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Pornhub is currently not available in more than a third of US States, due to new age verification laws. And just last week, two Republican senators introduced a bill which could ban pornography across the country. The looming threat on the industry was not lost on some of the biggest names in the adult film industry at this year’s Pornhub Awards. In fact, it was central to the event’s theme. WIRED’s Manisha Krishnan was there, and on this week’s episode tells us all about the event, and how Pornhub’s story is at the center of tech and politics today.
You can follow Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode and Manisha Krishnan on Bluesky at @manishakrishnan. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
Mentioned in this episode:
Your Favorite Porn Stars Are Sick of Being Censored. But They’re Not Going Away by Manisha Krishnan
The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe by Elana Klein
North Korea Stole Your Job by Bobbie Johnson
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: Hey, this is Lauren. Before we start, I wanted to just take a second to remind you that we want to hear from you. If you have a tech-related question that’s been on your mind or just a topic that you wish we’d talk about more on the show, you can write to us. We do read our emails, and that email address is uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. And if you listen to and you enjoy our show, we’d love it if you rated it and left us a review on whatever podcast app you’re using. We really do appreciate the feedback and it helps other people find the show. Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED’s senior correspondent Lauren Goode filling in today for Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, we’re going to an unexpected place that can actually tell us a lot about the relationship between tech and politics today. And that place is the seventh annual Pornhub Awards Gala. We’re going to talk about how adult performers are dealing with the threat of censorship and how Pornhub in particular has become a case study of how far anti-porn legislation could go. The most recent move happened just last week when a bill aiming to ban all porn in the United States was reintroduced by two Republican senators. I’m joined this week by WIRED’s senior culture editor, Manisha Krishnan. Manisha, welcome to the show.
Manisha Krishnan: Thanks for having me on, Lauren.
Lauren Goode: So you spent the day and the evening with some of the top Pornhub performers at this awards gala. Can you set the scene of the event for listeners and tell us a little bit about the folks you spoke to?
Manisha Krishnan: So, I mean, first of all, it was honestly very interesting to just be behind the scenes with them as they were doing all of their glam. We were at the Sunset Marquis Hotel after they got ready in their cowboy outfits, which were just so over the top. I mean, one of them was literally wearing a belt as her bottom.
Lauren Goode: As one does.
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah, they were beautiful designs. They were designed by this designer, Chris Habana, who has worked with Beyonce before. But anyway, so they all got dressed and then they let loose on the hotel and just were taking very sort of family photo style, but maybe the creepiest family photos you’ve ever seen, just sort of all over the hotel grounds. And then they piled into this party bus and we rolled up to the Saddle Ranch Chop House, which is where the event was at, and they took a bunch more photos. There was a red carpet featuring all of the porn stars on wanted posters. And then we went inside for the awards. And the awards themselves were very informal. It was 90% just partying vibes and then very, very quickly doing award stuff.
Lauren Goode: All right. So you mentioned that the theme of the event was country. Was that weird at all given the kind of pushback that porn sites and performers are getting from a lot of Southern states in the U.S.? Was this theme intentional?
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah, so most of these age verification laws have passed in the South, which means that Pornhub is not available in most of the South. So it did feel a little bit tongue in cheek that they were playing up this country theme, these sort of wanted posters. I asked them if they were trying to troll conservatives by doing that, and they would neither confirm nor deny that. But certainly there was a huge sort of political backdrop to all of this, to this big celebration of porn when you have kind of a war on porn that’s happening right now.
Lauren Goode: Tell us about this war on porn. What exactly is happening? What measures have been taken?
Manisha Krishnan: In 2022, Louisiana passed the first sort of age verification law, which means that it’s now the porn website’s responsibility to ID people and make sure that they’re at least 18 if they’re going on their website. And so since then there’s been around 20 states that have followed suit. And as a result, Pornhub has pulled out, excuse that pun, but Pornhub has pulled out of most of those states, so it’s currently not available in around 17 states. It did actually try to sort of play along with the Louisiana age verification law, and I was told that they lost 80% of traffic and that people just didn’t want to sort of give their IDs and their ID information when they were logging onto a porn site. They actually also raised this point that they actually have very buttoned up verification for their performers and the people uploading to their site. And what they’re saying is that when they remove their content from a state, they think that people might actually go and use even sketchier websites essentially that aren’t as rigid and don’t have as many standards in place.
Lauren Goode: Because these bans are specific to Pornhub, not porn in general.
Manisha Krishnan: They’re about any porn website. So basically what these bans say is if you are a website that has porn, you need to take on the responsibility of IDing the users of the site. But that is usually done through a third-party service, the actual verification part of it. And so Pornhub is saying, “We’re not going to do that. We think it’s risky.” And so instead, they are removing their content from the states that have passed these laws.
Lauren Goode: And now there’s a bill that’s attempting to ban porn on a federal level for the third time. What are the chances of it actually passing and becoming law?
Manisha Krishnan: So it’s kind of tough to say what its chances are. Basically what this bill is arguing is that they want to change the definition of obscene. They’re saying that the definition of obscene is too vague and that it doesn’t apply to the world of modern internet porn, and that internet porn is so depraved and so easy to get access to, especially for young people. And so they’re trying to sort of change that definition and give it a hard definition of any sort of actual or simulated sexual acts would effectively be criminalized. Now, as far as the chances of that passing, I think we’ll have a better idea in a few months because there’s actually a Supreme Court case right now that is looking at Texas’s age verification laws. So what’s happened, just backing up a little bit, with all these states that have passed all of these age verification laws, there have been lawsuits coming from both sides. So there have been porn entertainment companies that have been suing the states arguing that these laws are a violation of free speech. And also some of these states have been suing these companies saying you have failed to comply with our age verification laws. And so right now the Supreme Court is reviewing one of these cases, and I think when they issue their decision, which is expected later this year, we’ll have a better sense of how likely it would be for a federal criminalization bill against porn to pass.
Lauren Goode: What would you say is the driving force behind all of these laws or attempts at laws?
Manisha Krishnan: I mean, I think it’s part of this sort of wholesale return to super Christian values, traditional values that we’re seeing. And we saw a lot of that driven by Project 2025. So one of the co-authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought, there was a British nonprofit journalism center that sort of published a video of him last year where he said that these age verification laws were a backdoor way of having a national porn ban. And so he said what we were hoping for is that porn companies would just respond by pulling out of these states, which is exactly what Pornhub is doing. And then in that same sort of clip, he talks about wanting people to have lots of babies. And Lauren, I know that you guys have talked on this show about the whole pronatalism movement. So I think all of these things are sort of hand in hand.
Lauren Goode: So what actually is the connection there in the mind of people like Russell Vought or people who are supporting these more traditional values?
Manisha Krishnan: I mean, I think ultimately porn performers are sex workers. And sex workers are generally just a super marginalized community. They have always kind of been under some sort of attack were they’re ideological or actually criminal. And so I think that that segment of society doesn’t really necessarily fit into this larger vision of traditional Christian values. Even though, I mean, Asa Akira, she’s one of the porn stars I interviewed for the Pornhub Awards, she is a very famous porn star and she’s also a mom of two. So in their world, it’s not necessarily mutually exclusive, being a good mom and being a porn star.
Lauren Goode: Right. And your great story on WIRED.com. You were writing about how her kids don’t know, they’re young and they don’t know exactly what her mom does. She says she’s a video producer. And at some point she and her partner will have the conversation with them. But yeah, to her it’s a job. This is what she does for a living.
Manisha Krishnan: I mean, I think it’s a bit more than a job. She definitely has a passion for it. But once she decided she wanted to get pregnant, that was about seven years ago, she stopped shooting partner scenes. So now she only sort of self-publishes videos of herself on sites like OnlyFans and Pornhub, which is also kind of interesting the way that these sites have revolutionized the porn industry and sort of made it easier to control exactly what type of porn you’re performing in.
Lauren Goode: Manisha, let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about the different kinds of pushback that Pornhub has been getting about its content. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So it feels important to differentiate between the different kinds of pushback that Pornhub has been receiving. The things we’ve been talking about so far, mostly traced to conservative lawmakers disagreeing with sexual content being available on the internet. There are plenty of people who find porn offensive or it doesn’t align with their values. But back in 2019 and 2020, reports started coming in of Pornhub just being rife with sexual trafficking and child abuse videos. And a few years later, Pornhub admitted that it actually had been receiving proceeds from sex trafficking content. It ended up agreeing to a three-year monitor or basically an independent organization keeping tabs on whether Pornhub is actually keeping this content off of its site. How should we be thinking about these different approaches to basically moderating Pornhub, right? There’s the legislation that has protective purposes, and then there’s the legislation that has an ideological bent.
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah. So I mean, definitely Pornhub is kind of on this image rehabilitation journey. They obviously have been sort of accused of a lot of horrible things. They’ve admitted to profiting from sex trafficking content, meaning videos showing abuse that were on the site and were monetized. But since then they have sort of said, “Okay, we’re going to be about transparency. We’re going to try to help raise the bar in the industry by, for example, coming up with a set of good practices for porn operators to adopt in order to prevent the publication of child sexual abuse material.” They also have really buttoned up seemingly… I mean, they say… I should say they say that they have buttoned up a lot on sort of verifying the people, the identities of the people who are uploading to their site, as well as getting consent and releases from all the performers who appear in the videos uploaded to their site. So I think that Pornhub would say and does say that they’re not against age verification. In fact, one of the VPs told me that she would support some sort of age verification that happens through your phone, so potentially through an iOS update or something like that, rather than having that responsibility offloaded to a third-party site.
Lauren Goode: And what’s interesting is this is not the first time that big tech platforms have suggested that that age verification should happen at the level of the operating system, that basically Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android OS, the folks who run the app stores should be responsible for the age verification. This has been happening with dating sites, dating apps. But Google and Apple have maybe for understandable reasons pushed back on that responsibility.
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because it shows that nobody really wants to take on this liability of identifying people. I’m sure it opens you up to lawsuits. What Alex Kekesi, who is Pornhub’s VP of branding and community, what she told me was that she’s really hoping that the different stakeholders, the governments, tech companies can come together and create some sort of solution. But it does seem like there’s a lot of passing the buck around in terms of who is actually going to verify people’s ages. And the other thing she said to me was that she thinks that people would be more comfortable with it happening on their phone than giving their identification details away to a third party sort of verification source or a website.
Lauren Goode: Interesting. What do you think the most likely outcome is here of all of these measures, whether it’s around age verification, whether it’s about porn sites being allowed at the state level, or whether there could potentially be some kind of federal regulation that effectively bans porn?
Manisha Krishnan: I mean, a few years ago I would’ve said that a federal porn ban seems crazy. I just wouldn’t have thought that it could come to that. But we are living in a different era right now that seems extremely top down, top heavy. So I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, so many of the goals from Project 2025, as our colleagues have reported on, are already happening. So at this point, it really wouldn’t surprise me. But the one thing I do know is that people will find a way to get their hands on porn. Every time one of these bans happens, there’s a huge spike in how to get a VPN. So there’s always sort of loopholes and sometimes by taking something away, you’re just sort of leading people in a direction to something that might be worse than whatever the original thing was.
Lauren Goode: I mean, and it also forces a definition of porn that I think is hard for a lot of people to agree upon. Some people would probably say that they’re served porn-like content on Instagram.
Manisha Krishnan: Some people might say my article was porn. I mean, just because of the photos. It is, it’s a really slippery slope when you try to put a super hard and fast rule on things like this.
Lauren Goode: So I have one last question for you. Who actually won the Pornhub Awards this year?
Manisha Krishnan: I feel like I won the Pornhub Awards this year because in talking to so many stars about censorship, I found out that one of them calls his thingy a meat missile in order to avoid social media censorship. So I feel like that was a good little one for my vocab.
Lauren Goode: A meat missile. Who is the actor who calls it that?
Manisha Krishnan: He is called the Girth Master. He’s 6’6″ and he won Bestie. He actually tied for Bestie with a Spanish performer. And because they’re both not Americans, when he accepted, he was like, “I guess this is another reason immigrants are good.” And it was so funny.
Lauren Goode: That feels like the perfect place to take another break. When we come back, we’re going to do some recommendations and tell our listeners what else they should check out on WIRED.com this week. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode. And I’m joined this week by WIRED senior culture editor, Manisha Krishnan. Before we take off, Manisha tell our listeners what they should absolutely read on WIRED.com this week in addition to your fantastic story about the Pornhub Awards.
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah, so I would encourage everyone to read Elana Klein’s piece on Gen Z’s crippling fear of being cringe on the dating apps. I think it’s just such a great slice into their mindset. And basically it’s like everything from just sharing that you want a long-term relationship to actually earnestly saying what your hobbies are is considered extremely cringe. Essentially, any type of vulnerability is a massive faux pas, and yet a lot of them are super lonely and struggling with connection. I feel like these two concepts are very related. They’re very judgmental in the piece, but also hilarious. And so I just love those types of stories and I think everyone should read it.
Lauren Goode: What’s an example of being super cringe on a dating app? I’m just asking for a friend.
Manisha Krishnan: Just, okay, the first one I thought of and I kind of agree with this one was the guys who post the giant fish.
Lauren Goode: Oh, they have the fish.
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah. That one was like a classic one. And what about you, Lauren? What are you recommending this week?
Lauren Goode: I really enjoyed Bobby Johnson’s feature story, we’re calling it The Big Story, on how a bunch of pretenders, as they’re called in the story, from North Korea are interviewing for US-based tech jobs, IT jobs and basically perpetuating this whole scam and working with third parties in the US who are helping facilitate them, where they interview with these very sort of Anglo-sounding names and they seem to have great resumes and good coding abilities, and then when a recruiter goes to interview them, they present as Asian and they have accents and the recruiter’s kind of confused, but they end up getting a job and siphoning away money from the US and giving it to North Korea’s government. It’s a fantastic story by a freelancer named Bobby Johnson and I recommend everyone check that out. In case you weren’t paranoid enough already about what’s going on online, this will make you more paranoid. That is our show for today. We’re going to link to all of the stories we talked about in the show notes, so check those out. And be sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley, which is all about what DOGE has accomplished, what it hasn’t, and what it’s all potentially going to look like after Elon Musk’s exit. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. And if you’d like to get in touch with any of us for questions, comments, show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Jordan Bell, Kyana Moghadam, and Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.
