In a long essay, Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of History at the University of Delaware, writes that there is a persistent belief in the US that viewing pornography is harmful. While that belief has remained largely constant over time, what has changed are views about what kinds of erotica causes harm, what form the harm takes, and who is harmed, whether it harms those involved in the creation of it or those who view it or both.

Currently, the danger is perceived to that to young people and as of January 19th of this year, 19 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia) have age requirement verification requirements for adult-content sites. But not qll sites are complying. Some, especially one of the biggest sites Pornhub, have simply chosen to not provide access to people from those states.

Pornhub put up a firewall rather than comply. If nothing else, the move increased traffic to VPN (virtual private network) services, which provide users with unfettered access to Pornhub regardless of their location by securely connecting to a remote server. The given reason for requiring age verification – that pornography harms the minors who view it – is the latest salvo in a centuries-old American debate over erotica.

These state-level conflicts in the US emerged amid an international push for age verification on adult sites. In 2014, Mexico enacted an age verification law. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed late in 2022, imposed several restrictions on Pornhub and other large pornography sites, including age-verification requirements. A similar measure in Britain, the 2023 Online Safety Act, took effect in January 2025. France, which already required age verification in an earlier law, recently blocked four pornographic sites (Pornhub was not among them) from operating within its borders after finding that the sites failed to check users’ ages adequately. Members of the Canadian House of Commons continue to debate the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, which would require age verification. There, as elsewhere, civil libertarians warn that these laws fail to define ‘sexually explicit material’, and raise serious privacy concerns. Pornhub is challenging the laws on multiple fronts.

Davis looks at the prior attempts to limit access to erotica. She says that often there is ambiguity as to whether these laws are designed to protect minors from being exploited by pornographers or to protect children from the supposed harm that comes from watching sexual activity by consenting adults., that merely to look at sex is harmful to minors.

She looks at the work of Anthony Comstock who more than a century ago in the US went on a crusade to stamp out erotica because he felt that after viewing it, young men would go out and rape and mutilate and murder women.

Comstock was a buffoon, and many of his contemporaries found him repellent. But he was also enormously influential. He convinced Congress to pass a vast anti-obscenity measure in 1873 that empowered him to seize all items he personally found vile, including anything related to contraception or abortion.

And, as I write in my recent book Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (2024), he reshaped how Americans understood pornography’s harms. His contention that pornography could turn horny boys into murderers and good girls into prostitutes endured long after legal challenges overturned most of the 1873 law. Since the 1870s, the idea of whom porn harms has varied – boys, young men, all women, or society at large. But this association between erotica and injury continued to inspire generations of policymakers and activists.

The Comstock Act, hardly enforced today though never repealed, has ramifications for the debates over abortion and contraception.


The Comstock Act is a “zombie law”: Though long considered unconstitutional or unenforceable, it was never repealed and, with enough momentum, could be resuscitated and enforced.
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The Comstock Act is an anti-obscenity law passed by Congress in 1873. It was named for its chief proponent, the “anti-vice crusader” Anthony Comstock. 

The law made it a federal offense to transport by mail or other common carriers (which today would include UPS and FedEx), “obscene” materials like pornography, contraceptives, information about contraceptives, and any article, instrument, substance, device, drug, medicine, or other thing that can be used to produce an abortion.

In the early 1970s, the provisions of the Comstock Act that made it a crime to use the mail to transport contraceptives or materials around contraceptive use were repealed. 

The ban on the mailing of things designed to produce abortion is still in the Comstock Act. But in 1973, Roe v. Wade recognized a constitutionally protected right to abortion, and this prohibition hasn’t been enforced for decades. Even prior to the Roe decision, the Comstock Act had been understood to apply only to items mailed for the purposes of unlawful abortions.

In December 2022, shortly after the Dobbs decision reversed Roe and abolished the constitutional right to abortion, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Department of Justice issued a detailed memorandum opinion that reviewed the judicial and Congressional history of the Comstock Act. The OLC concluded that, even following Dobbs, the Comstock Act does not prohibit the mailing or delivery of abortion medications (i.e., mifepristone or misoprostol) unless the sender intends that the drugs will be used unlawfully.
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Some anti-abortion advocates disagree with this opinion and are attempting to use the courts and legislation to push for a broader and more literal interpretation of the Act’s text than has been accepted before. Under this interpretation, which has been rejected by earlier courts, the Comstock Act would ban the mailing of anything that can be used to produce an abortion in all circumstances (regardless of the sender’s knowledge or intent) and in all states—including those states where abortion is permitted.

If successful, using the Comstock Act in this way would essentially constitute a nationwide abortion ban. It would cut off access to abortion pills and thereby preclude medication abortion, and would cut off access to the medical instruments and materials used by health care providers to perform procedural abortions. If providers can’t get their instruments mailed by manufacturers, they’ll have no way to restock when supplies run out. This Comstock Act strategy would effectively shut down abortion not only in the 14 States that have banned it, but across all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Davis argues that some of these porn sites brought some of these new restrictions on themselves by failing to adequately police them for child pornography.

Proposals to limit porn access in the name of protecting the innocent are as misguided today as they were in 1873. I say this despite my ethical concerns about Pornhub and its corporate parent MindGeek (now rebranded as Aylo). These entities seldom removed videos depicting child abuse, rape or sex trafficking until an investigation by The New York Times in December 2020, alleging years of exploitative content, led Mastercard and Visa to block use of their cards to process payments on the site. In August 2022, Visa and Mastercard also suspended payments for advertisements on MindGeek after a woman sued Visa for helping monetise depictions of child pornography. Notably, the credit card companies acted in response to harms inflicted on the individuals involved in the creation of adult content. What Comstock argued – and what is resurfacing in conservative age-requirement legislation – is the idea that pornography injures those who see it. This understanding of explicit sexual content as assaultive has very little to do with actual physical or emotional damage. It instead reveals attempts to regulate sexuality, always with a heterosexual (and, often, marital) norm in mind.

She goes on to discuss the long history of so-called anti-vice crusaders in the US, even as access to erotica exploded, especially with the internet. She says that the nature of the conversation changed somewhat with some feminist groups focusing on the harm it did to women.

The American conversation about pornography and harm took a significant turn in the 1970s as new voices warned that it endangered the lives of women. Anti-porn activists addressed the dangers facing not only the women who performed in adult films but women generally, as a disadvantaged class… This shift occurred because new feminist groups emerged to protest what they considered damaging and dangerous images of abuse in pornography and in advertising.
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Debates over the links between pornography and harm became referenda on sexual freedom. In the early 1980s, the feminists who founded Women Against Pornography (WAP) teamed up with religious conservatives to support local bans on pornography. Sex-positive feminists, adult-film actors, and gay/queer liberationists countered that anti-gay government censorship and police aggression against sex workers were the greater dangers.

Then in the 1990s, the focus of Republicans turned back to the harmful effects on children and then in the 2010s back again to the harm done to women, that viewing pornography encouraged men to wreak violence against women, especially the practice of choking and erotic asphyxiation during sex.

Miller concludes:

Over and again, American campaigns against pornography stir up moral panic by asserting that explicit sexual content harms the people who view it – children especially. And they make this argument by insisting that there is something about visualising sex that incites violence. It’s an unnuanced and often factually tenuous case that confuses erotica with cruelty. And it diminishes the importance of efforts to protect people from actual sexual harms. Many feminists in the 1970s and ’80s believed that a popular culture saturated with banal representations of the abuse of women created a permission structure for real violence. Too often, these activists argued, Americans made violence against women look sexy. The conservative anti-pornography movement, however, aligned with feminists who took the more extreme position that pornography itself was inherently violent, however consensual the acts portrayed. These critiques gloss over the distinctions between consent and coercion, or between abuse and pleasure. They have led to crackdowns on queer and nonmarital sexuality.
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Americans need comprehensive information about their sexual health. PornHub is not the ideal place to go for that information (the site has a section dedicated to sex education), but legislation is a crude tool for controlling speech. As legal scholar Mark Joseph Stern notes about the court’s likely support for age verification laws, ‘if the court takes this step, there’s no reason why states’ battles against explicit material must stop at PornHub,’ with online bookstores and streaming services potentially at risk. As in the past, legal permission to restrict sites like PornHub will enable censorship of information about queer sexuality, whether explicit or not. (Indeed, in the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS activists fought against provisions of the Communications Decency Act that would have forced them to take down HIV-prevention information directed at teens.) Pornography addictions and the consumption of violent media do seem to inspire aggressive and dangerous sexual behaviors. Perhaps we should focus our public health campaigns on those issues. Instead, in a culture saturated with guns, gory video games, and shows depicting gratuitous cruelty, Americans remain far more concerned about sexual content than explicit violence. History shows that any attempt to censor pornography will inevitably also curtail access to the sort of sexual speech that we need today more than ever.

A case Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton reached the US Supreme Court this year in which it was argued that pornography causes ‘psychological and emotional’ harm. How the court rules will have significant consequences, not just for pornography but for speech in general. The current US Supreme Court has shown a willingness to overturn long-standing precedents in order to further a right wing agenda. So it is not out of the realms of possibility that they might reinstate parts of the Comstock Act that previous courts have ruled to be unconstitutional.