Summary
The Supreme Court’s hearing of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton signals potential limits on First Amendment protections for online pornography.
The case involves a Texas law mandating age verification for websites with “sexual material harmful to minors,” challenging the 2004 Ashcroft v. ACLU precedent, which struck down similar laws under strict scrutiny.
Justices, citing the inadequacy of modern filtering tools, seemed inclined to weaken free speech protections, exploring standards like intermediate scrutiny.
The ruling could reshape online speech regulations, leaving adults’ access to sexual content uncertain while tightening restrictions for minors.
Notice how we’re already asking past the sale with the tacit labeling of “sexual material harmful to minors,” with the presupposed declaration that sexual material is automatically harmful to minors.
The all-consuming mission to look at boobies is essentially universal for all pubescent boys from about 12 all the way to the age of majority. This is well known, and none of us came off any the worse despite widespread availability of older brothers’ back issues of Hustler, Usenet, dial-up BBS systems, and ultimately the world wide web.
If teens weren’t naturally interested in sex where wouldn’t been all them teenage pregnancies. Q.E.D.
This is an excellent observation.
We now no longer have the debate over whether or not this content is necessarily harmful to minors. It’s now automatically bad, and the new framing is: shouldn’t we ban bad things?
Should expect more of this kind of newspeak/doublespeak as the Trump years continue.
Just saying, the shit you can find on the Internet does not come even close to what Hustler was. There is instant access to all kinds of weird and fucked fetish shit that just wasn’t accessible in the 90s and earlier.
Bizarre fetish shit was very much available in the 90s and earlier. It just wasn’t in hustler or playboy.
There’s a vid on archive.org of the Spice Channel that must have been off someone’s VHS tape. It flickers a lot and is barely watchable, but I was curious what we were all missing back then.
Turns out, way more softcore than I was expecting. Slightly more hardcore than Skinamax at the time, but not by much.
How else they going to keep up viewership if you aren’t edging for hours?