Thursday, Virginia Democrat and President Pro Tempore of the Virginia State Senate, L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), is lambasting Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin because she can no longer access Pornhub’s streaming site for pornographic videos. Somehow one is not surprised that a Democrat politician is angry about being deprived of her favorite porn service. Still, there is a certain transparency about owning up to it in public.
What’s happening is that Virginia is one of a handful of states that require pornographic sites to ensure that users are not minors. As far as I can tell, Louisiana was the first to roll out the requirement. It was followed by Utah. Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas have laws that will go into effect on Saturday, July 1.
Pornhub claims that the states requiring users to provide proof of ID, get this, puts users at risk of identity theft because Pornhub can’t guarantee their personal identifying information. In my view, this begs the question of why you’d give them credit card information. Pornhub says they want a “device based” system that would let anyone verify a device that could be used by a minor.
In fact, porn aficionado Louise Lucas regurgitates Pornhub’s claim to her Twitter followers.
In all seriousness, we passed a bill during this session to protect children from online porn. However the executive branch had an obligation to create a system for age verification. Instead the Governor sat on his ass and relied on these websites with porn to do the verification process. This is a massive security risk to the personal information of (millions?!?!) of Virginians.
Why she thinks Virginia agreed to develop a verification system for a porn streaming service is thankfully left unanswered.
Unlike what a lot of folks choose to believe, particularly those on the Libertarian side, which act as remora sharks to conservatism, porn is not harmless, particularly to minors. And it is no surprise that a business built of sexual exploitation and a business imperative to provide new imagery would be actively involved in sex trafficking.
Pornhub, in the guise of its parent company “MindGeek,” is currently embroiled in a federal lawsuit involving a pornographic video of a 13-year-old girl. Efforts to have the video taken down started in 2014, but all it netted was Pornhub changing the title and metadata to prevent it from being tracked. As late as 2020, the video was still available on Pornhub. At one point, after receiving legal takedown orders, Pornhub required the girl to present personal identification to prove she was in the video. Financial powerhouse Visa is caught up in a class action lawsuit over it allegedly helping Pornhub monetize videos by underage and non-consenting persons. Other horror stories are available online.
What is astonishing about this is not that a Democrat would openly endorse harmful and illegal behavior; that is sort of baked into the brand. What is unusual is that Louise Lucas doesn’t bother to mention how young people, particularly women, have been victimized by the porn industry in general and Pornhub in particular. This, better than any press conference, shows how much Democrats really care about the issue. The amazing thing is that Glenn Youngkin, who has merely taken a baby step to shut down on what is alleged to be one of the world’s leading purveyors of underage porn, is supposed to be the bad guy because a Democrat state senator seemingly can’t get her porn fix.
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