Curmie has decided not to write about Donald Trump or Elon Musk (has there ever been a better name for a Bond villain?) except in passing. He’ll still post articles, memes, and
cartoons on his Facebook and Bluesky pages, but he’s going to protect his
mental health by not bothering to spend 1000 or 1500 words arguing that this or
that action by those two sociopaths is illegal, mendacious, hypocritical, moronic,
xenophobic, plutocratic, or intentionally cruel. It would be newsworthy if either of them ever
did anything that didn’t fall into at least a couple of those categories. So Curmie is going to write about other
things.
So, here we go…
Thirty-something years ago, when Curmie was new to the PhD
program at the University of Kansas, his mentor, the inimitable Ron Willis, urged
him to find something outside the theatre program to keep him from living in
the theatre building or the library. Ron
suggested Audio Reader, a service providing access to written material for the
visually impaired.
Curmie thought that such a volunteer gig might make sense,
and arranged for an audition, which included reading aloud from a variety of
sources. The only specific I remember
was that there was an article about the Kansas City Royals; Curmie remembers
smiling at the fact that he was enough of a baseball fan to know how to
pronounce the name of one of the Royals’ starting pitchers, Mark Gubicza.
Anyway, I got the gig, and began a weekly stint recording a
section of the Kansas City Star.
My schedule varied from semester to semester; at one time or another I
read from the front page (all stories that started there), nation & world
(everything from the news section that didn’t start on the front page), and
columns & editorials. I filled in
once or twice on sports when the regular person was ill or out of town. There were enough volunteers that we had the
entire Star, even the classified ads (!), uploaded to the system by 9
a.m. every day.
I’d been at Audio Reader for a few months when I got a call
from the volunteer coordinator. She
seemed hesitant, but asked me if I meant it when I said on my audition form
that I’d read anything. I said I
did. So… one of the guys who’d been
doing the Adult Magazine Hour had taken a job out of town, so they needed to
find someone else to do a monthly hour-long show, reading from Penthouse. See, someone did care about the articles!
I was pleased to find out that although I was expected to
describe all the photographs that accompanied news stories in the Star,
I needn’t do that with Penthouse.
Oh, and I should use an alias. I
was also lucky that the other guy reading Penthouse really liked the
smuttier stuff, so I could concentrate (mostly) on articles, which really did
include the occasional good piece of investigative reporting.
But the once-a-month thing was based on there being four
weekends a month, and sometimes there were five. There is only so much material that can be
coaxed from an issue of Penthouse or Playboy (there were two
“women’s magazines” in the rotation, as well).
That meant I got a second show some months. Audio Reader had subscriptions to the mags we
read every month, but the poor volunteer coordinator had to visit the local
porno emporium, hold her nose, and purchase… well, something those months.
I used to joke that one does not truly appreciate the
literary merit of Penthouse until one has to read aloud for 56-58
minutes from a magazine called (and I’m not making this up) Wet or Butts
and Boobs Monthly.
Another year or two later, Curmie gave a conference paper on
the press coverage of the Communications Decency Act, which was intended to
keep pornographic materials out of the hands of kids. Despite broad-based and bipartisan support in
Congress and from then-President Clinton, the CDA was struck down by a
unanimous Supreme Court, who ruled in Reno v. ACLU that it was an
unconstitutional abridgement of First Amendment rights.
Of course, in those days the allure of online porn was
limited by the available technology. Most
people’s internet access was through dial-up, and it would take a couple of
minutes to see a still photograph. Now, you
can access an hour-long video in an instant.
So shutting off hard copies of magazines doesn’t solve the problem of
allowing access to minors, many of whom have better technical skills than you
or I, Gentle Reader. Demand has changed
significantly. Unsurprisingly, companies like PornHub are now worth well into ten figures,
whereas Curmie had to check to see if Penthouse still exists. (It does.)
So we jump forward a couple of decades from when Curmie
moved to Texas and therefore stopped volunteering with Audio Reader (he still sends
a little money their way). Curmie became
dimly aware that in June of 2023 Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1181, which required pornsites to “use reasonable age verification
methods” to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18
years of age or older.” The law also
required websites to “display health warnings about the effects of the
consumption of pornography.”
Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, YouPorn and Brazzers,
did not comply, and they were sued by Abbott’s minion accused felon
Attorney General Ken Paxton.
And then there was a counter-suit, claiming violation of First Amendment
rights. Lather, rinse, repeat. The Fifth Circuit, which is generally roughly
as civil libertarian as the KGB, voted 2-1 to uphold the age identification requirement
but to scuttle the health warning.
Aylo appealed to the Supreme Court while blocking access to its sites in Texas. Instead, users saw a message stating that the company would comply with the law, but arguing:
Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites open and accessible. As we’ve seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply.
Curmie, being Curmie, wondered whether this argument holds
up, decided to test it. It took him less
than a minute to find a site with apparently thousands of videos, live feeds, “chat
rooms,” etc., readily accessible from Chez Curmie in Texas. And if Curmie can do that, you can bet the
ranch that pervy high school sophomore can do so, as well. It does indeed appear that sites willing to
obey the law are being punished relative to those that flout it. The question of selective (or, at best,
random) enforcement is real.
That still doesn’t solve the problem, of course. Curmie won’t claim to understand the various means of age verification and their relative effectiveness or intrusiveness. What doesn’t seem to be in question, at least ostensibly, is that some sort of gatekeeping would be a good idea. So we’re really talking about technical details, not philosophies. (Curmie does note the distinct possibility that Abbott and his ilk would very much like to shut down access to adults as well as to minors, but of course none of these folks would actually admit that this legislation is intended to be the thin edge of the wedge.) There’s a good overview of the various to-ings and fro-ings by Marc Novicoff of The Atlantic here.
Anyway, Curmie, not being a devotee of PornHub’s services,
confesses he’d pretty much forgotten about the whole business until a couple of
weeks ago when Justice Alito made headlines by inquiring, obviously mockingly, if PornHub is “like the old Playboy
magazine, you have essays there by the modern day equivalent of Gore Vidal and
William F. Buckley Jr.?”
A handful of left-leaning sites tried to suggest that the
question shows the 74-year-old Alito to be out of touch with reality. Curmie is no fan of Alito, whom he suspects
may well be past his sell-by date, but this question was indeed directly on
point, because he knew the answer. Some
of those mags from yesteryear did indeed have things to offer other than photos
of attractive young women in various states of undress. Lawyers for Aylo had to admit that, no, there’s
nothing equivalent on their site.
So where does all this leave us? Well, FIRE,
the best-known of the free speech advocacy organizations, has been all over
this case since SCOTUS agreed to hear it.
The entire post is worth reading, but here’s a brief sample:
The problem with age-verification laws is they place a burden on every consumer — adults included — to access constitutionally protected speech. And verifying your age online is a different animal from simply flashing a driver’s license to someone behind a counter. It usually means handing over your government ID for a platform or verification service to copy, entering the last four digits of your Social Security number, or even submitting to biometric facial scanning….
[The Fifth Circuit decision] ”ignores the district court’s finding that the Texas law is “unreasonably intrusive in its use of age verification” because, according to Texas’ own expert, there were “several ways that age-verification can be less restrictive and costly” than the Texas law requires….
Most recently, in Free Speech Coalition v. Rokita (2024), an Indiana district court… explained that strict scrutiny must apply to the age-verification law because, for example, Indiana’s law (like the Texas law) applies to websites that have 33.4% or more sexual content. In other words, age verification would apply even to “adults attempting to access material perfectly appropriate for minors” and “even when the majority of a website contains entirely acceptable, and constitutionally protected, material....
The hope, of course, is that the Court — unlike the Fifth Circuit — follows its internet speech precedents safeguarding adult free speech rights.
Still, the prediction is that this particular SCOTUS is
likely to uphold the Texas law and extend (or at least allow the extension of)
similar restrictions elsewhere. Caught
up in the legalese, the technical arguments, and the legitimate and appropriate desire to keep obscene
content out of the hands of minors are two simple questions: does the Texas law
do what its supporters say it does, and does it do so in the least intrusive
manner possible?
The answer to both of these questions is an incontrovertible “no.” QED.
No comments:
Post a Comment