Tucker posed this hypothetical: "What if there was a candidate who wanted to put the owners of Mindgeek [Pornhub's parent company] in prison? Would younger Americans support that?" Nick's answer was yes.
Almost everyone here has agreed at this point that age verification laws are meant to be an attack on the freedom of the internet, and that any effect on porn is beside the point. But for people who actually support the stated intent of the laws, it seems like legislating against the porn suppliers may be a way to effectively attack the industry without opening up another avenue of control.
What would this look like? In my opinion, fines and jail time for producers in the US and foreign websites that allow access to the US. As we've seen with social media in Europe, government pressure is enough to make companies change course.
The natural objection is that a VPN is really easy to use. That's true, but it's a barrier that would most likely severely curtail the usage of porn in pubescent children. The effect still might be substantial on adults as well. Also, it would effectively destroy the Onlyfans market since only a few determined women are going to jump through hoops to do illegal amateur porn for some company in Bulgaria.
Another objection I've seen is that women are the root cause of the breakdown of relationships, and that men need an outlet in porn to cope with that. The first part is obviously true but I don't think the second part follows. If massive numbers of young men are coping with the feminization of society through porn, that means it's a control mechanism to prevent them from getting angry enough to revolt. If we're going to make any progress against women's rights, men need to feel an acute sense of what they are missing.
There is also the possibility of knock-on effects on anime, movies, TV, etc. The only thing I really care about there is anime, but I think the collateral damage could be effectively controlled.
We seem to have done a decent job in the past, before 1950 when hardcore porn appeared out of "nowhere."
It would never be a perfect standard, but there are always fuzzy lines and edge cases with any standard. Yellow is different than red even though orange exists.
Maybe if we limit the scope to: sexually explicit (shows genitals), lacks artistic merit (not speech) and made/distributed by relatively big companies (Pornhub, Onlyfans).
I think the actual problem is that anything beyond that would be virtually unenforceable without some kind of intrusive system, I think It'd be worse than trying to get rid of piracy. In countries that banned porn, the producers go for the next best thing, ie. In South Korea camgirls are the market.
Don't get me wrong tho. De-incentivizing monetary gain from porn companies would still benefitial, since even them use psychological manipulation tactics to keep engagement, it's a deliberate distortion of sexuality
That seems like an acceptable scope. We'd have to accept camgirls because attempting to ban them would basically turn into the age verification scandal all over again. A better way to attack the industry would be heavy regulation and taxation, because there's no way an organization where the CEO is literally doing dance routines and dropping girls on the floor is run with any semblance of due diligence.
The thing with Twitch thots, though, is that porn is legal in America and we still have a massive e-girl market. So it's not really a case of picking one or the other.