Utah declared war on pornography, but kids are still swimming in smut. 

• Cover art by Daniel McLoud

Most people do not realize how popular adult websites are. Five of the 50 most-visited sites on the Internet show pornography, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. More people globally visit XVideos (No. 11) than TikTok or ChatGPT. More people check out Pornhub (No. 17) than LinkedIn, Pinterest or Twitch.

And it's not just adults who are looking at adult content. It's teens—and younger kids too.

The nonprofit Common Sense Media published a study last year based on a national survey of 1,300 teenagers ages 13 to 17. The results are alarming, especially if one suspects that the teens surveyed were likely to understate their habits.

The average age that kids first report watching porn? 12. The percent who have watched it? 75%. Of those, 70% say they watched it in the past week. And of those, 80% say that they've seen "what appears to be rape, choking or someone in pain," according to the study.

Even though there are measures in place that try to shield minors from porn, they don't work. Research shows that kids all over the globe are looking at sexually explicit material. That reality led Utah legislators several years ago to declare pornography a public health crisis. And, during the 2023 session, Utah became the second state (after Louisiana) to give its citizens the right to sue adult websites for damages if they don't take steps to ensure their consumers are adults.

Those measures were mocked by many progressive Utahns, who saw the same heavy-handed morality that limits our access to alcohol and lottery tickets—one Tribune letter-writer said the legislative focus on porn would make Utah a "national laughing stock." And yet, Utah's approach toward pornography has spread quickly across the country.

At least 16 states now have laws that obligate adult websites to verify that their users are over age 18. Most of those states are conservative, but even so-called "purple" states like Virginia have joined in.

While these laws spread, relatively little has been written about whether they are doing any good—or whether they are needed at all.

A careful look at Internet data and psychology research suggests that Utah officials have not found the best approach for protecting vulnerable youth from the firehose of online pornography. And, ironically, experts suggest that the best way to help our youth may be the one the Beehive State is least likely to embrace.

So Sue Me
Utah's pornography law grants a "private right of action," or the grounds for an individual to file a civil lawsuit against a business for alleged harm. SB287, co-sponsored by Woods Cross Republican Sen. Todd Weiler and South Jordan Republican Rep. Susan Pulsipher, declared that publishers of material harmful to minors who do not comply with age-verification requirements are liable. Their bill passed both the House and Senate unanimously in 2023 and went into effect last May.

Other states have followed Utah's approach and a few have also made it possible for their attorneys general to initiate lawsuits. In recent months, Texas has sued the companies that own Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Chaturbate and xHamster, seeking damages because the sites require "no meaningful screening" to comply with Texas' age verification law.

So far, no private Utah citizens have taken advantage of SB287 and filed a suit.

Weiler said he considered a version of SB287 that would have given the attorney general a right to sue, but he decided it was less likely to pass the Legislature because it would have likely cost several million dollars in salaries for attorneys and support staff.

"If I empowered the AG to go after them, it would have had a huge fiscal note," Weiler said.

Pulsipher was confident that SB287 was the right thing to do, but she wasn't sure how her constituents would react. However, she says, she was surprised at how much positive feedback she received.

"[It was] probably the most 'Thank Yous' of any stance I've taken or any bill I've ran," she said.

It made national news last May when Pornhub, the second most visited adult website in America, announced it would block access to its content in Utah because of SB287. However, since then there has been almost no coverage of how other popular pornographic sites have responded—and whether the new law has made any difference in Utah.

City Weekly accessed the 20 most-visited adult sites (as determined by Similarweb) from a computer in Salt Lake City using a home Internet connection with no filters installed. Of the top 20, 10 could be accessed with no age verification or by simply clicking a button that says "Yes, I'm 18," but offering no proof. None of these are complying with Utah's law.

Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition, which represents the adult entertainment industry, says he's not sure why.

"Sites that are overseas may not feel the need to comply with U.S. law," he said. "That's one of the key flaws of this legislative approach."

Six of the top 20 adult sites, however, do require age verification, while two others—Pornhub and YouPorn—have disabled their services entirely in Utah. Another two sites require registration and subscription, which may include age verification.

Data from Similarweb suggests that the Utah law has had a measurable effect: Local web traffic to the two sites that have disabled their services in Utah is down sharply, as are visits to five of the six sites that require age verification, with declines ranging from 12% to 81%, according to Simliarweb.

So, perhaps, Utah's law is working, in a way? Or perhaps, those seeking online porn are simply going elsewhere, to less popular and less-regulated sites: Total overall traffic to the top 100 adult sites, according to Similarweb, has remained steady in Utah over the past four years, ranging from roughly 2.5 million visits each month to 3.0 million, without any apparent pattern, or any significant reaction to SB287.

And, unsurprisingly, the sites with no age verification have seen a boost in traffic in Utah: Seven of the ten are up, and three of those have seen their traffic double. It turns out that if you don't make Utahns prove they're 18, they're more likely to check out your porn.

Out of Bounds
So, Utah's law has not had any dramatic effect yet: It may have shaken up the market, but not reduced it. But, perhaps, as legislators say, it's better to try and stop a bad thing than not try at all. Innovation in law, as in all fields, is not always successful.

"Are we winning the war against pornography?" asked Sen. Weiler. "No. Will we ever win it? Probably not. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can."

What Weiler hopes, he said, is that approaches like SB287 at least push back the age at which kids first encounter pornography by a year or two.

"Let's grant them a little bit more innocence," he said.

However, it's not clear that ordinary people are convinced that porn is all that bad. The polling organization Gallup has been asking Americans questions about pornography since 2011. Posters ask respondents whether a given activity is "morally acceptable." Over time, for most choices—divorce, abortion or having a baby outside of marriage—the percentages of "acceptable" have steadily risen.

As a country, we are becoming more tolerant and less likely to judge.

That was also true of pornography—until it wasn't. From 2011 to 2018, the percentage of Americans who found pornography "morally acceptable" rose, from 30% to 43%. But then it began to drop, settling into the mid- to high-30s. Perhaps, seeing how saturated the Internet is with porn has led some Americans to throw up their arms in disgust.

Even the industry, which fights regulation, recognizes the need to give adults tools to block their kids from seeing porn. Why don't those work? The problem, says Stabile, is that adults don't use the free filters that come with the phones and computers they buy for their kids.

But even if they do, he acknowledges, some explicit material will slip through. A 12-year-old might not be able to go to one of the industry's big video-sharing websites, but he or she can find the same imagery in surprising places: Snapchat; Reddit; Twitter.

"The Internet is open and filled with adult content," Stabile said. "Search a sexual term on Google and more than half the results will come from sites that aren't classified as adult."

The major porn sites that belong to the Free Speech Coalition, the trade association for the adult entertainment industry, point to measures they already take to make online porn safer. They monitor their sites for any content portraying minors, for material that's posted without consent (so-called "revenge porn"), for copyrighted images and videos and "deepfakes," and for content that uses AI to replace an actor in a pornographic film with the likeness of another person (often a celebrity). They also make sure their sites are properly coded as suitable for adults only, so that filters on your phone, computer, browser or internet provider will block them.

Stabile, the coalition's spokesperson, says that what lawmakers in states like Utah don't realize is that if they drive viewers away from the sites that follow these practices, the demand for sexually explicit material doesn't disappear.

"It just goes to sites that aren't complying," he said, "to the darkest parts of the Internet." These legal and regulatory measures, Stabile believes, "punish the good guys and reward the bad guys."

The adult industry offers reasons for why age verification systems are a poor solution, but such checks are common on the internet. Sites such as the rapidly growing sports gambling industry, online dating sites and sites that ship wine or tobacco to consumers routinely ask customers to prove they are over 18 or 21 before opening an account. "Age verification is a reality that many companies on the Internet have been living with for years," Weiler noted.

True, says Stabile, but consumers of those products freely share a picture of their driver's license because they aren't worried about the harm to their reputation or livelihood if a hacker tells the world they liked the Patriots over the Packers or ordered a case of Prosecco or a carton of Parliaments.

"Sexuality is different," he said. "Someone who looks at gay content, or fetish content, might have real reasons for refusing to share their ID."

Molding Minds
The "sexual revolution," which began in the 1960s, allowed many American women to embrace contraception and claim a right to sexual pleasure. Along with that came a growing tolerance of pornography, particularly magazines and films, which began to creep into the mainstream.

By the 1980s, some thinkers who had welcomed freedom and tolerance began to critique pornography. Feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin said that pornography was inherently exploitative toward women—both for its production and its effect on viewers. They made allies with conservative Christians who saw porn as immoral.

Pro-sex feminists like writer Ellen Willis soon challenged these voices. Anti-porn discourse, they argued, infantilized women, treating them as victims who were unable to enjoy sex.

Such debates are at least 40 years old—but they continue today, framing the conversation around bills like SB287. What's changed in the last 10 to 20 years is the focus on how porn affects kids, even before they are teens, now that so many children have high-speed internet and computers in their pockets and bedrooms.

Unfortunately, researchers cannot state definitively how pornography affects minors. It's impossible to do the best possible research—it would be both unethical and illegal to intentionally expose a minor to pornography and then measure what happens. But psychologists and other experts have reached some conclusions over the past few decades, as studies have intensified.

Among their conclusions: Teens who watch more porn are likely to have "more permissive sexual attitudes ... and stronger gender-stereotypical sexual beliefs," according to a 2016 review of dozens of recent studies in The Journal of Sex Research. In addition, according to the review, porn viewing is linked to "greater experience with casual sex behavior, and more sexual aggression, both in terms of perpetration and victimization."

Bryant Paul, an associate professor of media psychology at Indiana University's Media School, studies pornography. The research shows, he said, that young people and especially young men have come to expect certain sexual behaviors.

"It's changed what they think is normative," he said.

Teens who watch many videos of women moaning in pleasure while they are subject to aggressive or even violent practices often assume those activities are desirable. Paul warns, however, that it's difficult to establish a direct link between watching porn and becoming aggressive.

Are people drawn to violence in sex because they watched the kind of pornography that puts those scripts in their brains? Or, did they watch that kind of porn because they already had that predilection?

The answer to the age-old "correlation or causation" debate likely has to be some mix of both. "We have to assume that the people who are drawn to that content had some of those ideas anyway," Paul acknowledged.

The data does seem clear on one front: Teens who watch more porn have less accurate ideas about sex. A recent study in Communication Monographs, which Paul co-authored, analyzed a survey of 595 American teens and found that "the more dependent adolescents were on pornography for sexual learning, the more erroneous sexual beliefs they held."

These erroneous beliefs include: penis size is very important; most women enjoy anal sex; most people prefer rough sex to gentle sex; most women easily have orgasms during intercourse.

The data tells a complex story, however. Even if teens do watch porn—often at fairly high volumes, at disturbingly young ages—it's also true that Generation Z and Gen Alpha are, by far, the least likely to have sex as teenagers of any generation in decades. They're dating less, being less intimate and are less likely to be in long-term relationships.

Young people may be watching people have sex more than any generation in human history—but they're engaging in sexual activity less too.

Some of that is good news: The teenage pregnancy rate in the U.S. dropped more than 73% between 1990 and 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That's a trend that everyone can cheer, but other shifts in behavior are more worrying: It may be great that they are being more careful in their teens, but it's less great if they remain isolated and less happy as they move into their 20s and 30s.

Declining marriage and birth rates are no simple issues, but Paul says one thing is clear: It's not fair to blame online pornography alone for these massive societal shifts.

He calls that link "spurious at best." The causes, he said, are bigger than dirty videos.

"We're amusing ourselves to death," Paul said, referencing the seminal 1985 book by educator Neil Postman. "Media has become the drug of choice for experiencing dopamine and serotonin. You don't even need pornography. You can use Tetris. You can use TikTok. You're getting your pleasure fix and there's no reason to go through the hassle of dating someone, of having sex, of opening yourself up to the possibility of being rejected."

Logging Off
Deep breath, Utah parents. You know what is the most likely strategy to help young people not have their brains and libidos twisted by Internet porn? It's not filters, or age verification laws, although those might help a little.

It's by talking to you, observes Bryant Paul.

"What we know works best for stopping the potential negative effects of this content is for parents to talk to their children openly," he said.

The problem with porn, Paul says, is that it's not accurate. It's not realistic. Most people don't have bodies like that. And they can't or won't do those things. Someone needs to be honest with kids about this, as deeply, skin-crawlingly uncomfortable as those conversations are.

There are promising programs, Paul said, in which teens can talk openly to their peers about the problems with pornography. He pointed to one in Boston's South End, funded by the city's public health agency, which offers teenagers a course in Porn Literacy.

Paul recognizes that such programs are a tough sell for parents, especially in conservative states like Utah. "They're hard to introduce," he says dryly. However, he adds, even exposure to some of the real story behind porn, like the narratives found in the 2015 documentary film he co-produced, Hot Girls Wanted, can help puncture illusions a teen has about what they're watching.

The film follows several young women who answered a classified ad—"Hot Girls Wanted"—and within weeks they were acting in pornographic films. Within a month or two, the young women were being pressured to engage in sexual acts they had previously said they would not do.

The doc, Paul says, shows the viewer how "industry uses and abuses and chews up and spits out" these young women.

Some Utahns might be surprised that Weiler agrees—we need to talk to young people about porn, even if it's hard.

"We need to make it safe to talk about it," Weiler said. "They're going to search for porn. They're going to find it. And so we need to talk about it."