewish factions, radical Christian sects like the Mormons. China tries to suppress obscenity but has low fertility - it's not a panacea

Controlling for income, isn't a potentially important difference in the cases of the predictive success or failure of your hypothesis (1) social groups where women are strongly encouraged to focus on child-rearing and (2) those where they are not and have been legally dissuaded from having large families for generations?

At this sort of level of complexity, I don't think that messy correlations are going to tell you much about causation. It's better to look at the values and incentives that people have, and analyse their probable effects. Is it possible to have a highly obscene society where women are incentivised to spend a lot of time in the home raising children? I don't know. We do know that it is possible to have the opposite, though its compatibility with modern Western income and law is dubious.

China certainly has other factors going on than just obscenity. I only brought up China to say that I didn't think banning obscenity was singlehandedly capable of making your population graph back into a pyramid. I completely agree that it's a multi-factor issue. I agree that it's very hard to go back to the old equilibrium.

But the highest fertility groups tend to be religiously conservative and anti-obscenity. I'd add pre '45 'For the glory of the Emperor' Japanese to the list of high fertility cultures. They also engaged in heavy censorship, including obscenity. Even on the 'incentives and values' level I can only see fertility-lowering effects from pornography. It encourages people to do unconventional sex acts for fun or variety. It glamorizes promiscuity, which reduces marriage. The Catholics go on about how sex should be about reproduction, not pleasure - they're known for being fecund.

Now maybe losing obscenity laws is a byproduct of being a certain kind of individualist society that has low fertility, not a contributor. But is anything so clearcut as that? Everything affects everything else, effects are also causes. I'm confident that allowing pornography has some kind of effect on culture - whether it's embarassing men or women who don't think they're up to standard or pushing weird trends like furries or incest or whatever, the effects all seem to point in one direction.

they're known for being fecund.

Are Catholic birth rates impressive, when controlling for income? The pleas of the Pope didn't seem to do much for Irish or Irish-American birth rates, once the Irish weren't poor. As Terence O'Neill (a Protestant Prime Minister of Northern Ireland) put it:

It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets; they will refuse to have eighteen children. But if a Roman Catholic is jobless, and lives in the most ghastly hovel he will rear eighteen children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.

Bigotry aside, he had a point. Catholic birth rates seem to be high only because of Catholics who were poor. As Catholic groups catch up with standards of living that first emerged in Protestant Northern European societies, their fertility also falls.

Now maybe losing obscenity laws is a byproduct of being a certain kind of individualist society that has low fertility

Or maybe they don't have a direct causal connection.