Are you 18 or over? Are you my mother? Are you my sexy surveillance state?

*sydney sweeney voice* my retina scans are blue

It’s time we talked about age restrictions.

On July 25th, the United Kingdom’s “Online Safety Act” (OSA) went into place, requiring websites with content “harmful to children” to implement “highly effective” measures like facial scanning or ID collection to make sure visitors are older than eighteen.

OSA is being applied to certain subreddits, Twitter (sorry- “x”) accounts, Telegram and Discord channels, etc- but porn sites are getting a blanket mandatory age check.

Similar bills have been passing throughout the US- with currently 25 states having age verification bills, most having passed in 2024/2025.

The terminology “harmful to children” is found in both the US and UK documentation around age verification- and I am finding it classically frustrating in both its lack of clear definition and misapplication.

It’s been proven, for example, that social media use is “extremely likely” to be harmful to children, leading to anxiety, depression, self-esteem issues, and every other sickness immediately obvious from a cursory glance at the explore page.

It isn’t a controversial statement to say- even conclusively- that social media is harmful to children. Most people would agree with that easily.

But a mandatory age check on all social media platforms- for all content- would be seen as a ridiculous government overreach, even in pursuit of a healthy stock of protégés. Instead, it’s understood that a child’s access to social media is managed by parents, placed alongside other guilty pleasures like screen time and sugar consumption.

But with pornography, the burden of accountability rests solely on the industry and/or producer to manage consumption and response, as it does in so many other instances.

The education system doesn’t teach kids about sex and consent, so porn is expected to act as healthy sex and consent education.

The beauty industrial complex has made billions off selling an unattainable aesthetic standard, which the porn industry is blamed for failing to subvert.

Parents are unwilling to teach their children about pornography, so we are legislated to control their access.

At this point, the porn industry’s not the stepfather- it’s the father who stepped up.

Lets entertain- for argument’s sake- that these bills and laws aren’t easily bypassed by a VPN. Let’s say people are just opening their laptops and searching for porn the old-fashioned way: by typing “girls kissing” into Google.

When I talk about “the porn industry” I’m talking about the brands and businesses that fill hotel expo centres for trade shows like AVN and XBIZ. The people and platforms that produce content either themselves or through a studio, license scenes, and participate in pornography as a community and an economy.

These sites are the ones implementing age restriction measures.

But they make up only a percentage of the porn that is available online. Googling porn-adjacent terminology is just as likely to turn up sites like (these are examples not real sites) “fappjizz81020.com.uk” or “xxtubegirls029.com,” free to view aggregate platforms that operate by running ad space over terabytes of stolen content, located on an offshore anonymous server.

These sites do not give a fuck about regional legislation around age restriction. Most of them are actually designed to be taken down, getting hit with a DMCA or other legal threats only to pop up again as “fappjizz81021.”

Watching porn on these sites is participating in unethical porn consumption. And it’s what people will choose every time, if the alternative- the platform hosting consensual content that follows all the regional regulations- is asking for their biodata to watch someone bounce on it.

This legislation not only does nothing to prevent porn consumption, but makes it harder for people to consume porn responsibly and actively incentivizes unethical and illegal content.

With this type of data collection, a data breach and/or leak isn’t a matter of if but when.

Paired alongside growing Puritan, anti-sex, conservative value sets and direct examples of governments weaponizing personal information against their citizens, I understand why people balk at pairing their browsing history with their retina scans.

As a proud sicko-pervert, I feel similarly.

A good-faith understanding of this legislation is that people are struggling to regulate digital space, and drawing a straight line between showing ID at a porn theatre and a porn site without thinking about the wider implications of data collection.

I believe many of the individual people backing legislation this fall into this category, and I don’t hold it against them.

However, I don’t think these legislators are operating out of ignorance. I can assume they are familiar with FOSTA-SESTA, the “anti-human trafficking” legislation that simultaneously placed accountability on the platform instead of the user (similar to OSA), and classified all sex work online as “human trafficking.”

I can also assume they are familiar with the studies done since, proving that SESTA/FOSTA not only did nothing to curb trafficking, but actually exacerbated it.

I don’t believe these conservative legislators- the same ones passing legislation resulting in eleven-year-old girls being forced to birth children- give a fuck about kids.

I think they know this will make porn sites- reputable porn sites- almost impossible to operate. I think they’re using a time-honoured strategy in passing unconstitutional surveillance and censorship legislation, banking on the assumption that people won’t be willing to make an argument that accidentally positions themselves as against “child safety.”

I think you should care about this, even if you don’t watch porn. Or even if you’re totally cool with giving your ID to porn sites, because you only watch married couples kissing (no tongue). I don’t care.

I am begging you to give a fuck because chances are there is something about you- about who you are as a person, who you love, what you think is fun or interesting or valuable- that, one day, will not align with a government that is committed to an increasingly linear, hostile definition of valuable humanity.

In the meantime, I recommend you download a vpn.